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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29665 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Voting is a Prisoner’s Dilemma, where if everyone cooperates (by voting) the politics are sane and geared after the medal voter. But one’s vote is so insignificant, it is more beneficial to not waste one’s time and defect by not voting. However, if too many people defect, the parties polarize and scare the median voters away from the pools, and polity goes bouncing from extreme to the other. Compulsory voting, as in Australia, solves the PD.

Median in terms of polarization? I like your comment but you didn't do a lot of work to actually describe the particular outcomes that would be better if the median voter had more say.

Do you expect higher quality decisions from the median voter? Or is this just about avoiding outcomes such as wokism/far right?

The Median Voter Theorem states that a majority rule electoral system will elect the candidate preferred by the median voter. However, if the middle drops out and doesn’t vote, the candidates can easily be more extreme than preferred by the broader populace.

This doesn't make sense to me. Why would "the middle drop out"?

I assume that most people who believe that voting is a waste of time also believe that the major candidates don't reflect their preferred policies. This makes these "drop outs" by definition very far from median.

Dropping out should only matter if the two extremes do them at different rates. If dropouts are uniformly distributed or distributed at the extremes, then there's no change in the stability of the results.

The middle drops when the parties rely on negative campaigning to energize their (more extreme) base at the expense of the middle, who are usually already annoyed by politics. Negative campaigning affects partisans differently than non-partisans. When the middle drops out, the party that is marginally more effective at turning out their base win.

My intuition is that the opposite happens because there's more people in the middle, and so pandering to the middle is more useful. At least in swing states where pandering actually matters.

Is there any actual evidence of moderates voting less than extremists?

Pew research shows consistent voting is a U-shaped curve.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/

That link is super interesting, thanks for sharing.

Two comments:

  1. The U-shaped graph about the "political activism graph" directly speaks to the idea that the "middle is dropped out". What this graph doesn't show is that this phenomenon is getting worse (i.e. that the middle today are voting less than they voted 20 years ago). I interpreted your previous points as the middle is dropping out even more than it used to, and I don't see evidence of that.

  2. What there is evidence for in your link is that the middle is getting smaller and the tails of the distribution are growing larger. This is different than "dropping out" (which I interpret to mean not voting but continuing to have the same beliefs and staying in the middle). It seems to me that the actual polarization of beliefs is what's causing the polarization of discourse/policy and not the fact that the middle has stopped participating as much.

I understood that part, but I still don't understand the broader implications. In particular, you seem to be implying that electing a candidate preferred by the median voter is better than the alternative, and I asked about the reason why. I can come up with some reasons, e.g. you don't get policies such as reparations or bloody deportations because those are preferred only by the extremes. But what about broader policy questions, or those unrelated to polarization or culture war?

I’m not asserting a link between turnout and quality, though there may be one. Indeed, Public Choice Theory suggests that for certain policies democracy and majority voting is no guarantee of quality.

Public Choice Theory suggests that for certain policies democracy and majority voting is no guarantee of quality

Is there a salient example for this?

Usually it’s with policies with concentrated benefits for a few and diffuse costs for the rest, like rent control, occupational licensing, NIMBY, the list goes on.

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