Some Arguments in My Book for the Claim that Approval Voting is Superior to its Rivals

There has lately been what could be called a glut--indeed, a veritable superabundance!--of writing on proposed election law reforms, with a good deal of it finding its way to the email boxes of interested readers through the offices of Rick Hasen's Election Law Blog or the Substacks of a half-dozen scholars like Ned Foley, Rick Pildes, and Steven Hill. The most popular proposals these days seem to be Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), including both Ranked Choice and Condorcet methods. And the supporters of the various versions of these ordinal methods are, if I may say so, nearly at each other's throats. For what it may be worth, it's my view that all of these folks are, in a word, "barking up the wrong tree."

I haven't the slightest doubt <ahem> that all my readers here have already enjoyed (no doubt quite heartily!) my book on democratic theory. I suppose, however, that it is possible that several of you, after finishing that work and (fondly) laying it aside, have been kind enough to forward their copies on to friends without taking the trouble to memorize its most important passages first--a grievous, but perhaps forgiveable error. Well, despair not generous readers! There is now no reason to purchase another copy solely because you can't quite remember why Approval Voting is claimed therein to be superior not only to such ordinal rivals as IRV and RCN but also to Score Voting. 

Oh Frabjous Day! But....How is such good fortune even possible? Well (and please, there is absolutely no need for thanks!) it is managed by my reproduction below of one key section devoted to that subject. [Of course, if you'd really rather pick up another copy to refresh your memory of the entire argument, you can get one here. (I note that while link is specifically to the paperback version, there are, of course, also hardback and digital versions easily found nearby. I will also mention that the Brams/Fishburn book pictured above is also for sale there.) 

In any case, I haven't the slightest doubt that each of you DOES remember how I move on from soda choices to political candidates and from thence to the additional need for a multiple winner procedure--and what that should be--so I won't repeat any of that here. I will muse (regretfully) only on how much better off we would be in the U.S. today if people had listened.

Extract from Ch. 7 on Approval Voting

Suppose eight people (A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H) are having a party and are trying to decide what soda to bring. (For simplicity, I here require a single winner by adding the assumption that, for whatever reason—maybe it would be a major hassle or much more expensive for there to be more than one choice of beverage at the party—only one sort of soda may be bought.) Now, let there be four possible choices: Cola, Lemon-Lime (“L-L”), Orange and Root Beer (“RB”). There is no unanimity among the planners and, being the good (small-d) democrats they are, they think that the majority ought to have its way and plan a vote to decide the matter. One of the eight is made secretary and, as we shall see, keeps careful track of the votes cast. Here is the result when they are asked to give their favorite soda of the four (here designated with check marks):

While Cola receives a plurality of the vote, no flavor gets a majority. One member of the group therefore suggests a run-off election among the first and tied-for-second contenders only, leaving off RB all together since it did so poorly. Here are the results of this run-off election with ‘A’ indicating an abstention): 

 

Obviously, this second vote does not help. There has been no movement at all because voter H absolutely loathes all the flavors except RB and refuses to pick any of them as even passable choices for the party. The revelers aren’t completely stuck though, because there are other possible voting schemes. I will suppose that they are skeptical of ranked choice voting (“RCV),[i] not because they have heard criticisms of it involving vote splitting, non-monotonicity, or insincerity,[ii] but because they worry that it may not get party-goers what they actually want. They take this to be a possibility because someone might prefer one flavor to another even if she really dislikes both of them. So, perhaps unlike other democracy investigators, our group’s dismissal of ordinal methods does not involve concerns that the unavailability of intersubjective measuring sticks might allow for a huge divide between one person’s 1st and 2nd choices and hardly any at all between another person’s two top picks. Instead, they just doubt whether a collection of preference orderings can ensure that they will meet their goal of landing on a beverage that the party-goers actually want to drink, something that will be a “successful choice” for the participants generally. This concern can be taken to be a recognition that a sort of cardinality is required here, something that, at the very least, allows the assignment of a Yes or a No to each flavor, where a “Yes” means “this is better than nothing” and a “No” means “this is useless or worse.” Such assessments can correctly be said to mean the same thing to everyone. They reliably correlate in a way that ordinal preferences do not.

Two members of the group have suggestions. One has been swayed by literature she has received from a group advocating Approval Voting (“AV”),[iii] and the other is a sports and cinema fan and understands that rankings of teams and movies usually use some form of Score Voting (“SV”), where each voter gets to assign a number of points (or stars) to each candidate, and the points are summed to find a winner or produce a ranking. This two-member sub-committee decides to allow points to be assigned, but only if the system excludes everything that seems to them impossible to compare. That is, they agree to keep out any allotments of point differentials that might suggest “a little better than” to one voter but mean “much, much better than” to another. In their search for additional trustworthy information, they come up with the following (arguably cardinal) scale:

BOTH ENJOYABLE AND THE BEST OF THOSE LISTED                  4 PTS
GOOD ENOUGH (WOULD DRINK IT IF AVAILABLE)                       3 PTS
PASSABLE (NEVER HAD IT BUT WOULD TRY IT IN A PINCH)    2 PTS
NOT OK (NEVER HAD IT AND WON’T TRY EVEN IF THIRSTY)    1 PT
REALLY DISLIKE IT                                                                                0 PTS

The AV supporter insists on an additional condition. She agrees with the use of this scale only if the assignments of 4, 3, or 2 points are also counted as “Approvals,” and assignments of 1 or 0 are considered disapprovals. This is settled upon as well, and the third vote is duly taken. The secretary represents the approvals here with a check mark, and circles the two sums representing the highest number of points and the most approvals $$$

The results are disturbing. While the Plurality victor was Cola, the SV winner is Orange and the AV winner is L-L!

Perhaps it will seem that this embarrassment of winners is the result of the weirdness of there being so many “never tried it” votes with respect to what seem like common carbonated drinks. But it is important to realize that an attitude of “I really don’t know much about her (or it)” toward a political candidate or proposal is not unusual at all. Look at the secretary’s registers above again, but this time, think of them as the results of a political election for a representative, each of whom is put up by a different party. (Perhaps replace “Cola” with “Corporatist”; “L-L” with “Liberal”; “Orange” with “Outsider” and “RB” with “Republican.”) We can also think of the individual partygoers above as voting blocs. This may make it clearer that there can be a large number of decisions in which the assignment of the sort of SV points allowed by our party-goers would largely be a function of the varying amounts of risk that voters are willing to take. Some people will be OK with this or that relatively unknown candidate or proposal; others will not be willing to take their chances.

Brams and Fishburn 2007, perhaps the most complete and ardent work written in support of AV, does not say very much about what “approval” means. They merely note in passing that it is “voting for” something/someone or “finding it acceptable.” It is important to recognize that in some cases we may find none of the candidates “acceptable” even though one or two seem to us a bit better than the others. In such cases, do we “approve” of any of them or not? Should we understand approval to mean Is OK with? Thinks is pretty good? Supports? Hopes will win? something else? Couldn’t each of these understandings of “approve” produce different results in an election?[iv] This is a matter, discussed in previous chapters with reference to CHOICE, that I believe to be central to the question of what matters when one votes. And it is my view that the soda story above is quite helpful here. We have taken the first three on this list to be approvals:

BOTH ENJOYABLE AND THE BEST OF THOSE LISTED                  4 PTS
GOOD ENOUGH (WOULD DRINK IT IF AVAILABLE)                       3 PTS
PASSABLE (NEVER HAD IT BUT WOULD TRY IT IN A PINCH)    2 PTS
NOT OK (NEVER HAD IT AND WON’T TRY EVEN IF THIRSTY)    1 PT
REALLY DISLIKE IT                                                                                0 PTS

This is because, ex ante, we do not think our lives will be better off if anything satisfying either of the bottom two lines is picked. We might say that those two bottom lines seem to us to be Equal to Or Worse Than Getting Nothing at All. On this view, those only are the unsuccessful choices, and all others may be called successful—even though we may not particularly look forward to the of obtaining those we deem only “PASSABLE” and would admit that we may discover that we hate them. That is how affirmative votes (or approvals) should be understood throughout this book. It is a conception tightly connected with the concept of success. Notably, it does not involve favorites or preferential orderings, and so, perhaps, could not be used to construct an indifference curve. A choice should be deemed “successful” at time t if and only if its result is expected by the chooser to provide something that, at t, seems like it would be better than nothing at all. Of course, this is consistent with the unpleasant fact that when we make poor choices, our lives may get worse in spite of that “success.”

So, who (or what) should the authentic majoritarian take to be the winner in this election? The Corporatist (or cola), because he (it) is the favorite of the largest number of voters? The Outsider (Orange), who/which got the highest score? Or the Liberal (Lemon-Lime), who/which most voters found to be at least minimally palatable? In my view the third answer is best: it is the number of approving voters that the best democratic practice should take to matter most. Why? Just as we ought not to be stuck at parties with nothing we can stand to drink, we ought not to be stuck with ruler/representative A when more people among us can stomach candidate B. This is the position that I believe produces the nearest thing to a consensus victor and, is thus more likely to knock out the sort of outliers who are most discordant with anything that might be considered a general will. So, it is my view that if it is to be used to determine what the people do or do not want, aggregation should be taken to be the counting of approvals, where each person’s approval is given the same weight as everyone else’s, regardless of how enthusiastic or tepid it is.

Surely this tack will be more conducive to stable regimes than ones according to which candidates whom a majority of the populace absolutely do not want may get to take office. Obviously, I cannot insist that nobody could mean anything else by “consensus” or that “egalitarian democracy” simply must require AV. But I believe that mine is at least a reasonable approach that not only does well against known competitors, but captures much of the common sense understanding of “consensus.”

AV has some obviously desirable characteristics besides being uniquely competent to reflect the principles that motivate CHOICE. First, while it can countenance more than two candidates in a single-winner election, it is not susceptible to transitivity cycles, since it allows us only the choices of approval and non-approval. Thus, in a situation with seven candidates, whether we approve one, three, or six of them, there is never a danger of intransitivity. Second, it is consensus-building/revealing by its very nature. Indeed, in legislatures and committees, substituting simultaneous approval votes on alterations of proposals (placed beside both the original proposal and “no bill at all”) for the current practice of successive votes on amendments would vastly democratize procedures by eliminating the absurdly inappropriate power now held by agenda-setting moderators (Riker and Weingast 1988). Finally, it is easy to understand.[v]

Criticisms of AV[vi] have focused on a claimed likelihood of producing unsatisfactory results if voters bullet their favorite candidates in violation of the system’s explicit instruction that all approved candidates be voted for. Perhaps it would help in the effort to resist the lure of preferentism to put specific instructions on ballots indicating that what is wanted are bare approvals only: indications of which candidates are "passable."[vii] Thus, perhaps:

 

Vote for every candidate you think would be minimally OK, i.e., you would give a grade of PASS to them if they were considered strictly on a PASS/FAIL basis.

 

Insisting that such instructions will always be resisted in favor of doing whatever one can to elect one’s favorite[viii] is an empirical assertion of psychology, and those making it should understand that if they are right, the irrationality of social choices is inescapable, and reaching consensus will always be mere luck. This is because, as Arrow has shown, use of ordinal scales provides no possible means of coherently determining what would make a populace relatively content with governmental actions.[ix] Fringe candidates that most voters find abhorrent could always be selected. In the next chapter I will suggest a way one might overcome preferentist defeatism of this sort by buttressing minority voices in government.

It is interesting to consider Lindsay’s appraisal of theories that deliberative consent is a solution to the main problem of democracy in light of AV. Lindsay was a strong proponent of small group, Protestant-style deliberation as the best model for democratic practices. But he saw the limits of unanimity-building when he indicated that the margin between most and all must be filled. Why? Consider a church group of 50 people that cannot agree on whether to tear down their building and put up a new one, fix up the current one, or do nothing at all. Suppose the split is 35 for repair, 10 for tear-down, and 5 for nothing whatever. They debate and debate but make no progress. What happens? Do the five (“do nothing at all”) folk win if unanimity is never reached, or do we excommunicate them as “others” as Schmitt would have advised, and achieve unanimity that way? One devout Calvinist to whom I put this question, responded that, “Usually the dissenters get tired and concede or move on. Often folks just smile and ignore them like you do with a crazy old uncle.”

But, of course, there are two ways to “ignore” this group of five. One is to pretend they are not there, the other is to halt the proceedings until these dissenters retire or die off, which would, in this case, be allowing the proposal with the fewest supporters to win the day. Lindsay saw the hopelessness of the “perfect accord” approach in such situations and so might have supported AV, according to which the church would have been repaired—the moderate position. The “do-nothing” group would not have gotten their way, but, assuming adequate and fair deliberation took place, they would have had their appropriate say both prior to and within the election. It would not be might that made the result right, but the group’s fairly-assessed and aggregated desires, since nothing else (that the vote might have missed) is “really right.” As I will discuss further below, I don’t believe that AV is quite enough to guarantee the entire filling of Lindsay’s margin between most and all within large, necessarily non-deliberative groups like U.S. voters in large electoral districts, but I do think it is a crucial first step.

 

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[i] Under RCV, voters rank as many of the choices as they would like. If no candidates receive enough first-choice votes to win, the candidate receiving the least first-choice votes is eliminated, and the vote counters see what the second choices were of the voters who most liked this eliminated candidate. Those second-preferences are then distributed as if they were first-choice votes. This process is continued until some candidate(s) have/has enough votes to win. RCV is thus a way to conduct iterative instant run-offs, dropping the bottom candidate each time. Without specifying more complete preference orderings of the party-goers, it is impossible to determine which type of soda would come out on top pursuant to RCV.

[ii] See Brams and Fishburn 2005.

[iii] The voting rule for AV is quite simple: Vote for all and only those candidates you minimally approve of by making a mark next to the name of such candidates. These votes/marks will be summed. The candidate getting the most votes wins.

[iv] I have benefited from discussions with Kevin Zollman on this matter.

[v] It will likely be observed that everyone who writes about voting rules seems to have her own particular favorite. Sometimes such promotion stems from the calculation of likely outcomes given various estimates of voting strategies among the electorate. But theorists also attempt to demonstrate that their pet mechanisms provide the most accurate aggregations of individual preferences over a set of more than two options. But AV is not intended for that purpose at all: it maps (much easier to sum) approval profiles rather than preference profiles. In the next chapter we will look at another mechanism that eschews ordinality, but does so for a different purpose. Both procedures reflect my view that general wills are not ordinal rankings.

[vi] See, e.g., Nagel 2007.

[vii] Notwithstanding current television ads insisting that "Just OK is not OK," most people will agree that a grade of Pass is better than having to retake a class. What is actually “Just OK” or acceptable/approvable need not be BEST, anybody’s favorite, or even terribly good.

[viii] Caleb Huntington has speculated in conversation that this predilection might be related to the utility gain, for primitive hunters, in choosing only one antelope in the herd to focus upon and chase, even though any number of others would do just as well.

[ix] With respect to compiling ordinal lists, I agree with Riker and Weingast (1988, 382) that “tinkering with the mechanism” is pointless. There simply is no coherent way to sum individual rankings to determine what a group wants. In my view, to find the general will, one must scrap preferentism completely.

Is it Stupid to Spend U.S. Money to Help Other Countries?

 

The other day, in an interview with Fox News, President Trump said this: "“[Ukraine has] tremendously valuable land in terms of rare earth, in terms of oil and gas, in terms of other things. I want to have our money secured. I told them that I want the equivalent, like $500 billion of rare earth, and they’ve essentially agreed to do that, so at least we don’t feel stupid. Otherwise we’re stupid." 

Trump expresses a similar sentiment with respect to funding a military base on Greenland and policing the Panama Canal. He is not alone. There is a common attitude, endorsed by many of his supporters, that the diminution of America's "greatness" has largely been an effect of a (perhaps "woke") tendency to be nice  to others without being transactional about it. On their view, we have been stupid and this has made us weak, indeed a gullible laughing stock that is constantly being taken advantage of by other, more sensible nations. They think the Trump Administration should be thanked for merely taking back what is rightfully ours. For this will not only make our country much richer, but will restore our reputation as a savvy nation around the world.

Others, of course, vehemently disagree with this view. Not only do they think is it cruel for rich countries to fail to lend assistance to poorer ones whenever possible, but, they insist that in the long run, the policy of kindness has made the U.S. seem heroic around the world. Furthermore, it is claimed that cannier adversaries, like China and Russia, will simply step in and take over our good works, and that such activities will result in those countries inheriting our former popularity. In fact, in the view of a lot of Democrats, Trump's alleged selfishness has resulted not only in the self-harming removal of foreign aid from those who desperately need it, but also in a pointless bellicosity to countries that have been our staunchest allies for many years. On this view, it can  never make one stronger to pick fights with, or levy tariffs on, our close friends even if it may improve our balance of payments. And if we act in this way, any new "allies" we make as a result (and they are claimed to not REALLY be true friends) will be equally transactional. That is, they will just take advantage of our new selfish isolationism, by filling our shoes both as benefactors and more generous trading partners. And, naturally, the opponents of MAGA believe that such moves will be sensible on the part of these adversaries, not at all stupid.

How should such arguments be assessed? While the Maga points above are entirely tactical, their opponents here make both moral and empirical/strategic arguments. How one really "puts America first" is thus a deep and difficult question, and, in my view, is not one that should receive only an instinctual response.* In any case, my own limited ability to successfully prognosticate with respect to foreign policy questions, in combination with my general skepticism regarding knowledge of moral truths makes me reluctant to put much weight on my own gut reactions here. 

But I do have one strongly held view. It is that policy matters like these should be decided democratically. Sadly, however, we do not have authentic democracy in this country. If we did, not only would there be no Electoral College or Senate, but citizens would have the power to rapidly recall any elected official and overturn any enacted law via a referendum. My own views on Greenland or the Ukraine or foreign aid generally don't particularly matter, but the views of everyone ought to.  I don't know if the majority would agree with any of my own (possibly overly dovish) sentiments. But, sadly, that just doesn't matter in the United States.

My newest Hornbook Review touches on these matters. It is on a relatively old (1994/2002) batch of essays regarding the "America First" ideal. The instigating piece, by Martha Nussbaum, takes a cosmopolitan or "citizen of the world" stance.** Many of her respondents disagree with her. But none of the writers seem to me to put democracy first, as I would. Each seems to have more confidence in their own view about America's responsibilites both at home and around the world than in whatever may be desired by a majority of their fellow citizens. For any of you interested, my review of this book is here.

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* I note that discrepancies among scholars of voting theory engage in some of the same arguments over transactionalism vs. what might be called "long-term pie-in-the-skyism," with the first group insisting not only that strategic voting will always trump strict rule following, but that it is always stupid to believe otherwise. For example, the claim that with Approval Voting, voters who aren't exploitable will always bullet their favorite candidate instead of approving everybody they could tolerate has long been the most successful argument against that procedure. Again, that is both an empirical assertion and, I suppose, an insult to us softies.

** It is important to note that Prof. Nussbaum has changed her views since 2002. Her more recent take on these matters can be found in her books Political Emotions (2013) and The Cosmopolitan Tradition (2021) in which, as she has informed me, "I now follow Grotius in giving the nation, and emotions directed at it, a central part in justice."

Can Hyper-Polarization be Reduced by Altering Electoral Rules?

 

Ned Foley, Richard Pildes and Larry Diamond have recently put out--with a bit more fanfare than the usual book on democratic theory or voting rules can amass--a well-argued edited volume on how one might alter the U.S. electoral system in ways that will make the country less polarized and its governance more effective. The editors note that the book is the product of a task force comprised of 31 political scientists, law professors, and other scholars which was "formed in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol aimed at disrupting the counting of votes in the 2020 presidential election." They go on to say that the purpose of the task force was to consider "possible institutional reforms to elections in the United States that would diminish extremism and polarization and hence the potential for future existential threats to American democracy." And, based on the book's contents we can surmise that whatever the differences of the members, they all agree that our "current system enhances rather than reduces the voice and power of extreme candidates and factions." Their goal, therefore was to identify reforms that could reverse the overrepresentation of extremists and ease polarization. 

I have just reviewed this important book here and urge those interested to have a look.

I confess, however, that in that review, I entirely ignored three chapters: one on Presidential primaries, by Robert Boatright, one on campaign finance, by Ray La Raja, and one on Presidential nominations, by Pildes and Frances Lee. My reason for those omissions is that the most central issues covered in the book, regarding the alleged benefits of Proportional Representation and multi-party governance over our First-Past-The-Post two-party, plurality Presidential system, seem to have been controversial among the task force members--both during and subsequent to publication of the book. Even with respect to the limited question of the expected effects of various proposals on the reduction of incentives for hyper-polarization, there has been nothing like unanimity on suggested reforms. So I focused entirely on that bundle of issues in my review.

I think, therefore, that I ought to at least summarize the recommendations made by the authors of the skipped contributions here.

In his chapter on Primaries, Boatright advocates the following:

• A national congressional primary day, and  the possibity of turning to compulsory voting. ​Both in interest of increasing turnout.
• Ranked-choice voting (RCV), preprimary conventions, and the expanded use of runoff elections. ​
• Allowing parties greater flexibility in the making of primary rules and clarifying the role of state parties in nonpartisan primaries. ​​
• Experimentation with alternatives like open and nonpartisan primaries. ​
• Strengthening the ability of parties to keep "unfit" and "extreme" candidates through preprimary conventions or endorsements. ​
• Elimination of "the sore loser" rule to allow defeated primary candidates access to the general election ballot. ​

In their Chapter on picking Presidents Pildes and Lee recommend:

• Adjustment of delegate-selection rules and the primary calendar to make contested conventions more likely. ​
• Allowing superdelegates to provide peer review, by having them vote on the second ballots if no candidate wins a majority on the first one.
• Mandating a preprimary endorsement process to ensure candidates are acceptable to party leadership. ​
• Giving party leaders and members of Congress the power to make votes of confidence or no confidence to presidential candidates prior to the start of any Presidential primaries. ​
• Providing more power to national political parties who they believe should take full control of the organizing and hosting of debates,

In his chapter on campaign finance Ray La Raja pushes for: ​

• Increased financing for political parties by raising contribution limits, removing or increasing limits on party-coordinated expenditures, and (possibly) public funding for parties. ​
• Improving transparency by requiring meaningful disclosure of major donations and passing antiretaliation legislation to protect donors. ​
• Raising contribution limits for multicandidate PACs and encouraging the formation of PACs  that would represent a broader spectrum of Americans. ​
• Experimentation with public subsidies for small donors, particularly within legislative districts, and consideration of the elimination of voluntary spending limits for candidates where public financing has been accepted. ​
• Elimination of the separation of party funds that are used for legal expenses which is thought might reduce incentives for election litigation.

I admit to having mixed feelings about some of these proposals, but however that may be, I want to at least point out that the arguments made on their behalf by the authors here are cogent and certainly worthy of further discussion.

Democracy, Equality and Stupidity

 

For reasons that I can't quite put my finger on (maybe you can help?), during the last couple of months, I have been almost obsessed with how to reconcile democracy with an overabundance of uninformed (not to follow Charlie Pierce and say "idiotic") voters. As readers of this blog must know, I am a confirmed majoritarian, and unlike those alleged members of the Democratic Party on whom Donald Trump weirdly cast aspersions the other day for preferring the Electoral College to the popular vote(!), I absolutely object to anything that results in some votes being given more weight than others. I also hate "epistocracy" -- the idea that polities should be ruled by the wise, or "guardians," or "philosopher kings," or even the psychology experts that Asimov pushed in Foundation.

But I mean, really. As Kelly Weill demonstrated in her excellent Off the Edge, some people (even those who have flown around it multiple times) simply can't be convinced that the earth is round. Others insist that sometime after Moses received any golden tablets, but before he built his arc, dinosaurs were ambling around waiting to be domesticated. (Maybe because King Kong was punching them into submission.) I suppose these cuckoo views are relatively harmless -- or would be if they were not often conjoined with theocratic dreams -- but when the craziness involves the removal of FDA approval for vaccines that have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, things get scary.

From the perspective of democratic theory, though, we're all equal....aren't we? Well, what does this "equality" mean? And what does it imply for governance? “Democracy” might be used to express something like

The political organization of any group wherein each (or perhaps each sane, non-felonious, adult) member is provided with equal political power, and no other person or thing is provided with any that is not ultimately derivable from such provision.

Here, voting is plausibly seen as just one sort of exercise of political power among many. One reason electoral power has had traction here is that the right to vote is one of the simplest examples of political power that groups can distribute to their members.

One reason equality of votes and voters has been considered essential by democratic theorists of various kins is that according to "jury theorems," which rely on the idea that, at least with big bunches of sincere, independent people who are at least more competent to decide things than just spinning a wheel is, the more people that think X, the more probable it is that X is true. Given that assumption, the following might be claimed on behalf of democratic practices:

1. All and only democratic regimes are essentially characterized by their distribution of equally weighted votes to each citizen and a denial of all political power (not ultimately derived from such votes) to anything or anybody else.

2. The soundness of jury theorems shows that democratic regimes are more likely to produce correct policies than other type of political arrangement.

3. Therefore, the best manner of achieving correct public policies are those in which every person is provided with (and perhaps also uses) their equally weighted votes to determine public policy.

4. It is natural for people to want to live in just those places where public policies are usually correct.

5. Therefore, democratic regimes are best—or, at least, it is natural for people to want to live in and obey their edicts rather than under any other sort of rule.

However, there may be a problem with insisting that it is precisely “equality of political power among citizens” that ought to be considered a criterion for being democratic. For political power seems to be built up out of elements which do not all seem democracy-constitutive, or at least they are not so in the same ways. So, for example, intelligence, eloquence, and wealth may all be important parts of what makes someone “politically effective,” but it seems absurd to require of good democracies that they attempt to equalize every one of these constitutive elements in order to equally distribute political power to each citizen.

Furthermore, it might be possible to equalize total political effectiveness between two individuals by piling up one element in one of them and a different element in the other. That can be seen not to work if one is attempting to make democratic merit a strict function of citizen equality of total political effectiveness, because one of the relevant constituents of political power seems more critical here than any of the others: the weight of one’s vote.🗡 In this way, individual voting power resists being counted as just one item in the democracy-constituting batch. It is, for example, intuitively objectionable to suggest the removal of anyone’s authority to vote from one who has an overabundance of intelligence, eloquence, or cash.

The same sort of problem arises if one selects equal “community status” or “public regard” rather than political power as the key to democratic arrangements, for, again, the constituents of such status or regard may be piled up in various ways that arguably make equal totals, even though some, but not all, of these elements seem to be essential to democracy, or to be essential in a different way.*

As it is undeniably difficult to determine the exact ways in which citizens of democratic polities must be at least roughly equal, one may wonder why equality is thought to matter so much to epistemic democrats. The answer is not hard to find. Those familiar with the stirring words of French and American revolutionaries will of course realize that the idea that citizen equality is essential to democracy must go back at least to the Eighteenth Century. But, of course, so do Jury Theorems. And the connection is clear. Wherever such theorems claims that it is in majority opinions that one will find epistemic advantage, vote weight equality will be required.

Anyhow, for those who (like me) don't think democracy must essentially involve equal outcomes (of wealth, for example), it has generally been vote weights (as well as equal treatment/protection and non-discrimination) that has been settled on as the essential elements of democracy. This means that nobody's vote can be discounted, even if they think there were saddled triceratops roaming the American plains at the time "the founders" were fannying about with the U.S. Constitution.

What, if anything, can be done about this? Does it mean that democracy isn't such a great thing after all? That's the stuff I've been thinking about lately. It's thorny and confusing, to me anyhow, but it has resulted in a paper I have just completed and sent off to a journal (please keep your fingers crossed for me!) as well as a review of a book by Nobutaka Otobe, called Stupidity in Politics: Its Unavoidability and Potential that will soon be up here:

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🗡Parity of political power among group members is insufficient on its own, of course, since each person might be given precisely none at all. The idea of equality of something between each group member has long been attractive to democracy supporters. One political philosopher, Steven Wall, in his 2007 paper "Philosophy and Equality," mentions each of the following as an item that might be included as a principal constituent of the concept of democracy, or as a characteristic that can be expected to result from a democratic structure and can therefore be suggested as a good reason for endorsing such a form of government: equal moral importance, equal moral worth, equal regard, equal standing, equal political liberty, equal political standing, political equality, fair equality of opportunity for equal political influence, basic equality, equal rational political authority, equality of the social basis of self-respect, equal civil liberties, equality of protection from social insults or like offenses, and the equal availability of reasonable inferences regarding one’s personal worth.

* This issue is used for comic effect in a recent episode of a television situation comedy (Amy Schumer’s Life and Beth: see video above.) Beth, who is pregnant, asks her gynecologist, “Let me get to the important issues: how many drinks?” and receives the unwelcome answer, “No alcohol, no marijuana, no coffee…Well, one cup a day is okay.” Beth quickly responds with, “Okay, but if I don't have the coffee, then it’s probably fine to have a glass of wine, right? I think we’re all in agreement on this.” The point is that democracy advocates will not allow the absence of equal voting rights to be counterbalanced by things like a history of debate club victories or a close friendship with a local election official. Like Beth’s gynecologist, political theorists are expected to understand that some sorts of properties are essentially such that they can only be inappropriately (if perhaps humorously) redistributed in counterbalancing attempts.

A Million Bucks to Support Two Already Existing and Quite Safe Constitutional Provisions?

 

Among the large number of extremely weird occurrences that peppered the recently completed Presidential election in the U.S. was the creation of an unusual lottery. Elon (or "Leon" as Trump first called him) Musk started giving away a million dollars a day to randomly chosen registered voters who pledged to support freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. 

This was seen by some Democrats as an inducement to register, and lawsuits were duly filed claiming that such incentives are prohibited by election laws. I have nothing to say about the legality of the scheme here but will note that it seems a particularly cuckoo and wasteful way to try to affect an election. Obviously, it's chump change to our new hyper-efficiency devotee and future deregulation tsar, so it may not give a clear sense of the many ways he can benefit his and his fellow oligarchs' businesses by mucking around in Federal regulations, eliminating agencies and firing scientists.

That's not what I want to write about here though. What fascinates me now is his choice of the first two items in the Bill of Rights as provisions that are in need of support by perhaps a few thousand likely Trump supporters who may have been encouraged to register to vote for the first time. I mean, those two Amendments seem like they are pretty safe at present, especially given the present composition of the U.S. Supreme Court.

To be honest, I don't know what Musk's particular interest is in guns. Maybe he's got big ones on his space ships or wants to make some cool James Bond weaponry available to every Tesla buyer. Maybe he just wants people to be able to bring rocket launchers and bazookas to their local Walgreens without getting hassled by anybody. I really don't know. But I do think the NRA has had all that kind of thing pretty well in hand for at least a generation.

On the other hand, I believe I understand his interest in the First Amendment. It's about one more sort of absolute immunity now being sought by the right--the ability to make stuff up and disseminate it as widely as any really rich and powerful person can manage to do. 

Some people may remember the old Rothbard/Rand/Nozick libertarians who, perhaps reluctantly added "fraud" to the single other item (force) that they said it was appropriate for laws to prohibit. In their heart of hearts, the old libertarians didn't think anything really ought to be unlawful except, you know, murder or theft of one's beemer. Other than that, people should be LEFT ALONE to do their things (i.e., make the world lovely for poorer people). The problem was that lying, which doesn't seem particularly forcey, could nevertheless mess up contracts. Even a small con could be bad for corporations as well as as well as common shmucks considering some nootropic supplement or a lightning rod for their house (see Melville), so it might be necessary to allow prohibitions of lying too.

Well, Musk at X as well as Trump at Truth Social do NOT want to be prevented from disseminating  falsehoods, including absolutely cracked conspiracy theories. They want to be able to publish deep fakes and to insult any adversaries with absolute impunity (though, of course, Trump reserves his right to sue people--and maybe turn off the lights at media outlets--whenever he feels they are being mean to him. After all, consistency isn't really his thing.) But Musk doesn't seem particularly interested in suing detractors; he just wants never to be hassled for pushing whatever nonsense might benefit one or more of his businesses or those of his buddies, if he thinks those lies might be believed by a bunch of gullible fanboys.

To be honest, this is a very difficult problem. On the one hand, free speech, especially political speech, has a lot of good things going for it--even if J.S. Mill was a bit too optimistic about the benefits that he thought must follow from it. At the very least, democracy seems to depend on it. Furthermore, nobody really has any terribly good ideas of how to prevent dangerous lies from being disseminated. (We will surely have more of them emanating from RFK Jr.'s exciting future tenure as head of FDA, NIH, and CDC.) 

But again, I don't have any marvelous proposals regarding how to handle these problems, which have certainly been exacerbated by inexpensive and broadly available AI. I really don't think anybody does. I have discussed this matter in several book reviews and prior blog posts. Here, here, here, here, and here, for example. As you can see, I have struggled with the tensions between free speech and disinformation. It's extremely tricky and may well just be too difficult for me.

It's not too sticky a wicket for Musk, though. He knows precisely what he wants--to be able to spray any sort of bullshit anywhere he likes without impediment...and to be free to do so in ways that will ensure that these lies will be seen by millions, whether they have chosen to follow him on X or not. That's his idea of speech freedom, and he'll give you a chance to win a lot of money if you agree with it.

I Review One of the Late William Talbott's Books on Human Rights

 

The book I have most recently reviewed for 3:16 AM Magazine is Which Rights Should be Universal, by William J. ("Bill") Talbott. It's a very solid book, and for me was also quite educational. Most importantly, it's both a work that I think is worth careful study by anybody interested in political philosophy yet not something that is unapproachable by non-scholars.

Only after I sent off my review to my editor did I come to find out that Bill had died in May of last year, after a four year battle with cancer. In addition to being an excellent philosopher, he was a celebrated teacher and beloved family man. Like me, Bill fathered two precious daughters. I learn from his obit that he was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war. He didn't luck out with a high lottery number like I did. And he made no bogus claim of bone spurs like a certain Presidential candidate. In return for his courage and honesty, Bill was forced to provide two years of non-military service. 

When he passed, he was only 74 years old. Seems to have been an absolutely beautiful man.

Here is my review of his fine book. It's the only one of them that I've read, but I have little doubt that the others are good too.

The Sacred Song of the MAGA

For those who are interested, here is the real MAGA theme song. Anti-gay/trans, anti-welfare, xenophobic--even a bit anti-new tech. Sung by the original king of anti-wokeness, Archie Bunker, along with his hapless and long-suffering wife, Edith. Archie was created to be something of a laughing stock 50 years ago. Watching his obno antics was thought or hoped to be maybe a bit educative. And maybe it actually was for awhile. But today Archie's views are in the ascendancy, not just here, but around the world. MAGA is having the last laugh, I guess.

OK, here's the song, a fairly disturbing reminder of where the U.S. is as a country these days. But how did Archie Bunker emerge from his status as prince of the dumbasses to become our top dog? I leave you with that question.

Happy Halloween

Louis Menand's New Yorker Piece on Two New Books About the U.S. Constitution

 

As a result of my frequent (and shameless) self-promotion (which practice, to be fair, was urged on me by my publisher), I suppose that most people who chance upon this blog know that I have written a book on democratic theory and that I write reviews of other books on democracy for 3:16 AM. 

The latter fact of course entails that others are or have been also engaged in the writing of books on democracy. But did you also know that other people write reviews of democracy books too?!? No? Well, believe it or not...they do!! In fact, in the most recent issue of  The New Yorker, Louis Menand (of The Metaphysical Club fame) has provided his take on two new ones, Erwin Chemerinsky's No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States (Liveright), and the Paul Pierson/Eric Schickler offering, Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era (Chicago). 

Menand recognizes that neither of these works is particularly good and says so. He points out, with some amusement, that while Chemerinsky used to blame democratic failures in the U.S. on the Courts and formerly lavished praise on the Constitution, he now blasts both as terrible. Menand also suggests that Chemerinsky hasn't got a single workable proposal for fixing anything. Meanwhile, Pierson and Schmickler are derided for seeming to think that it is the Constitution ("America's software") that should be blamed for the extreme polarization in the U.S. today. Menand points out that both hostile segmentation and an almost complete lack of trust in government seem to be global, rather than domestic problems nowadays.

It's a little disturbing that these are the sorts of books that tend to get reviewed when there are so many democracy books coming out nearly every day, some of them quite good. Menand even lets us in on the fact that neither of his subject books is elegantly written. So, I suppose one may wonder why Menand and/or the New Yorker picked these two particular duds to promote...if only in Menand's negative fashion. (Indeed, Michelle Goldberg recently indicated in the NYT that she wasn't much more satisfied with the new Levitsky and Ziblatt book she reviewed there.)* 

Whatever.  What I want to talk about here is what Menand himself gets wrong about democracy in his review of these two mediocre books.

He writes, "Political decisions can't be entrusted entirely to the will of a bare majority of voters, in part because voters tend to be relatively uniformed about politics, but, more important, because nothing prevents majorities, once in power, from oppressing minorities." And he warns that Madisonian factions that are "actuated by some common impulse of  passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community" may cause us to end up with "either a movement led by a man on a white horse or a  tyranny-of-the-majority regime." I.e., either a Trumpian autocrat or a French Revolution-style terror.

Back in 1993, this "liberal" way of looking at the matter was brilliantly rebutted by the Harvard Constitutional scholar Richard D. Parker in a passionate article entitled, "Here, the People Rule." Parker there wrote of that sort of Menandian thinking that it is basically "grandiose puffing" that relies on the assumption that only "better-than-ordinary-people" can make decent laws. Parker noted that when we hear "the best people" conceding that, in spite of their obvious superiority, sometimes they must nevertheless"defer" to the majority, we should understand just how "haughty" the remark is. And he explained that an apparent desperation to "get out of the way of a big, vulgar group" is how we can tell that the condescending (and twee) narrator of Mann's Mario and the Magician should be placed with his fellow hapless liberals. Finally, he says that such attitudes are why that (perhaps intentionally) feeble group prefers the august judgments of those who have been elevated to "the bench" to what they might discover on the street. For, when one is troubled by anti-populist fears, one is likely to consider judges to be "so very superior to political actors, that they can represent our 'better' selves."  

Parker is at pains to point out (as I was also, both in my book and in this paper) that "to attribute much past or present oppression to 'majorities' is...a ridiculous exaggeration. Majorities rarely rule at all. Certainly, they almost never rule directly. When believers in 'majority tyranny' imagine their worst fear, they aren't thinking of a New England town meeting." And he notes, quite rightly in my view, that "[m]ost oppression...is the work of minorities. And much of it is the work of elite minorities--refined and well-educated--whose hands tend in real life to clutch the immediate levers of power." It is a very compelling paper, and one that I recommend everybody read.

In any event, I will sum up here by saying that, while Menand's review is surely better than the two books covered in his piece (or than the above-mentioned release recently discussed by Goldberg in the NYT), in the immortal words of Skip James regarding The Cream's take on I'm So Glad, "It's slick, but it still needs a little more grease." 

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*Among terrific recent books on the subject, one could mention those by Rosalyn Fuller and Jan-Werner Muller. But nevermind: the sublime mysteries of how some books get a ton of publicity and others almost none are certainly far beyond my humble ken. 

What a 1927 Novel, Made into a 1932 Boris Karloff Horror Movie, Can Tell Us About Current U.S. Politics

 

Just this (from the character, Margaret regarding the tycoon, Sir William): 

[S]he was troubled by a vision of factories and ships and crowded offices, and against this background there stood out the figure of this man, no, this huge resentful boy...someone lost, now smiling, now crying.... She stared at him. He had never really grown up. Were they all like that, these men who grabbed power, who wrecked whole countrysides, who sent other men flying all over the world?

--J.B. Priestly, Benighted