2014-10-19

Why do people complain about politics and politicians but don't stand for election themselves?

Another answer to a democracy-related question in Quora: Why don't people who elect politicians and then slag them off stand for election themselves?

Short answer: it's easy to complain about a problem, it's much harder to actually do something to fix it.

Long answer: let's say government has decided to raise your income tax and that makes you angry, so you complain about it. That requires hardly any effort, in fact many people seem to like complaining, so it's actually an enjoyable activity rather than a chore. This probably explains most of the cases when so many people seem to be unhappy and complain about government that one might think that we are on a verge of a revolution, but nothing really seems to actually happen.

But let's say you want to actually do something to fix the problem and are willing to spend some effort to do it.

First thing you need to do is to figure out a better alternative to the government decision. If they have decided to raise income tax to cover deficit, then what would be your solution to the problem? Do nothing and let the deficit grow? Raise some other tax instead? Or cut government spending? If so, which part? Defense? Health care? Many protest movements have this problem: they see a problem and are willing to spend effort to do something about it, but fail to come up with a realistic plan how they would actually fix it. Or they come up with dozens of plans, each incompatible with the others and fall to infighting.

But you are sure a better solution exists and are willing to do some work to find it. If you are lucky, you may find someone who already has come up with a better solution that you agree with, then you only need to back them: vote for them in the elections, promote their solution in blogs and so on, you are good to go.

But let's say that you come up with a new solution that no-one else is promoting. Let's even say that your solution is objectively better in every way and you are able to convince most people you discuss with that it is indeed a good idea.

In an ideal democracy, you would present your solution to public, convince majority of them that this is indeed an optimal solution and then it would become the government's policy. If you are lucky enough to live in a place that allows citizen initiatives or other forms of direct democracy, then you might be able to got this route.

The rest of us need to deal with representative democracy. You might be able to convince some existing candidate of your solution. But even if you find a candidate that agrees with your solution, she may have opinions about other issues that you do not agree with and therefore can't vote for her. Or perhaps she as a person is alright, but belongs to a party that has policies she must follow and you disagree with.

So you have gone through other options and the only way to get your solution implemented is to stand in elections yourself and are willing to put in the significant amount of work it requires and deal with the fact that despite all the work you are very unlikely to be actually elected. If you are lucky, you can find an existing party that has policies you agree with and are willing to accept you as their candidate and give you freedom to promote you solution. But likely your country has only a limited number of parties and each one has policies that you disagree with. Then you either need to compromise on some issues, agree to vote along party lines despite disagreeing with them and hope to eventually change them from the inside, or establish a new party or run as independent, which allows you to keep your integrity but requires significantly more work and reduces your chances to be elected basically to zero.

But let's say you put in the work, collected the signatures, kissed the babies and somehow manage to end up as a candidate in elections. You even get to keep a press conference about your candidacy and, most importantly, your solution. Then comes the Q&A session:
-"Now, are there any questions?"
-"Sure, your solution to sounds pretty swell, but what's your stand on gay marriage? Immigration? Abortion? Foreign policy? Dozens of other budget issues?"
Every time you don't give a firm opinion, you are accused of being vague or incompetent, that voters have the right to know what button you will push if the issue comes up to voting, or are you simply going put in empty vote every time? And each time you do give a firm answer, either your own opinion on whatever your party line is, some part of the voters are going to go: "Meh, I really liked his solution, but I can't really vote for someone who thinks that way about issue X".

So in the end, even if the majority of the voters would agree that your solution is the best, the only votes you will get are from people who happen to agree with you also on all the other secondary issues, no matter if you have really thought about them or are just following the party line. So no matter how superior your solution is, your probability to get elected depends mostly on the completely different issues.

But let's say you put in even more work, the money for advertising, kissed huge amount of babies and somehow managed to give sufficiently reasonable answers to all the other issues that against all odds you find yourself at a position of power, a freshly elected member of your nation's law-making body. Now you are finally in a position to implement your solution to national policy. 

Unless, of course, your party ends up in opposition. No matter how good your solution is and even if most other representatives agreed with it, generally government does not implement any ideas from opposition, no matter how good they might be. Or even if your party does end up in government, but your party leadership refuses to back your idea, perhaps because it would harm one of their major campaign funders. Or if you have coalition government, even if your own party would back the idea, but any of the other government parties makes it their condition that government will not back this solution, perhaps because it would hurt their contributors.

So the government does not take your solution into their agenda, but you could still go rogue and put your proposal to vote independently. Opposition representatives are likely to back it, but government party representatives are going to vote against it, event if they would personally agree with it. And since government parties are the majority, it is not going to pass, but at least you had your shot. But now you and any other representative who voted against their party line are going to find yourself blacklisted: all your future suggestions will be shot down on principle, any party co-operation or campaign support is going to go away and you'll find it hard to make it to candidate on any future elections. Even the opposition parties won't take you, after all, you are might go rogue also on them if they end up in the government.

So perhaps you do the wise thing and accept that your solution is not going to happen this term, but perhaps things will be different after the next elections. After all, now you have the experience, support base and publicity, so you have a pretty good chance to get re-elected and perhaps then your proposal will end up on government agenda. So you bide your time, all the time promoting your idea to you fellow representatives and party leaderships, so that your chances are better next time.

So the next election time comes and you start your campaign trail, more experienced and confident. And face almost empty halls, with a few former voters expressing their opinions: 
-"What the hell man? I really believed in you and your solution, I voted for you and told all my friends to vote, too, but what happened? You just sat on your ass for four years doing nothing, and now you have the nerve to ask for my vote again? Forget it. I should have known that all politicians are liars. I'm through with you and voting, except this one last time I'm going to vote for whoever is running against you."
So having lost your main supporter base you fail to get re-elected and become disillusioned and bitter. Perhaps you quit politics altogether, or perhaps you just become more pragmatic: forget your own opinions and ideas, just support whatever cause you think will get you most votes or campaign funding, maybe try to land a lucrative post-term job by supporting whatever laws one of the big corporations wants to see implemented.

So that, my friends, is the reason why most people complain instead of standing in elections themselves. Unless they want to become career politicians, in which case it's better to forget about the actual problem, go straight to the disillusionment part and take it from there.

(Addendum: That may all sound a bit pessimistic, so let me end with some hope. End of segregation, equal rights of women and gays, environmental issues, all have started with someone realizing: "Hey, this is wrong, we really should fix this" and then convincing others that yes, perhaps things would indeed be better if we change this thing. It is often long and uphill battle, but despite all the flaws in representative democracy, once the majority of people feels that a fix is necessary and consider it important enough to vote accordingly, eventually the change will happen.)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw

2014-10-16

Why do people still believe that direct democracy can't work?

My answer to a question in Quora: Why do people still believe that direct democracy can't work even though there are now examples which prove that is is working?

Those in power got there under current system. Why would they want to change the system that is working for them so well?

Also there are examples of bad decisions made by direct democracy. Then again, I'll bet there are even more examples of bad decisions by representative democracies or dictatorships.

Then there is the "stupid people" argument: average citizens are simply not informed enough to make decisions about complex issues, it is better to leave that to professional politicians. But if people can not be trusted to make informed decisions, how can they be trusted to choose the right people to make those decisions? If people would make bad decisions on issues, then they are bound to make bad decisions on choosing their representatives, say, by choosing them by their ability to appear good on TV and give rousing speeches instead of actual expertise of making competent decisions on complex issues. Dunning–Kruger effect actually pretty much guarantees this: not only are incompetent people unable to recognize their own lack of competence, they are also unable to recognize genuine competence in others, leading them to mistake confidence and charisma for actual competence.

Yes, people might be stupid and make bad decisions. But that problem is not solved by representation, is simply moves the bad decisions one step away: instead of making the bad decisions themselves, they elect incompetent representatives to make the bad decisions for them.

(Side note: If people can't be trusted to elect competent leaders or make informed decisions, shouldn't we just get rid of democracy and use a system where leaders are chosen by their competence instead of their popularity among masses? Sure, as soon as someone invents one. Unfortunately there currently does not exist a system that would guarantee a competent leadership. After all, who gets to decide who is competent to lead? Who decides who is competent to make that decision? Several methods have been tried, pretty much all of them ending badly for everyone. Democracy might not guarantee a competent leadership, but neither does any other known system. But democracy has one major advantage: it makes it much easier to get rid of truly horrid leadership. In most other systems the only way to accomplish that is to have a bloody revolution, in democracy you simply vote for the other guy in the next election.)

Ok, but what about time: most people have day jobs, they simply do not have the time to spend researching the complex issues that need to be decided, isn't it better to leave that to people who are paid to do that full time?

True, but I'll bet very few of the representatives bother to actually read the proposals either, let alone do any additional research. After all, they usually belong to a party and the party leadership decides how their representatives should vote, they just need to push whichever button they are told to push. Sometimes there might be issues where representatives are allowed to vote freely, but even in those cases most representatives are unlikely to do the work themselves, they simply ask opinion form someone who has done the research and whose opinion they trust and vote accordingly.

This is most likely what would happen also in direct democracy: it's not necessary to each citizen to do complete research on every issue, it is enough that some people do and then tell their informed opinion what the decision should be, then the others simply decide whose opinion they trust most.

Then there is the Principal–agent problem: Voter wants the representative to act on his behalf, that is, make decisions that benefit the voter. However, the representative is more likely to make decisions that benefit himself. Luckily they often align, since representative wants the voter to vote for him also in the next election. But sometimes they do not: opinion of a large campaign donor often counts more than that of several individual voters, or sometimes a good career offer after finishing current term is sufficient to override any concern of voter opinions. Remember any politicians that somehow end up in a well-paid job in a large corporation after serving their term?

The point of the democracy is that people have the power. However, representative democracy sometimes ends up making decisions that is opposed by majority of people, and that means that democracy is not working properly. Perhaps that decision was better, perhaps not, but if it is against the will of majority of people, then it is by definition undemocratic. Representative democracy was a necessary compromise during the time when there were too many citizens to fit under one roof, but we lacked the technology to debate and vote any other way, that is why we had no choice but select representatives to do that for us.

That limitation no longer exists, we now have the technology to research, debate and vote on issues online, no matter how large the number of voters. Now representation is just an unnecessary obstacle in the way of true democracy and it is time to get rid of it, no matter how much the current representatives would like to cling to their power.

2013-08-17

The problem of many choices

Or: Why Tyranny of Majority only supports questions with simple yes or no answer.

Voting between two choices is simple: each voter votes one or the other and the one with the most votes wins. Easy enough.

However when there are three or more options things get more complicated. And not just a little bit but a lot. The kind of complicated that there has been scientific research on it and the result is a theorem that there does not exist a completely problem-free method.

Instead of one best method we have several different methods, each with it's own strengths and weaknesses, though some methods are still clearly better than others.

Sceptical? Can it really be that difficult to make a choice between 3 options instead of 2? Let's have a simple example: A group of 15 people need to make a decision. There are three options: A, B and C. Only one of them can be chosen. The group can't come to a consensus about the best choice, so they decide to choose the best option for the group by a democratic vote. With only 3 choices, how hard can it be?

Example 1: Plurality - the simple way

Let's just ignore the complications and use the same system we used for two options: everyone gets to vote the option they think is the best and the option with most votes wins. This is the most obvious, simple and common solution, but also the most problematic.

The three options receive votes from 15 voters like this:

  • A gets 6 votes.
  • B gets 5 votes.
  • C gets 4 votes.

=> A gets most votes, therefore A wins.

Choice A has most supporters and wins, which seems fair. However, what if those who voted for B and C consider A to be the worst possible choice? In that case the election ends up with a choice that a majority of voters (9 versus 6) consider to be the worst possible outcome.

Point of the voting system is to reflect people's will, and if people end up with a choice that majority consider the worst alternative, their will does not seem to be reflected very well. Yet this is the most commonly used voting system around the world.

Another thing: what if choice C were dropped from the election? Then suddenly B would win instead of A. That means that the choice between A and B depends on whether a third option C is available or not. This violates Independence of irrelevant alternatives criteria which states that introducing a third option should not affect the choice between A and B. That is, adding choice C should affect the election result only if C ends up winning.

This can sometimes discourage candidates running in elections: if B and C happened to be candidates who belong to the same or similar party, then if both run, it would result in opposing party candidate A winning. But if either B or C decided to drop out before election, then the remaining candidate would win over A. Therefore it would be rational to one of them to voluntarily drop out of the election.

Plurality causes problems also for the voter: let's say a voter prefers option C, but could live also with B and loathes A. If he suspects that B might be more popular than C, he might figure that it is better to vote for B instead of his preferred choice C, just to prevent A from winning. And that would be correct: if all supporters of C voted B instead (or vice versa), then B (or C) would win instead of A. So instead of voting honestly for the best choice it can be rational to tactically vote for another candidate instead. Probably needless to say, a voting system which discourages honest voting is not a good one. Also simply a perceived weakness of C can cause voters to flock over to B, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy, even if in reality C would have been the more popular candidate.

Whether done by candidates by themselves or by the voters, the plurality voting tends to limit voter options to the (assumed) strongest two choices. This kind of solves the problem of multiple-choice elections by simply giving voters only two choices to choose from. However from the perspective of democracy it would be better to have more, not less, options to choose from. Plurality tends to lead to polarization and two-party systems where instead of the best candidate people vote for lesser of the two evils just to keep the bigger evil from winning.

In this sense even random ballot would be a better method: at least in it a voter can vote honestly because his choice between B or C does not affect in any way the chances of A winning.

Example 2: Multiple rounds

One way to fix this is to have the election in two rounds: on the first round the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and the final round is between two choices, which is again simple. So in our example C would be eliminated in the first round and on the final round those who voted for C vote instead for B:

Round 2:
  • A gets 6 votes
  • B gets 9 votes

=> B gets most votes on the second round, therefore B wins.

B beats A 9 - 6 and B is declared the winner. So while A has more direct supporters than B, majority of voters prefer B to A. Much better result, right?

Yet what if all of the A supporters would have preferred C over B? That is, if there were an election between B and C, C would win? This would mean that election was won by a candidate who would lose a one-on-one election to another candidate, which does not seem fair. Only reason this didn't occur is that C happened to be eliminated in the first round.

Example 3: One-on-one between each candidate

A way to fix this would be to have one-on-one elections between each of the candidates:

  • A vs. B: B wins 9 to 6
  • A vs. C: C wins 9 to 6
  • B vs. C: C wins 10 to 5

=> C beats every other candidate on one-on-one elections, therefore C wins.

A loses to both B and C, since most voters prefer any other candidate than A.
Since A supporters like C more than B, C wins B in one-on-one and therefore the whole election, even though it was the first one eliminated in multiple round voting.

Conclusion

So there we have it: three different voting methods, three different results, yet each can be said to be chosen democratically. This shows that voting between three or more options is a very different thing from voting between two options and the method of determining the winner clearly matters.

Recommendations:

  • Stick to selections with two choices as much as possible, just to keep things simple. If you have a question with multiple choices, try to split it to several two-choice questions if possible.
  • If you really need to have multiple choices (say election with multiple candidates), choose your election method carefully.
    • Avoid plurality as much as possible. If simplicity is important, use approval voting. Or even random ballot.
    • If a bit more complexity is acceptable, use multiple voting rounds. If the voters jot down their order of preference in a single ballot, no need to even have voting between rounds.
    • If complexity is not a problem (either can use computers or have plenty of time for manual counting) one of the Condorcet methods is a good choice. Schulze method seems to be popular.