By Jimmy Alfonso Licon

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is a tragedy on several levels. It robs his family and friends of the time they would otherwise have had with Charlie, especially his young children and wife. It is a tragedy to Charlie—his life was cut prematurely short. And it is a tragic signal that the wrong words spoken, even in a liberal democracy, can get you killed. As an academic and public intellectual, I find that chilling.

It is also, unsettlingly, a case study in how democratic incentives can corrode political life. For all the shock and horror surrounding the killing, its logic is not entirely mysterious. The tools of political economy and philosophy, especially concepts like rational irrationality and theories like costly signaling theory, can aid our understanding why political violence sometimes emerges from within democracy itself.

Economists and philosophers have long puzzled over a simple question: Why do citizens participate in politics when their individual actions are almost certain not to matter? Casting a single vote, attending a protest, or writing a letter to a representative rarely changes the outcome. The probability that your ballot tips a national election is about one in sixty million. That’s roughly the same chance as winning a state lottery jackpot twice. So, in light of this, it would seem irrational for anyone to spend time or resources on politics at all. Yet people do and they often do so passionately.

A popular account developed by the economist Bryan Caplan holds that citizens are “rationally irrational.” It is........

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