AN EXPLANATION OF THE CARTOON
BEFORE ELECTION
Candidate: (all smiles) I shall devote myself entirely to the Interest of our hard-working Population!
Pat: (duped) Let the poor men get good wages and enjoy his Sunday Bitters, and I’ll vote for you!
AFTER ELECTION
Pat: (disappointed) Well yer Honor, where is my Sunday Bitters I voted for?
Alderman: (dignified) We cannot sacrifice the welfare of the community to Party interests!
The cartoon depicts a politician breaking his promise to a voter. He claims that he cannot fulfill his promise because he is serving “the welfare of the community”. Meanwhile, his newly dignified dress suggests a newfound personal wealth. We are meant to suspect that he is lying; he is on the payroll of some special interest.
The voter, a “Pat”, plays the fool in this round of the election game. Will he play the fool again? He might not. The reader of the cartoon – who is no fool – will certainly not. In effect, the cartoon mobilizes voters, saying: “Don’t be a fool! We have to punish lying, promise-breaking politicians by throwing them out of office.” The implicit claim -- which I think is right -- is that this would change the election game for the better.
What would the revised game look like? In the pre-election moment, politicians would campaign on promises they could deliver, knowing that they would be punished at the next election if they were to fail to do so. In a large electorate, this would mean promoting a public policy vision that a majority of citizens found appealing. This is likely to lead to broadly better outcomes than the game where politicians survive in office by serving a small set of special interests.
In the revised game, politicians survive in office by credibly promising 51% the most that they can. This creates the incentive for politicians to promote and pursue divisive or partial public policy: policy that increases the benefits for the winning coalition by imposing costs upon those outside of it. This might mean imposing a religious vision that a majority likes, even if the imposition is loathed by those outside of it. It might mean pursuing a similarly divisive foreign policy or economic policy. Most tragically, a politician that credibly promises to citizens in general what they could expect to gain together (i.e. "the welfare of the community") is likely to lose to one who credibly promises more to roughly half of the citizens because he is willing to offend or offload burdens on roughly half (i.e. the other half) of the citizens.
So we are out of the fire of special interest politics, but into the frying pan of partisan politics (which retains quite a bit of heat from special interests). The descriptive aspect of my research focuses on this situation. The design aspect focuses on how we might escape it. The design question is this: is there any way to change the electoral game so that impartial politics would result?
I propose a simple turn-taking rule. Consider a high-stakes executive office like that of mayor, governor or president. If a candidate builds a supermajority of, say, 60%, then he wins the full term. If all candidates fail to build the broader supermajority, then the 1st place and 2nd place finishers take alternating years in office. I call this a turn-taking mechanism. There is quite a bit of nearby "design space" to explore: one could vary the supermajority threshold required to win the whole term, one could vary the proportion of the term that a coalition wins (perhaps with the size of their votes), one could vary the ballots used to pick winners, etc. But let us stick with the simple case for now.
The turn-taking term creates the incentives for politicians to build broader supermajority coalitions if possible. This would mean reaching out past swing voters to the base voters of the other coalition. So long as that is impossible and the polity remains divided into roughly equal "major" coalitions, those coalitions are put in a position where they can hold one another reciprocally accountable. Each coalition would be free to pursue its partial public policy vision, but the fact that they will be taking turns so long as division persists opens up an alternative equilibrium that I call government by the golden rule. What would policy and policy-making institutions look like if the ruling coalition treated the opposition as it wanted to be treated?
My conjecture is that government by the golden rule would allow many of the conflict-resolving and conflict-avoiding mechanisms that are already familiar to us -- for example, individual rights, federalism, transparency, an independent judiciary and a meritocratic civil service -- to blossom into a fuller form where they have already taken root, and to take root for the first time where they have not.
In this situation, politicians would have less reason -- and over time, less ability -- to put partisan or special interests above the impartial interest. So that the alderman could genuinely say to the voter, "We cannot sacrifice the welfare of the community to partisan interests." So long as other partisan interests or special interests were not being served either, a voter could accept the result without being played as a fool.
This raises more questions than it answers, but that is my research.
