Category: The Elephant in the Brain – Hanson and Simler

Machines Versus Partisianship

Posted on by jabittan
Political parties seem to have a problem today. Voters dislike being part of a political party and have choosen to register or refer to themselves as non-partisan in greater numbers today than in the past. Political parties have also lost control of their candidate nominations, and when a party makes a big push toward their preferred candidate, cries of corruption and system rigging erupt from the public.

However, at the same time, voters more consistently vote for a single party today than they did in the past. When we look at voters who register non-partisan and ask if they lean toward a particular party, we see that they overwhelmingly vote for members of that party in each election. Non-partisan voters who lean toward a party often end up voting along party lines at the same or higher rates as voters who are registered with a party. So while our parties seem to be loosing steam, partisanship seems to be growing.

Jonathan Rauch looks at this phenomenon from another perspective in his book Political Realism. He specifically looks at votes within congress and how congressional members seem to align within parties. Rauch writes,

“It’s often said that parties are stronger than ever because votes on Capitol Hill are so consistently partisan. But that can be (and usually is) because the majority party is allowing votes only when its factions agree, whereas machines facilitate decision-making when fellow partisans don’t agree. Ideological solidarity is a brittle glue, and reliance on it for intra-party cohesion is a sign of a weak party machine, not a strong one.”

What Rauch argues is that our parties need to find ways to create cohesion beyond ideology. Rather than relying on individual voter or policy maker issue stances to align, parties need to be able to bring different groups together within the political process. Parties which are only able to attract loosely committed voters fail to create a community of thoughtful and considerate political participants. The perspectives, views, and alternatives available to the party shrink, and in the public we see a fixation on a single issue from a single point of view, while in legislative bodies we see a limited number of votes on a limited number of partisan issues. This does not strengthen democracy, and easily breaks down, leading to the cynicism, criticism, and frustration that we see surrounding the American political system today.

I also think there is another phenomenon surrounding the abandonment of political parties and the staunch partisan voting pattern in the United States. Political identity is a powerful signal, indicating which group you are a part of and often influenced by both overt and hidden factors. In The Elephant and the Brain, Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson look at our hidden agendas and our group signaling in politics. We often don’t want to admin when we align with a party out of self interest or out of group identification. We hide behind a veil claiming that it is specific issues that drive our political alignment, but studies frequently show that almost no one has a real grasp of any given issue or any given legislator’s stance on an issue. What we are really displaying today, at least in part, is an institutional distrust driving us away from the parties that we complain about, but an identity stronghold in the claimed political philosophy that we back. Simler and Hanson may better explain why we see this pattern and if Rauch is right, then we must hope that machines can be built to activate local public action before dangerous demagogues use this identity and signaling undercurrent to divide rather than unite local communities.

Transactional Politics

Posted on by jabittan
Jonathan Rauch argues that transactional politics is a sign of a well functioning political system in his book, Political Realism. In his eyes, transactional politics, or favor trading and an attitude of “I’ll support your policy here if you support my policy over there,” is key to how things actually get done in government. In his eyes, this mindset is not a dirty and evil nature of politics but more of a necessary ingredient to legislative functioning. Without transactional politics, coalitions cannot be built and finding support between legislators and across bills becomes nearly impossible. According to Rauch, steps that the United States has taken to reduce transactional politics have actually made governance more difficult, if not completely impossible.

 

Rauch writes, “Transactional politics is not always appropriate or effective, but a political system which is not reliably capable of it is a system in a state of critical failure.” As much as we don’t like to believe it, our legislators and elected officials are humans. They have the same motivations and drives that the rest of us have, and therefore need a little extra help in building coalitions and creating groups to support political agendas. I am currently reading The Elephant In The Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, and the authors argue that the politics of coalition building is a necessary ingredient in human societies, and is literally one of the driving forces of human evolution that set us on a different course from the rest of the animal kingdom. If we take away a system that allows for trades and back-scratching, then we take away part of our human nature and we limit incentives for group bonding, cooperation, and legislative wheel greasing.

 

Transactional politics does look shady, and we would like our legislative motives to be pure rather than self-interested, or influenced by favors and favor repayments, or driven by the human desire to fit in with a group. Ultimately, however, stable political systems operate well when reacting to human nature in a more flexible manner. As long as the waste and excesses of transactional politics are small and can be generally viewed as serving the public interest, then transactional politics help create a stable system that is able to accomplish the will of the people. Abuse of the system and overtly political projects that violate the mirage of rational politics threaten the system and should be limited, but this is something that societies in the past have managed by grabbing the low hanging fruit of overt political waste or fraud. Without transactional politics however, we end up in a place where governance is impossible and the public becomes frustrated by entrenched ideology and political fighting. Coalitions become increasingly volatile as middle ground solutions are impossible to pursue, because coalitions cannot be built on trades and favors for legislative districts. When transactional politics is impossible, what becomes the main driving force of politics is not getting what you can from the political grab bag of goodies for your district, but instead is adherence to strict political and ideological values, making actual governance more challenging.

Political Realism

Posted on by jabittan
The last presidential election in the United States was undoubtedly an election unconstrained by political reality, feasibility, and truth. Both parties saw candidates from the outside make huge promises and sweeping generalizations during the campaign, with little or no consideration for how things could actually work in our political environment and economic system. President Trump outlandishly called for a wall along our southern border though few felt that it would be practical, possible, or effective, and Senator Sanders passionately announced his desire for a new healthcare system run entirely by the federal government, all the while downplaying the program’s costs, its political unfeasibility, and the fact that he did not have much of the implementation planned out.

 

Political realism operates in a different way than seems to be successful in our extravagant presidential elections. We prize bold energetic ideas and characters when electing a president, and realism is left to the side. To be a political realist, you have to be honest about the current situation, about how the status quo could change, and about what improvements or harms could possible arise. Observing that the status quo is not too bad and that there are may potentially worse situations that society could be facing does not win elections, but being more aware and asking these types of questions does help government improve.

 

Large grandiose plans and visions do not hold up over the long term. It is important for policy planners and decision-makers to think about political feasibility and to think about alternatives so that plans can be chosen that can actually be implemented and to meet the needs of society. We live in a world with limited resources like time and money, so we must think rationally and strategically about what we have. Large sweeping changes and plans are difficult because they must find a new way to rearrange the already limited resources we have.

 

Jonathan Rauch describes political realists in his book Political Realism by writing, “Always, the realists, asks: ‘Compared with what?’ Principles alone mean little until examined in the harsh light of real-world alternatives.” When we elect leaders based entirely on principle and charisma, and not based on an evaluation of alternatives, we end up in a place where good plans are abandoned for fantastic plans that could never truly be put in place, at least not in a good way. When our leaders are constrained to a limited set of principles, their policy options are limited and less imaginative, and as a result, good policy is thrown out. If we can’t meet all our principles in this model (our current model for politics) then we don’t take any action and we don’t improve the status quo in any meaningful way. Political realism isn’t sexy and doesn’t always win elections, but it does help society move forward with policy that can actually be implemented.

 

Today, as I reflect back on this quick post that I originally wrote in May of 2018, I can’t help but think about the power of signaling. At the end of the school semester I read Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler’s book The Elephant in the Brain and was captivated by a conversation that Hanson had with Tyler Cowen. Much of what we do in politics is signaling, and describing grandiose plans and visions signals your belief in the future prosperity of the country. Your huge plan is also a signal to voters that they should align with you because you think that what we need is the most scaled up version of what your co-partisans say is necessary. In a sense, politicians are signaling their loyalty and willingness to defend party ideas, even if those ideas are practically impossible. Political realism just can’t bring the same signaling firepower to the conversation, and may ultimately signal a betrayal of the party platform and a betrayal of a core group identity.