Apparently, the recent result of the New Hampshire caucus voting is so astonishing, that it's beyond the realms of modern statistical understanding... Or so it would seem. Anomalies like this tend to make me wonder about the effect polling has on the voting process. Presumedly there's an observer effect style influence caused by the polls on voter behaviour—and perhaps, in this case, it wasn't fully accounted for. That is, did New Hampshirites, on seeing the results from Iowa and New Hampshire polls, decide that the relative success of the candidates did seem right, and therefore tried to, on an individual basis, balance it out?
I sometimes, in idle moments wonder what the majority of people think about when deciding how to vote, generally. I can imagine that there are two primary approaches one could take—that is, a voter could either ask “which candidate would benefit the country more,” or “which candidate would benefit me more?”
If everyone considered on the later, we would expect to end up with the candidate that was most focused on the interests and morality of the majority of people. It would seem logical that this would lead to each voter having a smaller range of issues to considering, making it an easier choice, which hopefully equates to a decision better made. Similarly, you might also expect this method to be less susceptible to anomalies on the campaign, and other unexpected occurrences.
But, we end up with a bit of a prisoner's dilemma, in that we only get the best result if everyone votes this way. Furthermore, and perhaps most worryingly, if everyone voted this way, no consideration would be taking into account of the relative significance of the decision for different people. That is for some people, the outcome of an election might have very significant and long term consequences on their lives—particularly when there are major issues at stake (you know the ones; in the US this might be abortions, healthcare, gay marriages, war, and plenty others). However, you would expect that the people who are most effected by policy change will always be a minority. That is to say, for the majority of people in a stable country, the difference between one candidate and other will have only relatively minor impact on their lives. And yet, while in many government schemes votes are effectively weighted by various means, we would never expect them to be weighted to meet this ideal of consequentiality.
On the flip side attempting to vote in the best interests of the country is, presumedly, error prone, open to subjective judgements and vulnerable to aberrations and overly powerful rhetoric. I wonder if we misjudge the ways in which the interests of the majority can often benefit the minority. History has a cruel sense of irony about it; perhaps the indecisiveness of society comes from the realisation that sometimes our benevolence only makes things worse.
A depressingly extreme example involves a chap named Malthus who, at the end of the eighteenth century, proved that the Poor Law (in which donations were given to the unskilled poor) could never, ever improve the living conditions of the English poor. It should be noted that the beneficiaries of the Poor Law, as I understand it, were far better off than today's homeless. Malthus even came to the gloomy conclusion of eternal subsistence for the great majority. Fortunately he was proven wrong by the industrial revolution. However, ironically enough, this may not have occurred in England at all if it wasn't for the inequality of income and living conditions.
While the Malthusian Trap isn't yet a thing of the past, let's hope that its own observer effect, and the fact that we can recognise and understand it, will soon lead to it being so. But, it's got to make you wonder what other great ironies might lie under the surface of voter and government behaviour. Perhaps, back in the modern world, we end up with a compromise between both schemes--wherein those who do not feel compelled to vote for strong personal reasons, instead take on the overwhelming and massively challenging task of deciding which minority group deserves their attentions. Do we then inherit the worse of both sides? Does every voter then have to deal with the uncertainty that is central to the prisoner's dilemma?
The economy is perhaps a special issue in many elections. They say that it's the primary issue in the American presidential election at the moment--which I assume means that people will vote for the candidate they believe might correct issues with the economy, even if don't believe in that candidate's other policies, even those those seen as morality issues. In Australia, the liberal government retained power for many years, despite considerable animosity, apparently based on its economic promises. But that style of voting brings with it other worries, particularly if you consider that we can't reasonably expect the majority of voters to understand macroeconomics and government fiscal and monetary policy to the extent required to correctly decide on the policies that will most benefit themselves, or the country as a whole. Are we then forced to rely on analysis and opinion from the media? Or do we pick the candidate who blinks less? Furthermore, do we fully understand what controls the different houses and branches of government have over the country? Are we at all concerned that we can't, in the US or Australia, pick out our favourite people to run the central bank? Is it more true the the system of government and the private sector control the economy, rather than any particular elected individual or party? Is it the system as a whole that truly determines prosperity, in such a way that the system's ability to ensure that various powerful people's capabilities and education are up to standard is a far more important determiner of economic prosperity than any decision the general public might make? Surely we would prefer that to be the case.
Ok, perhaps it's not enough to make me lie awake at night, or delve deep into studying democracies; but at least it might serve to help feed the voice in the back of my head that sometimes says, when it comes to election time at home, “surely this can never work.”
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