If you answered “they can’t really do it well”, I disagree. My position is: they need swift, sharp feedback in order to do it well. Humans are actually remarkably good at decision-making when given swift, sharp feedback signals.
I agree with this. The place where I don’t follow your analysis is the assumption that voting is the primary means of feedback. We only hold elections every few years. If you want “swift” feedback, elections are not the tool for you.
Moreover, they don’t give very precise feedback in any real democracy. In, say, the UK, the election sends basically two bits of information per voter—LibDem, Tory, Labor, or other. Even in the US, the ballot just doesn’t encode a lot of information about voters; it’s single or double-digit bits per year. And each additional bit per voter is hugely expensive to collect. It costs millions of dollars to pay for all the analysis, campaigning, advocacy and so forth that goes into a national or regional election.
Happily, we don’t rely on elections as our primary mechanism for sending signals to the government. Functioning democracies have an amazingly rich set of mechanisms for getting prompt feedback from the public. We have opinion surveys. We have newspaper editorial pages. We have constituent letters and phone calls. We have donations. We have private meetings between government officials and lobbyists. We also have the whole panoply of economic indicators—politicians do notice when the stock market crashes or when bond rates spike.
I think trying to optimize the information content of the election system is missing the point. Elections aren’t the right tool for preference elicitation. Elections are there to give force to voter preference—they’re not only a measurement tool or even primarily a measurement tool. They’re a civic ritual to demonstrate the presence or lack of voter support for the government and they’re a system to designate a specific alternative in the event that the incumbents are voted out. it’s important that the election produces a clear outcome and an outcome with enough political support to sustain itself until the next election. It’s not important that it extracts the maximum information about the voter preferences on election day.
In conclusion: If you want swift and detailed feedback from the public, run a telephone poll. Rounding up millions of people and asking them about their preferences every few years is a lousy way to measure sentiment.
I agree with this. The place where I don’t follow your analysis is the assumption that voting is the primary means of feedback. We only hold elections every few years. If you want “swift” feedback, elections are not the tool for you.
Moreover, they don’t give very precise feedback in any real democracy. In, say, the UK, the election sends basically two bits of information per voter—LibDem, Tory, Labor, or other. Even in the US, the ballot just doesn’t encode a lot of information about voters; it’s single or double-digit bits per year. And each additional bit per voter is hugely expensive to collect. It costs millions of dollars to pay for all the analysis, campaigning, advocacy and so forth that goes into a national or regional election.
Well yes. This is a very good criticism of our current democracies.
I agree with this. The place where I don’t follow your analysis is the assumption that voting is the primary means of feedback. We only hold elections every few years. If you want “swift” feedback, elections are not the tool for you.
Moreover, they don’t give very precise feedback in any real democracy. In, say, the UK, the election sends basically two bits of information per voter—LibDem, Tory, Labor, or other. Even in the US, the ballot just doesn’t encode a lot of information about voters; it’s single or double-digit bits per year. And each additional bit per voter is hugely expensive to collect. It costs millions of dollars to pay for all the analysis, campaigning, advocacy and so forth that goes into a national or regional election.
Happily, we don’t rely on elections as our primary mechanism for sending signals to the government. Functioning democracies have an amazingly rich set of mechanisms for getting prompt feedback from the public. We have opinion surveys. We have newspaper editorial pages. We have constituent letters and phone calls. We have donations. We have private meetings between government officials and lobbyists. We also have the whole panoply of economic indicators—politicians do notice when the stock market crashes or when bond rates spike.
I think trying to optimize the information content of the election system is missing the point. Elections aren’t the right tool for preference elicitation. Elections are there to give force to voter preference—they’re not only a measurement tool or even primarily a measurement tool. They’re a civic ritual to demonstrate the presence or lack of voter support for the government and they’re a system to designate a specific alternative in the event that the incumbents are voted out. it’s important that the election produces a clear outcome and an outcome with enough political support to sustain itself until the next election. It’s not important that it extracts the maximum information about the voter preferences on election day.
In conclusion: If you want swift and detailed feedback from the public, run a telephone poll. Rounding up millions of people and asking them about their preferences every few years is a lousy way to measure sentiment.
Well yes. This is a very good criticism of our current democracies.