Could voting for a really crazy candidate work in your interest?
That’s the implication of a new study by some very sharp economists from the World Bank, MIT, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Northwestern University: ELECTORAL RULES AND THE QUALITY OF POLITICIANS: THEORY AND EVIDENCE FROM A FIELD EXPERIMENT IN AFGHANISTAN.
They compare the results in two types of local elections:
1. Where multiple candidates are elected; and
2. Where one winner rules.
In the latter, voters opt for clever moderates. But in the former, voters identify hard-cases and elect them.
“We propose a theoretical model where the difference in the quality of elected officials between the two electoral systems occurs because elected legislators have to bargain over policy, which induces citizens in (type 1) elections to vote strategically for candidates with more polarized policy positions even at the expense of candidates’ competence. Consistent with the predictions of the model, we find that elected officials in (type 2) elections are more educated than those in district elections and that this effect is stronger in more heterogeneous villages. We also find evidence that elected officials in (type 1) elections have more biased preferences.”
Negotiation is a staple of politics. Greek democracy was founded on the idea of thesis and antithesis entangling in order to forge synthesis. Our modern-day parliaments are the inheritor of this intellectual tradition.
But negotiating is tricky.
Coming to the negotiation table with a smile on your face and a sensible plan immediately marks you as the loser. President Obama found this out the hard way in his first term.
“When it came time to deal with the expiration of the Bush Tax Cuts, President Obama again immediately abandoned the liberal — and his own original — position of allowing all of the Bush Tax Cuts to expire and started negotiating from the centrist position of allowing only the Bush Tax Cuts over $250,000 to expire. By holding hostage the extension of unemployment benefits, Republicans quickly got their way in the tax talks.”
Obama is a smart guy and he did not repeat his mistake. Think Progress quotes him on the topic:
“I suppose what I could have done is started off with no tax cuts, knowing that I was going to want some and then let them take credit for all of them. And maybe that’s the lesson I learned.”
By his second term, Obama took a hard-line position to negotiating and the Republicans were the ones that copped the blame for the government shutdown of 2013.
Politics has become more polarised in the United States, as the fantastic Graphic on the right here illustrates (source: The Economist). That means more divisive figures in public life.
For example, Ted Cruz, the barnstorming Republican Senator from Texas who led the Republicans into the debt default impasse (an issue that required negotiation to resolve).
Cruz is described as…, well, let me Google that for you.
Now, Cruz lost the wrangle over the debt default. He was cut out by his own side. But his ploy might have been the only way to win. If the other side thinks you are an idiot before you start negotiating, you’ve convinced them they need to offer something stupidly good to close the deal.
The lessons for Australia are many. The moderates in parliament hold less power than the wildcards. And this is especially so in the Senate, where neither party currently has a majority, and negotiation is far more important.
This may be why you hear so much from the Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young and so little from the ALP Senator Carol Brown. The less mainstream your position, the more you can expect to gain in concessions, and so the more favour you can expect at the ballot box.
Evidence the Australian public is savvy on this topic can be found in the most recent Senate election, which sent a full box of Froot Loops to our nation’ capital.
This line of thinking raises two important questions:
1. Does this way of voting represent an inherent conservative desire? If we want to gum up the works of politics, matching the other side’s wildcards with wildcards of our own should just about do the trick. A government system stocked with outliers on the spectrum will create a lot more noise and fireworks than one stocked with moderates, but perhaps just as much in the way of real reform.
2. Where we see moderates elected to rule a system, can we assume this means we don’t expect any negotiation to happen? That if someone seemingly sensible like Bill Shorten is elected to head the ALP, that we expect him to rule it with an iron fist?
I value your thoughts on all this – please leave a comment below!
Thomas the Think Engine 