Two weeks ago I posted on the idea of quadratic voting, where voters pay a cost to buy votes, a cost that goes as the square of the number of votes they buy. Under certain reasonable assumptions, this voting system should produce economically efficient outcomes! Since so many get so obsessed with the objection that the rich might buy more votes, I focused on a “voting quarks” variation, wherein everyone gets the same number of points to spend across many elections.
This is an old article, but I've just read it, and it seems exactly wrong to me. More generally, consider a p-voting system, where the cost of casting x votes is x^p. It's intuitively clear, I think, that the larger p is, the greater the incentive to collude, or to buy votes outside the system. But quadratic voting is a p-voting system with p=2, and ordinary voting, that is one person one vote, is a p-voting system with p=infinity. And indeed the entire system of political parties, representative democracy, and all that can be viewed as an attempt to codify collusive voting in a scrutable way.
I've noticed that some people -- mostly economists and engineers -- put way more emphasis on voting mechanisms as a solution for the problems of democracy than is useful. Would changes to the voting system alter the media and party-driven hyper-polarization in contemporary America? I doubt it; the quasi-religious/tribal nature of party identity (at least on the liberal side) has little to do with how elections are structured.
Constitutions, laws, and formal structures are only as good as the people who use and enforce them. Some of the world's nastiest despotisms had (on paper) wonderfully humane and liberal constitutions. One of the world's longest-lasting and robust democracies -- the UK -- has a horrible ad-hoc kludge of a constitution.
It is impossible to devise a system which will always produce good results. You have to pick good people.
I'm just not concerned about that (why would you give up 4 years of representation because you are indifferent about a single issue in the current election?), but here I'm apparently in the minority on that.
I was using it as a code word for "respecting the wishes of an electoral majority in a way very similar to that of today".
P.S. The Swiss don't share your negative few of having lots of referendums (there are a lot of different voting procedures that "work", or at least work in some cultures).
The collusion issue gets interesting when you factor in something like gerrymandering. If you can win a lot of "safe" elections without needing many votes, you can pool the excess to use in contested elections.
You and I both have 100 quarks saved up. You really care about issue A and I am indifferent. I really care about issue B and you are indifferent. Ordinarily we might both buy 10 votes each on our respective issues. But if we can trust each other, we can agree to buy 7 votes each on both issues.
You are using "democratic" as a code word for "good" or "acceptable." There are a wide variety of democratic voting procedures that are undesirable and make people worse off. Having lots of referenda on single policies, for example.
If you're so worried about "majoritanism" in referedums that you'd entertain the idea of using the quark voting bazooka to do something about it then it's probably better to oppose referendums altogether. In other countries referendums are more rare and use separate ballots, often even separate dates from the regular elections, so using a different voting system would be feasible, that is if people can intuitively understand quark voting in the first place (then again, is it really so much more complicated than electoral colleges and having different rules regarding districts, etc... per state?)
Well, as an American, I'm comfortable stating that using different voting systems for referenda and other elections would confuse the hell out of most of my compatriots... :P
But I'm not sure that using QV for referenda would be a bad idea. The common criticism of direct democracy is that it allows for excessive majoritarianism. QV would actually alleviate this concern, right?
If quarks are only transferable to your future self and if referendums work without quarks then what exactly would be the problem?
Is it that the Americans on this blog are so used to referendums being slapped onto regular elections that they think this is the only way things could work and therefore quark voting would necessarily have to be applied to referendums as well?
Well circumvention would be more effective partly because quarks are intrinsically transferable. They would have to be represented either by physical tokens or entries in a digital database that at least one person (the voter in question) can manipulate to move them from one eligible election to another. Whatever the mechanism, moving quarks around would be easier than moving votes around in our world today, which involves bring busloads of actual human beings from one place to another, or at least finding a bunch of dead people and adding their names to the voting registry.
If no one is forced or paid to participate in an interest group it's still democratic. The Rhineland Model and its derivatives, as used in Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands, among others, offer ways to reign in unrealistic demands of the largest interest groups (essentially they force those groups to negotiate with each other).
This seems like a legitimate concern, especially if 'collusion' is understood broadly.
Isn't the basic theory of interest group politics that groups which can effectively coordinate can have a disproportionate effect on election outcomes, even in a one-person-one-vote system?
How would we buy votes if quarks were not for sale and bribing people to vote a certain way was illegal (or how would attempts to circumvent those restrictions be more effective in a system with quark voting than in a system with single, discrefe votes)?
You and I are a group of two. We agree that I buy ten votes, you buy ten votes, and we both vote for candidate A. We can't directly verify this, but we might still coordinate to achieve it.
This is an old article, but I've just read it, and it seems exactly wrong to me. More generally, consider a p-voting system, where the cost of casting x votes is x^p. It's intuitively clear, I think, that the larger p is, the greater the incentive to collude, or to buy votes outside the system. But quadratic voting is a p-voting system with p=2, and ordinary voting, that is one person one vote, is a p-voting system with p=infinity. And indeed the entire system of political parties, representative democracy, and all that can be viewed as an attempt to codify collusive voting in a scrutable way.
Even if the voting rules matter a lot less than the people who vote, it can be a lot harder to change the latter than the former.
I've noticed that some people -- mostly economists and engineers -- put way more emphasis on voting mechanisms as a solution for the problems of democracy than is useful. Would changes to the voting system alter the media and party-driven hyper-polarization in contemporary America? I doubt it; the quasi-religious/tribal nature of party identity (at least on the liberal side) has little to do with how elections are structured.
Constitutions, laws, and formal structures are only as good as the people who use and enforce them. Some of the world's nastiest despotisms had (on paper) wonderfully humane and liberal constitutions. One of the world's longest-lasting and robust democracies -- the UK -- has a horrible ad-hoc kludge of a constitution.
It is impossible to devise a system which will always produce good results. You have to pick good people.
I'm just not concerned about that (why would you give up 4 years of representation because you are indifferent about a single issue in the current election?), but here I'm apparently in the minority on that.
I was using it as a code word for "respecting the wishes of an electoral majority in a way very similar to that of today".
P.S. The Swiss don't share your negative few of having lots of referendums (there are a lot of different voting procedures that "work", or at least work in some cultures).
The collusion issue gets interesting when you factor in something like gerrymandering. If you can win a lot of "safe" elections without needing many votes, you can pool the excess to use in contested elections.
You and I both have 100 quarks saved up. You really care about issue A and I am indifferent. I really care about issue B and you are indifferent. Ordinarily we might both buy 10 votes each on our respective issues. But if we can trust each other, we can agree to buy 7 votes each on both issues.
You are using "democratic" as a code word for "good" or "acceptable." There are a wide variety of democratic voting procedures that are undesirable and make people worse off. Having lots of referenda on single policies, for example.
If you're so worried about "majoritanism" in referedums that you'd entertain the idea of using the quark voting bazooka to do something about it then it's probably better to oppose referendums altogether. In other countries referendums are more rare and use separate ballots, often even separate dates from the regular elections, so using a different voting system would be feasible, that is if people can intuitively understand quark voting in the first place (then again, is it really so much more complicated than electoral colleges and having different rules regarding districts, etc... per state?)
Well, as an American, I'm comfortable stating that using different voting systems for referenda and other elections would confuse the hell out of most of my compatriots... :P
But I'm not sure that using QV for referenda would be a bad idea. The common criticism of direct democracy is that it allows for excessive majoritarianism. QV would actually alleviate this concern, right?
If quarks are only transferable to your future self and if referendums work without quarks then what exactly would be the problem?
Is it that the Americans on this blog are so used to referendums being slapped onto regular elections that they think this is the only way things could work and therefore quark voting would necessarily have to be applied to referendums as well?
Well circumvention would be more effective partly because quarks are intrinsically transferable. They would have to be represented either by physical tokens or entries in a digital database that at least one person (the voter in question) can manipulate to move them from one eligible election to another. Whatever the mechanism, moving quarks around would be easier than moving votes around in our world today, which involves bring busloads of actual human beings from one place to another, or at least finding a bunch of dead people and adding their names to the voting registry.
If no one is forced or paid to participate in an interest group it's still democratic. The Rhineland Model and its derivatives, as used in Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands, among others, offer ways to reign in unrealistic demands of the largest interest groups (essentially they force those groups to negotiate with each other).
This seems like a legitimate concern, especially if 'collusion' is understood broadly.
Isn't the basic theory of interest group politics that groups which can effectively coordinate can have a disproportionate effect on election outcomes, even in a one-person-one-vote system?
How would we buy votes if quarks were not for sale and bribing people to vote a certain way was illegal (or how would attempts to circumvent those restrictions be more effective in a system with quark voting than in a system with single, discrefe votes)?
You and I are a group of two. We agree that I buy ten votes, you buy ten votes, and we both vote for candidate A. We can't directly verify this, but we might still coordinate to achieve it.