On not being obliged to vote for the Democrats, part three
Right, having established in Part 2 that the expected value of the benefit from voting Democrat is small due to paradox-of-voting issues, and that the non-instrumental arguments for voting can't be convincingly ginned up into an argument for voting for a party you don't support, I think we turn to consideration of the costs. I am not sure that we need to spend too much time on the opportunity cost of the time-and-shoe-leather, except to note that for anyone involved in politics to the left of the Democratic Party, there will always be a single-issue campaign where the time and effort produces greater expected value than a vote for the Democratic candidate in a midterm election, even in a marginal seat. I'm more interested in the strategic cost - not so much the cost of any individual vote, but the aggregate cost of a policy of always voting Democrat, no matter what. This can be defined as the difference between the expected value of the optimal reward/punish strategy, and the expected value of "Dems always"[1].
So we're into Game Theory then - it's been pointed out to me in the pub that I am not in general a big fan of credibility arguments, and this is indeed a credibility argument (one votes against the Dem candidate in the knowledge that doing so might have a very small negative expected value conditional on having gone out to the polling place in the first place, in the expectation of a positive value from the whole strategy). But all rules have exceptions - deterrence and credibility did win us the Cold War after all - and in this case I think an exception needs to be made.
After all, if you're choosing people to play strategic games against, the people most likely to respond in the way predicted by game theory are those who are already trying to play strategic games with you[2]. By introducing the whole median voter/spatial competition argument in the first place, the Democrats have, presumably unwittingly, signalled their susceptibility to being deterred or influenced by credible signalling.
That's the theoretics[3]. How about the empirics?
Well, draw a Boston box. On the X axis along the bottom, write "Have they operated inside the framework of electoral politics described by the Democratic Party?", YES and NO. On the Y axis down the left side, write "Have they in general seen some sort of success for their agenda over the last ten to twenty years?", YES and NO. Now we're going to write down the names of political movements which tend to the Left of the Democratic Party. Every name going into the top-right (mainly worked without Dems, seen positive progress) or bottom-left (mainly worked with Dems, mainly failed) quadrants is a point for me; every name in the top left or bottom right quadrant is a point for people who think that a strategy of always supporting the Democrats is the best way to make progress on left issues.
I'll do mine first:
Top Right: Green Party, anti-war movement, anti-WTO campaign, gay marriage campaigns
Bottom left: Teachers' unions, unions in general, Bono and Bob Geldof, gay military campaign, civil liberties campaigners.
Now you do yours. I will be amazingly generous by spotting you healthcare reform advocates for top-left, but this concession will be swiftly withdrawn if you try to quibble about any of mine.
[1] This is not a straw man. I know someone who makes it a point of political pride to always vote the straight Dem ticket, always donate time and money, and who will even on occasion donate more time and money to the Democratic Party when they shift to the right, to notionally compensate for those other people who might be demoralised. My personal view is that it is hard to understand a sense in which one could really be said that her "actual" political views are other than those of the Democratic Party, but I can't see into people's souls so I'll take her at her word.
[2] Game theory is an excellent way of predicting the behaviour of professional game theorists, which is worth knowing if you are organising, say, a mobile telecom spectrum auction and all the major bidders have hired economists to advise them on bidding strategy.
[3] There is one more remaining theoretical point of interest. My general argument against credibility and deterrence behaviour is the Davies/Folk Theorem - that since any course of action at all can be supported as a signalling equilibrium, "credibility" isn't a very good argument for any particular course of action[4]. Note in this context that the Folk Theorem half of this argument is actually missing an important qualification - you only get the general result of anything goes if your discount rate is not "too high". In plain language, this means that you can only justify credibility and deterrence if you care sufficiently about the future relative to the here and now; otherwise the potential future value of the benefits don't compensate for the up front cost of the signal. This is, in my view, why people trying to make non-supporters of the Democrat party vote for them will always resist any discussion of the long term future, of abstract or general trends, or indeed anything other than the specific horrible thing that will definitely (in the Oasis sense of "definitely maybe") happen right now if the Democrats were to have a 52-48 majority in the Senate rather than a 58-42 majority.
[4] And note, of course, that deciding not to vote Democrat in any given election isn't a "course of action" in this sense; I don't want to argue for a policy of never voting Democrat at all.
Even as a member, I'm not sure in what sense 'the anti-war movement' has seen success for its agenda. The wars went ahead, Blair and Bush were re-elected, the surge went ahead, and so on.
ReplyDeleteI think the anti-war movement failed to stop the war, and since the main movement name was 'Stop the War' this could be read as a failure. It did however succeed in making future warfare (especially in the middle east) pretty difficult - if the anti-war movement hadn't been so big and so loud, the sabre-rattling over Iran would've been more than just talk.
ReplyDeleteI think the main obstacle for starting another war was that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have gone so badly. Quick, easy victories (and ponies for all) would have made war with Iran more attractive. The anti-war movement didn't 'win', it was proven right.
ReplyDeleteI think a bigger obstacle to the war with Iran is that the US military think it would be a really bad idea.
ReplyDeleteLove your note [2], though, as I understand it, when Ken Binmore designed the auction (and got the telecoms companies to overbid), the bidders had not yet thought to employ such people. At all subsequent auctions, on the other hand ....
ReplyDeleteYes I think you're right on that - but hiring game theorists didn't help them because Paul Klemperer came in, tweaked a few of the specifications and legged them over all over again.
ReplyDeleteBinmore really should have been given a peerage or a knighthood or something before now for that one - it's probably the purest example ever of an economist doing something useful. The mobile spectrum auctions are also useful things to remember to cheer yourself up when you hear some arsehole going on about the national lottery as a "tax on stupidity".
Query on Bono and Bob Geldof having failed. If I were objectively assessing B and BG on their goals as determined by their behaviour, I'd suggest that both succeeded greatly.
ReplyDeleteI'm with those who are wondering how we can define the anti-war movement as having been a success in the last decade.
ReplyDeleteI'd add to barry's comment that the anti-war movement has been a success to the extent that it has rejected the dsquared strategy. That is to say: Vote Nader vs. Bush, get a crazy-ass war in Iraq that would seem inconceivable with Gore as president. Vote for Obama - a genuine, no-kidding, proud war-monger - and the odds of a war in Iran are dramatically reduced.
(It can be rude to bring Nader into a conversation for the same reason it's rude to bring up Hitler - nobody is proposing that level of lunacy. But dsquared seems to be doing just that.)
It seems to me that the problem with dsquared's arguments in this trilogy of posts is that they prove too much, even for those who have decided to vote for a third party. Say I'm a voter who is considering voting Green and has a gander at a pamphlet from the Popular Liberation Front of Judea. The Green platform and the PLFJ platform are very similar, but I feel that the PLFJ are more right-on about paid paternity leave and the plight of the Uighur. If the utility of my vote is merely as a means of personal expression, then I should vote for the PLFJ. The fact that the PLFJ only has a tiny fraction of the support of the Greens should not be a factor in my choice, since a vote for either party has virtually no chance of impacting on the ultimate result of the election. The fact that the Greens are in a position that they may one day grow to the point of influencing actual policy, whereas the PLFJ will never do so, is similarly irrelevant, since there is no practical chance that my vote by itself will decide if the Greens reach that critical mass. If the only relevant concern in voting is the expression of one's idiosyncratic political views, then the outcome would be the proliferation of niche parties designed to appeal to ever-smaller and more fastidious constituencies until there is one party per voter with nobody actually forming a government. OK, I admit, that doesn't sound too bad.
ReplyDeleteFor those of us who still think we probably need a government formed at the end of an election, and it would be better for that government to be a little bit progressive rather than not at all, there must be something wrong with dsquared's arguments. For me, the error lies in the leap from observing that an individual vote is almost never decisive to concluding that voting serves no practical purpose beyond individual self expression. On the contrary, it is precisely because an individual vote is almost never decisive that we must strive to find what common ground is there and build coalitions to achieve what good can be achieved. The inadequacy of the individual vote points us towards the need for compromise and collective action, not away from it.
That is to say: Vote Nader vs. Bush, get a crazy-ass war in Iraq that would seem inconceivable with Gore as president
ReplyDeletea) There was not much of an anti-war movement in 2000.
b) Gore was explicitly running on a ticket which included doing something about Saddam.
It might have been possible to have had some sort of experiment in 2004, however Kerry also ran on a pro-war ticket. It was only after that failure, and the whole rise of the Daily Kos thing and a whole lot of organisation outside the Democratic Party, that people started looking for people who hadn't screwed the pooch on Iraq, including that lanky mixed-race bloke, who at the time was a first-term junior Senator who had taken a seat through an extraordinary run of luck (with his opponents in both the primary and the actual race imploding in a wave of scandals).
Fewmet - I think you might be right here; I'm at present arguing for a stronger version of the argument than I can reasonably defend and I'm going to walk it back a bit in part 4. I don't want to take the full Dennis Perrin line and say that it's never acceptable to vote Democrat, or to use your vote strategically or for lesser-evil ends. I just want to make some space, even in a two-party or FPTP electoral system, for pushing back against the common belief on the part of the Democrats (and Labour in Great Britain) that they have absolute ownership of all votes left of the median. So yes, in your case, I would say that you do need to make a judgement about whether PLFJ is really a viable party, and that yes, this does certainly leave a space for people to decide not only that PLFJ isn't, but that the Greens also aren't. All I can really support here is that there is a genuine decision to make - as vs the mainstream-Democrat view that if you're to the left of the late Edward Kennedy (my god!), you have no real decision to make because it's obvious that you have to vote Dem.
ReplyDeleteQuibbling about the anti-war campaign has been done, but I'm going to quibble about the placing in the bottom left box of the "gay military campaign"; this has actually had quite a few successes recently, notably in the House and before the Supreme Court. Almost certainly, openly gay soldiers will serve, sooner or later, in the US army in Afghanistan; that's a measure of how successful the antiwar movement has been by comparison.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DADT
Almost certainly, openly gay soldiers will serve, sooner or later
ReplyDeleteAlmost certainly, Guantanamo Bay will be closed down sooner or later, but in so far as closing it down has been a matter of voting for a Democratic candidate who promised to do so, it hasn't happened.
Well, I think civil liberties campaigners belong in that lower left box; I just don't think the gay military campaigners do, especially as you're comparing them to the anti-war campaigners. The gay military types are going to be completely successful sooner than the anti-war types.
ReplyDeleteI agree that you can't count future successes here; but Don't Ask Don't tell was actually a step forward from the absolute ban on gay people serving which was in effect before, no? So I think you have to call that a partial success, or something.
ReplyDeleteAjay and Anon are right here. Proper "gays in the military" in the US will happen before gay marriage is legalised in the UK.
ReplyDelete- the "anti-WTO campaign": this has been most effective when working within the Democrats and countering the influence of the pro-WTO New Democrats, PPI etc, and has helped create a large bloc of trade-sceptic Democratic congressmen. Contrast with the giant papier-mache puppet anti-IMF wing of the anti-globalisation movement, which has been much less effective.
ReplyDelete- Bono and Geldof (not really the latter actually as no-one in the US knows him) have focused most of their attention on the Republicans as they have held the WH and Congress for most of the last 10 years. And John B above is right: you and I may disagree with AidIsBRILLIANT as answer to everything in development, but they've succeeded on their own terms.
Proper "gays in the military" in the US will happen before gay marriage is legalised in the UK.
ReplyDelete? Gay marriage is legal in the UK, isn't it?
this has been most effective when working within the Democrats and countering the influence of the pro-WTO New Democrats, PPI etc, and has helped create a large bloc of trade-sceptic Democratic congressmen. Contrast with the giant papier-mache puppet anti-IMF wing of the anti-globalisation movement, which has been much less effective.
hmmm, I just don't see the history this way. The trade-sceptic bloc of Democratic congressmen are in general manufacturing-oriented constituencies, who were the backbone of the anti-NAFTA movement. In as much as they've made common cause with anti-TIPS protestors, this is as a direct result of the successes of the puppets and balaclavas gang - in particular, the "Battle in Seattle" has to be seen as a huge victory for The Left (and for Brazilian and South African AIDS patients, inter alia).
If I were objectively assessing B and BG on their goals as determined by their behaviour, I'd suggest that both succeeded greatly
ReplyDeleteBono's goal is to look like a twat?
Gay marriage is legal in the UK, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteNo; AFAICT there's something legally and practically identical in every way, called 'civil partnership', and the government has made it very clear that this isn't marriage, because (as Spike Milligan would say) "it's spelled differently".
I agree with D^2's assessment of anti-WTO, in that Seattle really was a huge deal, and turned what had been an incredibly isolated, near-conspiracy theory position (I recall finding an anti-WTO comic book in a shop in San Francisco in 1996, and it meant nothing to me, a liberal just out of college) into, if not part of the debate itself, part of the background to the debate.
ReplyDeleteIt's probably one of the American Left's only recent successes on par with the Right's successes in delegitimizing formerly consensus positions (e.g., all the things that Nixon was willing to do but Obama wouldn't dare propose).
dd offers this:
ReplyDeletea) There was not much of an anti-war movement in 2000.
You've identified an irreducible difference between us. I regard the non-bombing of Iran as a huge success of pro-peace voters, and the invasion of Iraq as a huge failure. If you're going to define the anti-war movement as a political movement dedicated to ending wars that have already begun, rather than preventing them, then I see your point, but I don't see the justification for that definition.
b) Gore was explicitly running on a ticket which included doing something about Saddam.
That's true, and represents another irreducible difference of opinion. If you think Gore was likely to have invaded Iraq, we can only disagree.
But how is it that you see the antiwar movement as having been successful outside of two-party politics?
Bono's goal is to look like a twat
ReplyDeleteHehe. I'd say his goal was to use his fame as a musician to get (some) people to take him seriously as an Important Commentator On World Affairs. From the number of serious people who're happy to talk to him, share podiums with him, and generally indulge him on this, he's succeeded, even if most people think he looks like a twat.
Ajay's right on gay marriage in the UK. Some of my political queer movement friends are outraged by the symbolic discrimination, but since they're the only people who care about the difference (and make up a fairly small minority of the gay population), it's unlikely to change any time soon, particularly under the current government.
The gay marriage debate in Australia is also interesting, as marriage has an identical status in law to long-term relationships here (de facto partners), and gay relationships are already recognised on a de facto basis. Now that NSW has removed its explicit ban on gay adoption, there are no differences in terms of treatment between a long-term gay relationship and a straight marriage, apart from the lack of a ceremony.
you do need to make a judgement about whether PLFJ is really a viable party
ReplyDeleteI've done this one, back in 2005 when I still had (a) utter confidence in the correctness of my views and (b) illusions in the Lib Dems.
"When you get right down to it, it seems to me, there are only two good reasons for not voting for a party.
It’s a bad project.
...
It might be a good project, but it hasn’t got a hope."
(Is anyone on the Left going to be able to think of the Lib Dems as a 'good project' ever again?)
Mind you, on that logic I would have voted Green in 2010 as well as 2005, so the expressive vote can't be the whole story.
Incidentally, I think the answer to the sorites paradox in the instrumental vote scenario is to take time out of the picture: we know, when voting, that within 24 hours something will have been decided by the vote, and we vote so as to have contributed to a particular outcome. But that's another discussion, and this comment's long enough already.
I'd say his goal was to use his fame as a musician to get people to take him seriously as an Important Commentator On World Affairs.
ReplyDeleteI think you're being overly-charitable.
It is possible that Bono is just as cynical as Bush, Blair etc - they think "Good photo op, worth 3% of youth vote" and he thinks "good photo op, +4 on my Serious Quotient".
I think his thoughts are more "I R SERIOUS PERSON! These good guys when get to know them! We am making difference!"
Seattle was before my time, but from what I can see the critical issue was the willingness of developing countries to collapse the thing. Note that they also did this at Cancun in 2003, once more amid protests, but also in Geneva in 2006, Potsdam in 2007 and Geneva again in 2008 long after the protestors had got bored and stopped turning up, and by which point the main US opposition was the traditional labour union/ag types. Ironically, one of the developing countries' main beefs in Seattle was Clinton's sudden announcement that he would bring much tighter labour standards in the agreement, under pressure from the labour union/Public Citizen campaigners, so I guess you could say the latter were successful in that regard.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile the same (as in often literally the same) protestors had almost no impact on IMF operations over the same time, suggesting that it was something other than them which was the deciding factor.
TRIPS was already in place by Seattle, being part of the Uruguay round; it's true that campaigners succeeded (rightly) in softening the strictures on developing countries, but that was mainly done through persistent lobbying outwith the big ministerials.
Many of the Seattle protestors were actually environmentalists (remember the sea turtle costumes?) mainly displaying, I am afraid, that they didn't understand that the dispute settlement ruling in the shrimp-turtle case was a tactical setback but a long-term victory for them.
Protesters don't get to attend TLA meetings, so it's easy to say that any changes in the agreements made at these meetings are down to the people who did attend.
ReplyDeleteBut over the space of a couple of years, deciding to hold one of these conferences became akin to deciding to host a small war. Public perception went from 'these are inevitable and not really our business' to 'these are controversial and personally important'. And these things change what can be done by the people who attend.
Well...personally, I am looking at a choice between a Republican wingnut Senator and a (sitting) centrist Democrat. It's really not too difficult to make that choice.
ReplyDeleteI am puzzled as to what sense in which the US Green Party can be said to have had any victories.
Croak!