“Strategic reallocation of political effort” and the additional factor of “strategic reallocation of voting that takes into account other people’s strategic reallocation of voting effort” seems both very complicated to calculate and likely to actually matter to what happens in real elections. I would expect quibbles with your conclusions in this area.
You have one sentence that handles the issue, but I’m not entirely sure how you handled it because your sentence involves two pathenthicals, two double negatives, and ambiguity inducing self reference to “this fact”. Here is the sentence:
When we take into differences between election cycles, usually another 1-2 orders of magnitude, the value of voting in a “safe” jurisdiction in an election which is not close winds up negligible (if your reaction to this fact is not independent of others’).
Here is an attempted rewrite that I think restates the same thing with less ambiguity:
From one election cycle to another, fluctuating global factors account for 1-2 orders of magnitude difference in first order tie estimates. In these situations the value of voting in a “safe” jurisdiction is negligible unless many other people in your “safe” jurisdiction reason identically so that the safe status functions as a secondary global factor that causes the probability of a tie to increase in districts where the “naive” probability of a tie is low.
Assuming this re-writing captures the same basic idea, I think the issue of self-awareness induced ties can be analyzed in terms of the number of people who think of voting as “siding with a winning or losing side” versus “a costly duty to act in a publicly beneficial way”. Voters who think of voting as a costly duty seem potentially subject to self-awareness induced ties. Voters who side with predicted winners seem likely to push dynamics away from these sorts of ties.
This suggests small scale experiments and real world polling where voters are measured to see whether they vote according to one, both, or neither of these dynamics and the numbers who do so are used to refine election predictions.
The historical data already take into account the rough current distribution of such voters, and the efforts of national political organizations that try to put money into competitive races. If arguments like mine become more widespread in the future, they will change matters.
This post explicitly limits itself to causal decision theory to help avoid these issues, but I’ll discuss them in a future post on decision theory complications. The second parenthetical was an acknowledgment that there is more to say on it.
Experiments and studies like the ones you suggest do seem like they would be helpful in navigating those complications.
“Strategic reallocation of political effort” and the additional factor of “strategic reallocation of voting that takes into account other people’s strategic reallocation of voting effort” seems both very complicated to calculate and likely to actually matter to what happens in real elections. I would expect quibbles with your conclusions in this area.
You have one sentence that handles the issue, but I’m not entirely sure how you handled it because your sentence involves two pathenthicals, two double negatives, and ambiguity inducing self reference to “this fact”. Here is the sentence:
Here is an attempted rewrite that I think restates the same thing with less ambiguity:
Assuming this re-writing captures the same basic idea, I think the issue of self-awareness induced ties can be analyzed in terms of the number of people who think of voting as “siding with a winning or losing side” versus “a costly duty to act in a publicly beneficial way”. Voters who think of voting as a costly duty seem potentially subject to self-awareness induced ties. Voters who side with predicted winners seem likely to push dynamics away from these sorts of ties.
This suggests small scale experiments and real world polling where voters are measured to see whether they vote according to one, both, or neither of these dynamics and the numbers who do so are used to refine election predictions.
The historical data already take into account the rough current distribution of such voters, and the efforts of national political organizations that try to put money into competitive races. If arguments like mine become more widespread in the future, they will change matters.
This post explicitly limits itself to causal decision theory to help avoid these issues, but I’ll discuss them in a future post on decision theory complications. The second parenthetical was an acknowledgment that there is more to say on it.
Experiments and studies like the ones you suggest do seem like they would be helpful in navigating those complications.