The Problem with Political Mandates

 

 

Let's say candidate A and candidate B are running for office on a specific issue or policy.  Specifically, let's say candidate promises that if he is elected, he will make sure that X will happen, and candidate B, for her part, promises that if she is elected, she will make sure that X will not happen.  We could also assume that A comes from a political party that overwhelmingly supports X, and B comes from a political party that overwhelmingly opposes X.  Let's further assume that X is a popular thing that lots of citizens want.  Indeed, it is so popular, and people so fully believe that A is committed to X that it makes a decisive difference on the results of the election, and indeed A wins, and is duly sworn into office.  Generally, at this point, we tend to say that candidate A - or rather, elected official A - has a political "mandate" to do X.

Now that the people have voted in A to do X, is X more likely to happen, or less likely?  Let's think about it.

Remember, being a politician is a career - and not necessarily one with a great deal of job security.  In order to keep his job, A will have to survive a re-election and any challengers that might rise up to face him.  This could perhaps be B again, or perhaps someone else.  Even if it is not B herself, there will likely be some kind of challenger from the party that opposes X.  A, of course, knows this.  And everything that A does will be done with this in the back of his mind.

Right now, the people support A, because A has promised to do X, and the people want X.  Wanting X to happen is the reason A got elected.  But if X happens, then this reason disappears.  The people already got X.  When the next election comes, that will no longer be a consideration for them.  It's no longer a piece on the board.  

Now let's consider the political consequences of X not happening.  If X does not happen, then, in the next election, the people will face a frustrating decision.  On the one hand, A promised X, and A did not deliver X.  That makes them disappointed, and quite possibly angry.  On the other hand, their alternative is B (or some new candidate from B's party).  Although A did not prove himself particularly capable of making X happen, they know that if they elect someone from B's party, X will be even less likely to happen - because B has promised to do everything in their power to prevent B from happening.  So, though it may be frustrating to them, the people have no choice but to vote for A.

So, in sum, if A does not make X happen, people will have a a reason to vote for him, and if A does not make X happen, people will not have that reason to vote for him.  Thus, A has no incentive to make X happen, and a fairly strong incentive not to try.  A even has, by the same argument, an incentive to prevent X from happening, and can be expected to do everything in his power to stand in its way.  Thus, if, during an election, a politician promises X, then we can rationally expect that if people elect this politician, X will be less likely to happen than if they didn't.

Now, this doesn't mean that X won't happen.  It's possible that X will happen during the politician's term in office.  And if it does, obviously A will take credit for it.  And of course we can expect that before X happens, A will be giving speeches saying that he supports X and browbeating his colleagues for their lack of support for X.  But behind the scenes, we can expect that A will be dragging his heels the whole way.

Does this mean that if you are facing two candidates, one of which promises X and the other doesn't, and you want X, that you would be better off voting for the candidate that doesn't - that the candidate indifferent to or even opposed to X is more likely to achieve X than the one loudly demanding it?  Yes, under certain circumstances, this might be true.  There are times when it would be in the interest of candidate B, as we've called her, to "outflank" her opponent.  Why?  Well, generally, if politicians are getting elected, it is in their interest to maintain the status quo - since the status quo, with all of its problems and frustrations, is what gave rise to the political coalition that got them elected in the first place.  Changing the status quo risks altering the political dynamics that produce their base.  But if a candidate or a party is perpetually running on a platform of opposing something that is popular (X), and because of this, keeps on losing election after election, then, if by some chance they somehow manage to get elected to office (say, because of other issues), they actually might have a strong incentive to accomplish it - to do exactly what their opposing party kept promising and failing to do - just to take it off the board for the next election, so that it no longer acts as a barrier to their re-election.

This "outflanking" maneuver has long been known about in politics.  There's a saying, "Only Nixon can go to China."  In the case of Nixon, this meant that only he, who had proved himself an extreme, vicious anticommunist during the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) hearings, could politically afford to negotiate with Mao Zedong.  Had a Democrat attempted to do this, it would have been the end of their career.  

So, under what circumstances can we expect that the two sides will maintain the status quo, and under what circumstances can we expect an outflank switcheroo?  That's a very interesting question, and might be the topic of a future essay - the advanced level of this argument.  For now, let's focus on the basics.

I know this is a strange result - that politicians will reliably do the opposite of what they say they will do, and therefore that you should vote for the candidate who is opposed to everything you stand for.  So let's consider some objections to this line of reasoning.

I'll take what I consider the strongest counterargument first.  You might say to me, "But Ian, aren't there some good politicians?  Yes, getting reelected is important.  But surely it is not the only consideration in the minds of politicians.  Don't they really believe in the things they fight for?  Mightn't their values and political convictions outweigh their strategy for getting reelected?"  Yes, I think this is the strongest counterargument to what I've laid out above.  And I think it's true.  Sometimes there really are politicians who are deeply committed to accomplishing the things they promise to accomplish - perhaps more so than they are interested in getting reelected.  But let's say that, in one election, 95% of politicians are more committed to accomplishing their political goals than they are to getting reelected, and only 5% are more committed to getting reelected.  The next election, we can expect that those who have worked harder on getting reelected will be more likely to be in office, while those who were more focused on accomplishing political goals will be less likely.  So during the next term, let's say 80% will be more focused on goals, and 20% will be more focused on reelection.  And then next time, it might be 50-50.  And then 30-60.  Eventually those stalwart, idealistic true believers will be vastly outnumbered by the careerists who are more interested in maintaining the status quo.  Of course, I'm making up these numbers - actually I'd be very interested in an actual empirical study to determine how quickly this effect works, but I have no idea how you'd actually carry out such an experiment.  My point here is merely to point out a predictable dynamic (which I'll admit is hypothetical): over time, the tendency will be towards the victory of the careerists.  (I'm skeptical whether that golden age of 95%-5% could ever have existed in the first place.)

Besides, I think someone who raised this kind of objection against my argument might be misunderstanding me.  My point here is not to say, "Ehh, politicians are all a bunch of hypocrites."  Not at all.  I'm not trying to make a moral argument about the failings of individuals.  Rather, I'm trying to point out a structural defect of the entire system.  I'm sure that most politicians are, each in their own way, dedicated and sincere people.  They're probably just as frustrated with the system as the rest of us are.  And they can see how incentives are effective and the strategies that are likely to arise just as clearly as we can, if not more so.  I don't blame any particular person for this admittedly irritating result.  There's no conspiracy that caused things to be this way.  It's simply a fact about how the system is likely to operate, something almost like game theory's concept of the "prisoner's dilemma" which can be predictably seen to end in a result that is in none of the players' best interests - a dilemma that would require an almost super-human and beyond-rational level of empathy to solve.  And when I say that this vexatious problem is structural rather than personal, I do not mean to imply that the structure was designed maliciously or that I know of any different kind of structure that would solve this problem.  My point is not that politicians are dishonest - even if they were perfectly honest, we would be in essentially the same mess: they would simply openly admit that they are in a difficult situation, in which political interests run counter to their ideals.  Indeed, many of them do.

Another kind of objection that people might raise to my thesis here is that if politicians accomplished what they promised, people would be so grateful that this would ensure their re-election.  I don't find this objection very convincing at all.  Gratitude is not the typical attitude that people have toward their politicians - nor should it be.  If anything, we usually feel more resentment.  In democratic societies, we train our citizens to think critically about our leaders.  This is necessary for democracy to function, because as John Philpot Curran said, "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."  Training people to feel gratitude towards their beloved leader is more characteristic of dictatorships - and of course dictators have even less reason to be responsive to the issues and policies of the people they govern than democratically elected politicians do.

Each voting day, the electorate is - and ought to be - more oriented towards the future than towards the past.  They question they ask their politicians is not what have you done, but what can you do for me?  If anything, there is a tendency towards historical illiteracy and collective cultural amnesia.  Issues that gripped the imagination of the press and the public with an intensity that bordered on obsession are suddenly completely forgotten, as though they never existed.  When they are brought up, people will be able to summon up little or no emotion about them; they may remember how they previously felt in an inaccurate and often self-serving and highly rationalized way.  I say this, too, without moral judgment.  Nietzsche used to opine that forgetfulness is healthy for people, which is probably true.

This is not to say that people have no loyalty to their leaders.  Of course they do.  Take the U.S. House of Representatives: each election, despite constant calls to "throw the bums out," the incumbency rate hovers around 90%.  But is our loyalty mostly best explained as gratitude for politicians' accomplishments?  I doubt it.  I think that when we love our politicians, to the extent that we ever do, it is rarely for what they have done in office.  In fact, the reverse might be true.  We might love them not because of what they do, but in spite of what they do.  They become familiar to us, you know, good old so-and-so, who has been around forever, and we grow to have a kind of affection for them, in something like the same way that we have affection for other aspects of our home countries - the geographical features, the the native plants and animals, the customs, the clothes, the architecture, the games, the music, the dances, the other traditions.  If they're around long enough, there's a special place in our hearts for them - a kind of nostalgia.  If anything, I suspect that, for a lot of people, they have the most affection for the way they were when they were on the way up - first running for office, making lots of speeches, lots of promises, perhaps delivering fiery denunciations of other politicians - but once they get into office and start governing, they inevitably seem compromised, like they "sold out."  Perhaps that's even true.  But again, this implies that people's loyalty is more toward what politicians say, or what they merely "represent" - often quite vaguely, as in the famous portrait of Obama labelled "change" - rather than being toward what politicians actually do.  It's really only at the death of a "statesman" (remembering Harry Truman's definition of a statesman as a dead politician) that they are remembered for their accomplishments - not during re-election season.  And even in their eulogies, these accomplishments may be mistily misremembered, mixed in with a heaping scoop of what the politician "represented".  

Moreover, I assert that the reason that incumbents are re-elected to office again and again is not really so much because of our love our loyalty to them as individuals, but because we fear their opponents even more.  In other words, this is just an application, or a restatement, of the basic thesis I asserted at the beginning of this essay.  The voters are placed in the uncomfortable position of choosing between a politician who has proved ineffective at achieving what they elected them to achieve, and a politician who avowedly opposes this very policy.  Far from being an effective counterargument to my thesis, this merely reaffirms it.  "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't."  Yes, people can be reliably expected to vote for the same politicians again and again, but this in no way proves or even indicates that there is a kind of meritocratic filter that rewards effective politicians and eliminates ineffective ones.  The arrow of causation is reversed: the prospect of being voted out of office motivates politicians to avoid effectiveness.  Our loyalty, or gratitude to them is really irrelevant, or at most counter-productive.  Of course, the same is true for our politicians' opponents.  B is just as motivated to be ineffective at opposing X as A is motivated to be ineffective at supporting it.

Which brings us to another important point.  If politicians cannot be counted on to do what they promise, does that mean that they will accomplish nothing at all during their terms of service?  Not at all.  Since it is in a politician A's interest to drum up support from his political base by loudly demanding X, but at the same time doing everything in his power to prevent X from happening, an obvious solution presents itself: namely, for A to talk about X but to accomplish Y, where X is the politician's stated goal, and Y is something that is not quite X, something less than X, but which is somehow in some sense like X.  Let's examine this prospect for a moment.

Inevitably, this will be one of the main strategies that politicians use.  But how well does it work?  It depends, of course, on how similar Y is to X.  The goal, for the politician, is to accomplish enough to make it seem like a real accomplishment, and to be somehow perceived as being "in the direction of" X, in some sense, but at the same to make so that come next election season, the politician can still run on the promise of trying to achieve X.  But consider: if Y is almost the same as X, so close to X as to be indistinguishable from it for most people, then the same result will happen come election time as described above.  The general public, considering the issue "closed," or "over," will move on to other issues, which will become the more important issues at play in the election - indeed, the issue may be forgotten completely.  So we can see that a politician has a fairly strong incentive to make Y as unlike X as possible.  But this could potentially pose its own problems, if Y no longer seems "in the direction of" X.  Perhaps a "goldilocks zone" exists between these extremes, and undoubtedly most politicians will try to find it.  This puts me in mind of Zeno's Paradox: getting infinitely closer and closer to something without ever getting there.  But what if there were an even "better" solution: a policy, Y, that would appear to be moving "in the direction" of X, but would actually move society away from X?  In a way, that seems optimal for a politician.  Could such a policy be maintained indefinitely, though?  Or would the general public eventually "get wise"?  

Another objection arises: some might say that this argument only holds for a two-party system.  What about voting for a third party candidate?  While I applaud efforts to break down the two party "duopoly" and encourage third party candidates, I have to admit that, as I see it, if a third party candidate were elected into office, they would be subject to the same political pressures as members of the two major parties - if not more so.  When people vote for a third party candidate, they usually do so because of their profound dissatisfaction with the two major parties and their candidates.  But, precisely because people are so dissatisfied with the two major parties, they will be loathe to support the policies of the two major parties.  They will thus support the third party candidate precisely when and to the extent that, they oppose the policies of the major parties.  If a person from a third party is elected to office and manages to accomplish exactly they promised to accomplish, solving those issues as it were, then they will no longer have a reason to oppose the other parties and will offer no further comparative advantage to them, thus damaging their electability.  Thus, by the very same logic, just like candidates from major parties, a third party politician will be motivated not to accomplish those legislative and executive goals that motivated people to elect them to office.

So, in summary, no matter where you are on the political spectrum, you would be better off in achieving your goals if you vote for the other side.