If you are ethically-minded, this is cool stuff to argue–for or against.

The Future of Tradition
By Lee Harris
(Lee Harris is the author of Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of
History)
http://www.policyreview.org/jun05/harris.html

…the transgenerational duty to one’s grandchildren may be put in these
simple
terms: Members of each generation are committed to making sure that the
ethical baseline of their society does not move in a manner that their
visceral code instantly tells them is wrong. How much philosophical thought
is given in explaining this wrong, or in disputing its validity – all that
is irrelevant to the theory of tradition contained here.

But, once again, we confront the practical problem: How does a society go
about ensuring that the ethical baseline will be maintained at all costs,
and even when it is most tempting to depart from it in a downward direction?
Through appeals to enlightened self-interest, or through sermons and
philosophical tracts?

…

For us, it is imperative that an eight-year-old boy should have esteem for
himself, for the person that he is. We do not want him thinking, “I wish I
could be like John”; instead, we demand that he think, “I’m just fine the
way I am. I don’t need to model my behavior on anyone else.” But our
insistence on creating self-esteem in an eight-year-old boy comes with a
high price tag – by refusing to encourage the boy’s dissatisfaction with
himself as he is, we are inadvertently taking from him the primary human
motivation to change oneself for the better. By pumping him full of
self-esteem, we rob him of the will to set himself transformative projects
and goals. Totally at peace with what he is, he ceases to have any reason to
become something more – and certainly no reason at all to become what he
could be.

The contemporary gospel of individual self-esteem is at odds with the
universal tradition of mankind – a tradition that the German poet, Rilke,
summed up in the concluding lines of a poem addressed to the torso of
Apollo, whose heroic perfection Rilke saw as a challenge to our own far from
perfect status quo – “Du must dein Leben andern.” You must change your life.

…You must change yourself, as Rilke’s poem tells us, but into what? A
tolerant person? A wise person?

…

This is how those fond of abstract reasoning can destroy the ethical
foundations of a society without anyone’s noticing it: They throw up for
debate that which no one before ever thought about debating. They take the
collective visceral code that has bound parents to grandchildren from time
immemorial, in every culture known to man, and make of it a topic for
fashionable intellectual chatter.

…The intelligentsia have no idea of the consequences that would ensue if
middle America lost its simple faith in God and its equally simple trust in
its fellow men. Their plain virtues and homespun beliefs are the bedrock of
decency and integrity in our nation and in the world. These are the people
who give their sons and daughters to defend the good and to defeat the evil.
If in their eyes this clear and simple distinction is blurred through the
dissemination of moral relativism and an aesthetic of ethical frivolity,
where else will human decency find such willing and able defenders?

Even the most sophisticated of us have something to learn from the
fundamentalism of middle America. For stripped of its quaint and antiquated
ideological superstructure, there is a hard and solid kernel of wisdom
embodied in the visceral code by which fundamentalists raise their children,
and many of us, including many gay men like myself, are thankful to have
been raised by parents who were so unshakably committed to the values of
decency, and honesty, and integrity, and all those other homespun and corny
principles. Reject the theology if you wish, but respect the ethical
fundamentalism by which these people live: It is not a weakness of
intellect, but a strength of character.

If voting has signalling purposes, voting by mail “may” reduce total
turnout… but increase the share of informed voters…

“Theory and Evidence on the Role of Social Norms in Voting”
BY: PATRICIA FUNK
Stockholm School of Economics
Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE)
http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=627347
Date: March 2005

ABSTRACT:
This paper investigates social norms and voting behavior. I argue that
social norms create incentives for signaling, i.e., voting for the purpose
of being seen at the voting act. Empirical evidence on signaling can be
gained by looking at the introduction of optional postal voting in
Switzerland. Even though the possibility of mail voting reduced voting costs
substantially, it didn’t increase turnout. Consistent with my model’s
predictions, voter turnout decreased more in the smaller communities, but in
the meantime, the share of cooperators (=interested voters) was more
positively affected there. Therefore, modern voting tools may decrease
average turnout, but nevertheless, increase the quality of the voting
outcome. Current models predict the opposite, but ignore the effect of
different voting systems on the incentive for signaling.

(This is her model:)

If voting is only possible by going to the polls, potential signaling
benefits thus originate from being seen (or not being seen) at the voting
both. However, in small communities, people know each other and gossip about
who was observed at the booth and who wasn’t. Therefore, total signaling
benefits are assumed to decrease in community size (and) a nonpositive
relationship between voter turnout and community size.

(…) It can be shown that the introduction of postal voting has a
non-positive impact on turnout in small communities and a non-negative
impact on turnout in large communities (third result). The intuition behind
result three is that the introduction of postal voting has two
countervailing effects: a cost-reduction effect (with a positive effect on
turnout) and a reduced signaling effect (with a negative effect on turnout).

As for the latter, imagine a small community, where voting is only possible
at the polls. Due to the strong social pressure and the high signaling
benefits, a large share of defectors goes to the polls e.g. to avoid social
sanctions from non-voting. As soon as postal voting is allowed, cheating
becomes easy and defectors don’t vote anymore. In large communities, on the
other hand, signaling was less rewarding (or necessary) under the old voting
system, so that the cost-reduction-effect of mail voting dominates.

These predictions from the signaling model stand in contrast to the
predictions of standard models of voting, which only consider the modern
voting tools’ effect on the voting costs.