Speaking about the forthcoming presidential election and the prospects of Donald Trump, an Iowa GOP official said that “anything can happen” (“The Inevitable Nominee? Trump’s Election Momentum Builds Even as Legal Problems Mount,” Wall Street Journal, August 27, 2023).
In light of what we know about the economics of politics, this reflection is more than just an intuition from a minor party official. The idea that anything can happen in political space is supported by science—logic, mathematics, economics, and some historical and empirical confirmations of political chaos. In his influential 1982 book Liberalism Against Populism, political scientist William Riker summarized what was already known. I am quoting a whole paragraph (from p. 187), but the penultimate sentence gives the concise result:
In a remarkable discovery, [the late MIT economist Richard D.] McKelvey has shown that, for a wide class of differentiable utility functions, once “transitivity breaks down, it completely breaks down, engulfing the whole space in a single cycle set. The slightest deviation from a Condorcet point (for example, a slight movement of one voter’s ideal point) brings about this possibility.” Hence not only is a Condorcet winner unlikely, but also when one does not exist, anything can happen. There is no “small” set of probable outcomes.
(I have explained elsewhere the Condorcet Paradox and related theories as well as some of their implications for a realistic conception of democracy and elections; see my Independent Review article “The Impossibility of Populism” and also my Regulation review of Riker.)
A breakdown of the rule of law, a civil war, the Argentinization of America, or something banal like the election of Joe Biden or Mike Pence—any of that can happen. All of this follows from rational-choice analysis; it assumes that individual voters are rational. (Dropping this assumption, we could envision the possibility that if Caligula’s horse were running under the QAnon banner, the horse might win.)
These results must be qualified. As long as certain institutions—courts, constitutions or fundamental laws, political parties, government assemblies, bureaucracies, decentralized power centers, a free press—frame and constrain voting and its consequences, ordinary times will display more standard and predictable results, which public-choice analysis has explained. When the institutional structure of a society is under heavy strain, like in America today, political processes do resemble a roulette wheel. And we can’t seek refuge in “ordered anarchy” (a Buchananian expression), because this is not the situation now and it is very unlikely to be after the political wheel is spun.
READER COMMENTS
Jose Pablo
Sep 4 2023 at 10:53am
it assumes that individual voters are rational.
But they are not …
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691138732/the-myth-of-the-rational-voter
Jose Pablo
Sep 4 2023 at 11:07am
However, voter’s irrational behavior can be predicted, so, little hope for Caligula’s horse
Well … except if it runs as an anti-market nationalist who pretend to bring back manufacturing, aims to ‘Make America Great Again’ and promise to constructs a wall to deter ‘foreigners’ from gradually encroaching upon The Country, (affectionately referred to as ‘my precious’ by Caligula’s horse’s supporters).
Catering to voters irrationality seems to pay off … even if you are Caligula’s horse.
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 4 2023 at 11:35am
Jose: I saw this second comment of yours after I had hit the Submit Comment for my reply. We are probably saying the same thing. The voter’s rational ignorance probably works more in favor of the national-populist horse who promises both A and non-A plus national grandeur.
Jose Pablo
Sep 4 2023 at 1:05pm
The voter’s rational ignorance probably works more in favor of the national-populist horse
Yeah! … so it seems
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 4 2023 at 11:30am
Jose: In the context of social-choice theory, individual rationality simply means having transitive preferences. It is true that my joke on Caligula’s horse introduces a more general meaning, which is using the correct means to satisfy one’s preferences. Your mention of cognitive biases is then relevant. Note however that an individual voter who casts his single vote for Caligula’s horse is being “rationally irrational” (as Bryan Caplan says). It is simply not worthwhile for him to spend resources correcting his biases since whether he votes for the horse or not is going to have no measurable effect on which animal is elected.
Jose Pablo
Sep 4 2023 at 1:29pm
It is simply not worthwhile for him to spend resources correcting his biases since whether he votes for the horse or not is going to have no measurable effect on which animal is elected.
I always have held some doubts on this mechanism. After all the median voter seems to use a similarly “lazy” approach even when the stakes are (much) higher: when checking his bank balance sheet or when picking his “favorite” stock (or real estate investment) or even when choosing a long-term partner (the “reasons” for this last activity are not that far from the ones we used to pick a political candidate as you would expect. The average voter, definitely devote to this one, way less effort than he (or, in particular, “she”) should!)
It seems that the median voter gets a lot of pleasure (utility) from feeling that he is part of a tribe, from feeling his cognitive bias reaffirmed and from using his power (no matter how “pathetic” this power, for instance the right to cast an irrelevant vote, is) “against” their “enemies” (foreigners, political opponents, …)
It seems too, that “reading” and “researching” represents an insurmountable cost to the median voter (even when the stakes are high)
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 4 2023 at 4:48pm
Jose: To the median voter, yes. Not to the average consumer. See https://money.com/how-much-time-buy-car-report/#:~:text=In%202022%2C%20the%20average%20car,minutes%20going%20through%20the%20process. Consumer Reports claims to have 6,000,000 subscribers: https://www.consumerreports.org/annual-report/2022/impact-report#:~:text=CR%20is%20proud%20to%20have,our%20campaigns%20for%20marketplace%20change.&text=In%20fiscal%20year%202022%2C%20CR,and%20services%20in%20100%2B%20categories.
Walt Cody
Sep 4 2023 at 4:30pm
For a while now (if it ever was) voting has become less and less about a rational comparison of policies and more about an emotional tic, and the Democrats seem to have found a way to tick off a lot of voters. Trump 16 was to a great extent about a decade of dissing—sneering at half the country as “God and gun” clingers, baskets of (racist sexist ) deplorables whose foul odor could be smelled at Walmart’s ( by people too refined to ever enter a Walmart). If that was supposed to make voters vote D to avoid the label of toothless racist sexist moron, it backfired “bigly” and created a hardened tribe.
Similarly the hardened Liberal tribe, still clinging to those implanted fears that the other half of the country is racist, anti-constitutional and totalitarian, votes from that fear and not from rationally weighing the policies of their own party that seems to be increasingly…racist, anti-constitutional and totalitarian. Aside from killing the economy.
And the less we teach civics and history and objective analysis in our public and private grade schools, the less rational our future voters will be.
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 5 2023 at 11:03am
Walt: You are right that studying history and rational thinking is important. “Civics” is another matter. Don’t forget that the Pledge of Allegiance was invented by a socialist, Francis Bellamy, at the end of the 19th century, at the height of the populist movement. If you are free it should be obvious; you should not be obliged or pressured to swear allegiance to your protectors.
Walt Cody
Sep 5 2023 at 3:47pm
By “civics” I just meant how the federal, state and city governments work.
Jose Pablo
Sep 5 2023 at 9:15pm
Or doesn’t work …
Monte
Sep 5 2023 at 4:51pm
But the PoA, with its universal creed of “liberty and justice for all”, is a message we can separate from the messenger, isn’t it? Bellamy was a Christian socialist guided by a biblical perspective of how society should be organized and who chose not to include “under God” in his original penning (a change later signed into law by Eisenhower), as he was an ardent believer in the separation of church and state, as I assume you are.
Our younger generations’ understanding of civics is tragic and is what prompts economists like Caplan and others to write books about it (The Myth of the Rational Voter, The Coddling of the American Mind, etc.). So I would argue that studying civics is every bit as important as studying history and rational thinking if we want to salvage the future of our republic.
Matthias
Sep 5 2023 at 8:02pm
You seem very optimistic about the power of school to teach people.
They spend a lot of hours on teaching math, too, and nearly every curriculum you can find written down is full of wishful thinking on fostering critical thinking.
Neither of them seem to do much.
Monte
Sep 5 2023 at 10:38pm
Our educational system is part of the problem, isn’t it? We severely lag other countries, but that wasn’t always the case. It’s only been in the last half century that the U.S. has performed abysmally on globally standardized tests compared to most other developed countries, particularly since the adoption of Common Core. History and civics are rarely taught anymore. If they were, it might improve our academic standing and perhaps the average citizen’s ability to cast a rational vote.
Floccina
Sep 6 2023 at 12:30pm
Monty,
I think if you look at the data in detail there is not a significant difference in school quality among the developed countries.
Monte
Sep 6 2023 at 6:27pm
Floccina,
Thanks for the link. It’s encouraging to read that U.S. schools were doing better than portrayed in the media based on demographic PISA score criteria in 2010, but I wonder how we measure up today?
Regardless, taking the U.S. in isolation, graduate students are ill-prepared to enter the workforce, according to this more recent article found in the Harvard Business Review. See also K-12 Schools Are Not Preparing Students for the Workforce and Are Schools preparing students for the real world of today’s workforce?
Even more concerning is the serious lack of civics knowledge among average Americans:
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. – James Madison
Mactoul
Sep 4 2023 at 9:49pm
Do these theorems apply in the context of deliberative representative democracy where the voters vote for their representatives and not their policy preferences?
And the representatives themselves are not mathematical aggregates of voter preferences but persons with free will?
Walt Cody
Sep 5 2023 at 1:39am
Voters (ostensibly) vote for representatives who, when running for office, state the policies they (ostensibly) stand for and will represent. Though often what they state is generalized gibberish (“peace and prosperity!”) or, more specifically “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage” Some, however, do state actual policy aims (close the border, open the pipelines, defund the police, medicare for all) and voters then vote for them for that reason, the experienced voter knowing that the policies likely can’t be implemented and the representative well may use his free will to do either nothing or the opposite.
Jon Murphy
Sep 5 2023 at 7:55am
Short answer: yes. These theories were developed precisely in that context. We need methodological individualism for precisely the reasons you cite.
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 5 2023 at 10:54am
Mactoul: Your first paragraph raises an important question, which I suggested in the last paragraph of my post. The institution of representative democracy does attenuate the problem of chaotic aggregation of preferences, as do the other institutions I mentioned. (This led Gordon Tullock to argue that Arrow’s theorem is irrelevant. Buchanan, on his side, preferred the chaotic exploitation of changing minorities to the continuous exploitation of the same minority.) And cycles can also happen, although with less frequency, in smaller assemblies like a parliament; see my summary of the Muscle Shoals case in the US Senate.
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