I’ll admit I’ve never quite grasped the EA focus on voting systems over/vs the structural conditions under which we vote. It is a bit symptomatic of our technical solutions for social problem bias.
I don’t think voting methods is a bad EA focus, more that it is a chair with two legs. A bit too shaky while the structural conditions legs are missing to be all that confident about sitting on it.
I’m coming at this from a practical politics and campaigning expertise area as a politician who elects politicians and invests too much time tracking policy progression and maps the electoral pathway to creating the kind of parliament/senate/house etc we would need to deliver my ideal policy aspirations for fun.
If I haven’t commented in this thread on it I broadly think that chunk of your argument is solid. It’s clear that your expertise in voting systems is very impressive and it’s always good to have people on side with strong expertise in neglected areas.
I think the idea that proportional systems or systems that encourage smaller parties to win will reduce policy polarisation or speed up the legislative process/prevent bottlenecks needs a bit more potential outcome consideration.
Chambers and their coalition blocks do still tend to skew Left/Right—with the us vs them mentality persisting. The largest block can be potentially larger than it would be under an FPTP system (everyone wants to be on the winning team and everyone hypothetically can be) and will broadly decide policy.
The bottlenecks simply shift to a more informal inside-the-block process vs the more open to scrutiny chamber in these circumstances. I witnessed many a late-night policy WhatsApp battle between members in blocks while working in the European Parliament that closely resemble the ones I now have in a large FPTP group.
Where the arithmetic gets a bit dicey for the potential ruling block they are incentivised to allow increasingly fringe groups into the ruling block.
Those fringe groups usually make some very cheeky demands in return for their support and can end up with an outsized impact on the administration and end up polarising the agendas further. We don’t necessarily want to be amplifying the views of fringe groups where they present risks to EA causes.
There are some safeguards against fringe group influence but most people dislike them. When I was working in the European Parliament all the groups agreed to block a handful of really right-wing/anti-EU parties from getting any meaningful committee positions or passing policy. Good for the EU, pretty rubbish if you voted for one or more of those parties.
With enough clearly EA-aligned politicians, you could consider a similar technique to lock parties that promote x-risk raising policies or are against x-risk-reducing policies out, for an EA example, but again it’s a bit dodgy to voters.
I think anti-gerrymandering work is a strong angle for us to consider investment in on the traceability and neglectedness front.
I recently ran a grassroots anti-gerrymandering campaign in my area when the boundary review came around and the vast majority of people had no clue what I was on about when I explained cared a lot but did very little. Even the easy task of writing a comment on a website wasn’t taken up by a lot of people because the cause just isn’t seen as important enough.
I then went to a hearing as an expert to object to a gerrymandering boundary change proposal and it was unbelievably empty. Only a handful of us spoke over the course of the day.
Controversially, I think political attacks are quite an important part of the democratic process. Particularly to prevent bad politicians, which you clearly value very highly.
The average voter does little to no background research on candidates beyond what they see over the course of the campaign. There is no reason to believe that would change under a different voting system.
‘Nice’ electoral environments and positive campaigning pledges are already pretty weaponised (used by parties with things to hide to attack other parties for bringing them up).
Voters also miss the chance to gain important information about their candidate of choice that they might not be so willing to share. MP/Senator voting records are a big one because most people do not pay enough attention to how their reps vote.
I think anyone considering investing EA cash and resources in changing voting system campaigns/referendums needs to do a cursory sweep of the UK AV referendum. A qualified disaster on all levels and a great primer on how to waste a substantial amount of money achieving nothing because of poor planning and timing.
Two points regarding the possible downsides of proportional representation and multiparty systems:
First, different ways of implementing PR lead to different numbers of parties. If you just do nationwide party list, without a threshold like requiring at least 5% support to win any seats, there will be tons of parties, and the wheeling and dealing between them will ultimately seem more impactful than the actual election. But if you have multi-winner districts with < 10 seats each, only a few parties will win representation (but probably more than two). There’s an important sense in which politics is compromise. With a two-party system, voters have to compromise and support the more tolerable of two candidates. Then, whichever party wins a majority gets to govern uninhibited by the other party (aside from filibusters, the possibility of a split congress, etc.). Or with a 10+ party system, voters hardly need to compromise at all; with so many options, chances are they’ll be able to find a party they absolutely love. But this doesn’t remove the need for compromise, it just shifts it onto the elected officials. I think the optimal system splits the difference, putting some of the weight of compromising on voters and some of it on elected officials. Having more than two parties, but not more than six or so, should achieve this. To the extent you’re worried about the effects of having significantly more than three parties, this is entirely manageable with multi-winner districts—but I think your points have a fair amount of validity even for a three-party system.
(An additional consideration is that the US has a directly elected executive branch, so you wouldn’t necessarily have the dealmaking to determine who gets to form a government that you get in most places that use PR.)
Second, many of the harms of polarization are different from what you describe happening under PR systems. I don’t think the risk of a civil war or democratic backsliding is driven by a handful of extremists who need to be excluded, it’s driven by the widespread hatred that Democrats and Republicans have for one another and the perceived threat the other party poses to democracy. I think this has relatively little to do with the difficulties of dealmaking and controversial policy concessions to fringe parties, even though I lumped the risk of civil war and congressional deadlock together as “polarization”. In my model, I assumed that electoral reform would affect all the consequences of polarization equally. This could be very wrong! Perhaps proportional representation eliminates most of the congressional gridlock caused by zero-sum partisan maneuvering, and replaces it with congressional gridlock caused by the difficulty of getting several different factions to work together. (I find Lee Drutman’s argument from Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop that having more parties will result in a more functional congress to be quite persuasive, however.)
I want to split the difference between Marcus’ points and yours, Alisha. Let me start by limiting the scope to shifting the actions of the US government to better align with the needs and desires of the people without getting into prospects beyond representative democracy. There are many factors causing the current misalignment, but I believe the two largest in that context are vote splitting in elections and simple majority rules in legislatures.
Vote Splitting in Elections: The simplest example of vote splitting would be a an election with three candidates: Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, and Darth Vader. Most voters who support Luke also support Leia and vice versa, but hardly any of them like Vader. When Election Day comes, nearly 60% of voters support both of the Skywalker twins, but since they are only allowed to support a single candidate at a time with their vote, they collectively end up splitting their votes between Luke and Leia. The final results are Luke with 35%, Leia with 25%, and Vader with 40%; Vader is elected even though a clear majority of voters dislike him.
Vote splitting can get deeper and more complex when there are more candidates, but the fundamental result of an electoral system with vote splitting is the trend toward electing polarizing candidates. This is because polarizing candidates gain stronger, more isolated support among their voters and stronger animosity from everyone else. Because voters are only able to support a single candidate at a time anyway and because that support is expressed on their ballot as either full-on or not-at-all with no nuance, polarizing candidates with huge sums of money perform the best under systems with high levels of vote splitting. The downstream effects of having our government filled with polarizing politicians is the misalignment I was referring to at the beginning; the distribution of voters in political space is, like most everything, a (multi-dimensional) bell curve. Of course, having polarizing leaders causes that distribution to shift — it may be double-peaked in the US right now — but it’s always important to consider the people who don’t vote and why they don’t vote when talking about political distribution. Many of the reasons people don’t vote in the US can be indirectly affected by eliminating vote splitting.
Fortunately, vote splitting is caused by a solvable engineering problem that I’ve already bolded twice: only allowing voters to support a single candidate at a time. This broken mechanic — potentially invented because the ancient Greeks voted with pebbles and jars instead of auditable paper trails — feeds the toxic idea that we can only advocate for one group or one set of ideas at a time. In reality, most voters would support multiple candidates if the good ones didn’t have to fear splitting the vote. It’s the math of the method, not a vice of the voters or a crime of the candidates.
So, what’s the solution? There are many, but the simplest, as Marcus highlighted, is to remove the (arbitrary) restriction on our ballots that only allows voters to support a single candidate at a time. This leads to Approval Voting. By allowing voters to support multiple candidates at the same time, polarizing candidates are systemically disempowered and unifying candidates that draw broad support across the entire electorate are boosted in comparison.
Again to Marcus’ point, Approval Voting is a great “budget” reform for jurisdictions that currently use Choose-one Voting, are resistant to change, and have limited legally viable options for voting method reform. For jurisdictions that have more options or are currently on Ranked Choice (Instant Runoff) Voting (which does not eliminate vote splitting because voters can only support one candidate at a time in each distinct runoff round), STAR Voting and Condorcet methods like Ranked Robin are even better upgrades.
Simple Majority Rules in Legislatures: However, as you pointed out, Alisha, this is only half of the puzzle. Polarization is also amplified by the way our legislatures run. In a similar vein as candidates running under Choose-one Voting, policy is subject to the inherent polarizing effects of simple majority. When a given proposal only needs support from half of the electorate (the electorate being legislators in this case), those proposals perform best by ignoring the needs and desires of the other half of the electorate. It is simple strategy, and the result of this strategy is the enactment of polarizing (read: fringe) policy, which does not align with the needs and desires of the people.
How do we fix this issue? Once again, it’s mechanical. Instead of having only one proposal at a time be put to an up-or-down vote, legislatures should vote on multiple different proposals simultaneously. Practically, this would look like selecting an issue that needs to be addressed and a timeline leading up to the vote. For example, the goal could be “reducing domestic gun deaths” and the timeline would include two months of drafting proposals followed by a week of “campaigning” for different proposals within the legislature by dedicating 2 hours per day on the floor through that week to the specific issue. Over the course of that week, feedback is taken, adjustments are made, and proposals with more than, say, 15% of the legislature cosponsoring make it into the “ballot”. At the end of the week, legislators use Score Voting or STAR Voting to vote on all of the different proposals at the same time. The winning proposal gets sent. As an extra measure, an additional up-or-down vote on the winning proposal could be made, but it should always require a supermajority to pass. That supermajority threshold could be anywhere from 60% to 90%, but the point is that comprehensive proposals can often easily gain an additional 10 to 20 percentage points of support once they cross a critical threshold of around 70% to 80% support — that is, the graph of effort to gain more support dependent on how much support a proposal already has is wonky and has a dip in it toward the right end.
Now, in the US, I think voting method reform is far more viable right now than changing the rules of US Congress to the concept I’ve described here, but having better representatives and educating the public on the fundamental concept that “Majority is not democracy. Democracy is about building consensus.” could potentially lead to legislatures at different levels adopt this method someday.
I’ll admit I’ve never quite grasped the EA focus on voting systems over/vs the structural conditions under which we vote. It is a bit symptomatic of our technical solutions for social problem bias.
I don’t think voting methods is a bad EA focus, more that it is a chair with two legs. A bit too shaky while the structural conditions legs are missing to be all that confident about sitting on it.
I’m coming at this from a practical politics and campaigning expertise area as a politician who elects politicians and invests too much time tracking policy progression and maps the electoral pathway to creating the kind of parliament/senate/house etc we would need to deliver my ideal policy aspirations for fun.
If I haven’t commented in this thread on it I broadly think that chunk of your argument is solid. It’s clear that your expertise in voting systems is very impressive and it’s always good to have people on side with strong expertise in neglected areas.
I think the idea that proportional systems or systems that encourage smaller parties to win will reduce policy polarisation or speed up the legislative process/prevent bottlenecks needs a bit more potential outcome consideration.
Chambers and their coalition blocks do still tend to skew Left/Right—with the us vs them mentality persisting. The largest block can be potentially larger than it would be under an FPTP system (everyone wants to be on the winning team and everyone hypothetically can be) and will broadly decide policy.
The bottlenecks simply shift to a more informal inside-the-block process vs the more open to scrutiny chamber in these circumstances. I witnessed many a late-night policy WhatsApp battle between members in blocks while working in the European Parliament that closely resemble the ones I now have in a large FPTP group.
Where the arithmetic gets a bit dicey for the potential ruling block they are incentivised to allow increasingly fringe groups into the ruling block.
Those fringe groups usually make some very cheeky demands in return for their support and can end up with an outsized impact on the administration and end up polarising the agendas further. We don’t necessarily want to be amplifying the views of fringe groups where they present risks to EA causes.
There are some safeguards against fringe group influence but most people dislike them. When I was working in the European Parliament all the groups agreed to block a handful of really right-wing/anti-EU parties from getting any meaningful committee positions or passing policy. Good for the EU, pretty rubbish if you voted for one or more of those parties.
With enough clearly EA-aligned politicians, you could consider a similar technique to lock parties that promote x-risk raising policies or are against x-risk-reducing policies out, for an EA example, but again it’s a bit dodgy to voters.
I think anti-gerrymandering work is a strong angle for us to consider investment in on the traceability and neglectedness front.
I recently ran a grassroots anti-gerrymandering campaign in my area when the boundary review came around and the vast majority of people had no clue what I was on about when I explained cared a lot but did very little. Even the easy task of writing a comment on a website wasn’t taken up by a lot of people because the cause just isn’t seen as important enough.
I then went to a hearing as an expert to object to a gerrymandering boundary change proposal and it was unbelievably empty. Only a handful of us spoke over the course of the day.
Controversially, I think political attacks are quite an important part of the democratic process. Particularly to prevent bad politicians, which you clearly value very highly.
The average voter does little to no background research on candidates beyond what they see over the course of the campaign. There is no reason to believe that would change under a different voting system.
‘Nice’ electoral environments and positive campaigning pledges are already pretty weaponised (used by parties with things to hide to attack other parties for bringing them up).
Voters also miss the chance to gain important information about their candidate of choice that they might not be so willing to share. MP/Senator voting records are a big one because most people do not pay enough attention to how their reps vote.
I think anyone considering investing EA cash and resources in changing voting system campaigns/referendums needs to do a cursory sweep of the UK AV referendum. A qualified disaster on all levels and a great primer on how to waste a substantial amount of money achieving nothing because of poor planning and timing.
Two points regarding the possible downsides of proportional representation and multiparty systems:
First, different ways of implementing PR lead to different numbers of parties. If you just do nationwide party list, without a threshold like requiring at least 5% support to win any seats, there will be tons of parties, and the wheeling and dealing between them will ultimately seem more impactful than the actual election. But if you have multi-winner districts with < 10 seats each, only a few parties will win representation (but probably more than two). There’s an important sense in which politics is compromise. With a two-party system, voters have to compromise and support the more tolerable of two candidates. Then, whichever party wins a majority gets to govern uninhibited by the other party (aside from filibusters, the possibility of a split congress, etc.). Or with a 10+ party system, voters hardly need to compromise at all; with so many options, chances are they’ll be able to find a party they absolutely love. But this doesn’t remove the need for compromise, it just shifts it onto the elected officials. I think the optimal system splits the difference, putting some of the weight of compromising on voters and some of it on elected officials. Having more than two parties, but not more than six or so, should achieve this. To the extent you’re worried about the effects of having significantly more than three parties, this is entirely manageable with multi-winner districts—but I think your points have a fair amount of validity even for a three-party system.
(An additional consideration is that the US has a directly elected executive branch, so you wouldn’t necessarily have the dealmaking to determine who gets to form a government that you get in most places that use PR.)
Second, many of the harms of polarization are different from what you describe happening under PR systems. I don’t think the risk of a civil war or democratic backsliding is driven by a handful of extremists who need to be excluded, it’s driven by the widespread hatred that Democrats and Republicans have for one another and the perceived threat the other party poses to democracy. I think this has relatively little to do with the difficulties of dealmaking and controversial policy concessions to fringe parties, even though I lumped the risk of civil war and congressional deadlock together as “polarization”. In my model, I assumed that electoral reform would affect all the consequences of polarization equally. This could be very wrong! Perhaps proportional representation eliminates most of the congressional gridlock caused by zero-sum partisan maneuvering, and replaces it with congressional gridlock caused by the difficulty of getting several different factions to work together. (I find Lee Drutman’s argument from Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop that having more parties will result in a more functional congress to be quite persuasive, however.)
I want to split the difference between Marcus’ points and yours, Alisha. Let me start by limiting the scope to shifting the actions of the US government to better align with the needs and desires of the people without getting into prospects beyond representative democracy. There are many factors causing the current misalignment, but I believe the two largest in that context are vote splitting in elections and simple majority rules in legislatures.
Vote Splitting in Elections:
The simplest example of vote splitting would be a an election with three candidates: Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, and Darth Vader. Most voters who support Luke also support Leia and vice versa, but hardly any of them like Vader. When Election Day comes, nearly 60% of voters support both of the Skywalker twins, but since they are only allowed to support a single candidate at a time with their vote, they collectively end up splitting their votes between Luke and Leia. The final results are Luke with 35%, Leia with 25%, and Vader with 40%; Vader is elected even though a clear majority of voters dislike him.
Vote splitting can get deeper and more complex when there are more candidates, but the fundamental result of an electoral system with vote splitting is the trend toward electing polarizing candidates. This is because polarizing candidates gain stronger, more isolated support among their voters and stronger animosity from everyone else. Because voters are only able to support a single candidate at a time anyway and because that support is expressed on their ballot as either full-on or not-at-all with no nuance, polarizing candidates with huge sums of money perform the best under systems with high levels of vote splitting. The downstream effects of having our government filled with polarizing politicians is the misalignment I was referring to at the beginning; the distribution of voters in political space is, like most everything, a (multi-dimensional) bell curve. Of course, having polarizing leaders causes that distribution to shift — it may be double-peaked in the US right now — but it’s always important to consider the people who don’t vote and why they don’t vote when talking about political distribution. Many of the reasons people don’t vote in the US can be indirectly affected by eliminating vote splitting.
Fortunately, vote splitting is caused by a solvable engineering problem that I’ve already bolded twice: only allowing voters to support a single candidate at a time. This broken mechanic — potentially invented because the ancient Greeks voted with pebbles and jars instead of auditable paper trails — feeds the toxic idea that we can only advocate for one group or one set of ideas at a time. In reality, most voters would support multiple candidates if the good ones didn’t have to fear splitting the vote. It’s the math of the method, not a vice of the voters or a crime of the candidates.
So, what’s the solution? There are many, but the simplest, as Marcus highlighted, is to remove the (arbitrary) restriction on our ballots that only allows voters to support a single candidate at a time. This leads to Approval Voting. By allowing voters to support multiple candidates at the same time, polarizing candidates are systemically disempowered and unifying candidates that draw broad support across the entire electorate are boosted in comparison.
Again to Marcus’ point, Approval Voting is a great “budget” reform for jurisdictions that currently use Choose-one Voting, are resistant to change, and have limited legally viable options for voting method reform. For jurisdictions that have more options or are currently on Ranked Choice (Instant Runoff) Voting (which does not eliminate vote splitting because voters can only support one candidate at a time in each distinct runoff round), STAR Voting and Condorcet methods like Ranked Robin are even better upgrades.
Simple Majority Rules in Legislatures:
However, as you pointed out, Alisha, this is only half of the puzzle. Polarization is also amplified by the way our legislatures run. In a similar vein as candidates running under Choose-one Voting, policy is subject to the inherent polarizing effects of simple majority. When a given proposal only needs support from half of the electorate (the electorate being legislators in this case), those proposals perform best by ignoring the needs and desires of the other half of the electorate. It is simple strategy, and the result of this strategy is the enactment of polarizing (read: fringe) policy, which does not align with the needs and desires of the people.
How do we fix this issue? Once again, it’s mechanical. Instead of having only one proposal at a time be put to an up-or-down vote, legislatures should vote on multiple different proposals simultaneously. Practically, this would look like selecting an issue that needs to be addressed and a timeline leading up to the vote. For example, the goal could be “reducing domestic gun deaths” and the timeline would include two months of drafting proposals followed by a week of “campaigning” for different proposals within the legislature by dedicating 2 hours per day on the floor through that week to the specific issue. Over the course of that week, feedback is taken, adjustments are made, and proposals with more than, say, 15% of the legislature cosponsoring make it into the “ballot”. At the end of the week, legislators use Score Voting or STAR Voting to vote on all of the different proposals at the same time. The winning proposal gets sent. As an extra measure, an additional up-or-down vote on the winning proposal could be made, but it should always require a supermajority to pass. That supermajority threshold could be anywhere from 60% to 90%, but the point is that comprehensive proposals can often easily gain an additional 10 to 20 percentage points of support once they cross a critical threshold of around 70% to 80% support — that is, the graph of effort to gain more support dependent on how much support a proposal already has is wonky and has a dip in it toward the right end.
Now, in the US, I think voting method reform is far more viable right now than changing the rules of US Congress to the concept I’ve described here, but having better representatives and educating the public on the fundamental concept that “Majority is not democracy. Democracy is about building consensus.” could potentially lead to legislatures at different levels adopt this method someday.