Election season is upon us. Not only in South Africa but also in Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Israel, Serbia, Hungary not so long ago, France in four months, Spain and the US.
What is at stake? One purpose of voting is to pick people who will implement the will of the people, and millions of citizens will queue for a long time to have their say. Another purpose of voting is to rely on the wisdom of crowds to point us in a sound direction. Does voting satisfy either purpose?
Confusion over representation
Let us start with the will of the people – representation. There are multiple reasons to be sceptical about whether your will counts. For example, a tiny majority does not adequately represent what ‘the people’ want? We intuitively understand why the losing 49.9999% feel the result does not justify ignoring their wishes for 4-5 years. First-past-the-post systems, where the winner may receive fewer than 30% of the votes and more than 70% vote against that party, are even worse. Countries such as Brazil at least try to make sure the winner does eventually get more than half the vote. That does not solve the basic problem though.
In 1951 Nobel-winning economist Kennith Arrow published his impossibility theorem of voting systems. He proved that all of them are vulnerable to inconsistencies that raise questions about whether the winner represents the most popular choice. As an illustration of what he found imagine that three voters rank order politicians A, B and C, and the result is as follows –
Rank order
Voters 1st 2nd 3rd
1 A B C
2 B C A
3 C A B
Voters 1 and 3 prefer A to B, voters 1 and 2 prefer B to C, and voters 2 and 3 prefer C to A. Even though all three voters have a clear rank order in mind, a majority picked each of A>B, B>C, and C>A, and the collective choice is incoherent and contradictory i.e. A>B>C>A>B>C>A. Furthermore, each politician got an equal number of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places.
Arrow found that all except two voting methods are vulnerable to such contradictory collective outcomes:
a) only one person votes and
b) voters can vote for all the politicians or parties they consider acceptable.
While a) is a consistent outcome it cannot reflect the will of the people, and we can safely ignore it. Possibility b) allows us to measure the proportion of people who think a party is likely to implement their will satisfactorily. That is at least coherent but does not solve the possibility of completely and indefinitely denying representation to a minority group.
Voting implies that the will of the majority must prevail and be binding on everyone. It implies that it is right for bigger groups to impose their will on smaller groups. It is not worth participating in decision systems with pre-ordained answers or built in disrespect for the losers. Such systems are pointless.
If alternative paths to representation, such as effective protests or civil disobedience, are not available, then minorities are effectively slaves to the majority. Denied the right to thrive, minority groups must either submit, leave, or actively resist. The closer in size the minority is to the majority, and the greater the differences in culture, the more likely the choice will be resistance.
A solution would be to divide the country up into multiple autonomous areas. That makes it possible for minorities to become the majority in one or more areas and realise the means to express their will, through federalism. That would enable a larger fraction of people to achieve representation.
An absence of wisdom
What about the wisdom of crowd’s function of voting then? The idea is that the average judgement of a hundred or more people’s independent judgements is usually very accurate. The reason this works is because errors are random and cancel each other.
Advocates of democracy believe that since voting amounts to aggregating millions of independent judgements, it concentrates whatever good sense is in the individual judgements. The evidence that it does is not good.
Firstly, you know your vote is unlikely to determine the outcome of any political context and therefore your vote will have no consequences for you. In that type of situation, reality does not restrain thinking, and people let their imaginations run wild.
Secondly, a tiny fraction of voters ever bothers to find out about the issues, or even what their party policies are. Political struggles and voting are not about choosing policies, but rather about signalling your connections and the desired relative status of your group.
Furthermore, we seldom elect the most able into government. People best connect with those only a little brighter than themselves, so elected politicians are usually only a little brighter than the average voter. In sum, we should not expect great wisdom or good sense to result from elections.
There are ways of encouraging votes to perform a wisdom function. One way is to make voting always about specific issues – referendums rather than elections. Then only those who care and think about policies will want to vote. In addition, widespread public debates about policy prior to each referendum will increase the number of informed people. Direct voting also has the virtue of giving everyone more of a say.
Politics attracts bad actors
We often think that good people in government will lead to good outcomes but, as in the marketplace, it is the incentive structure that decides how most participants behave. In free markets those structures press flawed people to do the right thing – Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand.
Unfortunately, the incentive structures of government do not press people to do the right thing at all (see Public Choice theory.) They reward overly confident risk takers and psychopathic rule breakers. They impose few consequences on mistakes – governments never lose their funding, for example. That incentive environment, coupled with the type of person selected by electioneering, almost guarantees politicians will not live up to their obligations.
Still worth it – maybe
So, in view of how hard it is to secure representation, tap wisdom and guide moderately smart bad people to do good through the vote, are elections worth it? It is easy to see the flaws, but as Churchill famously said, democracy is the worst system except for all the others. So, are we stuck with it?
I don’t think so.
The federalist Swiss canton system, along with direct voting in referendums, can improve both representation and policies, all while educating the population and radically limiting the harm done by bad actors. A strong constitution and an independent judiciary would help too.
[Image: by Rawpixel]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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