Why Voting On "The Issues" Is Stupid And It's Fine If Voters Are Uninformed
There are tropes popular among elite watchers of electoral contests that are treated as self-evident and that I think are self-evidently wrong and portray a misunderstanding of how democratic elections and governments work.
The first is the idea that voters should vote based on “the issues” and that voting for/against a candidate based on her character is silly.
The ideal voter, in this scheme, would print out all the 10-point plans on the various candidates’ websites, read them, and then make an informed decision as to which policies she likes more. Conversely, she should utterly disregard attack ads pointing out that this guy is a philanderer and that guy is a hypocrite.
This is completely backward to me, and here’s why: what determines policies enacted by a head of government are her political coalitions and managerial/political skills, not her position papers.
Remember when Barack Obama stood apart in the Democratic primary by coming out with a mandate-less healthcare plan? And we ended up with a healthcare law that includes a mandate? It’s not that Barack Obama is a “flip-flopper” or had a change of heart or what have you, it’s that the healthcare plan that ended up being enacted was a function of political debates and coalition-building in the Congress. Conversely, whatever differences there might have been to a plan enacted under President Rodham Clinton would not have been due to the differences in whatever was on her campaign website, but to her managerial/political skill at navigating Congress and public opinion. And the reason why there was a universal healthcare bill to begin with was that the liberal/progressive movement had been chomping at the bit for decades for political circumstances that would allow for such a bill. What mattered was not any candidate’s “issues”, but the political context and the managerial/political skills of the chief executive. And anyone who expected otherwise betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of how American (indeed, democratic) government works.
“The issues”, in other words, are merely positional signaling, ie marketing, ie akin to the TV ads that sophisticated political watchers so disdain.
And yet, to most higher-educated politics watchers, a voter who had said “Well, I’ve read Clinton and Obama’s position papers on healthcare, and I’m going to vote for Clinton/Obama because I’m for/against a mandate” would have been applauded as sober and reasonable, while a voter who had said “Well, I’m going to vote for Obama because he seems more, put together, you know, more charismatic” would have been the subject of Twitter snark. But it strikes me as a much sounder basis for choosing a chief executive to point to their level-headedness and charisma—character traits that one assumes useful to running a government—than any 10-point plan, which is by definition a list of things that won’t happen.
Beyond broad strokes (are they “conservative” or “moderate” or “progressive”—in other words, what kind of coalition will they put in charge of the executive?) and a handful handful of litmus tests (it’s completely reasonable to refuse to vote for someone who advocates something you find abhorrent, whether that’s bank bailouts or foreign wars or what have you) “the issues” are useless in picking a candidate.
As I’ve written before, 99% of what presidents do is appointing and firing people who do the actual work of government. The remaining 1% is the most intangible and the most important—the Cuban-missile-crisis-type decisions, the do-we-go-to-war-with-Iraq-type decisions.
For determining who’s better at either of those, “the issues” are useless. And character, on the other hand, that thing that we are told should be irrelevant, is (nearly) everything. It’s very hard to judge a person’s character, but looking at their biography, their public appearances and so forth is going to give you a better indication than “the issues.”
Famously, George W. Bush campaigned on a “humble” foreign policy, and gave us anything but. Is it because “Bush lied and people died”? Of course not. It’s because 9/11 happened. If you cared about foreign policy, the relevant question wasn’t “Do I agree more with Bush/Gore/McCain?” but “Who has the character to respond more intelligently and competently to the unknown crises that are bound to happen?”
Deciding that based on TV ads, campaign appearances, little details like whether they seem honest, and so forth, is highly imperfect. But it’s a heck of a lot more reliable than “the issues.”
This brings up the broader question about whether voters should be “informed”. Yes, they should be!, we are told. A popular “contrarian” view we see once in a while is that uninformed and apathetic voters should just stay home if they can’t bothered to make an “informed” choice. But, again, this seems to me to miss how democracy works.
Democracy, as a political regime, is worthwhile because it has given us over the long run much superior policy and economic outcomes than alternative regimes. Yes, Singapore is better run and richer than Greece, but on the whole and over the long term, democracies tend to be freeer and more prosperous than non-democratic regimes.
The main reason for that is quite simply the following: leaders who deliver bad outcomes get fired, no excuses. That’s it. It’s the only regime we know where, at regular intervals, if most households feel that things are getting worse, whoever runs the government is out. The “no excuses” part is important, too. What matters is how implacable it is.
In the corporate world, e.g. Cisco CEO John Chambers has been given a free pass for over a decade by supposedly sophisticated investors for not lifting the company’s stock price because he came in during the tech bubble and so has to deal with circumstances out of his control. Supposedly unsophisticated voters, meanwhile, are much too clever to grade on a curve. It doesn’t matter that you “inherited the recession from Bush”—fix it, and fix it now, or you’re out.
This is a wonderful spur to providing good outcomes, and on the long run, in most cases, it works. If we could invent a regime that chose leaders any other way but had the crucial bad-performance-gets-you-fired feature, it would deliver superb outcomes over the long run. (Arguably, this is what the Chinese Communist Party is trying to build, at least if they’re smart.) People talk about a “democratic deficit” in Britain because the constituency, first-past-the-post system “underrepresents” some parties in Parliament and causes a relatively low number of swing voters in key constituencies to decide the fate of the country, but the system works nearly flawlessly: there was an economic crisis under Labour, and now Labour is out, and if the Conservative-LibDem coalition doesn’t fix it, they’ll be out in the next election, as they are well aware. Same thing with the Electoral College in the US.
Therefore, the only question you need to be able to answer when voting in an election is this: Do I feel better now than I did last time I voted? That’s it. You don’t need a PhD. Heck, you don’t even need to be 18. It’s the famous Reagan appeal.
Over the long run, it’s probably better to have a more informed polity, as many political decisions need to be made with the assent of the governed and it helps that the governed have good ideas/notions, but for the specific duty of voting for a president/governing party, these things really don’t matter. Not to mention the fact that being “educated” correlates with positions on social and other issues that are moral/aesthetic/tribal and have on the merits nothing to do with how educated one is, and the fact that the highly educated tend to have a bias toward believing that other highly educated people should run things, a bias which in my view the last decade has thoroughly debunked (in this sense, I would much rather be governed by the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty).
So, in sum, I hope I’ve disabused you of a few notions and convinced you of the following:
- Don’t vote on the issues, vote on character.
- Don’t complain that fellow voters are uninformed, it means the system’s working.
Beyond making a banal point about the limitations of the President to shape policy with great precision and the ephemeral nature of campaign promises, this seems like a bizarre and poorly thought out post.
Look, ploicy positions matter and that’s trivially obvious. Firstly they matter simply in terms of some small set of issues where the President really does have fine policy control. Secondly they matter in terms of what actually gets done; Rick Santorum will push issues that Mitt Romney will not and, yes, both have to grapple with the mechanics of lawmaking but the two will make entirely different compromises. Thirdly it maters in terms of the path-dependence of policy; Bill Clinton’s promises to reform welfare, for example, ended up binding him. Fourthly it matters in terms of siggnalling: look, Edwards, Clinton and Obama all were going to have to fall back on the same set of technocrats to design health care reform, but Obama’s refusal of a mandate was designed mostly as a way of signalling that he was interested in being less “revolutionary” and more centrist than his competitors, and that was what that policy difference was meant to convey.
Lastly it matters because in our tribal politics the candidate’s issues are a way of steering the party platform, ands that’s no small thing.
I’m not saying competence and management aren’t important. But it’s nuts to say that policy isn’t important too.
— Kiselguhr Kid · Feb 8, 02:49 PM · #
Some good points – but the key element of political character is how honest a politician is about policy, not how many people they’re sleeping with; and you can’t judge that without knowing something about the issues.
Every politician shades things, and claims more agency than they actually have in shaping the outcome, but at least in some cases you can spot plain dishonesty. Two examples:
In 2010 the Republicans campaigned hard on the threat Democrats posed to Medicare; then promptly voted for a budget which eliminated Medicare over a period of time.
In 2008 Obama campaigned against Bush’s abuses of the national security state, such as prosecutions of whistleblowers, excessive secrecy, and illegal surveillance; but once in office embraced them.
When you say character most people think of marital fidelity and the ability to sound sincere when talking about generalities, but that has nothing to do with governing.
— peter · Feb 8, 03:35 PM · #
Oh, right – PEG’s still here.
Lock up when you leave, ok?
— Chet · Feb 8, 05:09 PM · #
PEG, I agree that the coalition/influencers come before the public political stance. But the political stance provides a window into the type of political coalitions that would ultimately run the show. I agree with Kiselguhr Kid that those groups’ agendas matter a great deal. A president’s character may provide more insight into her ability to execute and organize those diverse influencers.
It does require a bit of reading between the lines, and that’s frustrating. When I hear the President say things like “We’ve got to get tough on China’s mercantilist trade practices,” a relatively uncontroversial statement, I hear manufacturing unions seeking protectionism. But It’s easy to read too much into vague political marketing slogans, and you never know exactly how the rubber will meet the road.
The greater accountability argument makes perfect sense, but poses some tough questions on how much success can be assigned to a political party in a given window of time. The current economic situation is a perfect example: should we boot Obama because the unemployment rate is above 8%? Or should we give him another four years because he arguably brought the economy from the brink of catastrophe to moderate progress? I don’t trust anybody (like Romney) who doesn’t recognize that answering that question is fraught with uncertainty.
China’s political leaders have a fair deal of leeway to screw-up as long as things are generally going pretty well (and over many year or even decades, not months). Would you support longer tenures for politicians so as to minimize the amount of campaigning and to provide a better efficacy indicators? I think I would, but not sure.
— walker · Feb 9, 04:37 AM · #
Chet: I will. Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.
walker: I agree that political positions give you a broad idea of how a candidate will govern, what direction she will take. But not more than that.
— PEG · Feb 9, 10:55 AM · #
I pretty much agree with PEG on this one. Last month there was an article by Conor Friedersdorf over at The Atlantic about the various meanings of the word “conservative,” and how the Republican candidates matched up with those. I learned about it at Front Porch Republic and reported my affinity scores with the four remaining candidates, based on Friederdorf’s evaluations:
——————————
Mitt: 10
Newt: 8
Santorum: 17
Paul: 17
My voting preferences are as follows:
Mitt: ABR. I will do anything I can to keep him from getting elected, short of voting for Obama.
Newt: He’s my man. Risky, crazy, unstable, but he’s the one who might do some good. He has been tried and tested by the leftwing hate machine.
Santorum: Sigh. I don’t think my opinions and his have much in common despite the scores, but I guess I did say ABR.
Paul: Sure, I’d be glad to vote for him if he could somehow get nominated.
———————————-
So my preference is Newt, even though it appears that my brand of conservatism has less in common with his than with that of any other candidate. The difference is character: Newt is a warrior. He’s too unreliable to be counted on to fight the right battle, but he has a chance of winning and he will fight, which means we have a chance with him.
Also, sometimes people say “I vote for the candidate rather than the party.” I don’t. I usually vote for or against the party. Once in a while there are individual Democrats that I would prefer over their Republican opponents. Four years ago there were issues on which I agreed with what Obama said over what Palin said. There were points on which, if what Palin said about Obama was true, that was a reason to vote for Obama. But I knew better than to do that. I’ll hardly ever vote for the Democrat, and if I do it’s only because I don’t want to keep some RINO from winning.
You might say that’s voting for the individual. But the problem is that Democrats are like a pack of country farm dogs. Your dog might be friendly, good to the children and an excellent watchdog. But if you let it run with other dogs at night, it’ll join a pack that terrorizes the countryside, killing sheep and chickens, leaving behind a trail of fear and destruction. Your dog will return home before morning looking all innocent, except for a bit of wool in its teeth. So individual Democrats might be good, but they run in savage packs, destroying anything they have a chance of killing. I don’t vote for them.
So how do I know the warrior Newt won’t join the feral dog packs in their destructive binges instead of opposing them? I don’t. But he has had experience in doing battle with them and knows how vicious they can be. Sad to say, it’s about the best chance we have.
— The Reticulator · Feb 12, 03:46 AM · #