So recently I’ve been reading “The Myth Of The Rational Voter” (which I highly recommend). Mostly the book makes a rigorous case for the intuitively obvious position that most people’s beliefs have more to do with what makes them feel good about themselves or what their friends believe than what the evidence shows. However, it also makes the simple, but profound, point that most people exercise far better judgment when they have significant value riding on the question. For instance even people who have the strong religious belief that god favors their cause and even that martyrdom brings stupendous heavenly rewards seem to reevaluate their position when they find out the other guy has the bigger army. It also explains the puzzling phenomena of religious tolerance. That is how can people who presumably think that belief the ‘true’ religion significantly increases the chance of eternal salvation abide what should be the ultimate form of child abuse, raising children in heathen religions¹. Listening to Steven Levitt (of freakonomics fame) give a talk today about how people tend to play the “dictator game” further solidified my certainty that this trade off between self image and more prosaic forms of self interest underlies most kinds of human interactions.²

Now “The Myth Of The Rational Voter” makes the case that many common political views can be explained by the fact that the social and psychological costs and benefits for espousing political beliefs far outweigh the minuscule chance that any individual will change the outcome. For instance the average liberal gains far more utility thinking of himself as racially conscious and being recognized as such by his friends for supporting affirmative action than he is likely to lose if it turns out that affirmative action harms minorities while imposing unnecessary costs on society (and vice versa for the conservative). After all his vote is extremely unlikely to change anything. Similarly the cost of seeming cold hearted and that pain of adopting a cynical view creates an incentive for people to boycott the products of low wage asian factories regardless of the evidence that this is a net harm to the very people laboring in those factories but when the prices are sufficiently lower for Chinese goods people tend to reexamine this belief.

Now if this account is true the trillion dollar question is how can we protect democracy from these sort of harmful incentives. The theory suggests what is needed is to make sure the people making the decisions have more directly at stake in the outcomes. Now the most traditional solution would be to add more layers of indirection to the system. Instead of having voters directly express their opinions on senators and presidents, thereby making policy decisions fairly responsive to public opinion, one could move to a system more like what the US founding fathers originally imagined with local elected officials voting for their constituents on national offices. While I do favor this reform it has it’s drawbacks. For one it is inherently unstable. The public wants more direct power and it is in the interest of any officials they elect to give it to them. Secondly, while being one of a small few with the power to truly decide policy does make self-image relatively less important (the consequences of your choice are now greater) it also increases the relative social and political pressures. For instance while the supreme court obviously does a lot better job deciding questions of law than the general public³ cases like Bush v. Gore suggest that the much greater dependence of their social and professional lives on strong partisans has a detrimental effect. Or alternatively that the public declarations of allegiance to one side or the other usually necessary to reach high office radically increase the costs of changing one’s mind once entering office. While an individual might only feel a bit foolish when they change their mind on a political issue someone who has achieved high office based on public affirmations of strong support for some view may feel like an out and out hypocrite.

A more radical, and likely more effective, solution would be to randomly choose some relatively small number of citizen electors. For instance instead of holding nationwide elections for president a year or two before the election we would randomly select 1000 or so registered voters from around the country and let these people choose the next president. Instead of spending massive amounts of money running campaign ads and campaigning all over the country politicians would spend the next year explaining in detail their policy views to these 1000 individuals along with the arguments and data needed to make their case. Given the much larger impact of the decision of each of these individuals they would have a greater incentive to genuinely familiarize themselves with the issues and relatively less reason to simply vote on feel good views. Of course to avoid the risk of politicians promising these voters programs targeted at their needs selection as a citizen elector would have to come along with a quite significant cash award reducing the impact of individual government programs on their lives, e.g., they would no longer have much selfish interest in bringing government jobs to their industry or region. However, this would be a relatively small cost to pay compared to current campaign budgets and it would certainly be miniscule compared to the potential increases in efficiency.

Unfortunately, I’m doubtful that the electorate would trust a system that relied so heavily on random sampling. After all most of the populace seems to strongly (and unjustifiably) believe that it would be better if everyone voted but don’t seem inclined to adopt the obvious solution of replacing voting with polling. So another solution might be to somehow create incentives for the electorate to get things right. Now obviously one can’t incentivize value questions as you can’t readily determine the right result but luckily people seem to largely agree on questions of fundamental value, at least much more than they agree on questions of efficacy. For instance their is broad agreement, despite some specific differences, on what schooling policy should aim to achieve. The debate between people favoring school choice or eliminating teaching unions and those opposing it is the efficacy of various policies in achieving these ends. Therefore one might imagine a system that proposes specific measurements of the effects of various policies and rewards those who correctly predicted those outcomes with cold hard cash. In other words we would divide voting on policies up into questions of value and questions of implementation with monetary rewards attached to correct choices on predictions about implementations.

Frankly this later solution actually seems less politically feasible and harder to implement than the former one. However, even if both of these options aren’t truly likely to be adopted hopefully someone will come up with some clever way to better align the interests of people making political decisions and the interests of the country at large that is more palatable. Certainly something must be done as it is unconscionable for us to sit here and let others suffer more than necessary just so we can have the luxury of feeling better about ourselves and not having to challenge our closely held beliefs.