A rumination on why I think “democracy” has to mean more than “majority rules” or “the favorite wins”—even when only a single candidate or proposal is being chosen.
The possibility of Condorcet “cycles” infecting the preference-rankings of groups is pretty well known by now—especially since Arrow’s impossibility theorem. The idea is that a group entirely composed of individuals whose preference-rankings are transitive may end up liking (as a group) A more than B, B more than C, and C more than A. This can happen because different sub-groups make up the three aggregate ratings. This (and other voting paradoxes even involving pairwise comparisons and Borda counts) have led some observers to denounce majoritarianism. Such critics consider it either an approach that can’t provide unambiguous winners when there are more than two choices, or worse, something that unambiguously provides the wrong answer.
Now, as I look at these matters, there are at least two essential characteristics of fair democratic choosings. First, they are egalitarian in this way: they must, to use the old Benthamite language, “count each vote as one and none as more than one.” That is, they cannot countenance weightings of most kinds, whether they are considered to follow from any rankings (cardinal or ordinal) of the voters or from any external assessments regarding the value of this or that vote or voter. Second, they are egalitarian in another way: the authority granted winners of elections must, in some rational manner, reflect ratios involving both the number of eligible voters and number of votes received. (I will not take up this latter requirement in this OP.)
While simple majoritarianism seems to share both of those desiderata, I take it that the latter (my own view) can’t rightly be characterized as a majoritarian position itself because it does not accept what is commonly known as “the majority criterion.” What is that? It simply requires that If there exists a majority that ranks a single candidate higher than all other candidates, that highest-rated candidate must win. As will be seen, there are good reasons for those with sound democratic principles not to join with majoritarians on this matter. In any case, the (let’s call it) “Egalitarian Proportional Democracy” I’m pushing for here shares with majoritarians the views that political actions and offices must be taken and distributed on the basis of the number of voters who want or don’t want something, rather than on how much they want them (as well as on the other matter that I’m not planning to discuss here). But surely that doesn’t tell us very much. Can at least the egalitarian portion of my description of Egalitarian Proportional Democracy be fleshed out? Let me try.
Suppose eight people are having a party and are trying to decide what soda to bring. [Based on an FMM comment, I add here the assumption that, for whatever reason, it would be a major hassle for there to be more than one choice of soda at the party.] And let there be four possible choices: Cola, Lemon-Lime, Orange and Root Beer. There’s no unanimity among the revelers, so, being the good (small-d) democrats they are, they think that the majority ought to have its way and plan a vote to decide the matter. Here is the result when they are asked to give their favorite (here designated with ‘X’):
A B C D E F G H
Cola X X X
L-L X X
Orange X X
RB X
As can be seen, while Cola receives a plurality of the vote, no flavor gets a majority. One member therefore suggests a run-off with the first and tied-for-second contenders only, leaving off RB all together since it did so poorly. Here are the results of this run-off election (with ‘A’ indicating an abstention):
A B C D E F G H
C X X X A
L-L X X A
O X X A
This vote didn’t help: there has been no movement at all because voter H absolutely loathes all the flavors except RB and refuses to pick any of the others as a passable choice for the party.
The revelers aren’t completely stuck though, because there are other voting possibilities. Let us suppose that, like me, this group has no truck whatever with the inter-personal assessments of preference intensities required for cardinal ordering, and that they are also skeptical of ordinal rankings to the extent that those assume similar “distances” between preferences. They think, that is, that there could be a huge divide between one person’s 1st and 2nd choices, and hardly any at all between another ranker’s 1st and 2nd picks.
Fortunately, two members of this group have been regularly assaulted by emails from voting reform organizations: one, from a group that pushes Approval Voting (“AV”), and another that favors Score Voting (“SC”). Those two discuss the matter with the other six party planners and the SC advocate is able to convince everyone that they can exclude all the questionable preference weights by using the following scale:
FAVORITE……………………………………………………………………4 PTS
GOOD ENOUGH (WOULD DRINK IT IF AVAILABLE)………………….3 PTS
PASSABLE (NEVER HAD BUT WD TRY IT IN A PINCH)……………..2 PTS
NOT OK (NEVER HAD & WON’T TRY EVEN IF THIRSTY)…………..1 PTS
REALLY DISLIKE………………………………………………………….. 0 PTS
The AV supporter is on board with undertaking a new vote that would use this scale, but only if the assignments of 4, 3, or 2 points are counted as “Approvals”—meaning that the voter can “live with” the choice. This is agreed upon as well, and the third vote is taken. For ease of counting, I represent the approvals here with an “(A)”:
A B C D E F G H TOT. Apps
C 4(A) 4(A) 4(A) 2(A) 2(A) 1 0 0 17 5
L-L 2(A) 2(A) 2(A) 4(A) 4(A) 2(A) 2(A) 0 18 7
O 3(A) 2(A) 0 3(A) 3(A) 4(A) 4(A) 0 19 6
RB 3(A) 0 0 0 1 3(A) 2(A) 4(A) 13 4
As can be seen, while the Plurality victor was Cola, the SC winner is Orange and the AV winner is L-L!
Perhaps it will seem that this embarrassment of “winners” is the result of the weirdness of there being so many “never tried it” votes with respect to what seem like common carbonated drinks. But it is important to realize that an attitude of “I really don’t know much about her (or it).…” toward political a political candidate or proposal isn’t unusual at all. Look at the results above again, but this time, think of it as a political election for a representative, with each coming from a different Party. (Perhaps replace “Cola” with “Corporatist”; “L-L” with “Liberal”; “Orange” with “Outsider” and “RB” with “Republican”.) This may make it clearer that there can be a large number of decisions in which the assignment of one or two points (approval or disapproval) will largely be a function of the varying amounts of risk that voters are willing to take. Some people will be OK with this or that relatively unknown candidate or proposal; others will not be willing to take any chances.
Keeping all this in mind, which “winner” will the authentic egalitarian support in this election? The Corporatist, because he is the favorite of the largest number of voters? The Outsider, who got the highest score? Or the Liberal, who most voters found to be minimally acceptable? In my view it is the number of approving voters that the sensible democrat must take to matter most. Just as we ought not to be stuck at parties with nothing we can stand to drink, we ought not to be stuck with ruler/representative A when more people among us can stand candidate B. On this view, if it is to be used to determine what “the people” do or don’t want, majoritarian/egalitarian-style aggregation should be understood as the counting of approvals, where each person’s approval is given the same weight as everyone else’s, regardless of how enthusiastic or tepid it is. That tack definitely seems more conducive to stable regimes than one in which candidates that a ton of the populace don’t approve of get to take office.
That is my current take on the matter. I recognize that I have here avoided all of the complicated issues surrounding strategic voting and how that is likely to affect results (if you’re curious, see the Wikipedia article on “Approval Voting.”) Anyhow, I look forward to comments to get a better handle on this. Thanks.
Allan Miller,
You had to mention it
I made an appointment just before Christmas to apply for French residency (previously unnecessary under EU rules) and it was set for 28th January. It was cancelled due to Gilet Jaune protestors trashing the govt office and a breakdown in communication meant me having to remake the appointment. Earliest date available – September! No need to panic.
😱😵😨😰
But, what’s the answer? We’re where we are and we can’t go back in time.
Question for USians! Now Trump has the judiciary in his pocket and is unafraid to use his power to declare a bogus national emergency, what’s the chance of President-for-life Trump?
I don’t think that places us under any obligation, though. The naivete of the question, the dubious nature of the campaign and the closeness of the vote are significant parts of the political landscape, not things that demand shrugging acceptance.
My own preference would be another vote when the exit terms are known. The last should not be regarded as a blank cheque. Of course there’s an inherent contradiction there, but it’s no more contradictory than the argument that voting is a once-only thing, or that all majorities have the same weight.
Brexit is now in a Concordet paradox: there is no majority (neither in Parliament, not in the country, if the polls are to be believed) for any possible course of action. Whatever the outcome will be, there will be more people against it than in favour.
If the majority criterion fails to decide on the outcome, what then?
One solution in such situations is to progressively eliminate the least desired outcomes through stepwise ballots, where each time the least favoured option (of all options remaining) gets eliminated until there are only two left. This will result in a final majority for one specific course of action. This could be streamlined to eliminate all but the two top options in the first round, with a final ballot in the second round. I believe this is how the French elect their President.
I can’t see this happening in the UK though.
That worked well, utterly obliterated any meaningful opposition and resulted in a meandering autocracy.
ETA and the Gilets Jaunes protests, also largely ineffective.
It won’t ‘cos tradition, history, nanny knows best.
You mistake me, Sir. I’m not shrugging, I’m not accepting and I’m not there!
I am not sure if the purpose of the OP is to examine an interesting intellectual problem in mechanisms of voting or to propose better methods to improve existing democratic states.
If practical improvement, it seems to me that it is more important to first get right many other things, for example: voter id laws, gerrymandering prevention, access to voting, electoral security and auditability, ensuring governments can take legislative action and not be deadlocked by over-complicated checks and balances, funding of elections, and how much of the judiciary-appointment process should be political.
It may just be my ideological background, but I do think that the British parliamentary system as implemented here in Canada for example, is superior or at least equal to the US system in all of those areas.
I do have doubts about layering proportional representation on top of these systems, as it proposed from time to time. On the other hand, a real third party choice makes possible minority governments which can be constructive.
Another challenging area is the role of parties versus one person-one vote in choosing candidates
On federalism: I doubt anyone will deny the need for city governments for local concerns such as transit, garbage, snow removal. Intermediate levels such as provinces are still helpful in geographically large countries like Canada to deal with geographically-based diversity of needs and views. I do think that cities need to gain more power: we have issues here in Ontario with the provincial government trying to take control of city issues.
There is also the role for provinces to provide smaller scale experiments for new policies, such as climate change policies in here in BC or in California.
In the longer term, it seems to me decentralization, not centralization, is the message of technologies like the internet.
I know, I was declaiming from my soap box!
I’m inclined to think there is likely a slim majority for Remain. Demographics alone may have swung that, but if the clear choice is against ‘no-deal’, that may change the minds of those who expected Norway, Canada++ or Switzerland deals, all of which come at a political cost. Ditto those who wish to sever all ties – each thinks the talismanic ‘17.4 million’ voted for what they themselves want. In reality, ‘don’t-remain’ is split.
Only one way to find out, of course!
This is an unexpectedly great conversation.
I forget that not only do folks here represent very different religious and political persuasions but also experience with different democratic governmental systems.
Thanks everyone. The perspective is fascinating
peace
I’m thinking that any system can and will be gamed.
The choices are not static , like ice cream flavors. Political choices are embodied in people who can dodge and weave, adapt and transform.
The defining characteristic of a non-brittle, stable dynamic government is resistance to takeover by a single faction or party. What people decry as tragic when someone they hate wins, is, I think, a wonderful thing. Opposition is essential to prevent descent into totalitarianism.
The worst outcome I can think of is transition to a system that is efficient. I don’t care if the trains run on time.
Almost any ballot measure or piece of legislation is subject to this sort of framing problem. If you parse the the language just right you can get a majority for all most anything.
Passions are another problem. Support for any particular candidate or measure will fluctuate over time sometimes wildly and unpredictably.
The inefficiency of government serves as a check on these sorts of things. I don’t think we would like direct democracy…..for long.
Jefferson was right on this one
quote:
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
end quote:
peace
Allan Miller,
And I just wanted an excuse for a rule of three!
There’s a theory about that! (It’s a PDF)
The Theory of Games and the Evolution of Animal Conflicts
I like STV, but as mentioned above, I like SNTV better. And, as indicated in the OP, I like Approval Voting too. Online voting also seems sensible to me–though it, too, can be abused.
One thing to consider is that recourse to what is “fairer” require fleshing out of that term. FMM says small districts are “fairer.”
Thanks. I said in the comment above that FMM takes decentralization to be “fairer.” That may not be right, though. It seems like both he and you are push it based on utilitarian considerations. I.e., Big governments tend to make bigger messes, so it’s in everybody’s interest to keep them small. Certainly, those types of arguments are more susceptible to empirical confirmation than appeals to, e.g., “fair representation.”
A lot of literature on democratic theory these days involves why there must be “deliberation” of some kind or other for results to be palatable. On that view, initiatives and referenda aren’t very good ideas. One also sometimes sees calls, like Alan has made here, for some kind of online discussion. (God knows we do a nice job of that here!). My own sense about Brexit, for what extremely little it’s worth is that democracies have to allow the ability for voters both to object to how their “will” is being carried out by recalling positions or representatives, and to change their minds. I mean there should be time constraints on that sort of thing so that there aren’t weekly plebiscites, and maybe the requirements for getting something on the ballot should be more difficult than the original elections. But it has to be possible, I think.
Well, I personally don’t like “supermajority” requirements. They just allow minorities to win. But referenda initiatives seem to me particularly bad ways to determine public policies. They should be reserved for reversing a government position or throwing some bum(s) out, IMO.
What if the vice president was the candidate with the second highest number of electoral votes? That, coupled with the vice president’s tie-breaking role in the Senate would be a sight to see!
I make it maybe 40% that if/when he loses in 2020, he claim it was fixed and won’t leave office. I’m not sure he actually wants to be president for life, but he’ll never admit that he lost an election.
A bit more parliamentary than our system.
Great point!
This proves that democracy is just a name, especially when the “democratic country’s” economy is based on arms production and use…
Due to that a steady number of arm conflicts is required or cold war, or both…or terrorism to keep people in constant fear so that they support the so-called democracy…
No offense to walto but I’m confused why this OP is published at TSZ, and even more, why it is featured…
I’m interested in all the stuff you mention in your comment, but lean a bit toward the more theoretical/less practical stuff, perhaps largely out of hopelessness. I find thinking abstractly about “constitution building” extremely interesting, but it’s not, as you point out, likely to be very useful if it leaves out the practical side.
As my OP suggests, I think use of Approval Voting is a better approach than successive pairwise contests.
I don’t think there’s any contradiction in the calls for another vote. It seems to me, on the contrary, that good democratic practices will often require stuff like that. Groups, like people, get new information, change their “minds” etc.
Democracy will be “just a name” if we explain it simply by pointing to a bunch of countries–current or historical–and say, “well, these are the democratic countries.” To me it seems more interesting to try to figure out what the concept actually requires, since, as you say, most of those examples are not happy.
It’s featured because otherwise your OP would have been at the top of the page not walto’s. I found walto’s to be far more interesting and likely to generate conversation. Sorry. 🙂
And the way the framers of the constitution originally set things up.
OK. But since democracies are not really democracies, how are you going to implement the concepts even if you manage to figure out what they are missing?
Fair enough! That definitely says something about my OPs…
But how is it related to what we usually discuss at TSZ?
These sorts of changes would be hard to implement, certainly. There are any number of organizations set up to reform democratic practices in this way or that. FairVote is one. They’ve been successful in bringing ranked voting to Maine. But it’s extremely hard for such groups to get traction, partly for the reasons petrushka has been mentioning.
I hope you’re not offering that gang up for canonization! Read Charles Beard before you do that!
(Hmmm. I wonder if you’d have been an anti-Federalist or a Tory in those days…..)
Thanks, but I warn you….my OPs generally don’t do very well on the generation-of-comments front. People mostly just want to talk about evolution here. It’s kind of this place’s thang.
The mathematics of voting should be inherently interesting to me, given my education and continued interests.
But choosing appropriate math seems to depend on how you define optimal. So I suspect discussions of that norm, not the algorithms themselves, are at the heart of the matter.
Our current federal government made a 2015 election pledge to revisit FPTP voting.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/monsef-electoral-reform-changes-referendum-1.3428593
This was another area where BC was the experimenter province for Canada
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_British_Columbia_electoral_reform_referendum
But the federal government backed away after doing public consultations. I suspect changing the optimality norm in a way that was acceptable to most people was the root cause.
https://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/trudeau-abandons-promise-for-electoral-reform/
Legalizing marijuana turned out to be much simpler.
That’s the American way.
Yes, exactly.
It is. And figuring out a way to even slow down election buying is very tough here since Buckley v. Valeo (1976) which, people forget, is a much bigger problem than Citizen’s United.
Incidentally, on the question of Trump leaving office (aka whether “it CAN happen here”), it’s instructive to see writing, by “Hitler’s favorite jurist” Carl Schmitt, and think about how many words in it would have to be changed in order for a majority of Trump supporters to be in complete agreement with it.
The Canadian Government, Senate, elections etc.are certainly no free of corruption…
Weren’t Liberals forced to bring on the board young Justin Trudeau after a major corruption scandal that took them out of power?
BTW: Evolutionary prediction please! Will marijuana legal use contribute to evolution or will Darwin Devolve?
I think that 2020 there is a good chance that there will be a split in the opposition to Trump between the eventual Democratic nominee who will be very progressive and a moderately progressive Howard Schultz in an independent bid.
The same sort of thing happened last time around when the democrats had a bitter split between the establishment and progressive wings of the party.
The republicans also had a split in the establishment/business/hawk wing of the party between Zeb Bush and Rubio and the evangelicals went with Cruz and the libertarians with Paul.
Trump had the allegiance of lower class whites and this allowed him to pick off the opposition one by one.
Almost everyone agrees that this election cycle was a cluster and an example of how not to do it.
I think that instead of changing the way that we vote in the general election we should change our expectations of what a president is.
If we did not think of the office as an all important zero sum proposition like the king of America we would be more likely to accept our second choice.
The solution in my opinion is to devolve power more localy so that folks in Kansas are not so scared about what the government in far off DC can do to them.
That approach might have worked with Hitler as well.
peace
Again, your solution requires approval on a national level. How is support for it to be measured and obtained? If a majority disagree with you about it,, should there be some other method of obtaining the temperature of the country on it?
Approval Voting is quite relevant to the Third Party and splitting issues you bring up. It’s a good way of finding winners who are actually “consensus” candidates.
{I feel like I’m channeling VT if I suggest that it is unlikely that a majority of commentators here have actually read more than the title and maybe the first sentence or two of the OP–but it’s probably our own faults….} 😢
How you ensure there is no pressure to vote a particular way from other household members would certainly be a problem. How that differs from postal voting which is on the rise with no reported problems (that I’ve heard), I’m not sure.
The contradiction is pointed up by people who ask ‘if you won’t accept the result of the first, why should we accept the second?’ So we’re perceived as in the position of both rejecting and supporting referendums. The reality is a little more nuanced, but many Brexiteers struggle with nuance.
I have no bias for or against “centralisation” as a principle. It seems to me to be a purely practical matter, and the arguments for or against are largely ideological (heh!). It makes no sense to have a national rubbish-removal service (excepting, perhaps, for nuclear waste). The example can be multiplied for many other services that have an inherently local organisation or requirement.
However, there are many services that do demand a national or indeed international organisation. Health, education and welfare should be nationally organised, because citizens have a reasonable expectation that standards, efficiency and service quality should be the same, no matter where you choose to live.
In effect, this is the contract at the heart of social democracy – that citizens agree to tax themselves to provide equitable access to social goods. And I would point out that this form of social organisation is probably the most successful political model in the history of our species (even in the United States).
There should be clear requirements for what is necessary to get a recall election on a ballot. The thing, is with “The British Constitution”–nothing is clear. It’s like improv.
The assumption of a shared national standard for these things fails in Canada: Quebec at least differs on all of them (for welfare, I am thinking in particular of pension plans).
Changing the federal structure would require a constitutional amendment which would very likely lack voter support.
It is fair that there be a national standard for transferability of health care benefits (given Canada’s single payer-provincial model), and that we do have.
Our federal system does break down when it gives too much power to the provinces, eg in their ability to set inter-province trade barriers.
Thanks. What I was particularly looking for, though, was a defense of the elimination of voting (rather than administrative) districts. FMM has pushed for more political decentralization by geographical region, and proportional representation generally frowns on that, both because of gerrymandering and because there’s no reason to suppose that people with like ideas always live together.
Again, I’d like to hear the decentralization advocates (petrushka and FMM to date) on these issues….