Given that much of existential risk is made up of human-caused events stemming from issues that can be mitigated by policy and better governance, this intervention is even more important.
This logic is also the core intuition behind why I’ve been so passionate about voting reform (and social choice reform in general). Some thoughts:
For better voting methods to translate into better risk policy, I assume that it’d be necessary for the public to strongly desire to fix the problem. In the case of climate change, we see a strong movement to address that [1], so I wouldn’t be surprised to see Approval electing representatives who are much better at addressing climate problems than those elected under choose-one voting (or Instant Runoff / Ranked Choice, which is basically iterated choose-one voting, and suffers from many, but not all of the same flaws).
However, when it comes to biorisk security and AI-notkilleveryoneism, I am concerned that the public is not nearly passionate enough about these issues to improve our governance on these issues. That said, there are two dynamics that might end up making Approval beneficial anyways. The first, is that Approval might increase the bandwidth of the Overton window / what people feel comfortable being politically passionate about. Choose-one voting naturally makes elections a choice between two major candidates, and this turns elections into a tug-of-war along a one-dimensional axis. Issues that are orthogonal to this axis will not be relevant, and people who are passionate about such orthogonal issues are, in my observations, perceived as “weird” by most people.
Because Approval can support elections that are competitive across many issues at once, this may give voters an incentive to be passionate about issues they currently are not passionate about under choose-one, and this would propogate to representatives (the propagation would be faster than we currently observe under Choose-one)
Secondly, even if this dynamic does not play out, the existing concern about climate change and nuclear weapons could end up (with Approval) giving politicians an incentive to take more action against these risks, and that some of that action may end up translating to a framework designed to handle existential risk in general. I feel more cynical about that possibility, but if there’s even a partial manifestation of the first dynamic I name, that might be able to push it over the edge to actually make a difference.
Or Approval might just end up being more of a nothing-burger. In my head, the arguments for why it will help make sense, but it’s possible after we run the experiment of actually getting it implemented, it helps with less than I hope it can help with. But that’s not the most likely outcome in my estimation, and in any case, it’s important to invest in actually implementing Approval in the real world, to see how things actually play out.
[1] We also observe a strong backlash to this movement, but my model is that this is a consequence of the impact the currently prevalent choose-one voting system has on our political system. Duverger’s law translates a choose-one system into politics that are more-or-less polarized into two camps. When one of these camps is passionate about an issue, and becomes associated with that issue, members of the opposing camp end up being incentivized (for signaling reasons) to downplay the issue, and even to take a vocal opposing stance on the issue, even if that opposing stance is poorly justified.
I expect that under Approval, this dynamic will not at all play out, due to the centripetal (centre-finding) nature of the voting system.
This logic is also the core intuition behind why I’ve been so passionate about voting reform (and social choice reform in general). Some thoughts:
For better voting methods to translate into better risk policy, I assume that it’d be necessary for the public to strongly desire to fix the problem. In the case of climate change, we see a strong movement to address that [1], so I wouldn’t be surprised to see Approval electing representatives who are much better at addressing climate problems than those elected under choose-one voting (or Instant Runoff / Ranked Choice, which is basically iterated choose-one voting, and suffers from many, but not all of the same flaws).
However, when it comes to biorisk security and AI-notkilleveryoneism, I am concerned that the public is not nearly passionate enough about these issues to improve our governance on these issues. That said, there are two dynamics that might end up making Approval beneficial anyways. The first, is that Approval might increase the bandwidth of the Overton window / what people feel comfortable being politically passionate about. Choose-one voting naturally makes elections a choice between two major candidates, and this turns elections into a tug-of-war along a one-dimensional axis. Issues that are orthogonal to this axis will not be relevant, and people who are passionate about such orthogonal issues are, in my observations, perceived as “weird” by most people.
Because Approval can support elections that are competitive across many issues at once, this may give voters an incentive to be passionate about issues they currently are not passionate about under choose-one, and this would propogate to representatives (the propagation would be faster than we currently observe under Choose-one)
Secondly, even if this dynamic does not play out, the existing concern about climate change and nuclear weapons could end up (with Approval) giving politicians an incentive to take more action against these risks, and that some of that action may end up translating to a framework designed to handle existential risk in general. I feel more cynical about that possibility, but if there’s even a partial manifestation of the first dynamic I name, that might be able to push it over the edge to actually make a difference.
Or Approval might just end up being more of a nothing-burger. In my head, the arguments for why it will help make sense, but it’s possible after we run the experiment of actually getting it implemented, it helps with less than I hope it can help with. But that’s not the most likely outcome in my estimation, and in any case, it’s important to invest in actually implementing Approval in the real world, to see how things actually play out.
[1] We also observe a strong backlash to this movement, but my model is that this is a consequence of the impact the currently prevalent choose-one voting system has on our political system. Duverger’s law translates a choose-one system into politics that are more-or-less polarized into two camps. When one of these camps is passionate about an issue, and becomes associated with that issue, members of the opposing camp end up being incentivized (for signaling reasons) to downplay the issue, and even to take a vocal opposing stance on the issue, even if that opposing stance is poorly justified.
I expect that under Approval, this dynamic will not at all play out, due to the centripetal (centre-finding) nature of the voting system.