The rationality of voting -- an early reference
Chris Kutz and Aaron Edlin pointed me to this book by Derik Parfit that made essentially the same argument that Aaron, Noah Kaplan, and I did, but twenty years earlier. Thus scooping by three years John Quiggin’s publication of the same idea.
The key idea—that rationality is not the same thing as selfishness, and that, in particular, voting is not a sucker’s game or a prisoner’s dilemma—is an important one, and I hope that my incessant promotion of this point will enable future researchers to be aware of it. So far, Parfit (1984) is our earliest reference.