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Bandwagon effect
The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology.
The opening anecdote relates Francis Galton's surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged (the average was closer to the ox's true butchered weight than the estimates of most crowd members, and also closer than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts).[1]
This is an example of two things: one, an attempt to show that the bandwagon effect does not exist, and an incomplete analogy. The electorate's votes are not a number whose aggregation is then averaged, nor are they a number that can be close to right. If they were voting on issues, as in the true democracy that has never in the history of the Earth existed (although the Iroquis (WP) American Indians came close), they might be able to approximate the crowd entity's success by eventually changing the system, by voting, closer and closer to optimum.
Furthermore, although this case is weakened by the discontinuity between numbers and voting, most of the guessers are actually wrong, and only a few actually right; there is no advantage to choosing the crowd to choose. In fact, the only possible advantage is that you have succeeding in choosing someone to choose.
