Should We Vote Via Coin-Flip?
The following article takes inspiration from Season 5, Episode 3 of Malcolm Gladwell's podcast ‘Revisionist History’, entitled “The Powerball Revolution”. Each episode is different, well researched and thought-provoking. I would highly recommend that anyone taking a road trip listen to the podcast.
As citizens of democracies, we are all very used to hearing people complain about their politicians. So much so, it becomes hard to imagine a democratic system in which people are actually satisfied with their elected leaders.
Our dislike of politicians has become increasingly loud in recent decades. Surveys from the Pew Research Center found that Americans believe the single biggest factor explaining Trump’s loss in the 2020 election is that voters were ‘excited’ to vote against Trump. That is, they ‘negative voted’ — voting against a candidate they hate, rather than for a candidate they like.
The upcoming Australian federal election is fielding two relatively unpopular candidates. Both the prime minister and the opposition leader are tied at a record low of 42% in terms of overall competency in a recent AFR/Ipsos poll — the lowest level for either position in 27 years. But this is not a new trend. In the last twelve years, only three have seen a sitting Australian Prime Minister with a net-positive approval rating. Hating your local politician is just as quintessential an Australian trait as being laid-back.
But is it fair to despise our politicians?
I think we should start asking ourselves: why do we always hate our politicians?
Now, I can’t give you a final answer, but I can give a suggestion of a place to start. To quote Malcolm Gladwell:
“Running for and running an office are two very, very different things”
Logically, our politicians are some of the best at getting us to vote for them. But it's not clear many of them are actually any good at running the nation.
But don't hate the player, hate the game. It's the voting system that's flawed.
Cronkite’s Laws
To find out how, let’s take a trip to the Cordillera Oriental in the Andes.
In ‘The Powerball Revolution’, Malcolm Gladwell interviews Adam Cronkite, a charity worker who studied successful leadership and voting systems while working in Bolivia. Cronkite worked with rural Bolivian schools to implement ‘lottery voting’ systems for school council elections. That is: rather than holding ‘popular elections’ to vote for student representatives, the council was drawn randomly from a hat with all students’ names who wished to be considered.
Gladwell coined three lessons he learned from Cronkite’s experience, ‘Cronkite’s Laws’.
Law 1: Many highly capable individuals are not in elected office because they do not want to run for office. Cronkite found that after their terms on the student council most of the top performers said they wouldn’t have, and would never in the future, run for office.
Law 2: When elected officials are chosen by lottery, the diversity of policies and initiatives are far greater. In direct voting, the school councils rarely strayed from organising social events. After the implementation of lottery voting, school initiatives ranged from preventative education around child slavery to the increased funding of free breakfasts for disadvantaged children.
Law 3: Voters cannot accurately gauge who the good and bad candidates are. To quote Gladwell, “nobody knows anything”. Cronkite found that the best members of the student council were often slandered in private by teachers prior to taking office, and the worst members of the council — the rare few that were voted off the council by their colleagues — often got undue praise prior to taking office.
No wonder we hate our politicians! They are only there because they wanted to run for office, they engage in the narrow confines of their prior beliefs of what politicians should do, and they are picked by us, the voters, who cannot accurately gauge talent in elected officials.
Now Cronkite’s laws are not peer-reviewed or backed up with mountains of evidence. Student councils in rural Bolivian schools are radically different to nation-state democratic parliaments! But, they certainly provide insight into the problems with our current voting systems.
Almost everyone knows a friend who they believe would be an amazing national decision-maker, but would never run for office. Almost everyone complains that their current politicians are unimaginative and small-minded. Almost everyone ends up underwhelmed by the politician they vote for.
I see two common themes underpinning a lot of Cronkite’s laws that capture the flaws of the current election ‘game’
Our voting system weeds out diversity of thought and makes our politicians wholly unrepresentative.
Our voting system requires our political representatives to put on a show whilst campaigning. And they do this because it wins our votes.
The ‘Political Class’
Many of the boons of ‘lottery voting’ in the Bolivian schools came because the student council suddenly became representative of the underlying population. It expanded the pool of leaders, from those in the ‘Political Class’ to everyone who cared.
The current voting ‘game’ draws candidates from a small subset of the population that is overly engaged in political matters — the ‘Political Class’. If you are not in this class of people, you have little chance currently of being an elected representative.
So, what makes the ‘Political Class’, the ‘Political Class’. It is not that they belong to some specific secret society, religion, ethnicity or economic class. It is that they are able to tolerate, or even enjoy, **the posturing, parading and politicking that comes along with being a 21st-century politician. Unfortunately, this small group often have outlooks, life experiences and wisdom as diverse as the British Royal Family.
However, a representative group of elected officials would easily have the diversity of outlook, life experience and wisdom to address the problems in Cronkite’s Laws.
But that's how the political system works. The very nature of the election ‘game’ contrives and shrinks the diversity of our elected officials because only a certain type of person, someone from the ‘Political Class’, wants to run for office.
Sadder still, our ‘Political Class’ segregate themselves into distinct ideological camps with binary worldviews. Any nuance and free thought still left are stamped out in favour of the ‘party line’. And those politicians that do try to add some diverse thought...well they tend not to get very far.
So, not only does our current voting system give us candidates who can rarely do what we want them to do, but it also gives us candidates from a very narrow psychology of people with some very strict opinion guidelines.
You do not look for a dentist who is the best at painting and was born on a Thursday. Why is it we mostly choose our elected representatives this way?
TikTok Politics
The emergence of 24/7, free-to-air, decentralised media has only worsened the non-alignment between the skillsets we want of our politicians and the skillsets they actually have.
80 years ago it was difficult to judge a politician for anything more than how they voted in parliament, what they said on the radio, and what was published in major editorial newspapers. Nowadays, we have an intrusive understanding of every politician's private life. We basically require all political candidates to be professional actors who have never made a bad judgement. No wonder they can’t govern well, they never push themselves to make mistakes because they are too busy perfecting their acting chops!
However, much as we might like to think otherwise, it's because of us, and how we vote. They wouldn't be playing the voting ‘game’ like this if it wasn't the winning strategy. If it wasn’t getting our votes!
Politicians are trying to sell themselves. We need to make sure we really understand what we are buying.
And you can’t blame the media either, there is a non-alignment there as well! Good thorough journalism is what we want. But click-baity, eye-grabby journalism is what we get — because news companies get paid by the eyeball, not by the brain cell.
A solution?
Now, we could implement ‘lottery voting’, to elect a more representative and diverse set of candidates. But that is almost certainly not going to work as a system to pick a nation's elected representatives. There is limited accountability and a lack of control of the electoral process by citizens. It is arbitrary by nature and can easily make citizens feel disenfranchised by their government — despite possibly enfranchising them.
Though, that doesn't mean we shouldn’t strive to change the ‘game’ in a way that solves the problems elucidated up in the Cordillera Oriental by Cronkite.
There is a solution. But it isn’t easy. And it relies on us: the voters.
So the solution is this:
Realise politicians are selling you what you want to hear.
Recognise you know and understand only a fraction of what is really happening.
Remember that just because someone has a different opinion, it doesn't mean they aren't valuable.
On top of everything else, look for the candidate that is a little more genuine and makes your elected representatives a little more representative!
It’s what we’ve got
Churchill once said,
“Democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”
Democracy, specifically representative democracy, has its problems and is not fated to succeed. But while it's flawed, it is the best we’ve got by a country mile. It requires active care from the citizenry. And hopefully, it can be a little less flawed, with a better understanding of its flaws.
More from The Curious One:
Don’t hate the player, hate the game