Foaming Election Fever
Can anyone else simply not generate the enthusiasm to really, properly care about this election?
It's not that I'm uninterested in the political system, or the democratic process, or proposed fiscal policy or electoral reform. I'm very interested in these things, but this particular iteration is simply not doing it for me.
For the past year or so I've been wondering whether it makes more sense to model the electoral process using Game Theory or Information Theory. For the uninitiated, Game Theory is a framework for mathematically modelling strategic situations, where many people want different outcomes (like who gets into power) determined by each other's choices (like who to vote for). Information Theory, on the other hand, concerns the encoding, transmission and interference of information as signals, and how to efficiently get information (such as a voter's preference for how they want to be governed) from one place (like a voter's brain) to another (such as Parliament). They are not alike, in either form or usage.
Unfortunately the two don't reconcile very well, because each one implicitly assumes that democracy does something different. There are, I believe, two general schools of thought on the function of democracy. One says it reconciles differences (a contest, best represented by Game Theory), and the other says it represents the will of the electorate (a signal, best represented by Information Theory). In reality, any given voting system will likely be a trade-off between these two positions. It's easy to imagine a system which gets so wrapped up in what the electorate wants that it can't make effective decisions. It's even easier to imagine a system which ignores large chunks of the electorate for the sake of forming a functional government.
So, are we idealists or pragmatists? Is it important that our preferences are faithfully represented by our government, or is there a point where we say "that'll do"; where our preferences are represented enough to stop Joe-Pot McHitler from ever gaining a majority, but not so much as to make it impossible to construct a working legislative body? There is, I'm sure you'll agree, no mathematical framework for helping us figure out the answer to that.
Or is there? The field of study covering this subject, (or at least the one I think is most worth the paper it's printed on) is called Social Choice Theory, and one of the most well-known works in Social Choice Theory is an idea which rejoices in the name of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. It concerns ranked preference voting systems, (although there's a corresponding and less catchy-titled Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem which says something very similar about non-ranked voting systems).
Basically, what these theorems prove (not suggest, not indicate, not provide evidence for, but prove, in the most intellectually honest sense of the word we have) is that it's impossible to have any kind of voting system which doesn't have one of the following:
1) a single voter who has a casting, "dictatorial" vote
2) a method for a unanimous favourite candidate to somehow not be elected
3) some conditions under which people are incentivised to vote for someone who isn't their preferred candidate
(I am paraphrasing a bit here; I've hodgpodged two slightly different sets of analogous conclusions from two slightly different theorems into one list, which is very bad practise, and I will undoubtedly receive a firm spank from the Baby Jesus after I die for having done it. If you don't want to trust me in the light of this disclosure, by all means look up the respective theorems and form your own conclusions. Otherwise, just go with me on this one.)
The interpretations of these theorems are diverse and barmy in equal measure. The one I'm inclined to espouse is that a 'best fit' resolution to people's choices and a system where everyone is represented are mutually exclusive properties of any voting system. It also implies the inevitability of tactical voting, since this seems the most systematically mutable condition. These both make an intuitive sort of sense. Annoyingly, they also bring us back to the original question: is it a contest or is it a signal? Are we voting to win, or are we voting to be heard? It can't be both.
Part of the embuggerance is the existence of tactical voting. This is implicit in the Game Theory model, which is all about strategically optimal choices, and often concerns making undesirable decisions because the counterfactual decision leads to worse outcomes. Under Information Theory, however, tactical voting is a form of interference. It destroys information about how people want to be governed, and that information cannot be undestroyed. Information Theory would tell us to construct a system which reveals people's preferences in spite of tactical voting, but Game Theory wouldn't even recognise it as a problem; a tactical vote is a person's preference.
I personally have a profound distaste for tactical voting. It leads to a stagnant, small number of credible parties who cycle between the same old ideologies for decades on end while the world changes around them. Laws are still being made in the same way they were in the 1970s, but we live in a drastically different time. The Digital Economy Bill was a prime example of legislation being passed on a subject which Parliament clearly knew nothing about. Why? Because the people doing the job now include a significant number of people who were doing the job decades ago. They're still there because they're in safe seats, and they're in safe seats because people vote tactically. There's no sensible turnover mechanism because people find it unsafe to vote for different things given a small number of credible alternatives.
There is, I suppose, an argument for a small number of credible parties in Parliament, running along the lines of making it easier to form a credible government and effectively legislate, but surely that's handled by the form of the Parliamentary system. For the first time in over thirty years we're faced with the prospect of a Parliamentary configuration which is a bit less predictable than an outright majority, and people are acting in equal measure as if either the sky is falling down or the Second Coming is upon us. The system will handle it. That's what it does. It would handle a monstrous number of smaller parties in much the same way, and maybe we'd get sick of going to the polling station every seven months, but it would eventualy resolve to a functional Parliament, which would chug along for several years until everyone got sick of it.
Traditional economics would tell me not to vote at all. The effect of my individual vote is staggeringly unlikely to have any bearing on the result, even before you take first-past-the-post and the standing of my preferred candidate into consideration, and unless I gain some sort of great personal satisfaction from voting, I could spend my time doing something more beneficial. But that isn't really an option, is it? Not only is my polling station just over the road, it's actually on my way to work. It's more effort to not vote than to pop in and stick a cross in a box, and it'll shut up everyone who thinks that not voting is somehow waiving my right to complain about future government behaviour. On the contrary, if none of them have my mandate, I can complain about all of them!
Perhaps I am just too bogged down with concerns over what my vote means and how it should be interpreted to realise why I should be enthusiastic about casting it, and to see why everyone else is enthusiastic about casting theirs. Still, these are important questions to ask, and they're not going to answer themselves. They are also, I believe, more important than which privileged shiny-faced arts-graduate busybody is ostensibly going to be running our country next week.
Even if they're not more important, they're certainly more interesting to think about. The actual election itself, each blow-by-blow event, is like a sport which has some very clever rules, and is probably extremely exciting to play, but which I am just not interested in watching. Brown, Cameron and Clegg may as well be playing some bizarre three-way game of Snooker, and each frame is more dismal than the last.
See, it's not that I don't think about these things. I just don't care about them.
It's not that I'm uninterested in the political system, or the democratic process, or proposed fiscal policy or electoral reform. I'm very interested in these things, but this particular iteration is simply not doing it for me.
For the past year or so I've been wondering whether it makes more sense to model the electoral process using Game Theory or Information Theory. For the uninitiated, Game Theory is a framework for mathematically modelling strategic situations, where many people want different outcomes (like who gets into power) determined by each other's choices (like who to vote for). Information Theory, on the other hand, concerns the encoding, transmission and interference of information as signals, and how to efficiently get information (such as a voter's preference for how they want to be governed) from one place (like a voter's brain) to another (such as Parliament). They are not alike, in either form or usage.
Unfortunately the two don't reconcile very well, because each one implicitly assumes that democracy does something different. There are, I believe, two general schools of thought on the function of democracy. One says it reconciles differences (a contest, best represented by Game Theory), and the other says it represents the will of the electorate (a signal, best represented by Information Theory). In reality, any given voting system will likely be a trade-off between these two positions. It's easy to imagine a system which gets so wrapped up in what the electorate wants that it can't make effective decisions. It's even easier to imagine a system which ignores large chunks of the electorate for the sake of forming a functional government.
So, are we idealists or pragmatists? Is it important that our preferences are faithfully represented by our government, or is there a point where we say "that'll do"; where our preferences are represented enough to stop Joe-Pot McHitler from ever gaining a majority, but not so much as to make it impossible to construct a working legislative body? There is, I'm sure you'll agree, no mathematical framework for helping us figure out the answer to that.
Or is there? The field of study covering this subject, (or at least the one I think is most worth the paper it's printed on) is called Social Choice Theory, and one of the most well-known works in Social Choice Theory is an idea which rejoices in the name of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. It concerns ranked preference voting systems, (although there's a corresponding and less catchy-titled Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem which says something very similar about non-ranked voting systems).
Basically, what these theorems prove (not suggest, not indicate, not provide evidence for, but prove, in the most intellectually honest sense of the word we have) is that it's impossible to have any kind of voting system which doesn't have one of the following:
1) a single voter who has a casting, "dictatorial" vote
2) a method for a unanimous favourite candidate to somehow not be elected
3) some conditions under which people are incentivised to vote for someone who isn't their preferred candidate
(I am paraphrasing a bit here; I've hodgpodged two slightly different sets of analogous conclusions from two slightly different theorems into one list, which is very bad practise, and I will undoubtedly receive a firm spank from the Baby Jesus after I die for having done it. If you don't want to trust me in the light of this disclosure, by all means look up the respective theorems and form your own conclusions. Otherwise, just go with me on this one.)
The interpretations of these theorems are diverse and barmy in equal measure. The one I'm inclined to espouse is that a 'best fit' resolution to people's choices and a system where everyone is represented are mutually exclusive properties of any voting system. It also implies the inevitability of tactical voting, since this seems the most systematically mutable condition. These both make an intuitive sort of sense. Annoyingly, they also bring us back to the original question: is it a contest or is it a signal? Are we voting to win, or are we voting to be heard? It can't be both.
Part of the embuggerance is the existence of tactical voting. This is implicit in the Game Theory model, which is all about strategically optimal choices, and often concerns making undesirable decisions because the counterfactual decision leads to worse outcomes. Under Information Theory, however, tactical voting is a form of interference. It destroys information about how people want to be governed, and that information cannot be undestroyed. Information Theory would tell us to construct a system which reveals people's preferences in spite of tactical voting, but Game Theory wouldn't even recognise it as a problem; a tactical vote is a person's preference.
I personally have a profound distaste for tactical voting. It leads to a stagnant, small number of credible parties who cycle between the same old ideologies for decades on end while the world changes around them. Laws are still being made in the same way they were in the 1970s, but we live in a drastically different time. The Digital Economy Bill was a prime example of legislation being passed on a subject which Parliament clearly knew nothing about. Why? Because the people doing the job now include a significant number of people who were doing the job decades ago. They're still there because they're in safe seats, and they're in safe seats because people vote tactically. There's no sensible turnover mechanism because people find it unsafe to vote for different things given a small number of credible alternatives.
There is, I suppose, an argument for a small number of credible parties in Parliament, running along the lines of making it easier to form a credible government and effectively legislate, but surely that's handled by the form of the Parliamentary system. For the first time in over thirty years we're faced with the prospect of a Parliamentary configuration which is a bit less predictable than an outright majority, and people are acting in equal measure as if either the sky is falling down or the Second Coming is upon us. The system will handle it. That's what it does. It would handle a monstrous number of smaller parties in much the same way, and maybe we'd get sick of going to the polling station every seven months, but it would eventualy resolve to a functional Parliament, which would chug along for several years until everyone got sick of it.
Traditional economics would tell me not to vote at all. The effect of my individual vote is staggeringly unlikely to have any bearing on the result, even before you take first-past-the-post and the standing of my preferred candidate into consideration, and unless I gain some sort of great personal satisfaction from voting, I could spend my time doing something more beneficial. But that isn't really an option, is it? Not only is my polling station just over the road, it's actually on my way to work. It's more effort to not vote than to pop in and stick a cross in a box, and it'll shut up everyone who thinks that not voting is somehow waiving my right to complain about future government behaviour. On the contrary, if none of them have my mandate, I can complain about all of them!
Perhaps I am just too bogged down with concerns over what my vote means and how it should be interpreted to realise why I should be enthusiastic about casting it, and to see why everyone else is enthusiastic about casting theirs. Still, these are important questions to ask, and they're not going to answer themselves. They are also, I believe, more important than which privileged shiny-faced arts-graduate busybody is ostensibly going to be running our country next week.
Even if they're not more important, they're certainly more interesting to think about. The actual election itself, each blow-by-blow event, is like a sport which has some very clever rules, and is probably extremely exciting to play, but which I am just not interested in watching. Brown, Cameron and Clegg may as well be playing some bizarre three-way game of Snooker, and each frame is more dismal than the last.
See, it's not that I don't think about these things. I just don't care about them.