Information disclosure requirements

I was trying to fill in Wellington election papers. I remain a conscientious non-voter at central government level, but councils are more like local clubs. And Wellington is such a freaking mess. 

In most other areas where people make choices, there are all kinds of government regulations mandating information disclosure - even if there are plenty of easy sources of information.

When we bought our car, there was the compulsory sticker on fuel economy and running costs. But you hardly need that. A quick Google search will give you fuel economy comparisons between cars. 

Food has compulsory nutritional labelling and ingredients listing. 

You can't go out and buy insurance without getting a lengthy and tedious compulsory disclosure statement from your insurance advisor. Piles of compulsory climate disclosures are coming. 

So surely surely it would be dead simple to look up the voting records of incumbents. Wellington uses a ranked voting system. So I wanted to punish everyone who had voted for the convention centre, or the expensive library rebuild, or who had ever voted against housing (whether intensification or expansion), and reward those who'd done the opposite, while sticking new challengers between those. 

And similarly for Greater Wellington Regional Council. Punish everyone who voted for the draft Plan Change 1 on the Regional Spatial Plan that basically bans new subdivisions. 

But while government mandates tons of often-superfluous information disclosure in other sectors, it is impossible to tell how councillors voted on different issues unless you know when the vote happened, in which committee, and are happy to wade through council minutes to find it. 

A snippet from my column in the Herald this week:

But because no voter is particularly likely to change the outcome, few would spend the time and effort that would be required to gather the information needed to cast an informed ballot.

While it would be relatively simple for councils to set up and maintain websites tallying each vote, rather than burying them in impenetrable minutes, it has not happened.

Compulsory information disclosure is most warranted when the public interest in a better-informed decision is high but the private incentive to gather information is low.

Central government believes we need fuel economy stickers on car windows – despite the ease of finding the same information online. The case for requiring councils to provide basic information on councillors' votes is stronger than the case for fuel economy stickers on car windows, and it hasn't happened.

We can't be certain that making it easier for local voters to reward and punish incumbents based on their voting records would substantially improve turnout or improve local government outcomes.

But surely it's worth trying. Democracy depends on voters being able to "throw the bums out" when necessary, but that requires being able to tell who they are.

It should be a lot simpler.

One fun game in ranked-ballots. Clearly unfit people sometimes put their name in the hat. People who, if elected, might result in central government appointing a Commissioner instead. 

If you'd prefer a Commissioner rather than some set of candidates for mayor, ranking the unappointable person ahead of that set of people is basically a game of chicken with Central Government...

Rational voting?

Andrew Gelman argues it could be rational to vote. Sure, you're only trivially likely to change the outcome. But if you do change the outcome, the outcome is changed for lots of people. Add up the benefits across that broad set, specify that people are at least somewhat altruistic, and all's good, right?

He could be right in the current election cycle. I expect there is substantial value in the GOP being punished hard in each and every place it can be, all the way down to the vote on city dog-catcher. That outfit has to understand that reputation matters, and that failing to constrain Trump has more cost than benefit. It should be made to understand that backing a demagogue brings electoral death. It needs to be more scared of supporting Trump than of not supporting Trump. The party needs to be turned off and on again.

But the argument does require that the voter places himself or herself in an epistemically privileged position. You only change the outcome if you make or break a tie. You only make or break a tie if half of the voters in your district think you're providing a public bad with your vote rather than a public good.

Why do you think that your half of the electorate's the right one and the other half's wrong? Shouldn't you be updating, at least a bit, based on that half the electorate disagrees with you? Maybe you're the one who's done all the sums and has gotten things right, and the other side is full of idiots who'd wreck the country. But maybe there's a marginal voter on the other side who's your mirror image and thinks the same of you.

There's probably somebody reading this now who thinks my second paragraph is complete rubbish and that there's a lot of value in stopping particular Democrats from being elected. And that person could be right!

So I don't think this makes for a generalised "Yes, it's rational to vote" argument. It could be combined with a Jason Brennan "If you're going to vote, you have a duty to vote well", so that it's rational to vote if you have really good reason to think you're better informed than other voters. Feel lucky?

Previously:

• No it can't!
• Economist irrationality

Flagged

It's possible, in theory, that a preference ballot like that used in the NZ flag referendum could fail to select a Condorcet winner. In that case, a flag that's the strong second choice of many but the first choice of few is killed in the early rounds and so is not able to pick up the second-choice transfers as other options are eliminated.

But I doubt that's happened this time around. Here's the final tally, graphic courtesy of the NBR.

For a non-Lockwood (the top two) designs to have won, you'd need... well, there's no path from here to there. There is no way that you can get to anything but a showdown between those two options since the total for each of them exceeds the total first-preferences of all of the three other options.

I've put in my OIA request for all the ballot preference data anyway, expecting it to be shot down, because I'm interested in whether the Electoral Commission actually has the law right on this one. They think it's illegal to provide the number of ballots that conform to the different potential preference orderings; I'm interested in whether the Ombudsman will agree.

It's also interesting that spoiled ballots beat Red Peak.

Update: Note too that iPredict has the current flag as 75% likely to win in the next referendum. How long those prices remain accurate will be interesting: they're not accepting new deposits, so trading is limited to those currently with liquid accounts.

Ballot snapshots

It made me really happy a few years ago when a student emailed me a picture of his completed ballot. Rather than tick the box for one of the parties, he'd written in his preference for that Gordon Tullock be elected. I knew that I'd done my job well.

It's maybe illegal to take a picture of your ballot. The Electoral Commission warns against it, but Graeme Edgeler's pretty sure it isn't illegal.

However, electoral law expert Graeme Edgeler said sharing a photo of a completed voting paper was unlikely to be illegal, as the commission's rules were intended to prevent people from mistakenly using a false ballot.

"The Electoral Commission might think it's against the spirit of the law...but the spirit of the law doesn't create a criminal offence.

"They might frown on people doing this, but I can't see a problem: it's part of the democratic process really, you vote how you want and if you want to shout from the rooftops, you can."

An Electoral Commission spokeswoman said any complaints about photos of completed voting papers would be assessed on a case by case basis.

The only good reason I can see for banning photos of a ballot is to prevent vote-selling. Suppose I offer you a dollar to vote for my preferred candidate. You can take my dollar, but I have no way of knowing whether you held up your side of the deal. But taking a picture from inside the booth with your ticked ballot provides the proof.

Now this matters less with the postal flag ballot: I could just pay you the dollar for the blank form, fill it in myself, and mail it. But it would still be easier for me to offer a dollar to anybody who tweets a picture of their completed ballot ranking the monkey-butt flag in first place.*

If you think selling votes is a bad thing, then you might want to support the continued ban on taking pictures of the ballot - unless it's a write-in ballot for Gordon Tullock. Those should always be allowed.


 * I do not care enough about flags to actually be making this offer. Are there really people who care enough about flags that they'd be willing to pay for an extra few votes for their preferred option?

Condorcet Conundrums

The elimination ballot New Zealand will use for its coming flag referendum isn't a bad one, but it is a shame that they won't be releasing the data that could tell us whether we've failed to choose a Condorcet Winner.

Here's me at the Dom:

Instead of asking the Electoral Commission to check first for a Condorcet Winner, Parliament told the Commission to follow a simple elimination procedure. It works as follows. If any flag is the first choice of a majority of voters in the first round, things are simple: that flag would by definition be the champion of all. But things get trickier if there is no first-round winner. In that case, the option that was the first choice of the fewest voters is dropped.

Let's take a simple example. Suppose that a million people vote in the flag referendum. 350,000 voters prefer the Black, White and Blue silver fern design but rank the Koru as second and all other options below that. 340,000 prefer Red Peak, rank the Koru as second, and all other options rank below that.

Finally, 310,000 prefer Koru as their first choice, rank the Black, White and Blue silver fern second, and all other options lower. Under the elimination procedure, the Koru is eliminated first because it is the first choice of the fewest voters.

A majority then prefers the Silver Fern to Red Peak. But, had Silver Fern faced Koru head-to-head, the Koru would have won – and it also would have beaten Red Peak in a head-to-head race.

Whenever a flag is the second choice of many voters but the first choice of few, the elimination procedure that the Electoral Commission will use risks choosing a flag that would have been beaten in a head-to-head race by another option. It might not matter, as there are only some configurations of voter preferences that would yield that kind of result. But it is disappointing that the New Zealand Flag Referendum Act did not ask the Electoral Commission to check.

Even worse, the Electoral Commission is forbidden from publishing the data that might let us know whether the voting procedure has resulted in the wrong flag being chosen. I asked the Electoral Commission whether they could provide the data that would let other researchers test which flag might have been chosen under different voting rules. Their Senior Legal Advisor replied that Section 50 of the New Zealand Flag Referendums Act 2015 prohibits them from disclosing that information and that they would decline any Official Information Act request on that basis.

Flag Cycles

I guess we'll never know whether the flag referendum has chosen the right flag. Why? Elections NZ cannot tell us.

Let's step back. Recall that the preferential ballot that will be used would provide us all the data we need to choose a Condorcet winner, if there is one. The Condorcet winner is the flag that would beat all other flags in a head-to-head match-up. So if my preferred flag, monkey-butt, would beat each of the fern designs and the red peak design in a head-to-head match, monkey-butt would be the Condorcet winner.

It's dead simple to check for a Condorcet winner in the preferential ballot. For each of the pairings, you pretend that all the other options don't exist and see how many voters say A beats B and how many say B beats A. If a majority of voters rank A higher than B in their preference ordering, regardless of how they rank them relative to all the other options, then A beats B. You do that across all the potential options. If some flag would beat each other option, that's the right flag.

Unfortunately, a preferential ballot with sequential elimination of options that receive the fewest first choices can sometimes choose the wrong option. Suppose some flag is everybody's strong second choice but the first choice of few voters. It could be quickly eliminated from the preferential ballot. It isn't necessary that a Condorcet winner exists, or that a preferential elimination would fail to choose an existing Condorcet winner, but it is definitely possible and it is definitely easily avoided. How? Before running the preference ballot, check to see if any option beats all the others and declare it the winner if so.

Even more unfortunately, we'll never know whether we've chosen the wrong flag. The Electoral Commission replied to my request as follows:

Dear Mr Crampton, Thank you for your e-mail of 24 September 2015 regarding the results of the first flag referendum and a request to provide the number of votes that conform to each of the potential preference orderings and publish the aggregates.

Section 38(1)(a) of the New Zealand Flag Referendums Act 2015 (‘the Act’), provides that in the case of the first flag referendum, once all the voting papers have been processed, the Returning Officer must:
(i)     calculate the number of first preference votes received for each option; and(ii)    count the votes in the manner described in Schedule 4; and
(iii)   declare the result of the referendum by giving public notice of the following:(A)     the absolute majority of votes determined at the first iteration; and(B)     the number of first preference votes received for each option; and(C)     the absolute majority of votes determined at each iteration at which an option was successful or excluded; and(D)     the number of votes recorded for each option and the number of transferable votes at each iteration at which an option was excluded; and(E)     the iteration number at which each option was excluded, where applicable; and(F)     the number of informal voting papers; and(G)     the outcome of the referendum; and 

The results will be published on the Electoral Commission's website: www.elections.govt.nz in accordance with these requirements.  The preliminary results will be released after 7pm on 11 December 2015 and the final result after midday on 15 December 2015.
 

Unfortunately, the Electoral Commission is unable to provide the additional result information that you would like because it is not permitted under the legislation.
 Yours sincerely

I wonder if it's too late to get an emergency change to the referendum legislation.

Update: A follow-up email confirms that the Electoral Commission would decline any OIA requests for those more detailed vote tally breakdowns as they view it as illegal for them to provide it.

Manipulating an STV vote

Ok, so the Internets are all a-twitter about how strategic voters should behave in the coming flag vote, and whether it's possible to vote strategically.

Recall that there are now 5 options: 3 with ferns, monkey-butt, and the red peak thing. Let's denote these A, B, and C for the ferns; M and R for Monkey-butt and Red-peak, respectively.

Suppose there are five different basic types of voters. This is just a constructed example; I have no clue what the actual preference distributions are. But suppose that red-peak is the second choice of a lot of fern-lovers who have strong preference for their most-preferred fern as compared to the others. And that one of the ferns - nobody much likes that fern. You all know which one.

And so:

10 voters	7 voters	5 voters	3 voters	4 voters
A	B	M	R	M
R	R	R	B	R
B	A	B	C	C
M	M	C	M	A
C	C	A	A	B

Everyone votes for most preferred candidate.  If no majority, the one with the fewest first-choice votes is dropped and the second choice moves up for those voters. And so on until there is a majority.

• C has no first-place votes and is dropped in the first round. 
• Then, R is dropped because it has only 3 first-place votes.
• Then, M is dropped because it has only 9 first-place votes (to 10/10 for A&B)
• Then, B wins 15 to 14 in the final round.

Suppose that the four monkey-butt supporters in the last column don't like this. Their least preferred option wins. What happens if they lie and say that they prefer red-peak to monkey-butt?

10 voters	7 voters	5 voters	3 voters	4 voters
A	B	M	R	M R
R	R	R	B	R M
B	A	B	C	C
M	M	C	M	A
C	C	A	A	B

And the sequence:

• C is dropped in the first round.
• M is dropped in the second round, having only 5 first-place votes.
• B is dropped in the third round, with only 7 votes.
• R wins in the fourth round, 19 to 10 against A.

By lying about their preference ordering, 4 of 29 voters flipped the outcome from their last choice to their second choice. If you think this isn't fair or somehow bad, they've also made sure that the Condorcet Winner actually won:

• R>A 19:10
• R>B 22:7
• R>C (unanimous)
• R>M 20:9

If they hadn't lied, B would have won: an outcome that 22/29 people would not have liked. So are they so bad?

Again, this is just a trivial constructed example. It is not easy in the real world to tell what actual preference orderings are. And knowing what they are is important for figuring out strategy. At the same time, since no one vote will ever change the outcome of an election, neither will any one strategic vote.

But, in general, if you think that fern-supporters are divided across ferns, and that a non-fern option might be a strong second choice, you might want to list that second choice as your first choice if you fear winding up with a fern you don't like. Similarly, if you're a big fern-supporter and you're scared that splitting your first choice options across the field will let somebody else sneak up the middle, well, maybe go with the fern you think most others like best.

This isn't something unique to STV - all systems are manipulable (other than dictatorship). That's the Gibbard-Satterthwaithe theorem. It may take more information to run properly than is feasible in a lot of cases, but it's possible. 

Perhaps a better bottom line: voting is irrational if you think you're going to change the outcome; it's even more irrational to put a ton of thought into strategy where you're not likely to change the outcome. Do you run complicated strategies when picking lotto numbers?

Berg

I'm really really looking forward to hearing Chris Berg when he visits us in a couple of weeks. Come join us either in Wellington (29 June) or Auckland (30th).

Votes for Kids

Newstalk ZB interviewed me last week on the idea being floated around that kids should get to vote on any new New Zealand flag.

I was a bit sceptical about it.

The audio's here.

I suppose that if we had to let kids vote on something, there wouldn't be much damage in a flag vote.

Theories about Conspiracy theories

Four nationally representative survey samples collected in 2006, 2010, and 2011 indicate that over half of the American population consistently endorse some kind of conspiratorial narrative about a current political event or phenomenon and that these attitudes are predicted by supernatural, paranormal, and Manichean sentiments. These findings suggest that conspiracism is not only an important element in American political culture, but also is expressive of some latent and powerful organizing principles behind American mass opinion.

So say J. Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood in the AJPS, in an article I missed when it came out last October.

Read this table and weep.

TABLE 1 Percentage of Americans Agreeing with Various Conspiracy Theories, 2011
Conspiratorial Narrative	Heard Before?	Strongly Agree	Agree	Neither	Disagree	Strongly Disagree
The U.S. invasion of Iraq was not part of a campaign to fight terrorism, but was driven by oil companies and Jews in the U.S. and Israel (Iraq War)	44	6	13	33	22	27
Certain U.S. government officials planned the attacks of September 11, 2001, because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East (Truther)	67	7	12	22	18	41
President Barack Obama was not really born in the United States and does not have an authentic Hawaiian birth certificate (Birther)	94	11	13	24	14	38
The current financial crisis was secretly orchestrated by a small group of Wall Street bankers to extend the power of the Federal Reserve and further their control of the world’s economy (Financial Crisis)	47	8	17	38	20	17
Vapor trails left by aircraft are actually chemical agents deliberately sprayed in a clandestine program directed by government officials (Chem Trails)	17	4	5	28	21	42
Billionaire George Soros is behind a hidden plot to destabilize the American government, take control of the media, and put the world under his control (Soros)	31	9	10	44	16	21
The U.S. government is mandating the switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs because such lights make people more obedient and easier to control (CFLB)	17	4	7	24	24	41
Note: N = 1,935 cases.
Source: Modules of the 2011 Cooperative Congressional Election Surveys.

Table 3 is even worse: 27% believe we're in End Times; 33% believe in ESP.

All that's left is figuring out how to do away with Manichean dualism and superstition; education seems to be the strongest preventative measure, along with having political knowledge.

Or maybe that's just what they want us to believe.

Really, all the voting boxes are rigged and that the Illuminati are not only making sure your vote won't count but also keeping track of how you vote? Haven't you noticed that the chemtrail planes are concentrated in areas where your preferred party's support is undercounted because of the Illuminati? Think about it. Voting's dangerous. Chemtrails.

 

Mandatory voting remains a bad idea

Andrew Coyne thinks voting should be mandatory in Canada*; Dylan Matthews makes a similar argument for America.

The best argument for compulsory voting, Coyne's, is that it could shift politicians away from campaigns based on getting out the vote: if everyone has to vote, then GOTV matters less, as does playing to the party's base.

While that's one notch in favour of compulsory voting, there are a few considerations against it that might give us pause.

Blood donation is almost entirely a public good. Were we to implement a mandatory blood donation regime, we would have to couple it with a tick-box allowing "donors" to indicate that their blood probably shouldn't be used or at least should undergo heavier screening: a Hepatitis B patient's blood probably shouldn't enter into general circulation.

But nobody seems to worry much about the quality of a compelled vote. They should.

Jason Brennan makes a pretty convincing argument that while none of us have a positive duty to vote, those choosing to vote have a duty to vote well: to weigh seriously whether the policies offered up by the different parties would achieve the ends that the voter wishes and that the trade-offs are worthwhile, in the voter's estimation. While few voters meet that duty, things are even worse among current non-voters: non-voters, on average, aren't made up of rational calculators and conscientious objectors like me; most non-voters instead have little political knowledge and little intention of acquiring any. And forcing them to vote does not encourage them to acquire more information.

I'll offer instead a compromise position: make voting compulsory, but also implement a simple quiz at the ballot box. Voters would need to be able to match parties with their main supported policies. They'd also be quizzed on a few basics, like which parties formed the prior government, whether crime rates increased or decreased over the prior administration, whether income inequality has been increasing or decreasing, whether most climate scientists agree that the planet has been warming, and order-of-magnitude level quizzes on the composition of the budget. The quiz questions would vary election to election but would hit on the baseline matters necessary for understanding the policy issues at stake in that year's election. Everyone's vote counts for at least 1, but we could award bonus votes for voting well. Everyone would have the opportunity to vote well: Elections NZ would put up the 50-or-so quiz questions and their answers; each voter might get a random draw of 10 at the ballot box. Those compelled to vote but unable to vote well would have less opportunity to do harm to their own interests with their vote. I won't go all the way to nudge-based voting, but we could at least avoid some harm with this version.

Think of the incentive effects. GOTV campaigns would be focused on informing supporters about basic facts so that the party's supporters' votes might count for more.

I could support compulsory voting if it came with this kind of mechanism. Or we could keep things voluntary.


* And see his prior similar argument here.

Electoral lotteries

The Timaru Herald asked me for comment a few weeks' back on my non-voting stance. They used about one line from the email below; I'll share the rest with you here.

“I have not voted in any election since the 1997 Canadian Federal election. I also do not buy lotto tickets. In any large-scale election, the odds of making or breaking a tie, which are the only ways that you can change the election result, are so vanishingly small that you might as well buy a lotto ticket and promise to give any winnings to your favourite charity. And buying lottery tickets is a poor way of supporting charities. Work by Casey Mulligan and Charles Hunter in the United States shows that only one out of every 89,000 votes cast in Congressional elections changed the outcome. They went back and checked every election going back over a hundred years. You would have had to have voted 89,000 times to expect to change one outcome. You could vote diligently over thousands of lifetimes and still not expect to change an election. New Zealand results would not be much different: your vote would have to be the one making or breaking a tie in a critical electorate like Epsom, or the one pushing your preferred party to or over the St-Lague quotient threshold. Neither are particularly likely. So why bother?

Most explanations of why people vote fail. If it’s civic duty that drives voting, there are many better ways of doing one’s civic duty. Voting is not a particularly effective use of one’s time in achieving any reasonable civic objective because of the infinitesimal chance that your vote changes the outcome. The best explanation I have seen is that many people just seem to enjoy voting as a means of self-expression. But it is a bit of a rigged game. If you don’t vote, you’re told you can’t complain about the outcome because you didn’t take part. But if you do vote, and your side loses, or if your side wins but does things you don’t like, you’re also told you can’t complain about the outcome: “We won, you lost, eat that,” as one Minister was reported to have said. I prefer not to play. 

It seems reasonable to object by asking what would happen if everybody else stopped voting because of such calculations. But if turnout were sufficiently low, I would probably go and vote. The odds of changing an election outcome where there is low turnout are much higher than when turnout is well above 70%; when turnout is low enough, voting makes sense even if you do not enjoy voting for its own sake. While it is fun to imagine what would happen if they held an election and nobody came, it is an exceptionally unlikely outcome. The calculus here discussed does mean that, all else equal, those prone to being very bad at assessing the statistical likelihood of things, pivotal votes included, are disproportionately likely to vote and so parties have less incentive to cater to the policy wishes of the numerate. While this is unfortunate, my one vote would not change it.

 As a concluding comment, I would urge those people who insist on voting to vote well. Philosopher Jason Brennan argues that we have no specific duty to vote, but that if we do vote, we have a duty to vote well. Voting well does not mean supporting any particular party or set of policy positions, but it does mean that a voter must look carefully at each party’s proposed policies and assess whether the policies would actually achieve the goals that the voter wishes to further. This is hard work, but the costs imposed on the public if you vote without such careful assessment seem to outweigh whatever civic benefits obtain from higher turnout.”

I tweeted Brennan's line on voting well on election day. I hope that doing so wasn't illegal under New Zealand's bizarre election-day legislation.

Value for Money: election broadcasting edition

New Zealand subsidises party political advertising during the election campaign. Parliament allocates funding to the Electoral Commission for the Broadcasting Allocation, which funds short political broadcasts. It appears that Parliament allocates a fixed amount of funding, which the Electoral Commission then divvies up amongst the various parties in accordance with their support.

I generally oppose the Broadcasting Allocation. Mechanisms like this always need to tread a careful line between overly advantaging incumbents and providing too-generous of taxpayer support to fringe movements opposed by most voters. So National and Labour get about two-thirds of the monetary allocation and just under half of the available minutes.

But, if we're going to have this kind of thing, I can think of no better use of the money than its being provided to The Civilian Party. Recall that The Civilian Party is something of a protest movement promising free ice cream and llamas. The New Zealand Taxpayers Union, which I generally support, has opposed this use of government funding. But where the funding comes out of a fixed pot, it's only at the expense of the other parties: were The Civilian Party's allocation removed, the other parties' allocations would be increased.

I'm willing to bet that viewers will receive far more utils from the two minutes of Civilian Party advertising than they will from that of any other party. Funding reallocations away from The Civilian Party will reduce total national utility. Redirecting funds away from the other parties and towards The Civilian Party, on the other hand, seems a fine idea. 

I think the NZTU got this one wrong. 

In the alternative, I humbly submit my request to get to be the one who decides which parties are really jokes in 2014. The list isn't short.

Dirty hands

I appreciated this bit in Art of Theory's interview with Michael Walzer (HT: Xavier Marquez):

Walzer: The argument of my piece on dirty hands, which is also the argument summed up in that phrase, is that sometimes it’s necessary in politics to do things that it’s wrong to do, which translates into the right thing to do being the wrong thing to do. That’s the incoherence.

What philosophers mostly believe is that the right thing to do is what, all things considered, is the right thing to do. The notion of getting your hands dirty implies that you’re doing something which is wrong and that’s what I was trying to get at in the article. You want political leaders who know that x is the wrong thing to do, because you want them to do it only in extremis. You want them to do it only at the last minute, when nothing else will work, and when there’s some looming disaster. It’s a kind of utilitarianism of the last moment.

You begin by rejecting the maxim “do justice even if the heavens fall,” and instead choose the maxim “do justice until the heavens are about to fall, and then do whatever you have to do to stop the heavens from falling.” You have to know that your actions at that last moment are something brutal, cruel, wrong. Otherwise you will do it too soon, and too often.

That's not far from what I think about voting: only do it if there's a lot at stake and if it's looking really close. And about a few other things too.

There should always be some utilitarian/consequentialist side constraint.

Economist Irrationality

Boy is S.M. at The Economist's "Democracy in America" blog having to engage in contortions to defend the rationality of voting.

Launching off from Katherine Mangu-Ward's really excellent summary of the case against voting, S.M. invokes Gelman's argument that large N elections both reduce the probability of decisiveness and increase the potential benefits from winning.

The mathematics are convoluted, but the message is simple: even with a one in 10m chance of casting the decisive vote, the stakes are high. In fact, the lower the odds are of influencing the vote, the higher the stakes. This is because everything scales linearly and more people will bear the brunt—or enjoy the benefits—of a country led by candidate X rather than candidate Y. So your vote in Ohio, Wisconsin or another tipping-point state is worth $60,000 to your fellow citizens. That’s a pretty good return on the investment of the hour or so it takes to vote.

Except that the very fact of your decisiveness in the election proves that half of all voters disagree about whether you're making the world a better or a worse place! You can only be decisive by making or breaking a tie. That happens when half the voters think you're rather wrong. And, unless you are in an epistemically privileged situation relative to other voters (and why would you think you are!), you can't know whether you're on the right side or the wrong side. Gelman's a great statistician, but I've never liked his argument here.

Worse, S.M. pulls a pretty shonky Kantian move.

This misses the point of the Kantian argument for voting. The idea is not that one person’s decision to forgo voting would crash the system—how would that possibly happen?—but that it is immoral to act on a maxim that we cannot imagine everyone else acting on. So if I consider adopting Ms Mangu-Ward’s proposed maxim—I will abstain from voting because the costs of voting outweigh the benefits—I will first need to see if the maxim passes a test implicit in Kant’s categorical imperative. I ought not act in accordance with the maxim if it fails the test.

So let’s see: can I universalise the non-voting maxim? Can I imagine living in a world in which every eligible voter opts for a nap or a game of Temple Run in lieu of going to the polls? No. The logic of American democracy does not support such a universalised principle. No one votes, no one is elected, a moment of constitutional failure brings an emergency convention in which unelected delegates draft a new constitution calling for an alternate system of specifying leaders that doesn’t involve the public. The franchise, and America as we know it, disappears. Since the logic of the system cannot be sustained were everyone to adopt the nap-over-voting maxim, I am morally bound not to act on it.

Here's the universalisable version. Two weeks before the election, flip a coin. If it comes up heads, flip it again. If it comes up heads, flip it again. If it comes up heads a third time (a 12.5% chance), study hard about the policy options, decide which candidate is best, and then go vote. If everybody does that, there's a non-trivial chance of being decisive (maybe we'd need four heads in a row to be more sure) and so you've an instrumental reason to get out and vote - and to vote more sensibly. At current levels of turnout, it's clear that everybody else is failing to play the universalisable Kantian "vote at low probability" rule, so a good rule of thumb is then "Don't vote unless turnout looks low enough; if turnout is low, run the coin flips."

The simplest and most plausible way of squaring voting with rationality is simply to recognize that people like doing it for its own sake. We don't try to come up with stories about how onanism increases reproductive fitness; it's done for its own sake. Same with voting. Unfortunately, that breaks most of the normative desirability of median voter outcomes.

Economic retrospective voting in dictatorships

Dictators have an interest in strong economic performance. In an Olson model, the dictator wants to maximize his total tax take, which generally means getting the underlying economic structure right but taxing at a rate that's too high from the perspective of maximizing GDP but just right from the perspective of maximizing the dictator's share of GDP.

But what happens when the dictator's tenure is at issue? Results then are less clear. If improvements in economic performance reduce unrest, then the dictator might tax less than would be otherwise optimal in order to lower his policing costs; if a strong economy builds alternative power bases that might provide threats to the dictator's position, then things are less clear.

ANU's Paul Burke looks at political survival in democracies and autocracies, finding that both autocrats and democrats are more likely to lose power when they preside over poor economic performance. In fact, they seem about equally responsive to economic conditions:

The LPM estimates in Table 10 provide no evidence that the short-run impact of economic growth on political survival differs between democracies and autocracies. Interestingly, the IV estimates suggest that the impact of the growth rate on next-year leader exit odds is smaller in democracies than autocracies, although the difference is only significant in the estimate in column 2 (and only at the 10% level). The IV estimates in columns 3 and 5-6 indicate that the short-run impact of growth on leader exits remains negative in democracies, albeit smaller (in absolute value terms) than that for autocracies.

Policy upshot?

Crisis assistance conditioned on the benevolence of national leaders may be valuable in shoring up the positions of benevolent leaders during times of economic hardship, while ensuring that corrupt or autocratic leaders do not receive relief from domestic political pressures at the very moment when these pressures are building in strength.

Playing the crowd

Stephen Franks sees clearly:

My revulsion is at seeing Phil Goff and other people I know to be patriotic and intelligent New Zealanders trapped into pretending that they believe in dopey policies (like vandalising our efficient GST with piecemeal exemptions) and dopey arguments (like claiming significance to lost dividend streams on SOE shares sold, without admitting that they may be less than the interest cost savings from borrowing avoided with the proceeds of sale).  David Cunliffe pretending that increasing the minimum wage and opposing restoration of a youth wage will have only a "marginal" effect on unemployment is as sick-making as watching Bill English having to pretend that John Key's dedication to the current superannuation policy is statesmanlike.

Labour (and National) are trapped into many policy and  debate positions that you and I may correctly believe to be stupid. But the Leaders are not talking to us. The major parties must now ruthlessly focus on their conversations with the swing voters in the middle. Only their votes matter. And not many of those voters know enough of public affairs to be worth talking to for long or in any depth about matters fiscal, or indeed any other complexity. Elections are won and lost on whether the causes espoused and the arguments used – as boiled down to the 10-15 words on each point that might get through the media filter to nationwide TV -  will make the Leader look like a nice non-scary, familiar and safe person to the 10-15% of voters who swing to vague sentiment. 

I was not surprised to read in a Herald report yesterday morning of the vox pop interview with a woman who will vote for John Key and thinks he leads the Labour Party.  Many of the swing voters would pay less attention to policy and politics than most New Zealanders would pay to World Wide (WWE) Wrestling. Both are now similarly staged.
...
My revulsion is from watching and listening to smart well-meaning men and women betraying their intelligence in demeaning debate, offering policies and justifications they know to be nonsense, or even worse, bad for their country, because of how they are forced to engage under the dynamics of elections in lazy democracies like ours. It is shared across the english speaking world.

The main exceptions: earnest idealists who ought to know better but don't (the Greens' Gareth Hughes) and those with so little chance of affecting outcomes that they can afford not to pander (ACT's Stephen Whittington, though I expect he'd not pander regardless of his position).

It may be worse than Franks thinks. In equilibrium where voters cannot tell what policy works but can sniff out liars, politics selects not for the panderer but for the demagogue who actually believes his own rot.

I hereby propose that, on election day, TV1 hold a Coronation Street Marathon with special new episodes and new scandalous character developments throughout the day. TV2 can do the same with Shortland Street. TV3 can air highlights from the Rugby World Cup. Meanwhile, we put on a V8 Supercar race someplace sufficiently distant from any polling place combined with nearby classes in spiritualism, healing, and crystals. And, crucially, that all of this be set and heavily advertised now so that political parties can adjust policies to suit the median of those who would still turn out to vote. It's apparently passé to support knowledge tests for voters. But why not raise the opportunity costs for those who would otherwise reduce the average quality of the ballot?

I don't advocate voting. But if you do decide to vote, you have a duty to not reduce the quality of the median vote.

Contractarian non-voting

Does agreeing to play the game make you complicit in the game's outcome?

I'd argued a contractarian case for conscientious non-voting.

I've a reasonable contractarian foundation. If I agree to a process, then I'm bound to accept the outcome of that process. And voting outside of a context where baseline rights are protected against majoritarianism means I give assent to the process that strips others of their rights, even if I voted against that outcome. It's not Sophie's choice, but it's not a good one.

I often hear arguments of the form "Well, if you don't vote, you can't complain." A contractarian of my stripe would reverse things: if you agreed to the rules of a poker game, you can't whine afterwards that you lost your shirt. If you don't like the game, you shouldn't play it at all: abstention is not unreasonable.

Eli Dourado tries to give me a way out. He agrees with conscientious non-voting, but thinks the contractarian turn unnecessary and, worse, wrong. Here's the first part of his argument, with which I agree entirely:

What Brennan misses (at least in the essay; I have not read the book) is that the cause of all these harms is not just that voters make bad choices. That is a narrow perspective. It is that so many domains are subject to collective choice in the first place. The correct response to the question, “Shall we pass a law that destroys the lives of people who use drugs, especially if they are black?” is not merely “No,” but “Take your democracy and shove it.” Merely responding “No” is collectively harmful, because it fails to challenge the implicit proposition that the domain is rightly subject to collective choice.

When you vote in an election on an issue (or for candidates who can decide an issue) that should not be subject to collective choice in the first place, your vote makes no instrumental difference. It is therefore costless not to participate. By the Clean Hands Principle, you should not vote in such an election.

The libertarian's vote does at least as much to legitimate democratic jurisdiction over personal private choice as it does to move the outcome of that choice. I went a bit farther than that, arguing that voting signifies assent; Eli disagrees:

Does my vote, my “getting my hands dirty,” constitute consent in contractarian terms?

I think it clearly does not. The simplest example is one in which dissenters misunderstand how improbable decisive voting is. Suppose that the question I cited earlier, “Shall we pass a law that destroys the lives of people who use drugs, especially if they are black?” is in fact at issue in an election. A minority of 30% oppose this measure, and half of these correctly believe drug use should not even be subject to collective choice. Nevertheless, the 15% of people who oppose collective choice for drug use incorrectly believe that there is a significant chance that their vote will be decisive. Since the vote is happening no matter what, they show up at the polls to try to avert disaster. Does their voting on the question on the basis of mistaken beliefs about their probability of success constitute consent? I believe it does not.

Another example is the case of the Hail Mary pass; it involves no mistaken beliefs. Suppose you arrive at home to discover that some gunmen have broken into your house and are about to execute your daughter. The gunmen offer you a proposition. They happen to have 100 dice with them; if you roll 100 1s, they will spare your daughter’s life. Now, you know very well that the odds of rolling 100 1s with 100 d6 is 1 in 6^100, a very large number, but you say a Hail Mary and roll them anyway. Are you therefore consenting to your daughter’s execution, or at least to the proposition that rolling dice is a legitimate way of deciding whether your daughter should be executed? Again, I think not.

Like most people, I believe that consent can be a source of obligation, including political obligation. But only real consent counts; if your disgust at political discourse and need for self-expression overcomes your desire to keep your Hands Clean, then yes, your hands are dirty, but no, you haven’t consented. Consent has to be intended. The fact that contractarianism in practice relies so heavily on unintended forms of (fake) consent means that we don’t really have to take it seriously as a source of political obligation.

I agree with Eli that the threshold for consent in contractarianism is pretty low. If we can imagine that individuals sufficiently insulated from their interests by the constitutional veil could have unanimously consented to a set of constitutional rules, then the constitutional move solves democracy's infinite regress problem. Everybody knows that that consent is fake, but it's a useful thought experiment. But if imaginary consent by hypothetical people behind the veil lends moral weight to a constitution,* how can the real voting act not convey some kind of consent?

I'll agree with Eli that nobody would take the Hail Mary example as constituting consent. It's a contract signed under duress. Neither the signer, nor anybody around, nor the gunmen (unless he's utterly insane) would view there as having been consent. The contract wouldn't stand up in court either. Nobody takes coerced consent as real. Even if we imagine a case where a crazed gunman forces somebody to sign a contract that he was already about to sign, we'd still require some second affirmation after the gunman had been locked away that the consent was real. It isn't just what's true in the signer's heart that matters, it's how the community of observers understands the act.

Imagine an alternative case where I undertake something that any reasonable person would understand as constituting consent, but that I hadn't consented in my heart. Then, my only out is if I can demonstrate that it was unreasonable to have expected that I understood the act as signifying consent. So when Firefly's Captain Mal unwittingly wed a local lass by participating in a local ceremony (hit the 2:50 mark), the consequence of which he did not understand, he was eventually able to extricate himself - partially because the local lass wasn't quite what she'd seemed either. But everyone around understood the act as constituting assent, even if he was unaware.

Turn things around a bit. If Mal knew that everybody understood his acceptance of Saffron's gifts as acceptance of marriage, and he still accepted the gifts, he would either be consenting to marriage or engaging in fraud in hopes of a fun wedding night to be followed by an "I didn't know!" annulment. But not having consented in the deepest cockles of your heart isn't a defence to breach of contract.

Alas, I didn't write philosophy as an undergraduate. I'm sure there's a philosophical literature on what's sufficient for consent, and it probably isn't "voluntarily doing something, knowing that most people take the act as constituting consent". But that's my working hackish definition.

In Eli's argument, the voting act can do harm "because it fails to challenge the implicit proposition that the domain is rightly subject to collective choice." If we're in the world in which a libertarian's voting can do harm on this kind of basis, we're also in the world in which people take voting as signifying some agreement with the implicit proposition; I'm not sure how this "failure to challenge" can do harm unless the act of voting goes a bit farther and gives at least some support to the collective choice mechanism. Would we see so much handwringing about the health of democracy when turnout rates dip if the voting act didn't provide at least some kind of support for the system?

Eli gives some nice cases in which someone may vote while not assenting to the domain of collective choice. But pointing out these kinds of cases isn't enough to show that voting doesn't normally demonstrate agreement; lying to the murderous horde at the door that's seeking somebody hiding in your basement doesn't make you a liar, but lying for fun when there's no great reason for doing it just might. Voting when you reject the system is a bit fraudulent, but sometimes there are worse harms to be avoided.

My confidence in the propositions here advanced is pretty weak - philosophy just isn't my absolute or comparative advantage. And note the caveat in my first post: the case here advanced only applies to the anarcho-curious (Dourado @Normative's nice term) and strong minarchists who view most actions of government as illegitimate. Brennan's case is far more general and applies to all would-be voters: if you vote, it is wrong to vote badly.

* Yes, the weight is weak because the assent is hypothetical. But it can rule out at least some potential constitutions - ones that leave an individual worse off than he would be in the state of nature.

Public Choice as User Guide

Machiavelli's analysis was both positive and prescriptive: how ought the prince maintain and extend his power? Public Choice has sometimes been accused of being a handbook for would-be despots.

Now, Bueno de Mesquita (HT: @Isegoria) has produced a book that leans more closely to this kind of users-guide: The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behaviour is Almost Always Good Politics. This one's going to the top of my Amazon queue. In the meantime, here's Moynihan's review.

There would probably be a market for an intelligent-layman treatment of all the public choice results on voting and elections written as a guide for candidates and junior politicians.

NZ Youth - increasingly rational

I, for one, celebrate the increasing rationality of today's youth:

Two months from the November 26 general election, one in four New Zealanders aged 18-29 aren’t enrolled to vote – something Electoral Enrolment Centre National Manager Murray Wicks is trying to change.
He says low enrolment “is the norm”, but this election the figures are skewed towards “an over-representation… in the 18-29 age group”.
The reasons are different for each person, Mr Wicks says, but two dominate.
“Voting’s not cool, it’s something that grown-ups do, it’s something that adults do, and it’s not interesting,” he says.
“There’s also that they just haven’t got around to it."

I've not yet seen a plausible instrumental story about why any individual should vote. Plenty of good non-instrumental stories - some folks think it's fun for its own sake, and who am I to question their utils?

He says young people need to be aware that their vote counts and will influence election results. “Their vote is important, their voice is important,” he says. “Whatever they choose to vote they’re making the decision for New Zealand and for themselves, rather than leaving it to other people to vote for them.”

That may be true of youth voters as a block, but it isn't true of any individual in that group. If iPredict's saying there's a 94% chance National forms the next government, the odds of any individual vote changing that are pretty slim. So too are the odds of any voter pushing any minor party from being just under to being just over the quotient for another list seat.

Elections NZ gives the St Laguë quota numbers from the 2002 election. The system divides each eligible party's vote by sequential odd numbers: 1, 3, 5, ... 53, ... 105. The largest quotient gets the first list seat, the second largest quotient gets the second list seat, and so on.

The last allocated list seat in that election went to National: their 425,310 votes divided by 53 gave the 120th largest quotient: 8024.717. Had there been a 121st seat, it would have gone to United Future, whose 135,918 votes gave it a quotient of 7995.176 when divided by 17. How many more votes would United Future have needed to have taken that 120th seat from National? 502. If some group of 500-odd National voters had stayed home, that 120th seat could have flipped over to United Future. Would that have changed the election outcome? No. Peter Dunne still would have gone into coalition with Helen Clarke.

To change the outcome of an MMP election, you either have to be the pivotal voter in a pivotal district like Ohariu-Belmont or Epsom, where a minor party's election lets it bring in a few other MPs, or be the voter who changes the quotient on the 121st list seat sufficiently to flip the ordering of the 120th and 121st quotients, or be a pivotal voter in a district that generates an overhang. And, on top of that, the change in the composition of Parliament has to be sufficient to either change the governing coalition or the substantive power of members of the coalition. In the 2002 example above, Peter Dunne's jumping from 8 seats to 9 is unlikely to have had any substantive effect.

Alas, most folks prefer the veil of self-deception, imagining that their vote really does make a difference. No Right Turn says voting is a weapon youths can use against their failing elders. Maybe. But it's a weapon not unlike a one-use eyedropper when trying to drown an elephant.