Tag: voting

Electoral Metaphysics

As General Election time rolls round again, it’s time to address the age-old question, is it really worthwhile to vote?

The case against is made most eloquently by Steven Landsburg in the context of last year’s US presidential election. The probability of one vote making a difference to the outcome is negligible — comparable to winning the lottery 1000 times in a row.

There are some objections that can be made to this, most obviously that the result of the election isn’t just who wins. The margin of victory has an effect on the actions of the government throughout their term. Indeed, in the US we have seen endless pontificating on what lessons parties should draw from the answers voters gave to pollsters on their way home.

There’s another objection, however, which attacks Landsburg’s reasoning directly:

Let’s get mathematical:

Let a be the result of the election ( candidate X votes – candidate Y votes, to be simple) if I don’t vote

Let b be the result of the election if I do vote (say for candidate X).
Now, b = a + 1, so the actual outcome of the election will only be different if a=0 or a=-1 (whatever the rules are for tied elections). This is Landsburg’s calculation.

But what is the real justification for saying b = a + 1?

We can assume that my vote doesn’t affect anyone else’s vote. After all, they’re not supposed to know.

But that’s not sufficent. For b to equal a + 1, the votes of other people have to be statistically independent from mine. Can I assume that?

Now we get philosophical. The common view of me as a mind with “free will” seems to imply the independence assumption. But it isn’t backed up by sociology or neurobiology. On the basis of either observation or a reductionist, mechanistic view of the human brain, my vote is likely to be significantly correlated with other peoples’ votes. That, after all, is the assumption behind opinion polling.

And based on that correlation, b – a cannot be assumed to be 1. It might be 5, or 100, or 10000.

Imagine, as a thought experiment, that we are all identical robots. We process our various inputs, and reach our conclusions. In the simplest possible model, either we will all vote for the same candidate, or none of us will vote.

As one of those robots, my vote will not affect anyone else’s, but if I vote for X, X will win.

We are not identical, and we will not all vote the same. But the correlation, though less than one, is surely greater than zero.

The tricky question: If I use this argument, and therefore vote, will there really be more votes for my candidate? Again, the opinion pollsters believe so. I think they’re right.

Psychologically, we do not reach decisions entirely via explicit logic. In fact, we invent reasons to excuse the decisions we would have made anyway. If I am determined to vote, more other people will vote than if I am indifferent. If my candidate wins by 10 votes, I will say, “If I hadn’t voted, he wouldn’t have won.”

Of course, if you live in a safe constituency, your vote won’t alter the result. That makes the case for a better electoral system all the stronger, since it shows that many people are denied political influence in a way that other people are not.

In any case, I will vote for a fringe party, so my candidate won’t win. But the same effect will amplify the secondary effects of my vote. A good percentage will have a real impact on UK politics.

New Party II

Follow up to “A New Party?”

“stoatman” commenting at Samizdata points to The New Party. I’ve never heard of them, but their web site hides their platform under a mass of something-for-everyone waffle. Digging down, the only policies that aren’t a total fudge are withdrawl from the EU, and tax cuts funded by social security cuts. Not bad policies, to be fair, but not practical in an electoral sense.

A large majority of the electorate has a firm positive commitment to the current welfare state. We’re stuck with it until there’s a major fiscal crisis making it obviously unsustainable, or until there’s a real revolution in attitude among the population, which I cannot see happening in the near future.

A fringe party cannot attack on that front. It can only gain influence by using an issue or group of issues where the majority are either opposed or indifferent to the positions of the major parties. UKIP has done that. Greens have done it in the past.

I don’t think there’s a large positive commitment by voters to the removal of the individual freedoms that were normal thirty or forty years ago. A party that made its main platform the reversing of all the pointless restrictions on individual freedom that have come in during the last decades might draw a large enough vote to encourage other parties to take on the agenda.

Of course, many of us would want to go a lot further, but once we get as far as, say repeal of drug prohibition, the influence of the party would wane. Every vote gained by a major party taking that policy would lose them one. The same goes for much of the economic liberalisation we would like to see. A policy of allowing people to smoke in pubs would not be a vote-loser with the electorate at large in the same way. Every political issue outside the core “freedom” policies would have to be fudged in the normal way: adopt the same positions as Labour and Conservative (they’re mainly the same).

To come from nowhere to challenging for worthwhile numbers of votes there has to be a very clear core platform, not a broad bit-of-everything manifesto. A few clear slogans pushing basic freedoms, and a name to match (“The Civil Liberties Party”?).

There are arguments against taking this approach. It would cannibalise the UKIP vote to some extent, and UKIP is doing a good job — in the long run EU membership is a bigger issue than foxhunting or email interception. The party could not become explicitly pro-withdrawl without alienating a large proportion of its potential support.

Another argument against is that if we as activists devote our effort towards this compromise platform of relatively popular freedoms, it could weaken the struggle at an intellectual level for a full and logically consistent level of freedom.

A new party

The utter failure of the Conservative Party to challenge the Civil Contingencies Act, ID Cards, denial of the right to self-defence, arbritary bans on smoking, etc., leaves the population politically helpless.

The Liberal Party has traditionally been the party most associated with civil liberties, but while the modern Liberal Democrat party nominally hangs on to its beliefs, it does not inspire confidence that civil rights are a high priority, nor are they a major campaigning subject. A Liberal Democrat party with a share in power would seem more likely to push its European, Welfarist and (in the current context) pacifist policy directions much harder than civil liberties.

Some have optimistically suggested that UKIP might force the Conservative party to be replaced, somehow producing a party with more sympathy for the liberty of the individual. UKIP’s organisational problems apart, one must bear in mind that UKIP’s membership and core support are likely to be just as sympathetic to authoritarianism as Howard’s party.

UKIP has shown, however, that in the modern world of narrow-based parties, it is possible for a new party to have an effect on the national politics, and, most of all, on the public agenda.

Is it time for a new party to take up the cause of freedom against the totalitarian tendencies of the current political class? It could not be a Libertarian Party; to get votes it would have to accept the status quo of the current bloated state, and it would be unwise to take the hunting ban as a central issue; and it would have to oppose specific EU abuses without explaining how they could be prevented without leaving the EU, but if a party could grab 10% of the vote on a platform of rolling back the Nanny State and the Surveillance State, it would at least bring the topics into the political mainstream.

Update: Added another post on the subject.