DISQUS

bago · 4 years ago

Wait, you mean self-awareness changes behaviour? Astounding!

bago · 4 years ago

Not to sound pedantic or anything, but awareness of constraints will invariably alter behavior, as that winds up being additional data to use in any decision matrix.

Javier Hidalgo · 4 years ago

Will, I recommend chapter 3 of the book Democracy Defended by Gerry Mackie. After an extensive literature review of the existing evidence, Mackie concludes "Riker's conjecture is that it is not the case that most of the time most reasonable voting methods lead to mostly the same outcomes. The evidence at hand is overwhelmingly that the conjecture fails."

Worth a look.

Will Wilkinson · 4 years ago

Thanks, Javier. I'll take a look. My guess is that Mackie's definition of "reasonable voting method" must be pretty tendentious.

Javier Hidalgo · 4 years ago

Mackie is refering to plurality, Borda, Condorcet, Bentham, Hare, Copeland, Coombs, and culminative methods of voting. There are others out there, but these are probably the mostly widely discussed methods. To be sure, there are some differences in outcomes when different voting methods are used. However, Mackie suggests that the differences are much smaller than Riker and other social choice theorists believed.

Will Wilkinson · 4 years ago

Yeah. I'm thinking of alternative democratic structures beyond different voting methods. All the methods you mention are ways of voting for representatives, for example. But also I'm interested in schemes, like Roberty Cooter's, that, instead of having a system where a single representative votes on a wide variety of issues, voters vote for single-issue representatives in overlapping single-issue jurisdictions. Or systems of direct referendum voting, etc. Or systems where voters can trade votes. Or even a system where there is lower threshold for constitutional amendment. These different democratic institutional structures can be combined with various different voting procedures like the ones you mention. I think you end up with wildly different outcomes. And that leads to the question of justification. It's simply not good enough to say that a system is legitimate because it is democratic. One has to justify the choice of one democratic system, which will bias the system in favor of certain kinds of outcomes, over another, which will bias the system in a different direction.

Javier Hidalgo · 4 years ago

Ah, now I understand what you're saying. The Athenian lot system is another radical example: a way of electing officials that is democratic, yet does away with elections altogether.

Javier Hidalgo · 4 years ago

That should read: a way of selecting officials that is democratic, yet does away with elections altogether.

Nicholas Weininger · 4 years ago

The obligatory SF quote here is from Ken MacLeod, who in one of his "Engines of Light" books (I think it's the first, _Cosmonaut Keep_) has a society on another planet that chooses officials by lot (hierarchically: you get chosen by lot for a seat in your local assembly, which then chooses some of its members by lot for a seat in the regional assembly, etc). One of the characters from that society remarks that "Elections are *so* undemocratic," and you can see what she means.

Nicholas Weininger · 4 years ago

For that matter, in this age of secure Internet everything, why make the legislature representative at all? Let every citizen be, if he/she chooses, a voting member of Congress, with the right to remotely cast a secret ballot on any proposed bill.

People who wanted to save themselves the trouble of voting by themselves could pick someone else (anonymously if desired) to serve as their proxy. Likewise, if you wanted more influence for your views you could try to persuade others to pick you as their proxy; the one requirement would be that to serve as a proxy for others you would have to publicize your voting record. To put a bill up for consideration you'd have to get petition signatures from, say, 1% of the electorate, either directly or through proxies; to pass one you'd need a majority and a "quorum"/turnout threshold. We could retain an elected Senate to do the few things that actually require a physically present set of representatives, such as holding steroid hearings. :-)

If this isn't quite technologically feasible now, within a generation it surely will be, and then what excuse will Congresscritters have for continued existence?

Javier Hidalgo · 4 years ago

Nicholas, interesting--my memory is a bit patchy, but I think Aristotle regarded elections as inherently oligarchical practices because elections are won or lost on the basis of merit, wealth, etc. Selection by lot on other hand is premised on the assumption that citizens are equally competent.

I can't resist quoting Protagoras, in Plato's dialogue:

"when the question relates to carpentering or any other mechanical art, the Athenians allow but a few to share in their deliberations...But when they meet to deliberate about political virtue, which proceeds only by way of justice and wisdom, they are patient enough of any man who speaks of them, as is also natural, because they think that every man ought to share in this sort of virtue"

The lot system enshrined in practice the principle that all citizens were minimally competent to share in governance.

James Barnett · 4 years ago

Not to rain on everyone's parade, but this sounds just like proportional representation. Under this system of elections, these small, single-issue parties just gang up and form coalitions.
Isn't that what basically have already? Extremists and centerists are in both parties and ideologues, like environmentalists and libertarians, play both parties more or less.

Wild Pegasus · 4 years ago

But the Condorcet Paradox, agenda manipulation, May's Theorem, single peakedness, Downsian equilibrium, Black's Theorem and the like, are not [part of law school curricula] --not yet, at least.

If there are any books explaining these concepts to the intelligent laymen, I'm all ears.

- Josh

Will Wilkinson · 4 years ago

Public Choice III, by Dennis Mueller.

washerdreyer · 4 years ago

Many of those concepts are addressed, though not in any particular Eskridge, Jr.; Frickey; and Garrett, Cases and Materials on Legislation: Statutes and The Creation of Public Policy. 3rd Edition. Which I'm reviewing for my last law school exam of the year, and thereby providing small counter example to Amar's point

Kenny Easwaran · 4 years ago

I believe it was Bob McGrew (my co-blogger at Cardinal Collective) who I was discussing this system with once, who pointed out that in fact this is one of the few voting schemes that will manage to satisfy the desiderata of Arrow's Theorem. This is because in the non-randomized case, the only system that does this is dictatorship (letting one individual make the choice), and in the randomized case, the only ones that do are linear combinations of those that do, and this is the symmetric linear combination of all of the dictatorships.

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