Gehl and Porter spell out what they see as the desired state of Congressional politics. This would include these characteristics:
—Effective solutions. These are centrist policies that deal with problems, not perfectly but effectively and with bipartisan support.
—Action. Partisanship should not produce gridlock in the face of difficult issues.
—Broad-based buy-in over time. This means that major legislation would have bipartisan support, rather than being rammed through by the party that happens to hold a majority.
—A balance of short- and long-term needs. Too often, the only bipartisan legislation adds to fiscal deficits and unfunded liabilities.
Whatever the risks are with its adoption, final-five voting should not be compared with some political nirvana. Instead, it ought to be evaluated relative to the current situation, and from that perspective it seems like a promising reform.
An incremental improvement to be sure, but assumes the state capacity to conduct free and fair elections, something which has been lacking in the US for a couple of decades or more. Need to start with legitimate voter registration rolls, a uniform system of voter ID, measures to prevent harvesting votes of citizens without their knowledge or consent, paper ballots, and transparent and accountable tallying methods. Nothing will be improved by trying to graft reform on to a rotten stem in which unregistered individuals can show up at a polling place on election day without identification and cast a ballot and countless other fraud friendly practices have prevailed for many election cycles.
Well, states run elections so you have 50 plus territories sets of rules. Want to federalize them? Me, too. Good luck.
I’ve got to say, looking over the past year especially, the precise procedure for picking election winners really doesn’t seem to be the big problem, and neither does any tinkering with it provide even a partial solution to any of those big, fundamental problems with our system.
Three potential problems:
a) Is the diagnosis accurate? Is it the case that rules for voting in primaries are the main cause of polarization?
As far as I can tell, the matter is far from settled. See, for example, a new study by Nathan J. Canen, Chad Kendall, & Francesco Trebbi, “Political Parties as Drivers of U.S. Polarization: 1927-2018,” NBER working paper 28296 (December 2020), which finds that party discipline (‘whipping’), rather than primaries, are the main (and growing) cause of polarization in Congress:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w28296
Here is the abstract:
“The current polarization of elites in the U.S., particularly in Congress, is frequently ascribed to the emergence of cohorts of ideologically extreme legislators replacing moderate ones. Politicians, however, do not operate as isolated agents, driven solely by their preferences. They act within organized parties, whose leaders exert control over the rank-and-file, directing support for and against policies. This paper shows that the omission of party discipline as a driver of political polarization is consequential for our understanding of this phenomenon. We present a multi-dimensional voting model and identification strategy designed to decouple the ideological preferences of lawmakers from the control exerted by their party leadership. Applying this structural framework to the U.S. Congress between 1927- 2018, we find that the influence of leaders over their rank-and-file has been a growing driver of polarization in voting, particularly since the 1970s. In 2018, party discipline accounts for around 65% of the polarization in roll call voting. Our findings qualify the interpretation of – and in two important cases subvert – a number of empirical claims in the literature that measures polarization with models that lack a formal role for parties.”
b) Does the proposed cure (final-five voting) have plausible or predictable bad side-effects?
My intuition is that final-five voting introduces complexity and opacity in the eyes of voters. Simplicity is a virtue for legitimacy and transparency.
c) How does the polity get from here to there? Is there demand for anything like final-five voting?
I don’t see any constituency pushing final-five voting. There are better proposals for electoral reform — for example, quadratic voting (E. Glen Weyl and Eric A. Posner) — but none of them have traction. (Quadratic voting would integrate ‘intensity of preference’ without creating single-issue 3rd parties, a potential side-effect of final-five voting that Arnold mentions in his review.)
Arnold, you may be interested to read about Wayne Wheeler. Under his leadership, the Anti-Saloon League functioned an awful lot like the veto-wielding third party that you describe in your review. Wheeler marshaled a solid ~10% of voters in various districts across the country and leveraged their votes to advance the Prohibition agenda. It’s tough to overstate his influence in securing the passage of the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act.
I learned about Wheeler in a book written by Daniel Okrent called “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.” Okrent discussed the book on Econ Talk way back when, which is where I heard about it. It’s a fantastic interview, and I found the book even more interesting.
Most voters are too stupid or uninterested to spend more than 10 seconds on a ballot race, with the exception of the presidential election. This sounds like a good system for people that care, but it would be nearly entirely swamped by the bias and noise from low interest voters.
G&P are working from an invalid metaphor – that there is a normal distribution of opinion along a left/right line.
A few observations.
Massachusetts had a initiative on the ballot to establish ranked-choice voting in the commonwealth. The voters rejected it soundly. The view of many is that ranked choice voting is something academic economists would enjoy but the majority of actual voters would find confusing. It would inhibit voting.
The other issue is the conceit that “centrist” policies will be “effective” in dealing with problems. Centrist policies may be popular; that is why we call them centrist. But I have no reason to believe a centrist policy is effective.
Finally, I reject the “liberal” notion that the only thing we need is some institutional reform, and then all will be well. The political civil war in the US cannot be fixed by institutions. No reform will make the woke tolerate speech they don’t like, or reduce the conflict between those who think the US is a noble country and those who think it is diabolically evil.
I’m not sure I would say “rejected it soundly”. The actual results were:
For: 45.2% 1,548,992
Agn: 54.8% 1,875,712
Very few people seemed to care one way or another.
Voters may have rejected ranked choice in some jurisdictions where they had an opportunity to vote on it, but it has been adopted in quite a few places.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_United_States
Perhaps people are rejecting ranked choice because it perpetuate s single member districts. Sixty percent of USA people want a viable third party, including majorities of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. The USA really needs proportional representation if it would have the actual consent of the governed:
https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/517088-poll-60-percent-of-voters-say-a-viable-third-party-is-needed-to
Arnold, I regret that you have focused only on the proposal. I have yet to read the book but I think we cannot ignore the first part on Political Competition (there the authors attempt to diagnose the institutional roots of a U.S. duopoly that is serving people badly). As much as I celebrate their focus on politics as competition for government power, their diagnosis may be too simple. I view the U.S.’s domestic political order as the world’s most complex one. More importantly, its complexity has been increasing as the competition’s prize –measured by the personal benefit at all levels of government– has become huge (a perception reinforced by the pandemic). How many additional runners would the NY marathon attract if its prize were increased 10 times? How would that affect the average quality of the applicants and the selected runners?
How does this reform take into account that tens of millions of voters believe fraud and/or lack of transparency is the primary problem in politics? After all, that’s what got the Capitol building stormed yesterday. Also, aside from President, how many voters know the candidates well enough to have an informed opinion on ranking up to five candidates for each position?
How would we implement a system that is explicitly designed to reduce the power of the two parties which currently control all of the power between them?
Lastly, I think it could actually create a higher risk of extremism. Many people who would vote for a more extreme candidate decline to do so to avoid ‘wasting their vote’. If Trump was running third party in 2016, we all know he never would have been elected, even if he did enjoy success reminiscent of Ross Perot. With this system, you can vote first for a Socialist or Green, knowing that if they do poorly, your backup vote will still count.
Arnold, if you (concerned American citizens) are looking for answers, first you have to understand and agree on the questions. As an outsider that has been watching U.S. politics for the past 50 years, I think the issue is the increasing number of Americans who have entered the competition for grabbing government power to force other people to do what they want (that is, to meddle in other people’s lives). The increasing number of politicians (with their financiers as well as with their armies of servants) appears to be closely related to the weakening of the system of checks and balances at all levels of government (I’m not arguing causation but an escalation). Given the impossibility of a Mao’s re-education of your politicians (including financiers and servants), the question is how to contain the dark side of politics and government by reconstructing that system.
Arnold, it seems that you and other concerned American citizens will have to pay attention to what is going on these days. Like it or not, soon you will have to choose whether you are for or against the barbarians. They have already started to cancel all opposition to their final push to grab government power. You can laugh at Pelosi and Biden because of their long records of malice and stupidity, but you know they are the façade of the barbarians and their well-financed armies. You can feel safe by condemning Trump and his supporters but you know it will last a few weeks. Sorry, you will have to choose.
Arnold, the barbarians are betting that their revolution will neither be televised nor be discussed on social media (Qs.: how long do you think you will be able to continue blogging? or like your MR mentors, are you planning “to reform” your comments section to please the new rulers?).