The 2016 presidential election has us asking hard questions about the legitimacy and future of democracy. We are questioning--yet again—the prudence of an Electoral College. We are reminded of voter irrationality. We are debating who is to blame for giving racism, misogyny, and xenophobia a platform from the highest office in the land: the poor? the media? racists? Some are even questioning whether we can persist in disciplines that seem so impotent in face of political power.
But even disciplines that aren’t questioning their legitimacy, like political science and economics, face the problem of inertia. Suggestions for how we might enhance or eclipse traditional democracy are met with horror. The right to vote is twisted shamelessly into a duty to vote. Advertisements shame anyone who chooses not to participate in a system that some have argued is itself immoral. The two-party system has become a self-perpetuating trap of anti-intellectual rhetoric.
This isn’t to say there aren’t important proposals on the table. We might, as Sarah Conly (2013) suggests, get over our love-affair with autonomy and start unapologetically restricting the freedom to engage in what social scientists consider “harmful” behavior. Or we might continue softer efforts already underway, changing not which choices are available, but the structure of those choices (Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, 2009), and England has seen significant increases in tax revenues using this approach. We could also increase access to political participation, as Beth Simone Noveck (2015) suggests, increasing transparency in policy-making and including a wider array of informed citizens in the decision-making process. More radical still, we could ditch democracy for something better, along the lines of what Jason Brennan (2016) suggests, giving more weight (or more votes) to better informed citizens.
Of course, each of these proposals faces serious objections and overwhelming social obstacles. And the likelihood that any one of them would convince a majority of Americans to change the way they understand American politics is, frankly, inscrutably low. And so, maybe there aren’t live prospects for serious change. Maybe the current U.S. system is the best the U.S. can hope for. What then?
If that’s right, then perhaps we should stop playing big politics altogether. There are two problems with political decisions in contemporary democratic republics: (1) voters are uninformed and (2) there is little access to vehicles of political change.
Problem 1 is that everyone—citizens and politicians alike—make poor decisions, both for themselves and for others. We don’t know what’s good for us, and even when we do, we don’t reason well about it. We are easily taken in by fallacies, cognitive biases, heuristics, and social biases. And most importantly, politicians are no less subject to poor reasoning than anyone else. Even apart from political pressures to behave selfishly, the people we hire to make decisions on our behalf are no better at making decisions than we are, and are no more likely to take experts seriously except when they serve their interests.
Exacerbating this problem, the causal connections between laws, regulations, and the real world are so tenuous that it is difficult (even for policy experts) to discern which are effective for which outcomes. There are no experimental controls for public policies. We get one shot under one set of experimental conditions.
And whether because of political pressures or a naiveté to confirmation bias, politicians are happy to tell us that the good things happened because we voted for them and the bad things happened simply because of bad luck or the other team. Political rhetoric appeals to all those seedy places in our minds that tempt us for all the wrong reasons. The Devil appears as an angel of light, as the old text says.
Problem 2 is that people lack access to mechanisms of political change. Consider that citizens are legally excluded from almost every political process except voting (see Noveck, 2015). And the options on which we vote are chosen and framed behind closed doors by those with a vested interest in preserving the control vested in their positions. Only the odd activist campaign catches the interest of politicians, and then only to be recast and oversimplified to solidify constituents and used as ammunition against opponents. Further, our votes are so filtered through state rules and the Electoral College, and their mathematical impact is so insignificant, that voting for a candidate is about as effective as cheering for a sports team from the stands. We are not the ones with the power, and we have virtually no chance at changing the rules of play. We have no more influence over political institutions than fans have over draft picks.
But this is no call for anarchy. Even without a formal political state, the desire to preserve our interests would likely lead us to create social institutions not appreciably different from formal political states (see Nozick, 1974). And this is not a call for libertarian minimal government. It is so easy to want those in power to come to our aid, that any trend in that direction would likely be reversed in subsequent election cycles.
Instead, this disconcerting state of affairs suggests something altogether different from a political solution, though perhaps no less radical. It is a call only for those who recognize the depth of this problem to change their orientation toward democracy and political belief.
Continue reading with Part 2 (of 2).
And see my Winning Votes by Abusing Reason: Responsible Belief and Political Rhetoric (Lexington Books, 2016).
References:
Brennan, Jason. 2016. Against Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Conly, Sarah. 2013. Against Autonomy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Noveck, Beth Simone. 2015. Smart People, Smarter State: The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.
Thaler, Richard H. and Cass R. Sunstein. 2009. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New York: Penguin Books.
But even disciplines that aren’t questioning their legitimacy, like political science and economics, face the problem of inertia. Suggestions for how we might enhance or eclipse traditional democracy are met with horror. The right to vote is twisted shamelessly into a duty to vote. Advertisements shame anyone who chooses not to participate in a system that some have argued is itself immoral. The two-party system has become a self-perpetuating trap of anti-intellectual rhetoric.
This isn’t to say there aren’t important proposals on the table. We might, as Sarah Conly (2013) suggests, get over our love-affair with autonomy and start unapologetically restricting the freedom to engage in what social scientists consider “harmful” behavior. Or we might continue softer efforts already underway, changing not which choices are available, but the structure of those choices (Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, 2009), and England has seen significant increases in tax revenues using this approach. We could also increase access to political participation, as Beth Simone Noveck (2015) suggests, increasing transparency in policy-making and including a wider array of informed citizens in the decision-making process. More radical still, we could ditch democracy for something better, along the lines of what Jason Brennan (2016) suggests, giving more weight (or more votes) to better informed citizens.
Of course, each of these proposals faces serious objections and overwhelming social obstacles. And the likelihood that any one of them would convince a majority of Americans to change the way they understand American politics is, frankly, inscrutably low. And so, maybe there aren’t live prospects for serious change. Maybe the current U.S. system is the best the U.S. can hope for. What then?
If that’s right, then perhaps we should stop playing big politics altogether. There are two problems with political decisions in contemporary democratic republics: (1) voters are uninformed and (2) there is little access to vehicles of political change.
Problem 1 is that everyone—citizens and politicians alike—make poor decisions, both for themselves and for others. We don’t know what’s good for us, and even when we do, we don’t reason well about it. We are easily taken in by fallacies, cognitive biases, heuristics, and social biases. And most importantly, politicians are no less subject to poor reasoning than anyone else. Even apart from political pressures to behave selfishly, the people we hire to make decisions on our behalf are no better at making decisions than we are, and are no more likely to take experts seriously except when they serve their interests.
Exacerbating this problem, the causal connections between laws, regulations, and the real world are so tenuous that it is difficult (even for policy experts) to discern which are effective for which outcomes. There are no experimental controls for public policies. We get one shot under one set of experimental conditions.
And whether because of political pressures or a naiveté to confirmation bias, politicians are happy to tell us that the good things happened because we voted for them and the bad things happened simply because of bad luck or the other team. Political rhetoric appeals to all those seedy places in our minds that tempt us for all the wrong reasons. The Devil appears as an angel of light, as the old text says.
Problem 2 is that people lack access to mechanisms of political change. Consider that citizens are legally excluded from almost every political process except voting (see Noveck, 2015). And the options on which we vote are chosen and framed behind closed doors by those with a vested interest in preserving the control vested in their positions. Only the odd activist campaign catches the interest of politicians, and then only to be recast and oversimplified to solidify constituents and used as ammunition against opponents. Further, our votes are so filtered through state rules and the Electoral College, and their mathematical impact is so insignificant, that voting for a candidate is about as effective as cheering for a sports team from the stands. We are not the ones with the power, and we have virtually no chance at changing the rules of play. We have no more influence over political institutions than fans have over draft picks.
But this is no call for anarchy. Even without a formal political state, the desire to preserve our interests would likely lead us to create social institutions not appreciably different from formal political states (see Nozick, 1974). And this is not a call for libertarian minimal government. It is so easy to want those in power to come to our aid, that any trend in that direction would likely be reversed in subsequent election cycles.
Instead, this disconcerting state of affairs suggests something altogether different from a political solution, though perhaps no less radical. It is a call only for those who recognize the depth of this problem to change their orientation toward democracy and political belief.
Continue reading with Part 2 (of 2).
And see my Winning Votes by Abusing Reason: Responsible Belief and Political Rhetoric (Lexington Books, 2016).
References:
Brennan, Jason. 2016. Against Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Conly, Sarah. 2013. Against Autonomy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Noveck, Beth Simone. 2015. Smart People, Smarter State: The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.
Thaler, Richard H. and Cass R. Sunstein. 2009. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New York: Penguin Books.
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