I believe OP is correct that voting on issues leads to affective death spirals. But the idea that we can vote on character presupposes a population composed soley of rational, non-party-affiliated politicians; and it furthermore presupposes that rational politicians will agree on value issues, which I believe is not at all the case.
Would you vote for Sarah Palin if you thought she had a good character? Would you be more likely to vote for her if you thought she was extremely competent at getting things done?
I would prefer, in decreasing order of preference:
a competent politician with values similar to mine
an incompetent politician with values similar to mine
a rock
an incompetent politician with values different from mine
worst case: a very competent politician with values different from mine
You’re talking about the “competence” to achieve one’s political aims; the ability to get laws passed, for example, or to administer programs. This is bad in the hands of one’s political enemies—it is not good when Nazis are “competent” at genocide.
The OP is talking about the “competence” to achieve those goals where everyone is in rough consensus—we all want GDP growth, but the most competent politician is the one who’s best at getting it. This is usually less a matter of being good at getting laws passed, and more a matter of judging the efficacy of policies against the real world.
This kind of “competence” at non-controversial goals is universally a good thing. Nobody wants the trains not to run on time. The question is, would you prefer a politician who’s competent at non-controversial goals, or a politician who’s on your side in the controversies?
Doesn’t it depend on how different their values are?
As an illustration, let’s suppose each politician has a general competence score 0 ⇐ C ⇐ 1, where 1 means they achieve exactly what they stand for, and 0 means no better than random (e.g. a rock).
The other important factor is how much overlap there is between your preferences/values—suppose that the magnitude assigned to an issue scales with how much you care about it. Let’s define the value overlap as 0 ⇐ V ⇐ 1, and the proportion of issues you disagree on as (1 - V).
Then the net movement toward your preferences this politician achieves is: V C - (1-V) C = C * (2V − 1)
So as long as V > 1⁄2 (i.e., you agree on more than you disagree on), more competence is a good thing. For example, I’d rather have someone with whom I agree with on 80% of the issues and is 80% competent, than someone with whom I agree with 90% of the issues and is 50% competent.
We don’t tend to argue about issues where there is strong value overlap (for example, no one’s going to come out explicitly in favor of bribery, or executing innocent people, or another recession), but politicians can still make a difference on these issues, so I thing there’s strong reason to suspect that V > 1⁄2 for most politicians.
Of course, not every failure to achieve a goal is due to honest incompetence. If a politician intentionally speaks in favor of a policy with no intention of carrying it out, measures of general intelligence like GPA or IQ should not be as good at predicting this kind of “incompetence” as they should be at predicting honest incompetence. However, more specific measures of competence, like a politician’s past record, should be helpful in predicting how effectively current promises will be kept.
So as long as V > 1⁄2 (i.e., you agree on more than you disagree on), more competence is a good thing.
No, because improvements in most areas have a cutoff: making the tax-structure better enough to compensate for the loss due to some other odious position simply might not be possible.
And there are a host of non-linear effects like that, from voting coalitions to simply non-linear utility functions.
You can substitute some measure taking the structure of your preferences into account, e.g. some measure of the difference in your utility* between their and your perfect political outcomes.
Absolutely. That is exactly what you have to do. My point is that if you have:
utility = sum over policy areas of ability-to-change(policy) times (your-worth(their-preferred(policy)) - your-worth(default(policy)))
Most summaries of ability-to-change(policy) as a single number will have examples of your-worth(their-preferred(policy)) such that increasing their overall ability to implement their platform does worse, even in the cases where they broadly agree with you.
Would you vote for Sarah Palin if you thought she had a good character? Would you be more likely to vote for her if you thought she was extremely competent at getting things done?
This prompts the tangential but interesting observation that neither Sarah Palin nor George W. Bush were considered particularly incompetent or polarizing when they were merely state governors who hadn’t entered the national scene.
The fact that they became this way, or were seen as such, after entering national campaigns suggests something none-too-pleasant about national politics in the U.S.
I believe OP is correct that voting on issues leads to affective death spirals. But the idea that we can vote on character presupposes a population composed soley of rational, non-party-affiliated politicians; and it furthermore presupposes that rational politicians will agree on value issues, which I believe is not at all the case.
Would you vote for Sarah Palin if you thought she had a good character? Would you be more likely to vote for her if you thought she was extremely competent at getting things done?
I would prefer, in decreasing order of preference:
a competent politician with values similar to mine
an incompetent politician with values similar to mine
a rock
an incompetent politician with values different from mine
worst case: a very competent politician with values different from mine
We’ve got warring notions of “competence.”
You’re talking about the “competence” to achieve one’s political aims; the ability to get laws passed, for example, or to administer programs. This is bad in the hands of one’s political enemies—it is not good when Nazis are “competent” at genocide.
The OP is talking about the “competence” to achieve those goals where everyone is in rough consensus—we all want GDP growth, but the most competent politician is the one who’s best at getting it. This is usually less a matter of being good at getting laws passed, and more a matter of judging the efficacy of policies against the real world.
This kind of “competence” at non-controversial goals is universally a good thing. Nobody wants the trains not to run on time. The question is, would you prefer a politician who’s competent at non-controversial goals, or a politician who’s on your side in the controversies?
Doesn’t it depend on how different their values are?
As an illustration, let’s suppose each politician has a general competence score 0 ⇐ C ⇐ 1, where 1 means they achieve exactly what they stand for, and 0 means no better than random (e.g. a rock).
The other important factor is how much overlap there is between your preferences/values—suppose that the magnitude assigned to an issue scales with how much you care about it. Let’s define the value overlap as 0 ⇐ V ⇐ 1, and the proportion of issues you disagree on as (1 - V).
Then the net movement toward your preferences this politician achieves is: V C - (1-V) C = C * (2V − 1)
So as long as V > 1⁄2 (i.e., you agree on more than you disagree on), more competence is a good thing. For example, I’d rather have someone with whom I agree with on 80% of the issues and is 80% competent, than someone with whom I agree with 90% of the issues and is 50% competent.
We don’t tend to argue about issues where there is strong value overlap (for example, no one’s going to come out explicitly in favor of bribery, or executing innocent people, or another recession), but politicians can still make a difference on these issues, so I thing there’s strong reason to suspect that V > 1⁄2 for most politicians.
Of course, not every failure to achieve a goal is due to honest incompetence. If a politician intentionally speaks in favor of a policy with no intention of carrying it out, measures of general intelligence like GPA or IQ should not be as good at predicting this kind of “incompetence” as they should be at predicting honest incompetence. However, more specific measures of competence, like a politician’s past record, should be helpful in predicting how effectively current promises will be kept.
An important point. We are, after all, talking about human politicians here, not Clippy.
No, because improvements in most areas have a cutoff: making the tax-structure better enough to compensate for the loss due to some other odious position simply might not be possible.
And there are a host of non-linear effects like that, from voting coalitions to simply non-linear utility functions.
You can substitute some measure taking the structure of your preferences into account, e.g. some measure of the difference in your utility* between their and your perfect political outcomes.
*pretending that humans have utility functions
Absolutely. That is exactly what you have to do. My point is that if you have:
utility = sum over policy areas of ability-to-change(policy) times (your-worth(their-preferred(policy)) - your-worth(default(policy)))
Most summaries of ability-to-change(policy) as a single number will have examples of your-worth(their-preferred(policy)) such that increasing their overall ability to implement their platform does worse, even in the cases where they broadly agree with you.
This prompts the tangential but interesting observation that neither Sarah Palin nor George W. Bush were considered particularly incompetent or polarizing when they were merely state governors who hadn’t entered the national scene.
The fact that they became this way, or were seen as such, after entering national campaigns suggests something none-too-pleasant about national politics in the U.S.
I would prefer an ornamental cabbage to a rock, personally.
But would you be willing to vote for a rock if it put the ornamantal cabbage on the ticket in the VP slot?
Yeah, I take the long view about ornamental cabbage politics. VP experience will make it easier to elect next time.
Would you rather vote for George W. Bush or Richard Nixon?
Or, from the other side of the political spectrum, Lyndon Johnson or Jimmy Carter?
Nixon. He actually paid a price for his violations of the law.