It’s Not Irrational. It’s Signaling Behavior.<br />But voters also tend to assume that politicians who are tough on crime are at least somewhat more likely than others to favor the death penalty,<br />and that’s all it takes to launch the dynamic that Mr. Loury and Mr. Goffman described.<br />Building on earlier work by the sociologist Erving Goffman, Mr. Loury’s core insight was<br />that people, especially politicians, often engage in signaling games, which put enormous pressure on them to act in ways that contradict their private beliefs.<br />Get the Upshot in your Inbox<br />Because economists generally assume that people behave rationally, you might expect members of my profession to have been flummoxed<br />by the behavior of many United States senators during the repeated, failed attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.<br />Some Republican senators will conclude that voting against an Obamacare repeal is dangerous, regardless of their own beliefs,<br />since going against the party line could cause many voters to question their faithfulness to conservative principles.
