How does slavery have concentrated costs and diffuse benefits? That’s a poster-worthy example for a system that benefits very few (top slaveholders) at the expense of everyone else (much lower economic growth and of course the experience of the slave population)
Even if legislative votes were to become secret, legislators would make it known what their preferences were and the price of their support.
For that matter, even though electoral ballots are formally secret, legislators and political parties know full well who their constituents are, who is wavering, who supports their opponents, and what the respective goals and priorities of those constituencies are.
So the idea is that, to the degree a politician is honest, they'll either refuse to be bought or be easily caught, and to the the degree a politician is dishonest, no one will try to buy them?
I worry about a happy medium of hypocrisy, where a politician convinces themself that what's good for the lobbyist is what's good for the country, possibly aided by a generous donation or two.
If I'm buying a vote, and the vote doesn't go the way I want, I can at least figure out "one at least of the sons of bitches backstabbed me" and then I don't pay any of them a bribe ever again. If I don't know it was Joe who defected and not Bill, Tom or Erica, then I'm not paying good money to *any* of them.
The ones who stayed bought will be angry at the defector and will put pressure on them to cut it out, because without that extra recompense for their hard labour in the public interest, how are they going to pay for their love-nest for the mistress?
Probably the best case scenario. This is how shareholders vote, it's how directors vote, and corporate management is much, much more effective than government management these days. When everyone's trying to max out his equity value, there's no conflict of interest.
This is just one feel you can cop from the elephant of "Democracy and the various things that pass for democracy suck and don't work."
Dealing with externality problems that are unpriced and artifically inflate equity valuations is literally one of the core functions of government, and one of the things self-interested equity-driven management not only sucks at solving but affirmatively opposes.
I think both you and Ethics Gradient have reasonable points.
"because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa." isn't horribly wrong. At least "try not to crater the whole economy" is in most everyone's interest. Still, even trying to maximize the value of a very broadly based portfolio isn't the same as trying to optimize the circumstances of the average citizen (or, the average constituent for a specific politician). Externality problems, e.g. health effects of pollution that don't show up on a balance sheet, can be quite real.
This works(ish) if politicians have their investments in a blind trust, and just want to improve the value of the Index generally. It doesn't work if they can go all-in on particular stocks and pick winners legislatively, though openness hasn't actually protected America from that exact thing, and other countries solve it by legally mandating aforementioned blind trusts.
I mean this isn’t a hard problem to solve. No one associated with a congressperson should have any financial instruments period. They should be like monks.
Yea that will limit who is interested, and that is a great thing.
"Yea that will limit who is interested, and that is a great thing."
Whether that would be an improvement seems uncertain to me. If the effect was to replace politicians motivated by bribes (or more indirect equivalent) by politicians motivated by a monomaniacal lust for power we might not wind up better off...
Yeah there is always a big danger when making revolutionary changes that you aren’t very happy with the revolution. Though our current system is so bad that it seems like it is time to roll the dice. The little bit my world overlaps with the world of lobbyists and DC belt insiders it is pretty disgusting (for instance I have an acquaintance who is a pharma lobbyist). Even in her carefully crafted internal self image she sounds like a monster, I shudder to think the reality.
"The little bit my world overlaps with the world of lobbyists and DC belt insiders it is pretty disgusting (for instance I have an acquaintance who is a pharma lobbyist). Even in her carefully crafted internal self image she sounds like a monster, I shudder to think the reality."
Aargh, that sounds appalling. Thanks very much for the view into that world!
Why stab the bribers in the back, who are the ones handing you the brown paper envelope stuffed full of cash and who are likely to consistently pay happily for your vote, rather than your constituents who are a bunch of poor, whiny, demanding ingrates who can't even understand why you need to go on that important fact-finding mission to that overseas tourist resort:
Exactly, lobbyists are also much more likely to figure out who the defector is and change their behavior than constituents. Even if some journalist writes an expose with evidence that so and so is taking bribes from lobbiest and ignoring constitutes, the people will dismiss that as the other sides propaganda. Heck, they do that now, even with the votes public so they can't defect too much.
It would not be difficult to defeat the entire purpose behind protecting political representatives from lobbyists via secrecy. If I am trying to give $1,000 to one member of a ten-person committee, I can instead spread $100 across all ten members and do the same thing. Further, this works out very well for the whole committee, whose lobbyists are now giving to everyone. The whole board benefits!
First item on the agenda at the committee meeting: "So, everybody here got the $100 check from [Lobbyist], right? Let's make sure anything that they wouldn't like, but which we need to do, has at least one dissenting vote, so if [Lobbyist] asks, any of us could plausibly claim to have been the one who stayed bought."
"What if they meet with two or more of us at the same time?"
"Senior committee member gets first dibs on accusing [Lobbyist] of attempting to access classified documents."
Wouldn't a lobbyist with any sense withhold the majority of payment until the legislator had publicly and convincingly spoken in support of the lobbyist's side of the argument? The legislator might still defect when it came to an actual vote, but they would have had to pin their colours to the mast somewhat by making their position, or apparent position, publicly known and maybe even convincing a few other legislators to vote the way the lobbyist would want.
Of course. I never claimed it was an infallible solution, just that it might work to secure a vote but even if not it could, from the lobbyist's standpoint, have beneficial side-effects.
First, lobbyists may agree that their bought politician should *not* publicly support the position they will vote for. Saying "I support unreasonable subsidies for [lobbyist's position]" is a great way to not get reelected. This reduces the ability of a lobbyist to require such public statements.
Second, it's not unusual for someone in congress to truly desire a particular result but realize that it's not possible or good for that result to come about. Even if they wholeheartedly agree and say so publicly, they may feel that they have to do otherwise at the actual vote. This is actually intended by the author here, as closed door meetings are supposed to result in changed minds.
The “gyroscopic representation” proposal solves that in a way - only vote for candidates who have been publicly committed for a long time in ways you endorse, so that they are unlikely to go against these views in secret. The evangelical Christian, or the long time union leader, or the blogger whose thoughts have been on record for decades.
Isn't that already the case? Politicians try to present a spotless record of partisanship, but it's still part of the whole "tell them what they want to hear" strategy. And there's the problem that the pressures differ at different levels. Under this proposal, running for office is asking the voters to lead you into temptation.
Another related point I recently saw discussed (https://philarchive.org/rec/NGUTIS) is that expert judgment works best when not second-guessed. When it is exercised in public, it tends to get dumbed down to the thing the non-expert would have done.
I once had a conversation with a 20yo college libertarian. He was very passionately trying to convince me that the world would be so much better if literally everything was privately owned. Private water and private air, private rivers and private oceans, private police and private military. And the argument does seem appealing, in the "streamline everything" sort of way, but only if you don’t ask any questions about any of the details.
I get the same feeling here. "If government proceedings are private, then lobbyists will have no way to know whether a senator they paid off has done what he was paid to do." Huh? This makes sense as long as you spend no more than 0 seconds thinking about it.
If you think it's obvious why it wouldn't work, you should make the argument, not just assert its obviousness. The latter doesn't really help anyone. You really can't assume that everyone will find the same things obvious as you; you should actually make the argument to point out the error.
The simplest argument against "darkness is the best disinfectant" might be that we are already testing it. All the time. SEC investigations are largely private, and yet it’s still in bed with the financial industry. Same with many other examples of regulatory capture. FCC, FDA, FTC, you name it. (Occasional FOIA request notwithstanding)
In fact, I can’t think of one example where group A and group B are incentivised to cooperate and are prevented from doing so by too much privacy.
Plus there's always just the fact that lobbyists can run tests to find the liars. Pay off 10 senators to vote for X bill, see how many votes it gets. Pay half to vote yes on another bill, and half to vote no, see what changed, continue narrowing until you find the defector etc. Pricey sure, but it's a short-term expense.
Then it turns into a real-life game of The Resistance, with the morally conflicted politicians making occasional votes for the evil policies from lobbyists but trying to vote good when they can... In fact it actually turns into Secret Hitler.
But the most obvious problem with this whole proposal is that voters have no mechanism even in principle to police rampant defection by their putative representative. Why would we expect elections to have any capacity for enforcing legislative discipline instead of being pure popularity contests even more than they already are?
I think you’ve made an important point. We complain that these days the governing is done by the administrative state and not by Congress — and the Federal Register graph cited suggests that this really started ballooning when extreme transparency did. It’s as if governing *must* happen in secret, and when you turn on the light it scurries into the baseboards where you can’t see it.
There's also the phenomenon that there are many lobbyists paying all sides of a debate. This is so that they can always say "Listen to me because I've paid you."
This would not change if things were more secret than they are.
Well, there's long-running dispute here over who owns the river Blackwater. All the fishing rights are privately held, and you have to buy a licence to fish the river.
This makes good business for the various fisheries who have bought the rights and run package tours for fishermen, but the locals often get caught if trying to fish.
So you have the State saying it's about conservation of native fish stocks, and the locals saying it's about conserving them for businesses who let outsiders fish them, and local fishermen can't make a living.
This seems like a bad example to garner sympathy for the locals, though. Overfishing fish stocks is a classic example of a tragedy-of-the-commons situation that’s actually solved by privatization and licensing. The libertarian rejoinder here is that If the locals enjoy fishing so much they can buy the rights themselves. Otherwise the limited resource gets allocated to the highest bidder as it does everywhere else.
Obligatory necessary reminder that the tragedy in question was the commons, i.e. a time-proven actual solution to this very problem, getting destroyed by privatization apologists. ("This seems like a bad example to garner sympathy for libertarian positions", "a classic example of ideological blind spot", etc.)
I mean, to elaborate, since for all my exasperation the blind spot seems to be genuine - commons are not free-for-all, commons are community control. It may be confusing if you expect formal contracts or written rules, but when it's accepted that a community at large has a final say and a right to intervene and stop any use of a resource that diminishes its utility for others, there's usually no need to elaborate that personal use within socially accepted limits is perfectly welcome.
Once the commons can no longer be enforced (and it's historically no accident that they stopped being enforceable), privatization in the form of selling extraction rights, which at least preserves some vestiges of the community control by allowing it to set limits and constraints, is indeed preferable to privatization in the form of [just claim it and it's yours]. But in the absence of evidence that the locals want a free-for-all, I'm finding it safe to assume they act upon a shared culturally-transmitted idea of the commons and the individual rights they would have provided them.
A lot of things changed in the 1960s and 1970s. Attributing them to sunshine laws via graphs is not an adequate attribution, unless you control for the enormous range of confounding. For example, what about economic policy? Laughably, we could claim using the same graphs we ought to go back to the gold standard (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock).
Furthermore, grandstanding idiocy took place before sunshine laws and after. If we are playing a game of correlation = causation, then it can go both ways. See the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and then the legislative response (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident) which needlessly enmeshed the US further into Vietnam. How could this happen if the lack of sunshine laws truly protected politicians from the invidious influence of public inspection?
Very much agreed! Even changes that were listed which are more directly connected to government actions (quadrupling imprisonment, quadrupling the plague of lawyers) are, at best, perhaps things that can be connected to specific laws (the drug war laws in particular, for the former), and are not at all clearly linked to Congressional procedure changes.
Also, that graph doesn't show general wage stagnation. It shows stagnation in medial *male* individual income. There is no corresponding stagnation in medial female individual income. The overall median hasn't kept pace with GDP per capital (see graph since 1974, which is the start of when FRED has data on median individual income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=16RUY), but it has grown quite a bit (60% growth adjusted for inflation via PCE deflator vs 120% GDP growth with the same adjustment).
The remaining gap has a bunch of proposed explanations. The two big ones are that non-cash compensation (especially health insurance) has become a much larger portion of total compensation and the average has diverged from the median due to changes in income distribution.
There are also a widely-shared graph that purports to show wage stagnation since 1973, comparing real total compensation to real labor productivity, but this is mostly an artifact of using different inflation adjustments to the two things being compared: total compensation here is adjusted via CPI-U, while productivity is adjusted via the non-farm business price deflator. If you use the same adjustment for both, or just use nominal dollars with no inflation adjustment, almost all of the gap goes away.
Scott did a deep dive on the latter chart a while back (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/25/wage-stagnation-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/). His conclusion of the impact of inflation adjustments is different than mine, concluding that inflation calculations explain 1/3 to 2/3 of the gap based on various expert analyses that attempt doing more meaningful apples-to-oranges comparisons (mostly using more modern consumer inflation adjustments like PCE or chained CPI for wages while still using the NFB deflator for prices). Which I disagree with on the grounds that "Health care and education have gotten way more expensive relative to the rest of the economy" (the main drivers of the gap between PCE or C-CPI on one hand and the NFB deflator on the other hand) is a very different problem from "wages have stagnated relative to overall economic growth".
I agree, this seemed like the weakest part of the argument. It might be plausible to link the increased polarization in congress to the sunshine laws. But the rest seems a stretch. And the essay would be better without it. Still I like the over all idea, why not give it a try? Maybe start in some state government?
I'd personally also put the move to open primaries as a big possible reason on the political side. Thank goodness Britain seems to have backed away from their recent disastrous experiment with them.
I wonder if there's other ways you could test that. For instance, pick some local government official, as a totally made up example, say, sherriff, or whoever is in charge of the local-government-owned municipal utility. I imagine for at least some particular office, in some states that's an elected position, and in other states it's an appointed position. I wonder what you could determine by comparing the behavior of elected officials who are appointed versus elected, but have more or less the same duties. Or elected local officials that have approximately similar duties but have very different levels of public visibility on their deliberations/choices. Might be tough to control for all the variables in play, but seems like it would be a way to get at this sort of question.
For a real-life example, in King County WA the sheriff has gone back and forth between being elected and appointed. The arguments for elections seemed to come down to “voters should have more control”, and arguments for appointments came down to “we can get better sheriffs if they don’t simultaneously have to be politicians”.
Can someone explain why special interest groups and industry groups (i.e. money in politics) don't fall into the "allowed exceptions" under "Some individuals have no interest in politics, and no wrong is done to them if they have less influence than individuals that are very interested in politics." And "Some individuals have technical expertise in a particular area such as nuclear power or human behavior. They ought to have more influence than the lay public on those issues."
I think it's basically chosen as an axiom, I think by the author of the book rather than this review. Those four criteria p1-p4 are the four that they consider valid, morally justifiable; it's like choosing their *definition* of what they would consider fair politics.
I assume they list as exceptions the cases where they don't think it's plausible to reach the ideal of everyone getting equal representation. Getting the views of people who just aren't interested in politics for personality reasons may technically be possible, but with rather high costs, and ensuring that the views of someone who can't be bothered to vote are counted equally to the views of the politicians themselves is practically hopeless. Not taking into account too much the interests of concentrated interest groups is something that at least a partial solution has been proposed to, so it should not be regarded as unavoidable.
Egalitarian politics is a game where people want the outcome to be determined by rhetorical skill. If the outcome is dominated by money, politics is pay-to-win.
Making congressional votes secret, might make it hard to buy a congressman's vote, but if most of the influence comes from power to influence what goes into a bill, basically no amount of secrecy will stop them from saying "please make sure that the following language [...] ends up in the bill". If the bill ends up with that language (and they didn't give the same instructions to anyone else on the relevant committee), they can be pretty sure that it was their agent's work.
Yup. And, even if the committee votes are secret, the committee deliberations can't very well be secret from committee members. That data seems likely to leak.
Even for the committee votes: Suppose that lie detectors are made to work even sort-of kind-of reliably. A congresscritter could volunteer to take such a test in private in a lobbyist's office while recounting their committee votes.
Sure, the data isn't impossible to get, but this certainly puts more barriers in place. You seem to implicitly be saying (by not arguing against it) that this would work, if the privacy could be guaranteed, with the issue being that it can't be guaranteed. Do you not think partial measures would provide partial success?
"this certainly puts more barriers in place" Agreed.
"You seem to implicitly be saying (by not arguing against it) that this would work, if the privacy could be guaranteed" I apologize. I didn't mean to imply that. I'm undecided about whether, if secrecy _could_ be guaranteed, whether that would be a net gain or net loss. My knee-jerk suspicion is that it would enable politicians to focus on their narrow self-interest, ignoring both lobbyists and constituents.
I remember reading that there were philosophers in ancient China arguing that the laws themselves should be kept secret, to prevent clever lawyers from gaming the system. That's one level of secrecy that would solve the problem.
I don't think this is workable because there will always be a sufficient number of disgruntled constituents who I propose would demand to know if the person they voted for took the "wrong" side. The whole thing would be DOA in this scenario.
I take the point that transparency isn't any sort of cure all, but I have a strong suspicion that politicians would find a way to communicate how they voted on particular legislation if there was money at stake.
Agreed. Lack of transparency just empowers a group of unelected insiders who can exploit information not known to the general public. As a real-world example, consider how members of Congress get rich from insider trading of stocks.
Hm. Throat-clearing first: I spent the better part of a decade as CTO of the Sunlight Foundation, a transparency-focused nonprofit in DC. During that time I hired/was the boss of Lee Drutman while he wrote http://leedrutman.org/the-business-of-america-is-lobbying, which I recommend. Much of our organization's work focused on money in politics, through both the lenses of investigative and data journalism; as well as general pro-transparency measures like scraping federal and state bills and exposing the normalized data through apps and APIs. I currently work in DC for a non-gigantic software company as head of policy, and while legislative lobbying is only a small part of the work I do, it is something I have done a fair amount of over the years through lobby days, work with individual offices, testimony, coalition letters, and saying hello to staffers while collecting free sandwiches at New America events.
My time at Sunlight was highly educational and only mildly disillusioning. I learned a lot about transparency and its limits. This piece is right that fully transparent processes often lose their value as their original functions are overwhelmed by performative concerns (most committee hearings should probably not be broadcast, imo; calls to put cameras in SCOTUS are a bad idea unless we're collectively writing that institution off and trying to speed things along). I also agree that providing the electorate with better information is probably not a realistic path to significantly better outcomes. But this account falls short in a few ways.
First, it underestimates the opacity currently available to legislators. Legislative language is generally drafted behind closed doors, often during a process of negotiation with potential cosponsors. If a bill is meant for more than signaling purposes, coordination with leadership and across the caucus is inevitable. In many cases leadership will also try to organize votes in ways that enable vulnerable members to avoid taking stances that will cause them problems. But this is usually about avoiding attack lines in future TV spots more so than obscuring their activity from funders. Because...
Second, this account overestimates the practicality of opacity. Legislative activity is carried out by hordes of staffers, many of whom later go work for trade groups, lobby shops and other influence operations. A big part of those people's jobs involves maintaining relationships and the flow of information that they enable. It's true that legislators themselves can occasionally act in surprising ways. But the imagined opacity-enabled defection scenarios discussed here are game theory daydreaming, not anything close to how Congress actually works.
Third, the influence ecosystem is more complicated than is being imagined here. At the nonprofit we were <em>highly</em> incentivized to find stark quid pro quos. But these are quite rare (I still think fondly of Duke Cunningham's handwritten grift receipt). Generally, money reifies relationships and preferences that already exist. It doesn't twist a legislator's preferences; it finds and empowers the potential legislator, out of a field of many, whose preferences are aligned. It doesn't get an obviously corrupt measure added, but it surfaces a plausible concern that might otherwise be ignored (and perhaps should be). And in most cases, its presence reflects the attention of a legitimate and significant political bloc: most commonly an employer (polisci is unambiguous about the primacy of economic conditions to electoral outcomes, after all), but also--particularly with the internet small donor revolution--often just genuine voter passion. It's rare for money to arrive in and influence the system without some substantial and politically legitimate coalition behind it, though of course there are examples (with apologies for the cheap shot, SBF comes to mind).
None of this is to say that I think our current influence ecosystem is good, mind you. It's clearly a wasteful red queen's race, at a minimum. But I don't think it's the case that we've got a bunch of actors who would deliver different results if their actions were less visible. Their actions are already varyingly opaque. Reducing transparency would preference insiders who would inevitably still be able to glean information they need about hypothetical defections, if that was actually how things worked. And the actors are usually more aligned with the influencers--often because they correctly understand their voters' preferences--than it's pleasant to believe.
With all that said: I appreciate this thoughtful post and think the complex effects of transparency are worth considering.
(Those correlation graphs at the end are embarrassing, though, c'mon)
I’m not sure there’s a threshold point at which it can be counted as “fulfilled”. Opinions are published; oral arguments are available as audio; the justices’ private meetings and their clerks’ activities are not. I think this tracks pretty well with which of these activities are used to make symbolic statements to advance factional projects.
This makes some great points and has been a significant update for me. However, I'd like to push back on some things:
> If all groups are equally uninformed, loud, well-informed, well-organized special interest groups would no longer have an outsized influence on the political process. It would not be clear which legislators were and were not cooperating, so there would be no information for the members of the interest group to act on.
This argument only seems to apply to coercion, not to persuasion.
When an issue has concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, I imagine politicians will tend to hear more and better arguments in favor than against, and may come to incorrectly-but-honestly *believe* that something is a good idea, due this bias in the information they receive. This would still give special interest groups an outsized influence (though perhaps less of one than they have now).
> Anticipatory representation is, however, fully consistent with opacity.
This only seems true for a very extreme and crude form of anticipatory representation. Opacity does still allow you to say "in hindsight, this new law made our lives worse, so let's throw out all the politicians who presided over it". However, it does NOT allow you to say "in hindsight, this new law made our lives worse, so let's throw out the politicians who supported it but keep the politicians who tried to stop it."
This seems like a pretty substantial reduction in the effectiveness of anticipatory representation to me. Or at least, a substantial reduction in its *potential* effectiveness; I could perhaps be persuaded by data that the extreme and crude version is the only one that the public actually does.
(One could declare that they are defining the category "anticipatory representation" to not include the cases that are being lost, but those cases absolutely do not fit into either of the other categories you defined, so if one did that then one'd need to add a new category for them.)
> Unfortunately, [transcript accountability] would come at the cost of removing all the benefits of secret deliberation. We actually have a natural experiment to demonstrate this. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has always deliberated in secret, but in 1993 started to release transcripts of their meetings on a 5-year delay.
I broadly agree that releasing transcripts __soon enough to let voters directly act on them__ directly undermines the whole point of secret deliberations, but it still seems like an obvious good idea to release them after a LONG delay, like maybe 50 years.
I don't think this would appreciably help with accountability, but it would be good for historians, it potentially acts as a weak-but-nonzero safeguard against the legislature becoming permanently corrupt, and it seems harmless if you set the delay high enough.
In a partisan environment, "the politicians who supported it" can be reasonably approximated as "the ruling party" and "the politicians who tried to stop it" as "the opposition". Exceptions can be made for politicians who publicly spoke out on one side or the other.
An argument can be "better" in the sense of being more persuasive even if it only uses symmetrical weapons, but that's not the kind of "quality" I'd like to give influence to.
Interesting review. In particular the concluding comments.
Let me as a contrast give an entertaining example of how high-level politics is carried out in Sweden, which is a rather different type of democracy than the US. (Sweden is sometimes uncharitably described as a someone-has-talked-together democracy.)
Sweden did something dramatic in the mid-1990s: The government totally revised - and significantly scaled down - its old age pension system. It is an interesting story from a US perspective, and should be for ACX readers more generally, since trying to do something with the US social security system is regarded by everyone as the "third rail" of US politics: Touch that, and you are dead. How did the Swedes none the less succeed, also with no-one protesting in the streets (compare that also to the recent modest pension retrenchment poor old Macron barely managed to squeeze through the French political system). Here is the story, including (translated) quotes from Urban Lundberg, a Swedish historian who interviewed key actors and analysed the process:
The Swedish pension reform was facilitated by a high-level, interparty working group which met between 1992 and 1994 and prepared the reform proposal. Lundberg describes the working arrangement as follows:
"The will to compromise was apparent in the way the pension committee worked, which in my interviews was described as very close/confidential ("fortroendefull"). The idea was first to agree in the committee. Then the agreement should be anchored in the respective party leaderships. Only after that should mass media and the general public be informed. [The shared opinion was that] No one would win on a new principled fight over pensions. Thus the desire was for any price to keep the discussions of the working group away from the public. Even the internal discussions in the parties were held under strict control....Officially the committee did not work to create a new system but to "reform" "improve" and "modernise" the old. The Social Democrats made this an absolute condition for even considering participating in the committee. It was strictly ruled out even for the Conservatives to say something different." (p 30-31, own translation from Lundberg).
Within-group psychology also played a part in bringing about the path-breaking pension outcome. It turned out that the members representing the two most antagonistic parties, the Social Democrats (Anna Hedborg) and the Conservatives (Margit Genser), liked each other. Lundberg interviewed Anna Hedborg:
"I think it played a role that Margit Genser represented the Conservatives. She is a very independent and systematic person. She loves logic. If you challenge her with a very logical line of reasoning she cannot resist it - and I am a little like that too. Könberg [representing the Liberal party] is also a bit like that. We are all very issue oriented, somewhat engineering types...Somehow I thing it was a very lucky mix of persons. Both that we were the persons we were and then not more than us." (quote from Lundberg 2001, 32; own translation)
Lundberg argues that this favourable personal chemistry created a "we" identity among the committee members, and made them define the situation so that "we" have to convince "them" (the leaders of the respective parties) that "we" are right. This bonding between high-level committee members, making them present a united front vis a vis outsiders, is rare even in Scandinavian politics. In probably helped bring about the path-breaking outcome.
The general take-home point is that elite-elite interaction during a political reform phase involves a complex social process, where actors must find out if they can trust opponents to stick to informal deals. The core structure resembles an assurance game. Each elite will be wary if they can trust other elites to cooperate, rather than to defect and reap the benefits of attracting disaffected voters. Reputations for being cooperative or uncooperative (which depend on political culture and traditions) act as signals in this game. In addition to reputations, elites can employ strategies such as self-binding (publicly announcing their intentions), bonding and reputation-building (e.g. engage in joint committees) to signal their intentions to other players (where deception may also be part of the game). It must be borne in mind that the world of elite politics is somewhat similar to a village community, in the sense that most people know each other and expect to meet and interact also the day after the reform. Hence social controls (including the risk of social ostracism) discourage disloyal behaviour, and help make informal agreements stick.
References:
Lundberg, Urban (2001) Socialdemokratin och 1990-talets pensionsreform. [Social democracy and the 1990s pension reform.] In Joakim Palme (ed): Hur blev den stora kompromissen möjlig? [How was the big compromise possible?] Stockholm: Pensionsforum.
See also:
Lijphart A. 2001. The pros and cons - but mainly pros - of consensus democracy. Acta Sociologica vol 36, p. 129 - 139.
A good description of how the culture of elites can affect their positions and decision making processes. (You could say, it's almost like an open conspiracy.)
The Swedes aren't very prone to protesting in the streets in any case. And Nordic people in general have a lot of trust in authority.
>How did the Swedes none the less succeed, also with no-one protesting in the streets
Succeed in the sense of swindling the electorate, by masterfully papering over the conflict between elites' interests (ostensibly "antagonistic" at that) and that of the masses? Seems like an important point to clarify.
It is debatable if the Swedish retrenchment of pensions was necessary to ensure long-run macroeconomic sustainability or not. In this ACX context, I would put a parenthesis around that question, and instead emphasize that the Swedish story shows that democracy is not a frail system that works only on sunny days: Democracies are also able to make hard decisions. The assumption that democracies are not able to do this, has been an influential critique among "democratic overload" scholars, and has formed the rationale for - among other things - isolating Central Banks/Treasuries from government/political control.
I guess the question is, just how democratic the optimal "democracy" should be. Obviously the unwashed masses don't have the first idea about which unpopular policies are crucial for their own good, but then what the actual feedback mechanism is supposed to be in the first place?
Charitably, this seems unduly optimistic that people other than the masses know which "unpopular policies are for their own good". Certainly it's notable that democracy has over the last two centuries outperformed all other systems of government (insert Churchill quote of your choice here), suggesting the masses might actually be better at picking the best policy rather than whatever form of expertise is deployed in other systems. Those who are down on democracy have a tendency to hold views unlikely to receive democratic mandates (e.g. actual Nazis, decarbonise now zealots, proponents that schools should have an oath of allegiance to Brittany Spears) which they believe are necessary unpopular decisions. It's likely that people are better at voting for their own good than those frustrated by democracy give them credit for.
I do question how a democracy is meant to function with any feedback mechanism other than direct election though. Any other system, including primaries or party lists, inserts a separate level of control between the demos and the representative. Whatever process that means democracies make good decisions is threatened if your choices are limited to a narrow field controlled by small groups (from a transatlantic perspective the last couple of US presidential elections seem to be good examples of this). Democratic feedback should be direct to representatives, because that's how democracy corrects for erroneous decisions.
Democracies may have outperformed other systems of government but causation might be working there in the reverse direction. Maybe democracy is something that develops when things are going well.
Another question is to what extent the system of government we call a democracy is actually democratic. In the Swedish example here, it seems that the people were presented with proposed policy as the only alternative, as a fait accompli.
The opening focus on votes is a bit unfortunate because the later discussion of lobbying dynamics reveals that votes are a minor issue. If an approach based on secrecy were to be really beneficial, it would need to involve secrecy at all stages of drafting and passing legislation. But not only would this require a sweep of other unrealistic changes to the political process to even attempt to secure confidence and accountability, it also starts from a naive belief that politicians who are 'free' (in Bentham's sense) would act more in alignment with public interest. The reality is that our social and economic structures drive a lot of unpopular policy making; lobbying might grease the wheels and get certain things prioritized but much of the same legislation would get passed anyway.
I agree. The whole thesis while plausible seemed to run against the evidence presented around voting. Floor votes are ostensibly the most transparent part of the process and apparently the least affected by money while the earlier parts of the process are harder for normal citizens to observe and are more influenced by money.
agree particularly with that last sentence. my summary of the book review is "i see problems downstream of a transparent process: therefore a good solution to these problems is to remove the transparency".
most striking was the bit about policy makers feeling unable to change their position when debating in front of an audience (voters): the proposed solution is immediately to remove the audience. meanwhile, you and i discuss things in public online spaces (like here), where updating one's beliefs in response to new evidence is considered **noble**. it's just assumed that culture like that can't be replicated in a political environment, but (1) i've never seen that challenged with any rigor and (2) it conflicts with the other widely held notion that public policy is _downstream_ of culture (e.g. that gay marriage became legal only after it gained traction at a social level). particularly with the latter view, even if pursuing secrecy were more _pragmatic_ than pursuing cultural changes, the latter might give more benefit for the same level of effort given just how widespread are its effects.
We say that the influence of special interest groups and wealthy individuals is a violation of political equality, where "a democratic society realizes political equality if and only if influence on political decisions is insulated from features of persons other than (p1) their desire to participate in politics, (p2) the quality of their argument, (p3) their relevant expertise, or (p4) their unique position to advocate a particular cause".
But how do we know that special interest groups and wealthy people aren't disproportionately high on (p1), (p2), and (p3), in which case they should disproportionately influence politics? Maybe what we want is not political equality (which we may have in some sense today) but more power taking the side of issues that we're on?
As my Substack points out today, there is NO transparency of real-time (meaning within two days of) Congressional actions. To get such data, you have to pay between $4800 and $9000. dollars. There are reasons for this. There are real legislators causing the lack of transparency. If we want to endeavor toward mental health, we should first find a way of putting our feet on the ground. Then Scott et al can bring in as many charts as he'd like.
Democracy is indeed dying in darkness, because real legislators are doing thiings in real time (even in the last four weeks) to hide transcriptions of live Congressional hearings. These people have names and their actions can be empirically traced. I have no idea why this thread isn't connected to any on the gound realities.
see Extra! Extra! Read All About It-- for Only $9,000
Why Democracy in America Has Been Hobbled by President Biden and Ironically by the Very Democratic Senators Who Most Recently and Most Fiercely Told You They'd Promote Transparency
It’s not only to the Biden’s fault though he has given many speeches about the necessity of open democracy. I put it on him in the peas because you need to put it on someone. Nevertheless, the entire Democratic leader ship with that exception of maybe two senators is not willing to commit itself to releasing transcripts of hearings in a timely way In 30 years of journalism I received dozens of transcripts, live hearings true interaction (as Hegelian as you can get on the hill. It ain’t much, but it’s better than nothing. And anyway developed nations. That do not transcribe. The words of their highest elected officials are by definition not democracies.) also the POLITICO that you see is entirely different from Politico Pro, and political premium, which issue bulletins and full transcripts every other minute. The argument the Senate is using for failing to release live hearing transcripts is that the technology is difficult and expensive the federal news service provided full transcriptions of all house and senate, full and sub committee hearings for a pittance. Congress has never been about rationally or cost-effectively leading the nation. It’s about craft I just didn’t think the legislators wanted to be so honest about their perfidy.
To corrections because I dictate to Siri I meant to say graft GRAFT not craft. And the federal news service has been doing this 31st century technology since the mid-20th century.
Many good points here, but I couldn't quite get through it. Am I an outlier in having a deep aversion to the misuse of the term "terrorism"? Threatening to shift one's influence to the opposing party might be reasonably called intimidation, but even that would be stretching the point in the context of professional political machinations.
I live near D.C., and the local joke is "Drive North till you smell it, then East till you step in it." Politics is their full-time job, and they all understand the nature of the transactions in question.
I believe that's the actually original meaning of the word, with actions intended to force political compliance on electors as a whole a development of the term in response to mass democracy. If you think about it the actions of an Andrew Jackson supporter threatening violence at a hustings and Al Qaida are just different ways of attempting to force political change in a direction of their choice.
The word "terror" literally just means fear, and "terrorism" is just any systematic action that tries to make the other side comply by fear. This can be state terrorism which comes from the state (almost every dictatorship uses state terrorism in various forms), or it can come from other groups. Either it's against the whole public (like the 9/11 attacks from islamists) or against anyone who would speak for the opposing policy (for example extremist right-wing or left-wing groups), but also something like criminal gangs who terrorize shops to make them pay money.
The way it's used in the article is a weak form of terrorism, but makes totally sense to me.
He starts out defining terrorism as "simply threatening physical violence against anybody that didn’t vote in the appropriate manner.", which is perfectly fine.
But then he immediately follows up with "He wants the citizenry to essentially rule by terrorism, threatening to put legislators out of a job if they step out of line.", and a couple of instances later, "Legislators are currently accountable in the sense that they might be voted out of office if their constituents are unhappy with their performance. The citizens rule by a kind of terrorism."
He is > literally < calling the proper and correct operation of democracy "essentially... terrorism" and "a kind of terrorism". How can you consider this a defensible use of the term? Under this reasoning, any correct operation of a well-accepted system of governance which sometimes causes fear can be called "terrorism".
In a well-ordered society, would-be criminals are motivated not to commit crime at least partly by fear of punishment. Under your definition, this would be terrorism.
Sorry, these are just objectively incorrect uses of the term.
Worse: In this day and age, with people intentionally misusing that particular term in bad faith for political gain, it's wildly inappropriate.
As I said, it made sense to me and didn't strike me as odd. Of course, the term "terrorism" is usually used with a very negative connotation nowadays, especially since 9/11. But I don't find it odd to use it in its literal meaning, which per se is neither positive nor negative.
Perhaps that has to do with me being a non-native speaker, with German as my primary language. Or me reading a lot about history, where the usage is closer to its literal meaning.
>Kogelmann also cites the problem of asymmetric information. The problem is essentially that interest groups tend to form around issues that have concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. This incentivizes a small, well-organized minority to spend a lot of time and energy monitoring Congress, usually pushing policies that do not benefit the majority.
This whole section seems to boil down to "people being heavily and passionately involved in politics around issues they are knowledgeable and care strongly about is bad".
You highlight the NRA and Corn Subsidies, and conclude they are bad because nra positions (not expanded on) are unpopular, and because corn policies don't benefit the majority.
I struggle to think of any policy that actually benefits the majority. The civil rights movement? All about helping minorities. Welfare? Most people aren't on it. National Parks? Waste of money maintaining wilderness far away from me I will never see.
I don't think that a policy should be disregarded just because it doesn't, in a vacuum, benefit everybody. The government is an amalgam of millions of policies that don't all touch everybody, but everybody gets something. Further, I don't think a policy is bad just because it is "objectively unpopular". If something is supported by people who ar knowledgeable and care strongly about it, but doesn't fare as well when the general public hears a 5 second blurb and makes a first impression opinion, we shouldn't just automatically fight those in the know.
People too lazy or apathetic to actively involve themselves in politics have only themselves to blame. Why would we handicap people who actualy want to spend their time working to make the country we all share a better place?
> Why would we handicap people who actualy want to spend their time working to make the country we all share a better place?
I believe the argument being made is that these sorts of policies actively make the country a *worse* place.
As for such things as welfare and civil rights, the question of justice and social obligation comes into play; people may not personally benefit from the specific initiatives in question, but everyone does benefit from living in a just society that provides for human flourishing- and even if they don’t, we may very well still have the obligation to provide such.
Many would argue that widespread gun ownership benefits everybody as a shield against tyranny/ potential good guy with a gun scenarios, and that corn Subsidies benefit everybody by maintaining our agricultural base.
Anybody can make an argument that any policy they support is good for everybody, and it's hypocritical to just decide the policies you like are the good ones and anything else is working to make the world a good place.
How do I benefit from "living in a just society that provides for human flourishing" if I don't personally benefit from the specific initiatives in question?
The author essentially concedes this point when he flips his position and calls for proportional representation for the purpose of empowering minority viewpoints (presumably ones that he likes, as opposed to the examples he cites of viewpoints he doesn't like). There's a lot of politically motivated reasoning being passed off as neutral philosophy here.
I think it's not about benefitting everyone, it's about benefitting everyone on average. The idea with corn subsidies is that they make corn farmers (and people who use corn) while making everyone else a little poorer, and this mostly balances out except that it also distorts the economy and makes it less efficient, thus harming everyone on average.
I think you conflate two different concepts here: the people you described should absolutely be encouraged to participate in the political debate, they should be heard and be able to bring forth their best arguments. This is both true for the corn subsidies and the National Parks. The review and the book agree with you that this is a good thing.
And to make this clear before the main point, those people should *not* make the decisions themselves. They should have to convince others, the politicians, of their points. I hope we can also agree on that. If every lobby group can just make their own decision, this ends badly.
But what the review points out: it's perfectly possible to have those interested people engage, argue, bring forth their points to the decision-makers, and so on. But then, after that, we can still keep the deliberations and the votes of the decision-makers secret. That is what the book advertises for.
This does have some drawbacks, for example that the engaged people might think "they did not decide how I wanted them to, probably the decision-makers did not understand my arguments". But the review does discuss these points, and whether or how far they can be mitigated. And it comes to the conclusion that the advantages outweigh the drawbacks.
Those graphs are American only, right? I've never seen any similar information coming out of European countries. Now this could mean that nobody's taken the data from those countries yet - but it could also mean it's an America-specific problem (likely an impact of congressional lobbying being far more advanced over on your side of the Atlantic).
I think lobbying is quite advanced in Europe. You don't hear about it because it's less visible, and the amounts are smaller because American federal lobbying affects policy for a rich population half the size of Europe and likely more of world GDP.
Mmm. I think it is fairly clear that secret voting would *decrease* the influence of lobbyists somewhat. It wouldn't eliminate it. One obvious tactic would be that lobbyists could simply find people who genuinely hold views helpful to them, and finance their campaigns. Because the candidate's position is genuine and idealogical, lobbyists wouldn't be worried about them defecting, even if they couldn't track their votes. Indeed lobbyists already do this.
I am more worried than the author of the book and this review about the downsides of secret voting. If we have no idea how any representative actually votes, we are essentially voting for plausible, charismatic, good speakers. None of these are obviously desirable attributes in a decision maker.
Policy jurys (where all legilslature votes are carried out (in secret) by a randomly selected jury of the general population) both eliminate lobbying (or very nearly so), and retain the legitimacy of votes by tying them directly to the electorate's wishes. Of course they have problems of their own (if you like the idea of representatives being experts with better understanding than the electorate, you lose that), and no one has ever actually tried them on a large scale.
>One obvious tactic would be that lobbyists could simply find people who genuinely hold views helpful to them, and finance their campaigns.
My impression is that this is basically already how it works. Lobbyists aren't going to politicians and paying them to take positions contrary to ones they took previously. They might nudge on the margins, but their main concern is ensuring "their guy" is in a position of power to begin with.
"Legislators’ votes in committee used to be secret"
But was there much uncertainty in 1958 among lobbyists how Senator Johnson voted on the corn bill in committee?
It sees like the Australian ballot is secret mostly because it's too much work per ballot to figure out how each voter voted from talking to them and to people they know. In contrast, there are only 100 Senators and 435 Reps so it would pay lobbyists to figure out who is voting how with a high degree of accuracy.
If they're telling the truth or not trying hard to conceal it, sure -- but why do you think it would be easy (or even possible) to figure out the vote of someone who stayed silent or was deliberately deceptive about it?
These ideas don't seem novel. When was the book published and what is the full name of the author? Really feel like a book review should include those details upfront.
Meg Greenfield's _Washington_, from 2002, is a very insightful book about the trade-offs between transparency and opacity in congress. It mostly laments losing the latter, when smoke-filled rooms free from the press allowed for horse-trading. That book is full of salient anecdotes across many decades. I'd argue it is a much better book than whatever book this review was about, but I don't feel like I got to know this book very well.
It feels like this account of money in politics is undertheorised.
Firstly, "political equality" may entail that individuals with more money are not entitled to extra political influence, but this does not seem to carry across straightforwardly to interest groups. We do want the tech industry to have more influence on government than the tallow manufacturing industry, precisely because there's more money there, so its interests matter more.
Secondly, it's important to differentiate between a concentrated interest getting outsized political influence due to co-ordination issues, and a minority group with deeply felt feelings about an issue. There are millions of individual gun owners in the USA, that's a classic diffuse interest, and to the extent the NRA has persuaded them that guns are a vital interest that should determine their vote, that's classic democratic politics.
Thirdly, threatening to run advertising against a candidate as retaliation seems legitimate and indeed desirable. If Sen. Whitehouse wants to vote against the interests of the fossil fuel industry, they are performing a public service by pointing that out. The Senator's real problem is that "Whitehouse Hates Coal" is a slogan that will cost him more votes than it wins him.
Finally, the reason to control legislators is not just to prevent them voting their self-interest. It is to prevent them having sufficient "slack" as to vote their (necessarily narrow, unrepresentative) conception of the public interest, at the expense of the public's view. The whole reason these lobbying groups exist is because there are lots of broad interests that don't get naturally represented in the legislature.
My assumption was that the attack ads were on unrelated issues. If the fossil fuel industry wants to run an ad saying "Senator Whitehouse is terrible because he'll make your fuel and energy bill more expensive.", fair enough. If they say to Whitehouse that if he doesn't vote in a way the lobbyists like, they'll run an ad saying "Here's a video of Senator Whitehouse kicking a puppy.", that's unhelpful. I don't know if this actually happens.
It's normally the former. But even when on the rare occasion it's the latter, so what? If a politician doesn't want voters to react in horror to a video of him kicking a puppy, he shouldn't kick puppies, and if he does kick puppies he should own it. More generally, I am much more suspicious of candidates who want to suppress true information or persuasive arguments regarding themselves, than I am of the organisations who want to bring it forward.
Interesting throughout, though too dry to "win". From my German view: a) Bismarck said:"Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made." really famous quote here. b) many votes in parliament are secret, but mostly they are strictly along party-lines. Which is fine as we vote for parties, not politicians, really. Following voting patterns of a single politician seems pointless - his party will take care, undoubtedly. - c) Rarely only (abortion/euthanasia), a vote is declared "free" - and the CDU-guy may vote NO while his party leader votes YES. And the SPD-lady YES. Even then, the vote is usu. secret. - d) Most fun are moments, when all in a party/coalition vowed to vote YES - and one defects anonymously (Heide Simonis in 2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heide_Simonis ) Or an unloved candidate overplays her hand: Andrea Ypsilanti (the dissenters were pushed to take a handy-pic of their vote to proof they did not secretly dissent. They did then choose to dissent publicly as well.) - Seems Bismarck was kinda right all along.
"the agenda that I’m trying to push with this post."
I'm glad the reviewer admits to having an agenda; this is more transparent for them than however they are serving the book, which they admit doesn't help the point they want to make.
The issue with transparency, or the lack of it, is that:
(1) We've had non-transparent public voting. We've seen how that goes, from rotten boroughs to the scene Dickens exaggerates about the election in Eatanswill:
"In this chapter, Mr. Pickwick and his friends visit the town of Eatanswill while it is in the throes of an election. The two political parties are the "Blues" and the "Buffs," each party being represented by a partisan newspaper. The town populace is divided equally between the parties, and the agents for the candidates use all their wiles, including bribery and drink and other underhanded means, to win votes from townspeople in the opposing camp.
...After the speeches of the two candidates were given, each promising his utmost to do everything in his power to benefit Eatanswill, the mayor called for a show of hands and declared the Honourable Samuel Slumkey the winner. Mr. Fizkin demanded a poll which then took place amid much frenzy and inebriation. Ultimately, the Honourable Samuel Slumkey was indeed declared the victor."
"The young radical Charles Dickens sums up his derisive attitude towards electioneering even in the name of the fictitious East Anglian borough holding the bye-election: Eatanswill (eat-and-swill). The twenty-year-old former parliamentary reporter's take on the nation's much trumped up representative democracy involves underscoring its follies, rather than, like Hogarth's scathingly satirical scenes in The Humours of an Election (1754-55), exposing its hypocrisy and immorality. As Bruce Kinzer states regarding the continuity of dubious election practices after the passage of the Great Reform Bill in 1832, "Heightened party conflict and the persistence of bribery and treating (plying electors with food and drink) meant that the cost of contesting elections remained high", ensuring that the wealthy (the traditional aristocracy and the newly rich industrial capitalists) would continue to control election outcomes."
The secret ballot is also open to accusations of fraud, ballot stuffing and the like, but at least we've tried the opposite method and we know why it doesn't work.
(2) It's not following Congress or the Dáil or Parliament that is the problem. People know about the laws getting passed, or not passed, as they come to affect them. Televised proceedings are transparent and have shown how few representatives bother to turn up, how long-winded and technical the proceedings are, and how honestly it really is boring to watch the sausage being made.
We also know about "the room where it happens", the "smoke-filled back rooms" and so on, where we the public assume most of the dealing is done. We know about lobbyists and special interests. We know about the pork barrel, and most of us don't mind that so long as our town gets jobs and money out of it, and to heck with the rest of the country.
People are rather suspicious of local representatives that get elected and then decide, once they arrive in Congress or the Dáil or Parliament, that their job is to be statesmen and look after the good of the nation and worry about their place in history. We voted you in to look after us first.
The problem is that we don't get to see the room where it happens, where the deals are done. Then outrage happens when scandals about cosy arrangments and 'tit for tat' deals where I scratch your back and you scratch mine and one hand washes another. Outrage about the Covid parties (and that happened in most countries, it looks like) where the general public were being cajoled, coerced, lectured and forbidden from free movement or association, where you couldn't go visit your sick granny in the hosital, where you had to stay masked in separate rooms and be treated as the next thing to a leper if you tested positive. Meanwhile, our leaders who imposed such restrictions were packing in the tables close together for their supporters (meaning the moneybags donors) at parties and celebrations and functions to beat the band, because the rules are only for the little people.
They forget that they are public representatives, which means servants of the public. They are voted in to represent us and our interests, and they are our employees. They don't get to go for "I went for a drive to test my eyesight" in the middle of a lockdown they agitated for, and that in this case it was unelected advisors who did it was really stoking the outrage.
SPADS, special advisors, little friends - all the unelected ones with the whore's prerogative:
There's enough of that already, without giving even more anonymity and lack of accountability to them.
See the recent mini-scandal about the national public broadcaster in my country, which is funded by a combination of public money (the licence fee) and advertising revenue. It eventually came out that at least one of the 'stars' (in their own inflated opinions) was being paid over and above the public salary figures given out, and that there was a lot of under the table money being passed around (e.g. the five grand for flip-flops).
I very much doubt he's the only one, and it's likely this was going on for years. The people involved all treated it as their own little club where they paid off each other, and didn't even consider their fiscal responsibility. And it would still be going on if it hadn't been exposed mostly by accident.
*This* is why the unwashed masses want transparency: because you can't trust any of the bastards.
1. The people get a secret vote while the legislators must be public because the legislators are the servants of the people and not the other way around. Would you hire someone and allow a stipulation that you could not check on their work?
2. The policy for large lobbyists now is to pay all sides to gain influence. They have enough money and there are few enough legislators to do this. They likely will pay one side more - so they can say to the other, "If you move towards me I will change this." This will not change by adding secrecy.
3. Proportional representation just makes it harder to get rid of legislators, because they're then (partially or wholly) picked from a list of party hacks, rather than politicians who actually have to get out amongst the people and can be fired by concentrated effort. Their job is then to satisfy the party only.
Having working on the Hill in the late 70s, I have some fly on wall knowledge another aspect of secrecy in "negotiation" - the horse trading and the whipping process.
The book seems to focus on the legislative branch. I wonder about the judicial process. US is essentially the only country in world with grand jury process and it's secrecy. (Maybe Liberia too?). I'm conflicted.
At trial juries deliberate in secret, but may be polled after verdict to confirm unanimity.
Settlement negotiations and plea deal negotiations are done in secret.
I detest settlements that are sealed.
I'm not sure how I feel about cameras in courtrooms, but I think that courtrooms must be open to the public. I do appreciate live audio access. Audio access seems to give the necessary transparency without the spectacle.
Isn't political equality the assumption that swallows the argument? With the right definition of political equality, one could justify virtually any system of government!
I don't think this fully grapples with the logic behind the secret ballot. Look around the world (starting around the time nominal republics came to displace unconstitutional monarchies) and see how often a single political party or dictator gets entrenched in power. Without a secret ballot it's very hard for anyone to "vote the bastards out"*, as they will be punished by the incumbent. It's true that politicians today may feel "terror" at the hands of voters, but it's not comparable to the threat governments can impose on their citizens and it hasn't resulted in a single party being dominant.
*That requirement is why Popper rejected proportional representation in favor of first-past-the-post.
> Some are highly articulate and can shape political discourse around their ideas. It would be undesirable and probably impossible to try to deny outsized influence to thought leaders.
The Athenians would disagree, hence sortition.
> The legislator can promise up and down to vote in favor of that amendment, but will have no way to actually prove it. With no way to verify that the exchange took place, the lobbyist would soon give up.
A legislator who has announced his retirement is ending the iterated game described and cannot receive more campaign contributions or "bank" more reputation by doing lobbyist bidding. Studies have been done on how such legislators behave in their last term. Garett Jones is aware of them. Is Kogelmann?
I don't see what proportional representation has to do with the Philadelphia Convention. Political parties as we know them know didn't really exist back then, so there were no parties to be proportionally represented. The fact that the right to vote wasn't extended nearly as far back then as it is now is entirely separate from how those votes translate into representatives.
> Transparency is supposed to increase trust in government, but according to this study by Pew [url], trust in government did not increase and arguably decreased after the 1970s transparency reforms.
This reminds me of Matt Yglesias on the media: many people falsely believe the media was more trustworthy in the past, though we know now they deliberately kept the public in the dark about many things. It's just that now with the rise in transparency & decline in gatekeepers we get more info on media (and government) failings.
And once one inculcates that it's hard to maintain democratic idealism (related to what Dan Klein calls the "Romance of the People"). But you can't dissolve the people to replace them with another, and it's hard to reform a democratic system to be deliberately less democratic (perhaps 10%, per Garett Jones). The proposed reform of secrecy here would seem to remove the actual purported benefit of democracy, in which case one could just go to 0%.
You can have proportional representation regardless of parties, as in the Irish system. People vote for individual candidates in a multi-seat constituency. They can be party members or independents. Votes from eliminated candidates - or excess votes gained by elected candidates - go to the next candidate on the list. You can vote 1, 2, 3... for as many candidates as you care to.
Obviously party members tend to do well when it comes to vote transfers between them, but the basic system is independent of parties, whatever form they take.
I think ranked choice is way better. PR can devolve into endless coalitions that give power to the swing factions to advance their favourite cause. The Green Party in Germany arguably got to kill nuclear due to this system
Ranked ballots should allow independents and alternative parties to exist as more than rare exceptions while tending to maintain clear winners who have fuller agency and are clearly responsible for their policies
Seems incredibly naive to think that the problem of lobbying could be solved by simply closing meetings. Lobbyists would still have relationships with the reps, would receive reports from their friends on the substance of closed sessions, and of course, can still observe the outcomes, for just a couple objections that would seem to be enough to nullify the argument.
I found this very unconvinciing. Lots of comments above have already noted that lobbyists/insiders generally would quickly figure out which legislators vote which way, but I don't think anyone has very explicitly mentioned the reason: there are very few of them. When there are only a few hundred votes up for grabs, experienced political actors literally tally every one. That doesn't happen in constituencies with tens of thousands of voters (though beware, big data will figure it out, and may already know how you vote).
The whole lobbying/special interest groups argument just seems very naive. The book/review author seem to think that if the special interest group have some difficulty identifying exactly who voted on which bill because of a secret ballot, that they will just pack up and go home? Why? Even the analogy with the secret ballot for elections doesn't support this idea. Do politicians not campaign because they are unable to identify which way specific voters vote? No, they just campaign in a slightly different way...
I think the idea of enabling legislators to speak more freely is misconceived as well. I don't want my legislator to speak freely. I want her to be tightly constrained by the requirements of truth, specialist knowledge, and representing my interest. In particular, I don't want my vote for a legislator to mean that that person can go to Westminster/Washington and do what the hell she likes. I see the voters as hiring a legislator for specific job, and she should not be speaking outside the bounds of that job.
I dunno, this rubbed me up the wrong way all over... which perhaps means that I should spend some time thinking harder about it. Maybe there's something there that I'm missing.
I disagree with the claim that the reason citizens elect representatives is because of their difference in opinion. I want my representatives to make decisions on issues where I have no opinion because I don't have the time or expertise to form one (like "What interest rate should the central bank have?"), but on issues where I do have an opinion, and there is therefore a possibility for differing opinions, I mostly would prefer they agree with me. This isn't perfect, and I acknowledge probably some of my opinions are wrong, but the first factor (them having opinions where I don't) is much more important.
Generally, this post had some interesting points, but I forgot it was even meant to be a book review until the last paragraph.
Don't know how this one made the finals, they admit they didn't even finish the book.
>and their every action is extensively documented.<
If this is true, then we know exactly who is lobbying them and how, it'll all be there in the documents.
>Kogelmann argues that we should reject the intuitive appeal of promissory representation because it will inevitably lead to pandering: politicians supporting policies they know to be bad or ineffective because of popular support.<
This is, of course, the heart of the entire argument; we should increase opacity so that we can ignore the desires of the citizens we dislike. All the nonsense about lobbyists is sleight of hand.
>terrorism is an even more effective tactic than bribery. Instead of making a contribution to a legislator to try to get an amendment added, the lobbyist can instead threaten to donate to a primary challenger<
Telling the store owner if they don't refund you you'll be shopping elsewhere; you know, terrorism.
>In theory, proportional representation should reduce the legitimacy gap. If any viewpoint large enough to constitute a minor political party is given at least one seat at the table, we have good reason to believe that that viewpoint will be considered in debate. <
No you don't. Why would you? You just said women and slaves were ignored in the Philadelphia Convention, and they surely had more people holding their viewpoint than your imagined one-seat party. Or is the argument that the one seat will be able to tell everyone that they were ignored? You know; transparency?
> You just said women and slaves were ignored in the Philadelphia Convention, and they surely had more people holding their viewpoint than your imagined one-seat party.
But they had zero seats at the Convention, right? That's the whole point? I'm confused about your objection here.
> Or is the argument that the one seat will be able to tell everyone that they were ignored? You know; transparency?
I think this idea is described favourably in the OP as "testimonial accountability".
> The implication seems to be the group is too large to ignore now.
Hmm, okay, I don't see that implication. I interpret "viewpoint large enough to constitute a minor political party" as just a minimum size requirement, to avoid having to include super-tiny fringe groups. That is, it's not "too large to ignore", it's "large enough to be worth addressing".
This strikes me as the old problem of comparing an imperfect implementation of one system to a perfect theory of another. I cannot imagine a world where sufficiently motivated lobbyists couldn't discover or predict how their legislators voted. In such a system we've just introduced yet another inequity between interest groups and the general public.
As other posters have written, the comparisons to the pre and post-1970s are laughable. So many things changed during that time period that you can't show causation this way. Also, having a few committee votes be secret is very different than the kind of total secrecy the book seems to be advocating.
The basic assumption here that evil (?) moneyed interests can only influence legislators by rewarding or punishing them for votes is false. In general, people with money can influence politics in many ways. George Soros got a lot of soft on crime DAs elected, just by contributing to their election campaigns. On the right, the Koch brothers have done similar things. Basically, if voters can choose to vote for candidates based on "the kind of people they are" then people with money can choose to donate based on that as well.
In general, I would expect high-status people to learn all the "secrets" anyway. There are hundreds of people in the legislature, and each of those people has a small army of staffers, IT techs, whatevers. If you can convince even one of those hundreds (maybe thousands) of people to spill the beans about what someone said in the supposedly secret session, all the benefits of secrecy evaporate. We could very easily end up in a situation where titans of industry and the head of the FBI know how all the congressmen voted, but the general public does not. Seems pretty dystopian to me.
In general, I think people overestimate the dangers of "money in politics" and underestimate the dangers of the creeping hollowing out of democratic institutions in favor of bureaucratic ones. We already live in a hybrid system where the director of the SEC can wage a private war on cryptocurrency with nary a voter or a new law in sight. Similar things could be said for many agencies, especially the intelligence ones. Rather than worrying about money in politics, we should worry about whether Congress is even relevant in 2023.
This is a very good case for choosing a legislature by sortition, so that they can legitimately deliberate in secret like a jury. It is a terrible case for secret deliberations by elected representatives: it will select for a group of legislators even more sociopathic than the ones we have, people who are unusually adept at hiding their true preferences and blaming others for their misdeeds. Proportional representation is a very poor substitute for sortition here, since it still empowers political parties, and success within a party will still be unrelated to actual voting behavior and thus select for the same kinds of sociopaths. The root of the problems he is trying to address is the badness of elections: either making elections less bad, or making government less dependent on elections, are promising solutions, but making elections worse by removing electoral accountability is not.
Secrecy would not stop lobbying or even slow it down much. As this review notes, lobbyists care more about the amendment process than the final vote. The lobbyists are totally certain who introduced their amendment, because they're the ones who wrote the amendment and gave it to the congressman!
I'll give another example from my personal experience. I'm a bureaucrat who has no power whatsoever to make independent decisions: everything I do must be approved by a political appointee. And yet I get lobbied constantly, because the lobbyists know from my job title that I must be the one who talks to the political appointee about certain issues.
Another one to add to already large pile of Americans trying to come up with a better way of doing democracy while studiously ignoring the fact that many other democracies both, (A) already exist, and, (B) already do it better.
This one at least briefly mentioned the possibility of proportional representation, but then had to throw in a comment about how it was still, apparently, a matter of debate as to whether that is better than first past the post. That made me think: how many states have moved from FPP to PR, and how many have switched in the other direction? I can't think of a single case of the latter (I don't think Greece's bonus system counts as FPP), but dozens of the former.
The last is a very interesting argument, but it doesn't necessarily mean that PR is better than FPP. It could also just mean that it's very hard to switch from FPP to PR, and not quite so hard to switch into the other direction.
Arguably, PR does not work very well in countries like Italy or Israel because they have such a huge number of tiny political parties that it is very hard to form coalitions. Once you are in this situation, it's impossible to switch away from it, since you need some small parties to agree, and they would have to agree to their own doom.
It's a little like unanimous votes. Almost everyone agrees that it's extremely bad for the EU that most votes need to be unanimous among all countries. But it's impossible to change because you would need an unanimous vote on that, and there are already too many members to ever achieve that.
After I posted that I asked ChatGPT about it and it pointed me towards Italy, which did, to significant degree but not completely, switch back towards a nearly FPP system, but the Constitutional Court eventually threw it out.
Israel raised the minimum percentage threshold to enter parliament to reduce the number of minor parties and it worked. They raised it three times in fact, so it now sits at 3.25%, a fairly sensible number. Another way to do it would be to set a maximum number of parties that can be in parliament; I'd recommend it be eight.
The EU introduced qualified majority voting, successfully getting rid of the requirement for unanimity on a wide variety of questions, proving that it can be done.
Thanks, I wasn't aware of the reforms in Italy and Israel. So perhaps I am a bit too pessimistic about changing those systems. Though the results seem to be mixed at best. Both Israel and Italy currently still have 12 parties in their parliament, which seems very much to me, and it does not seem less than before the reform. The Israelian government clearly suffers from the large number of parties in the current (and previous) coalition. In Italy it seems a lot more stable at the moment. So perhaps the reform did help there.
For the EU, you are right that qualified votes have been extended to a lot more areas in 2014, so yes, it can be done sometimes.
Israel only elected 10 parties. Two were added after the election, presumably from splitting. I think this is a bit unfair to blame on the election system. But, yes, 10 is still a bit too many. Maybe they could raise the threshold to 4%, which I believe is the most common setting for it.
Of the latest Italian election only 8 parties got proportional seats (one party only a single seat via that method) and 2 others only got seats via the direct FPP part of the election (each time only a single seat).
The Italian election system history is distressingly complicated...
>Israel raised the minimum percentage threshold to enter parliament to reduce the number of minor parties and it worked.
Worked in what way? Certainly not in terms of the number of lists entering the parliament. (And I say lists, not parties, because the lists can be agreed upon by coalitions of parties, so the number of distinct organizations in Knesset might have just as well actually increased.) (Of course the real goal of raising the threshold was assumedly to keep the Arabs out - which didn't work either.)
Sorry, I wrote that badly. I meant to say that they attempted to raise the electoral threshold and succeeded in doing so three times. This clearly demonstrates that it can be done, which was the point I was trying to refute.
Yes, they'd need to go a bit higher to reduce the number of parties further. Israel is uncommonly fragmented in its society and I'd suggest that it represents the worst case scenario for making PR work.
It's somewhat hard to imagine what Israel would look like under FPP given that it doesn't use any electoral districts at the moment and also given the settlement situation and also given the many minority groups I imagine drawing districts would be a nightmare.
It's also humorous to see this arcane term "first past the post" thrown around as if it's some specific, obscure method of voting, and not just "the literal definition of voting." In common parlance, when one says "Let's take a vote on it", it's *always* implied that it's a "first-past-the-post" vote. Because that is always what voting has meant, for all of history, until about 5 minutes ago. But you don't want that to be the case, so you use an obscure term to 'other' the concept of voting itself. No. Voting is when you vote on something and the thing with the majority of votes wins - always.
And of course new voting systems would rarely be overturned, because the people who got elected using the new system obviously benefit from it and wouldn't allow the old system to return.
There is also no benefit to other systems, because they all inevitably turn into the same two ideological-party system in the end (see e.g. any number of European countries with the typical setup of "one, or at most two conservative parties that always vote together, vs. the liberal party + labor party + green party + social democrat party + socialist party + communist party that always vote together.
I lived through my country, New Zealand, switching from the old system to a PR one and the old system was very consistently called FPP to distinguish it.
Three separate referenda were held at various times putting FPP and PR against each other in a very clear and simple ballot. There were only two options: FPP or PR. And, under this "ancient and honourable method of voting" that very same "ancient and honourable method of voting" lost every single time!
So what do you do now? Discard it because it produced the wrong result?!
What has happened is that the two old main parties are still big enough that they can change back to the old system unilaterally, but they choose not to do that because it would be a very unpopular action for them to take.
And if you think there is no real change anyway then it shouldn't bother you what electoral system is used. Personally I think the change it quite significant.
I think the third and best choice is FPP with ranked ballots. Stable and clearly accountable governments from FPP and the ability of third parties and independents to challenge them without strategic voting to interfere
Ranked ballots kill partisan incentives. In Alberta I recall a ranked ballot Progressive Conservative leadership vote where #1 and #2 initiated a dogfight between them. Everyone put #3 as their second choice and they easily won when the second place candidate's votes went to him
In contrast I think PR still allows lots of room for partisanship for its own sake as well as choosing special interest policies that give you a secure base
Lo and behold, the same 'tribe' pushing for these alternative voting systems gets their new voting system put in place and... immediately uses it to seize power for their political party - against the wishes of the majority of the electorate, 58% of which would have preferred someone from the other party.
Lots of countries have "these alternative voting systems" and none of them are dominated by one party winning all the time. Any advantage, if it even happens at all, is quickly washed away.
Ok, I read the article now and it contradicts your point. It says that she would have won under a plurality system anyway. However while reading it I recalled how that election actually went and I see your point. I still don't agree with it though: it really seems to me that Alaskans showed their inexperience and lack of understanding of the new system by not casting second preference votes. They likely wont make that mistake again.
Alaska also tried really hard to make a ranked voting system as messed up as it possibly could. I've never seen another like it. The first ballot could end up with thousands of names on it in the future if people feel like messing with it, that's not good design.
Nah, it's perfeclty clear that Alaskans showed their understanding of the new system by, e.g., casting second-preference votes for a Democratic candidate, and he's pissed about that, because instead of a poll in which a majority vote wins, he'd like some kind of party-list system in which the Republican party is entitled to Nick Begich's votes.
I'm not trying to be sardonic here, his position here just literally is the exact reverse of the position he took half-a-day earlier. My suspicion is, he's intellectually committed to neither. His posts start making much more sense once you assume he's simply committed to his in-group (which, I don't know, somewhere on the right, far far on the right where you literally cannot see a difference between liberals and communists), wants an electoral system that delivers wins to his in-group, and believes the current one does that, while any proposed changes to it are evil plots to take those wins away.
Yeah, that's probably the case. Alaskan Republicans are not really like other Republicans, being more independently minded. I also checked the numbers and not really enough people failed to mark a second choice on their ballot to make a difference if they had.
The third placed candidate withdrawing from the second round was also very destabilising and unusual, another symptom of poor election design.
Unfortunately Americans in general are very reluctant to look beyond their borders for possible solutions so they have to relearn everyone else's mistakes the hard way. Still it has been great to see a bunch of these new election systems take root at the state level around America, long may that trend continue, after all the status quo is not delivering popular outcomes.
Anyway, you seem to be interested in election systems; I dug up an old comment I made about how the US election system ended up so weird and just now posted it to my Substack. Perhaps you'd like to read it:
>Voting is when you vote on something and the thing with the majority of votes wins - always.
Well, not always, for example not in FPTP. And not in representative democracy, which is precisely why the issue of whether the composition of the elected body is proportional to the electoral vote arises in the first place.
>In common parlance, when one says "Let's take a vote on it", it's *always* implied that it's >a "first-past-the-post" vote
Yes, we all fondly remember that when we had to pick where to go for class dinner, we would divide the class in subgroup, and the option supported by the majority of the subgroups (rather than the majority of the voters) would be the winning one. Also, those whose idea happened to win the first time had the faculty to unilaterally re-determine the groups, and to tailor their composition such that their proposals would win even when opposed by a clear majority of voters.
I swear, lots of anti-left comments on this blog are pure "Charlie Brown had hoes" stuff
I am a huge fan of the political system of Switzerland, and obscurity is one of their main (and unconventional) political principles. It's called "Kollegialitätsprinzip" (principle of collegiality) and says that the government confers secretly, and after their decision all members of the government need to stand in for this decision towards the public.
This is much more remarkable than it would be in other countries because Switzerland does not have coalitions, but rather the government is formed jointly by all major political parties, from left-wing over liberals to the far right-wing.
It's not 100% obscure. For example, each member of the government has a department where they have to be the active part, work out laws, negotiate with the parliament etc., and you usually know how they think about questions concerning their own department. But in general the principle is respected and makes the government much more obscure than in other countries like Germany or the UK.
I have never paid too much attention to this principle of the Swiss system (there are a LOT more unusual and remarkable quirks), but the review made me update that it might be more important than I thought.
This was a deliberate decision, and does make sense. In Switzerland there are a moderate right-wing and a far-right party, but only one left-wing party in the government. (On federal level.) I was referring to those concrete parties.
In principle, a far-left party does exist in Switzerland ("Alternative Liste"), but it is too small to be represented in the government. (The government only has 7 members.) It is represented in some regional governments.
If I ask Sen Senny to add rattlesnake protections to the law, then I can verify the modification is in the law, even if all meetings and votes are secret. Only the law has to be public.
While I enjoyed reading this, I’m surprised the author of this review resorts to “see correlation? causation!” and seems to totally omit the potential that members of a secret convention wishing to push their agenda would be incentivized to record AND leak recordings from these conventions, if not to the public then at least to the SIGs and elite...which destroys much of the proposed benefits. The essay pushes secrecy as a solution (and there’s merit in trying!), but it does so without discussing or thinking through what new equilibrium might manifest and mitigations one could take.
"Important for the current discussion, political equality does not seem to be realized in many modern democracies (despite very high levels of transparency). The classic example of this is the 2014 paper by Gilens and Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” in which the authors demonstrate that legislators in the United States are highly responsive to the preferences of interest groups and economic elites, but essentially unresponsive to the preferences of average citizens. "
There are at least three scholars from reputable institutions who claim to have refuted this conclusion (link below). I haven't looked into it closely to see who's right or wrong, but I did have a similar objection of my own: the opinions of regular people and elites are highly correlated, so wouldn't you come to the conclusion that elite opinions don't matter if you control for popular support and then plot elite support vs. probability of legislative success, rather than controlling for elite support and then plotting popular support vs. probability of success? The original authors don't do this (as far as I can tell), even though it's an obvious thing to try
I think secret ballots in the legislative -- paraphrase-able as "The thing which is wrong with Congress is that it is not like Among Us" -- are a terrible idea.
Everyone in Congress wants to advance their own career to some degree, if you don't play to win, you will probably not go much further than a leaflet distributor in politics. At any time, the percentage of Congresspersons whose own career is optimally advanced by making the notional majority succeed is less than 50%. The opposition has the incentive to make the other party fail fast and fail hard. But the backbenchers of the party with the majority would also personally benefit from a spectacular failure ascribed to their party leaders, which will open up prestigious positions for them (if they can hang onto their seat while the voters punish their party).
The rational thing would be to vote against the interests of your own constituents. If your supporters are strongly pro-NRA or pro choice or anything like that, nothing will drive them to the ballot boxes like new laws against their pet interests.
If you don't have attribution to bad decisions (like failure to pass any budget bills), the only thing the voters can do is collectively is replacing all of the legislative. The quality of the legislators will probably change for the worse during each such replacement. After two iterations, I would expect you will mostly get demagogues campaigning on burning the system down.
My model of politics is that during election season, candidates make promises to both the voters and their donors, which may be at odds. The book review makes it sound like a forgone conclusion that when you remove outcome based incentives, the politicians will defect in their alliance with their donors instead of defecting in their alliance with the voters. Call my cynical, but I am doubtful about that. Even when the donors can not control how they vote, they still get preferred access. If you have a diffuse public good on the one hand (like curbing climate change), while you have a very concrete human interest on the other hand (like your golf buddy who worries about the economical sustainability of his company which employs thousands of your constituents), it is very human to pick the concrete particular interest (it is not like climate change killed anyone you know personally, and anyhow the fraction of CO2 emissions your buddy is responsible for will not make a difference anyhow).
"Anticipatory representation", where the smallfolks vote for the incumbent administration if life is good and against them if life is bad is also available to the special interests. Lobbyists can simply reward outcomes instead of voting patterns. The 1%er Interest Group could simply commit to rewarding all the representatives if their tax cuts bill passes. This would be twice as costly for them as just rewarding the ones who voted for them, and also remove the individual selection advantage of corrupt representatives, but still allows for the creation of a misalignment between the personal incentives and the overall effect on the electorate.
The idea that any plenary debate can actually be aimed at finding consent seems absurd. If you have a few hundreds participants, everything remotely interesting will get leaked.
Like presidential debates, college debates and talk shows, parliamentary debates are performed solely for the benefit of the audience. I am somewhat sympathetic to the argument that they are largely obsolete in the age of youtube and podcasts.
The bonmot that "Laws[ ...] like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made" from 1869 feels as true today as it was back then. The horsetrading needed to pass laws a la "I will support your special interest law if you later support mine" is obviously not happening on public record, because such backroom deals -- which I would argue are centrally where the future of the law is decided -- will obviously happen with the smallest viable number of participants.
Of all the suggestions made by this book review, I could maybe get behind the idea to make congressional committee deliberations non-public. I doubt it would help much with big lobbyists figuring out what goes on, though. As the saying goes, three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. If you have instead a comittee of a few dozens, you only have to have a few informants (who are unaware of the identity and number of other informants) to be kept up to date.
The issue here is there are three conceptions of what representative democracy’s trying to achieve, and opacity only makes sense for one of them (my made-up names:
1) Substitute Direct Democracy: The ideal is that the policies and laws that are enacted are those which would win a referendum. Direct Democracy on that level is impractical for whatever reason (could be too much going on, equally could be “no one has the time to learn about all this stuff”) so representative democracy is a good enough for government work substitute for either public opinion, or what public opinion would be if the public knew more (but had the same beliefs and preferences).
2) Selective Democracy: We want the best people to make laws, and we want everyone to have a say in selecting the best people.
3) Corporatist Democracy: Different parts of society want different things and have different interests, but we only have one government. The solution is a grand bargain where different groups compromise and get the things they most care about (eg. farmers get price floors in exchange for fishermen getting protective quotas and factory workers getting safety regulations - all of them are a minority on their own so in a direct democracy they’d be sunk). Some of them also have contradictory interests. In parliament, their representatives can all meet up to hammer out a deal. This is much more European than Anglo-Saxon and I’m only including it for completeness, but the US has historically done it to a limited extent between regions.
Opacity is really an argument for 2 over 1; lobbyists will get around it fairly easily, but the public won’t. That means representatives don’t have to pander to voters/can listen to experts/can meaningfully debate and convince each other, which 1 doesn’t want but 2 does (3 probably doesn’t either, but it assumes a different sort of electorate who only/predominantly care about getting their specific priorities). Opacity (which was really killed by the internet, not sunshine laws) is probably the easiest way to shift towards 2, but longer terms, 1-term limits and possibly either indirect elections or approval voting might also work. The main thing would be a cultural shift towards people wanting 2 instead of 1.
My biases are entirely in favour of conception 1, so if I’ve undersold 2 or 3 then I apologise.
Among the many problems with the proposed system, is that it is based on a simplistically narrow misunderstanding of how lobbying works.
Lobbyists do not simply talk to congressmen and offer them thinly-disguised bribes for votes, whether floor or committee. They also talk to congressional *staff*, both personal and committee. Talk to them, take them out to expense-account lunches, offer to do their homework for them with carefully-prepared white papers on whatever subject those staffers are rushing to become experts in, and offering them high-paying lobbying jobs when their staff term is over.
This is a path to real influence that doesn't require "bribing" congressmen. But it is also a path to *intelligence*. One staffer might not tell a lobbyist everything, might even lie to protect his boss's interests. But talk to a dozen, and you'll know what you need to know. Including who voted for what, if it matters.
The most likely outcome of a "secret" government, is one that is still transparent to lobbyists and other powerful interests, but hidden from the voters. I vote "no".
There's a hell of a lot of discussion of the USA here, but there are other countries in the world and it would seem informative to examine how they address these issues - eg. proportional representation is the status quo in many countries
All your ways of mitigating costs are flawed. Anticipatory legislation doesn't work since people don't know which politicians are voting for the bad thing, and which ones are voting for the right thing. And if things stay bad, they can't tell whether flipping back would make things worse or not, because they have no idea what their elected representative is doing.
Gyroscopic legislation doesn't work since people don't know whether those archetypes will actually votes in those interests. And it would be very profitable for special interest groups to prop up someone in those archetypes who will actually vote against what people suggest.
And this hope that special interest groups won't find out who's defecting seems naive. As another commenter suggested, they can test bribing different groups for different outcomes to test for defections. Hell, a large part of the work special interest groups do is achieved by them directly convincing representatives, not just bribing votes in ways the politicians disagree with.
So many things changed in around 1970 that tying them all to this increased transparency seems wholly unfounded. Do you disagree with the lead hypothesis surrounding increased crime and incarceration, and instead attribute the rise (and later fall) to increased government transparency?
If you want to stop money from influencing politics, consider just limiting donations.
There's one argument which this piece doesn't address, but is nonetheless quite important. Sometimes politicians don't see the whole picture. It's not malice, it might not even be incompetence, but it's possible to introduce legislation that affects a small and very specific minority (think people without mobile phones, people with a specific disability or condition or believers of a niche religion) in a very significant way. Even in proportional systems, it's impossible to give a seat at the table to all such tiny minorities, and even if it were, it would effectively amount to opening up the debate to anybody who is interested.
If the debate is transparent, even if 99% of citizens don't care, there are a few that do, and those few are often willing to bring the issues up. If we removed transparency for the process, we'd still have to provide some kind of summaries so that people and NGOs would know which viewpoints were considered and rejected and which genuinely were just never thought about.
One of major reasons why citizens vote in private is to save from the consequences of voting against whosoever ends up being the winner. If the citizens votes are made public, it will incentivize governments to single out the dissenters.
Really sorry, but I am not familiar with what happened with Brendan Eich. But, you are correct, if on the winning side voters can suffer consequences for their votes being public
Brendan Eich donated to the winning side of a citizen-lead ballot initiative. However, most of the people (or at least the loudest ones) in his industry were on the other side, so they lead a successful effort to get him kicked out of the company he founded.
"Some individuals have no interest in politics, and no wrong is done to them if they have less influence than individuals that are very interested in politics. "
I don't have the words to adequately express how false this is.
"If legislators voted by secret ballot, this resolution mechanism would cease to function. Say that a lobbyist makes a contribution to a legislator hoping for an amendment to be inserted into a bill. The legislator can promise up and down to vote in favor of that amendment, but will have no way to actually prove it. With no way to verify that the exchange took place, the lobbyist would soon give up."
Laughably easy to disprove. Why on earth would you suppose a lobbyist would need to rely on public/official sources for information on how votes went? We already have "secret" discussion of all three branches of government leaked to (friendly to the leaker) media and we are supposed to believe that the vote counters/observers will be incorruptible?
"The NRA operates on a similar dynamic. It spends a good deal of its time and money on the task of making sure its members are informed about one particular issue, resulting in policies that are objectively unpopular among Americans."
"I have only touched on the first three chapters of Kogelmann’s book. The rest is also interesting and worthwhile, but somewhat distracts from the agenda that I’m trying to push with this post."
This contest isn't a partial-book review, Author, nor is it a place to push agendas. On that basis I will not be voting for this review in the final tally and I encourage others to avoid doing so as well.
I was honestly astonished that a review that openly stated that made it to the finals. Absolutely agree, would never dream of voting for it on that basis alone.
Yeah, this is not a book review, just a political statement which takes ideas from a book. Whether I had agreed with the central thesis or not (I think treating lobbying as illegal bribes is a much better idea than making policy-making secret), I don't understand why this not-a-review is a finalist. Or is every review submitted a "finalist"?
I have long been an advocate of actually sequestering the legislators. If it is important enough for a jury trial, it is important enough for running the country. They should be in a fortified bunker with no communications access during session.
I feel like the take that less transparency would = less interest group influence both unlikely and not necessarily desirable.
First of all, I just find it unlikely that moneyed interests would not come up with ways of influencing legislators with secret votes. Legislators would still come from parties, because parties are one of the main ways we simplify political decision making. Interests groups could buy influence with party leadership, who still need to run and win elections, and then lean on them to elevate "true believers." This is exactly what has happened with the conservative legal movement. There's nothing to stop a given appointed judge from deciding to just become a liberal, but the Federalist society has become very effective at identifying conservative 1L's, rearing them into successful lawyers who agree with the federalist society leadership (and their donors) on >90% of issues, and then getting Republican politicians to appoint them. The same could easily happen in this kind of system.
Second, I'm not totally convinced that special interest groups having influence is a bad thing. When we say "special interest group" we think "bad," but we're all part of one interest group or another. I think the NRA is bad and corn subsidies are silly, but I'm glad that organizations like Planned Parenthood have influence in Washington and like federal grants to public transportation in the Bay Area. Reforms that made interest group influence align more closely with their relative size would be awesome (say, abolishing the senate), but I don't think eliminating influence is necessarily a good thing. I think that the idea of moving to proportional representation is essentially admitting this. You're just going from a system where lobbyists represent groups and lean on legislator to one where the lobbyists are the legislators. Like, instead of the UAW paying a guy a bunch of money to get Hakeem Jeffries to like their bill, they spend a bunch of getting him elected and then he argues for the bill in committee? Maybe that's better, but I honestly don't think its substantially different.
Identity-based representation makes the problem of gerrymandering much worse, and also disadvantages younger voters who are much less likely to have someone like them in congress.
Also even if you fix the problem of congressionals voting for *corporation's* interests, you exacerbate the problem of them voting in their *own* interests. You don't need to lobby a congressperson if they have stock in your company.
Transparency is bad - secrecy is better - what? The point of transparency is so that interested parties can at least have some possibility of understanding what is really going on in terms of legislative operations.
Nor is the author's/reviewer's understanding of how money corrupts politics, well based in reality. It isn't any one thing - it is everything. For the top tier - throw money on both sides of the donkey/elephant divide. For the next tier - focus on on side. For the next tier down - focus on key states/senators. etc etc.
It isn't just about votes either. Money also brings in consultants ranging from staffers to "free" help pre-writing bills (see ACA).
Hot take - would a more secret system as proposed work better if there was transparency in how often politicians voted contrary to their public statements? So - we know when politicians frequently lie, but we don't know how they vote on individual committee decisions and in votes on legislation?
"In order for citizens to hold legislators accountable for their actions, citizens must follow congress, which they do not do."
"Removing the audience allows participants to make mistakes more freely and eliminates the incentive to pontificate and grandstand instead of discussing substantive issues."
These two ideas seem to be in opposition to one another. Either citizens don't care enough to follow the process, or they care too much to get anything done. What gives? I think the way Congressional debate happens in practice takes advantage of both ideas. It's a forum for addressing the public if you're Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Jesse Jackson, AOC, etc. What better place to gain a public name for yourself and ascend to higher office than to blast your principles as broadly as possible.
Alternately, you can bury seemingly important bills in a lot of parliamentary procedure or discussion of minor amendments that you expect to be defanged before passage anyway. While everyone is debating the $5 million amendment that changes a minor point on abortion or guns or whatever, virtually no discussion focuses on the other 1,000 line items from the $2T bill. If ever someone asks why some provision that shunts millions of dollars to ~20 wealthy families for the next 5 years, there will be some minor amendment that an AOC or MTJ can introduce to distract the public.
This means the things that are discussed are either 1.) too idealized/polemic to implement as policy directly, or 2.) too boring to care about. The intent is to only have the public pay attention when you actually want them to pay attention - and to use the spotlight to distract the public and thereby manipulate the effect of 'transparency'.
Yet we still have lots of laws getting passed, and many of them clearly involve complicated debates and compromises. But if Congress is all a big show, where are the debates happening? At dinners/parties/etc. outside the official halls of Congress. In other words, Washington will find a way to deliberate in secret no matter what sunshine policies we put in place. Does it really matter whether that debate happens in a fancy building built by the public or in a fancy building built by private individuals?
I'm not convinced any of the policies proposed would have a measurable impact.
This is an interesting, if somewhat biased, review of what looks to me like a deeply impractical solution.
Being that there is nothing new under the Sun, and to counteract our tendency to focus on things most recent, it would be useful to consider historical precedent in any discussion of various governmental system models.
Before looking at alternatives we first need to enumerate the key performance indicators to serve as the basis for evaluation. The ones most often heard today are GDP growth, economic inequality, and, less often, national security. This is natural because these KPIs are measurable and and well-known. However, an intense focus on such factors betrays a strong recency bias. In my view, the best indicator of success for a system is its longevity, because longevity implies ability to successfully compete and withstand shocks. Let us consider the most prominent examples.
The system that was most often used by our species would appear to be autocracy. After all, it had persisted for the vast majority of recorded history. Still, a closer look should undermine what might appear to be a strong record informs us that individual autocratic polities tended to have much shorter lives, persisting frequently for mere decades. The most notable exceptions thrived mostly in antiquity and were such household names as the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and Roman empires. Notably, the latter two survived longer than 400 years.
A somewhat more successful system in terms of pure longevity has been what I call, for lack of a better term, an oligarchic autocracy. Under oligarchic autocracy the power of the autocrat is significantly constrained by the counterweight of subject grandees. Most of the world-historical empires were organized this way, including Egypt, China, and the Holy Roman. Their record looks impressive, but their success was generally achieved on the backs of long-suffering working populations, and they tended to be vulnerable to frequent change of dynasty and violent upheaval, leading even more suffering.
A point worth noting about the above two systems is the manner of their final dissolution. In every case an end of a long-lived autocracy was disastrous collapse, no matter what revisionist historians will try to tell you.
Direct democracy by this metric does not look good at all - Athenian being the most successful with a lifespan of only about 200 years. Representative democracy did better: the Roman republic endured for about 400 years, depending on how one counts. Both systems succumbed to elite capture before violent demise.
Less frequently discussed is the system of elective autocracy with oligarchic elements. To my knowledge there have been two, one lasting about 300 years and the other exceeding a whopping 1500. This Methuselah of governmental systems was none other than La Serenissima. From the earliest beginnings, her system consisted of a popularly elected autocratic ruler, who notionally had absolute power but in practice was usually obliged to consult with subject grandees, whose support was indispensable to his initial election. After some growing pains, and just in time for Venice’s meteoric rise, the problem of familial capture of the position was resolved, and thereafter the succession had been mostly peaceful and usually went to the best-qualified member of the elite. An important wrinkle of the system was that the doge was liable to be deposed and killed if his policies led to palpable disaster. Judging by the rarity of popular uprising, the system was generally beneficial to Venetian plebes as well, even after they effectively lost the vote. With respect to transparency, deliberations of the ruling council were notionally secret, but in reality all excision-makers were participants with complete information at their disposal.
Perhaps the winning system, should it ever become possible, would be to have an elective autocrat who is subject to deposition and execution following an annual popular vote. After all, few things concentrate the mind more effectively than threat of death. We may recoil before this notion as barbaric, but our descendants may not be so picky.
I can concede that the drawbacks of transparency sometimes outweigh the drawbacks of secrecy, possibly even most of the time.
However, that hardly means that increasing secrecy is either the best or most feasible solution to today's problems in politics. Let's consider negative ads, for instance:
> The threat is plain: step out of line, and here come the attack ads and the primary challengers
But why do negative campaign ads work in the first place? They work because a vote against my opponent is equivalent to a vote for me. So it works in countries with single-seat districting systems, especially if there is a two party system and first-past-the-post voting system... the U.S. uses all of of this! Take away the two-party system or the single-winner districts, and suddenly negative campaigning is somewhere between worthless and much less effective than positive campaigning.
It's hard to get voters to care enough about the voting system to want it changed. But since transparency (unlike first-past-the-post) is affirmatively popular with voters, It doesn't seem easier to abolish transparency than to abolish single-seat districts.
I can concede that the drawbacks of transparency sometimes outweigh the drawbacks of secrecy, possibly even most of the time.
However, that hardly means that increasing secrecy is either the best or most feasible solution to today's problems in politics. Let's consider negative ads, for instance:
> The threat is plain: step out of line, and here come the attack ads and the primary challengers
But why do negative campaign ads work in the first place? They work because a vote against my opponent is equivalent to a vote for me. So it works in countries with single-seat districting systems, especially if there is a two party system and first-past-the-post voting system... the U.S. uses all of of this! Take away the two-party system or the single-winner districts, and suddenly negative campaigning is somewhere between worthless and much less effective than positive campaigning.
It's hard to get voters to care enough about the voting system to want it changed (and when they do campaign to change it, for some reason they often ask for only a minor improvement, such as Instant Runoff Voting in single-seat districts). But since transparency (unlike first-past-the-post) is affirmatively popular with voters, It doesn't seem easier to abolish transparency than to abolish single-seat districts.
> The complete solution he proposes is proportional representation.
Does Kogelman really stress the value of opacity above that of proportional representation, as this review seems to imply? This part makes me wonder.
Watergate?
How does slavery have concentrated costs and diffuse benefits? That’s a poster-worthy example for a system that benefits very few (top slaveholders) at the expense of everyone else (much lower economic growth and of course the experience of the slave population)
I assume it led to things like cheaper cotton and sugar, which is a diffuse benefit.
High quality entertainment in the Colosseum.
Judges face less electoral competition, with SCOTUS in particular having lifetime terms after being appointed (rather than elected).
> This is actually a significant check against their power because they can’t just make a corrupt choice that can’t be justified in writing.
Isn't this what the OP/Kogelmann calls "testimonial accountability"? I'm not sure if you're actually disagreeing with OP here.
Even if legislative votes were to become secret, legislators would make it known what their preferences were and the price of their support.
For that matter, even though electoral ballots are formally secret, legislators and political parties know full well who their constituents are, who is wavering, who supports their opponents, and what the respective goals and priorities of those constituencies are.
Wouldn’t they feel a temptation to just take the money and defect, supporting their constituents instead of the bribers?
The problem is that every politician can claim they obeyed the funders, but the funders have no way of knowing.
Interesting point, but I suspect that the lobbyists would not take long to figure out who the defectors were.
If the votes were actually secret, that might be very hard to do.
You don't think the lobbyists would figure it out?
Not if you had a secure secret ballot and the legislator in question was a good lair who didn't want them to figure it out.
So the idea is that, to the degree a politician is honest, they'll either refuse to be bought or be easily caught, and to the the degree a politician is dishonest, no one will try to buy them?
I worry about a happy medium of hypocrisy, where a politician convinces themself that what's good for the lobbyist is what's good for the country, possibly aided by a generous donation or two.
If I'm buying a vote, and the vote doesn't go the way I want, I can at least figure out "one at least of the sons of bitches backstabbed me" and then I don't pay any of them a bribe ever again. If I don't know it was Joe who defected and not Bill, Tom or Erica, then I'm not paying good money to *any* of them.
The ones who stayed bought will be angry at the defector and will put pressure on them to cut it out, because without that extra recompense for their hard labour in the public interest, how are they going to pay for their love-nest for the mistress?
They might choose to vote in a way optimal for their individual stock portfolios, secretly defecting from both lobbyists and constituents.
Probably the best case scenario. This is how shareholders vote, it's how directors vote, and corporate management is much, much more effective than government management these days. When everyone's trying to max out his equity value, there's no conflict of interest.
This is just one feel you can cop from the elephant of "Democracy and the various things that pass for democracy suck and don't work."
Dealing with externality problems that are unpriced and artifically inflate equity valuations is literally one of the core functions of government, and one of the things self-interested equity-driven management not only sucks at solving but affirmatively opposes.
I think both you and Ethics Gradient have reasonable points.
"because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa." isn't horribly wrong. At least "try not to crater the whole economy" is in most everyone's interest. Still, even trying to maximize the value of a very broadly based portfolio isn't the same as trying to optimize the circumstances of the average citizen (or, the average constituent for a specific politician). Externality problems, e.g. health effects of pollution that don't show up on a balance sheet, can be quite real.
This works(ish) if politicians have their investments in a blind trust, and just want to improve the value of the Index generally. It doesn't work if they can go all-in on particular stocks and pick winners legislatively, though openness hasn't actually protected America from that exact thing, and other countries solve it by legally mandating aforementioned blind trusts.
I mean this isn’t a hard problem to solve. No one associated with a congressperson should have any financial instruments period. They should be like monks.
Yea that will limit who is interested, and that is a great thing.
"Yea that will limit who is interested, and that is a great thing."
Whether that would be an improvement seems uncertain to me. If the effect was to replace politicians motivated by bribes (or more indirect equivalent) by politicians motivated by a monomaniacal lust for power we might not wind up better off...
Yeah there is always a big danger when making revolutionary changes that you aren’t very happy with the revolution. Though our current system is so bad that it seems like it is time to roll the dice. The little bit my world overlaps with the world of lobbyists and DC belt insiders it is pretty disgusting (for instance I have an acquaintance who is a pharma lobbyist). Even in her carefully crafted internal self image she sounds like a monster, I shudder to think the reality.
"The little bit my world overlaps with the world of lobbyists and DC belt insiders it is pretty disgusting (for instance I have an acquaintance who is a pharma lobbyist). Even in her carefully crafted internal self image she sounds like a monster, I shudder to think the reality."
Aargh, that sounds appalling. Thanks very much for the view into that world!
Why stab the bribers in the back, who are the ones handing you the brown paper envelope stuffed full of cash and who are likely to consistently pay happily for your vote, rather than your constituents who are a bunch of poor, whiny, demanding ingrates who can't even understand why you need to go on that important fact-finding mission to that overseas tourist resort:
https://vtdigger.org/2012/05/14/whats-in-a-congressional-junket-plane-travel-hotels-and-meals-all-gratis/
Exactly, lobbyists are also much more likely to figure out who the defector is and change their behavior than constituents. Even if some journalist writes an expose with evidence that so and so is taking bribes from lobbiest and ignoring constitutes, the people will dismiss that as the other sides propaganda. Heck, they do that now, even with the votes public so they can't defect too much.
It would not be difficult to defeat the entire purpose behind protecting political representatives from lobbyists via secrecy. If I am trying to give $1,000 to one member of a ten-person committee, I can instead spread $100 across all ten members and do the same thing. Further, this works out very well for the whole committee, whose lobbyists are now giving to everyone. The whole board benefits!
First item on the agenda at the committee meeting: "So, everybody here got the $100 check from [Lobbyist], right? Let's make sure anything that they wouldn't like, but which we need to do, has at least one dissenting vote, so if [Lobbyist] asks, any of us could plausibly claim to have been the one who stayed bought."
"What if they meet with two or more of us at the same time?"
"Senior committee member gets first dibs on accusing [Lobbyist] of attempting to access classified documents."
Wouldn't a lobbyist with any sense withhold the majority of payment until the legislator had publicly and convincingly spoken in support of the lobbyist's side of the argument? The legislator might still defect when it came to an actual vote, but they would have had to pin their colours to the mast somewhat by making their position, or apparent position, publicly known and maybe even convincing a few other legislators to vote the way the lobbyist would want.
The idea that some commentators have expressed that "all we gotta do is 'X' and we got the problem licked!" is silly.
Sociopaths will find ways to game any system.
Of course. I never claimed it was an infallible solution, just that it might work to secure a vote but even if not it could, from the lobbyist's standpoint, have beneficial side-effects.
Two issues.
First, lobbyists may agree that their bought politician should *not* publicly support the position they will vote for. Saying "I support unreasonable subsidies for [lobbyist's position]" is a great way to not get reelected. This reduces the ability of a lobbyist to require such public statements.
Second, it's not unusual for someone in congress to truly desire a particular result but realize that it's not possible or good for that result to come about. Even if they wholeheartedly agree and say so publicly, they may feel that they have to do otherwise at the actual vote. This is actually intended by the author here, as closed door meetings are supposed to result in changed minds.
One worry is that you could have Machiavellian politicians who lie about what they suppprt to get votes.
The “gyroscopic representation” proposal solves that in a way - only vote for candidates who have been publicly committed for a long time in ways you endorse, so that they are unlikely to go against these views in secret. The evangelical Christian, or the long time union leader, or the blogger whose thoughts have been on record for decades.
Isn't that already the case? Politicians try to present a spotless record of partisanship, but it's still part of the whole "tell them what they want to hear" strategy. And there's the problem that the pressures differ at different levels. Under this proposal, running for office is asking the voters to lead you into temptation.
Another related point I recently saw discussed (https://philarchive.org/rec/NGUTIS) is that expert judgment works best when not second-guessed. When it is exercised in public, it tends to get dumbed down to the thing the non-expert would have done.
I once had a conversation with a 20yo college libertarian. He was very passionately trying to convince me that the world would be so much better if literally everything was privately owned. Private water and private air, private rivers and private oceans, private police and private military. And the argument does seem appealing, in the "streamline everything" sort of way, but only if you don’t ask any questions about any of the details.
I get the same feeling here. "If government proceedings are private, then lobbyists will have no way to know whether a senator they paid off has done what he was paid to do." Huh? This makes sense as long as you spend no more than 0 seconds thinking about it.
If you think it's obvious why it wouldn't work, you should make the argument, not just assert its obviousness. The latter doesn't really help anyone. You really can't assume that everyone will find the same things obvious as you; you should actually make the argument to point out the error.
Fair enough, that was snarky.
The simplest argument against "darkness is the best disinfectant" might be that we are already testing it. All the time. SEC investigations are largely private, and yet it’s still in bed with the financial industry. Same with many other examples of regulatory capture. FCC, FDA, FTC, you name it. (Occasional FOIA request notwithstanding)
In fact, I can’t think of one example where group A and group B are incentivised to cooperate and are prevented from doing so by too much privacy.
Plus there's always just the fact that lobbyists can run tests to find the liars. Pay off 10 senators to vote for X bill, see how many votes it gets. Pay half to vote yes on another bill, and half to vote no, see what changed, continue narrowing until you find the defector etc. Pricey sure, but it's a short-term expense.
Then it turns into a real-life game of The Resistance, with the morally conflicted politicians making occasional votes for the evil policies from lobbyists but trying to vote good when they can... In fact it actually turns into Secret Hitler.
Seems like we need a system where a vote is 5% likely to be flipped randomly. Surely that would be within the overton window.
None of those regulatory bodies face elections. They are selected by experts, who usually have ties to the industry.
But the most obvious problem with this whole proposal is that voters have no mechanism even in principle to police rampant defection by their putative representative. Why would we expect elections to have any capacity for enforcing legislative discipline instead of being pure popularity contests even more than they already are?
I think you’ve made an important point. We complain that these days the governing is done by the administrative state and not by Congress — and the Federal Register graph cited suggests that this really started ballooning when extreme transparency did. It’s as if governing *must* happen in secret, and when you turn on the light it scurries into the baseboards where you can’t see it.
There's also the phenomenon that there are many lobbyists paying all sides of a debate. This is so that they can always say "Listen to me because I've paid you."
This would not change if things were more secret than they are.
Well, there's long-running dispute here over who owns the river Blackwater. All the fishing rights are privately held, and you have to buy a licence to fish the river.
This makes good business for the various fisheries who have bought the rights and run package tours for fishermen, but the locals often get caught if trying to fish.
https://thefishingdaily.com/latest-news/youghal-fisherman-convicted-of-illegal-netting-on-04-july-2022/
So you have the State saying it's about conservation of native fish stocks, and the locals saying it's about conserving them for businesses who let outsiders fish them, and local fishermen can't make a living.
This seems like a bad example to garner sympathy for the locals, though. Overfishing fish stocks is a classic example of a tragedy-of-the-commons situation that’s actually solved by privatization and licensing. The libertarian rejoinder here is that If the locals enjoy fishing so much they can buy the rights themselves. Otherwise the limited resource gets allocated to the highest bidder as it does everywhere else.
Obligatory necessary reminder that the tragedy in question was the commons, i.e. a time-proven actual solution to this very problem, getting destroyed by privatization apologists. ("This seems like a bad example to garner sympathy for libertarian positions", "a classic example of ideological blind spot", etc.)
I mean, to elaborate, since for all my exasperation the blind spot seems to be genuine - commons are not free-for-all, commons are community control. It may be confusing if you expect formal contracts or written rules, but when it's accepted that a community at large has a final say and a right to intervene and stop any use of a resource that diminishes its utility for others, there's usually no need to elaborate that personal use within socially accepted limits is perfectly welcome.
Once the commons can no longer be enforced (and it's historically no accident that they stopped being enforceable), privatization in the form of selling extraction rights, which at least preserves some vestiges of the community control by allowing it to set limits and constraints, is indeed preferable to privatization in the form of [just claim it and it's yours]. But in the absence of evidence that the locals want a free-for-all, I'm finding it safe to assume they act upon a shared culturally-transmitted idea of the commons and the individual rights they would have provided them.
A lot of things changed in the 1960s and 1970s. Attributing them to sunshine laws via graphs is not an adequate attribution, unless you control for the enormous range of confounding. For example, what about economic policy? Laughably, we could claim using the same graphs we ought to go back to the gold standard (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock).
Furthermore, grandstanding idiocy took place before sunshine laws and after. If we are playing a game of correlation = causation, then it can go both ways. See the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and then the legislative response (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident) which needlessly enmeshed the US further into Vietnam. How could this happen if the lack of sunshine laws truly protected politicians from the invidious influence of public inspection?
I had the same thought. Trying to connect wage stagnation to Congressional procedure changes 50 years ago is a real stretch.
Very much agreed! Even changes that were listed which are more directly connected to government actions (quadrupling imprisonment, quadrupling the plague of lawyers) are, at best, perhaps things that can be connected to specific laws (the drug war laws in particular, for the former), and are not at all clearly linked to Congressional procedure changes.
Also, that graph doesn't show general wage stagnation. It shows stagnation in medial *male* individual income. There is no corresponding stagnation in medial female individual income. The overall median hasn't kept pace with GDP per capital (see graph since 1974, which is the start of when FRED has data on median individual income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=16RUY), but it has grown quite a bit (60% growth adjusted for inflation via PCE deflator vs 120% GDP growth with the same adjustment).
The remaining gap has a bunch of proposed explanations. The two big ones are that non-cash compensation (especially health insurance) has become a much larger portion of total compensation and the average has diverged from the median due to changes in income distribution.
There are also a widely-shared graph that purports to show wage stagnation since 1973, comparing real total compensation to real labor productivity, but this is mostly an artifact of using different inflation adjustments to the two things being compared: total compensation here is adjusted via CPI-U, while productivity is adjusted via the non-farm business price deflator. If you use the same adjustment for both, or just use nominal dollars with no inflation adjustment, almost all of the gap goes away.
Scott did a deep dive on the latter chart a while back (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/25/wage-stagnation-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/). His conclusion of the impact of inflation adjustments is different than mine, concluding that inflation calculations explain 1/3 to 2/3 of the gap based on various expert analyses that attempt doing more meaningful apples-to-oranges comparisons (mostly using more modern consumer inflation adjustments like PCE or chained CPI for wages while still using the NFB deflator for prices). Which I disagree with on the grounds that "Health care and education have gotten way more expensive relative to the rest of the economy" (the main drivers of the gap between PCE or C-CPI on one hand and the NFB deflator on the other hand) is a very different problem from "wages have stagnated relative to overall economic growth".
I agree, this seemed like the weakest part of the argument. It might be plausible to link the increased polarization in congress to the sunshine laws. But the rest seems a stretch. And the essay would be better without it. Still I like the over all idea, why not give it a try? Maybe start in some state government?
I'd personally also put the move to open primaries as a big possible reason on the political side. Thank goodness Britain seems to have backed away from their recent disastrous experiment with them.
“ we ought to go back to the gold standard “
Well…
I wonder if there's other ways you could test that. For instance, pick some local government official, as a totally made up example, say, sherriff, or whoever is in charge of the local-government-owned municipal utility. I imagine for at least some particular office, in some states that's an elected position, and in other states it's an appointed position. I wonder what you could determine by comparing the behavior of elected officials who are appointed versus elected, but have more or less the same duties. Or elected local officials that have approximately similar duties but have very different levels of public visibility on their deliberations/choices. Might be tough to control for all the variables in play, but seems like it would be a way to get at this sort of question.
Clever!
I'd like to suggest judges, some are elected, some are not. What they do is well documented.
For a real-life example, in King County WA the sheriff has gone back and forth between being elected and appointed. The arguments for elections seemed to come down to “voters should have more control”, and arguments for appointments came down to “we can get better sheriffs if they don’t simultaneously have to be politicians”.
https://ballotpedia.org/King_County,_Washington,_Charter_Amendment_5,_Return_Sheriff_to_an_Appointed_Position_Measure_(2020)
Can someone explain why special interest groups and industry groups (i.e. money in politics) don't fall into the "allowed exceptions" under "Some individuals have no interest in politics, and no wrong is done to them if they have less influence than individuals that are very interested in politics." And "Some individuals have technical expertise in a particular area such as nuclear power or human behavior. They ought to have more influence than the lay public on those issues."
I think it's basically chosen as an axiom, I think by the author of the book rather than this review. Those four criteria p1-p4 are the four that they consider valid, morally justifiable; it's like choosing their *definition* of what they would consider fair politics.
I assume they list as exceptions the cases where they don't think it's plausible to reach the ideal of everyone getting equal representation. Getting the views of people who just aren't interested in politics for personality reasons may technically be possible, but with rather high costs, and ensuring that the views of someone who can't be bothered to vote are counted equally to the views of the politicians themselves is practically hopeless. Not taking into account too much the interests of concentrated interest groups is something that at least a partial solution has been proposed to, so it should not be regarded as unavoidable.
Egalitarian politics is a game where people want the outcome to be determined by rhetorical skill. If the outcome is dominated by money, politics is pay-to-win.
Making congressional votes secret, might make it hard to buy a congressman's vote, but if most of the influence comes from power to influence what goes into a bill, basically no amount of secrecy will stop them from saying "please make sure that the following language [...] ends up in the bill". If the bill ends up with that language (and they didn't give the same instructions to anyone else on the relevant committee), they can be pretty sure that it was their agent's work.
Yup. And, even if the committee votes are secret, the committee deliberations can't very well be secret from committee members. That data seems likely to leak.
Even for the committee votes: Suppose that lie detectors are made to work even sort-of kind-of reliably. A congresscritter could volunteer to take such a test in private in a lobbyist's office while recounting their committee votes.
Sure, the data isn't impossible to get, but this certainly puts more barriers in place. You seem to implicitly be saying (by not arguing against it) that this would work, if the privacy could be guaranteed, with the issue being that it can't be guaranteed. Do you not think partial measures would provide partial success?
"this certainly puts more barriers in place" Agreed.
"You seem to implicitly be saying (by not arguing against it) that this would work, if the privacy could be guaranteed" I apologize. I didn't mean to imply that. I'm undecided about whether, if secrecy _could_ be guaranteed, whether that would be a net gain or net loss. My knee-jerk suspicion is that it would enable politicians to focus on their narrow self-interest, ignoring both lobbyists and constituents.
I remember reading that there were philosophers in ancient China arguing that the laws themselves should be kept secret, to prevent clever lawyers from gaming the system. That's one level of secrecy that would solve the problem.
It would solve the problem indeed, like a tactical nuclear strike would solve the problem presented by an annoying fly.
I don't think this is workable because there will always be a sufficient number of disgruntled constituents who I propose would demand to know if the person they voted for took the "wrong" side. The whole thing would be DOA in this scenario.
I take the point that transparency isn't any sort of cure all, but I have a strong suspicion that politicians would find a way to communicate how they voted on particular legislation if there was money at stake.
Agreed. Lack of transparency just empowers a group of unelected insiders who can exploit information not known to the general public. As a real-world example, consider how members of Congress get rich from insider trading of stocks.
Hm. Throat-clearing first: I spent the better part of a decade as CTO of the Sunlight Foundation, a transparency-focused nonprofit in DC. During that time I hired/was the boss of Lee Drutman while he wrote http://leedrutman.org/the-business-of-america-is-lobbying, which I recommend. Much of our organization's work focused on money in politics, through both the lenses of investigative and data journalism; as well as general pro-transparency measures like scraping federal and state bills and exposing the normalized data through apps and APIs. I currently work in DC for a non-gigantic software company as head of policy, and while legislative lobbying is only a small part of the work I do, it is something I have done a fair amount of over the years through lobby days, work with individual offices, testimony, coalition letters, and saying hello to staffers while collecting free sandwiches at New America events.
My time at Sunlight was highly educational and only mildly disillusioning. I learned a lot about transparency and its limits. This piece is right that fully transparent processes often lose their value as their original functions are overwhelmed by performative concerns (most committee hearings should probably not be broadcast, imo; calls to put cameras in SCOTUS are a bad idea unless we're collectively writing that institution off and trying to speed things along). I also agree that providing the electorate with better information is probably not a realistic path to significantly better outcomes. But this account falls short in a few ways.
First, it underestimates the opacity currently available to legislators. Legislative language is generally drafted behind closed doors, often during a process of negotiation with potential cosponsors. If a bill is meant for more than signaling purposes, coordination with leadership and across the caucus is inevitable. In many cases leadership will also try to organize votes in ways that enable vulnerable members to avoid taking stances that will cause them problems. But this is usually about avoiding attack lines in future TV spots more so than obscuring their activity from funders. Because...
Second, this account overestimates the practicality of opacity. Legislative activity is carried out by hordes of staffers, many of whom later go work for trade groups, lobby shops and other influence operations. A big part of those people's jobs involves maintaining relationships and the flow of information that they enable. It's true that legislators themselves can occasionally act in surprising ways. But the imagined opacity-enabled defection scenarios discussed here are game theory daydreaming, not anything close to how Congress actually works.
Third, the influence ecosystem is more complicated than is being imagined here. At the nonprofit we were <em>highly</em> incentivized to find stark quid pro quos. But these are quite rare (I still think fondly of Duke Cunningham's handwritten grift receipt). Generally, money reifies relationships and preferences that already exist. It doesn't twist a legislator's preferences; it finds and empowers the potential legislator, out of a field of many, whose preferences are aligned. It doesn't get an obviously corrupt measure added, but it surfaces a plausible concern that might otherwise be ignored (and perhaps should be). And in most cases, its presence reflects the attention of a legitimate and significant political bloc: most commonly an employer (polisci is unambiguous about the primacy of economic conditions to electoral outcomes, after all), but also--particularly with the internet small donor revolution--often just genuine voter passion. It's rare for money to arrive in and influence the system without some substantial and politically legitimate coalition behind it, though of course there are examples (with apologies for the cheap shot, SBF comes to mind).
None of this is to say that I think our current influence ecosystem is good, mind you. It's clearly a wasteful red queen's race, at a minimum. But I don't think it's the case that we've got a bunch of actors who would deliver different results if their actions were less visible. Their actions are already varyingly opaque. Reducing transparency would preference insiders who would inevitably still be able to glean information they need about hypothetical defections, if that was actually how things worked. And the actors are usually more aligned with the influencers--often because they correctly understand their voters' preferences--than it's pleasant to believe.
With all that said: I appreciate this thoughtful post and think the complex effects of transparency are worth considering.
(Those correlation graphs at the end are embarrassing, though, c'mon)
Many Thanks for your detailed and informative comment! I hadn't thought about the staffers at all - and they are crucial.
Whatever you think of SCOTUS, it does produce judgements including dissents which can reasonably be considered to fulfill the transparency function.
I’m not sure there’s a threshold point at which it can be counted as “fulfilled”. Opinions are published; oral arguments are available as audio; the justices’ private meetings and their clerks’ activities are not. I think this tracks pretty well with which of these activities are used to make symbolic statements to advance factional projects.
This makes some great points and has been a significant update for me. However, I'd like to push back on some things:
> If all groups are equally uninformed, loud, well-informed, well-organized special interest groups would no longer have an outsized influence on the political process. It would not be clear which legislators were and were not cooperating, so there would be no information for the members of the interest group to act on.
This argument only seems to apply to coercion, not to persuasion.
When an issue has concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, I imagine politicians will tend to hear more and better arguments in favor than against, and may come to incorrectly-but-honestly *believe* that something is a good idea, due this bias in the information they receive. This would still give special interest groups an outsized influence (though perhaps less of one than they have now).
> Anticipatory representation is, however, fully consistent with opacity.
This only seems true for a very extreme and crude form of anticipatory representation. Opacity does still allow you to say "in hindsight, this new law made our lives worse, so let's throw out all the politicians who presided over it". However, it does NOT allow you to say "in hindsight, this new law made our lives worse, so let's throw out the politicians who supported it but keep the politicians who tried to stop it."
This seems like a pretty substantial reduction in the effectiveness of anticipatory representation to me. Or at least, a substantial reduction in its *potential* effectiveness; I could perhaps be persuaded by data that the extreme and crude version is the only one that the public actually does.
(One could declare that they are defining the category "anticipatory representation" to not include the cases that are being lost, but those cases absolutely do not fit into either of the other categories you defined, so if one did that then one'd need to add a new category for them.)
> Unfortunately, [transcript accountability] would come at the cost of removing all the benefits of secret deliberation. We actually have a natural experiment to demonstrate this. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has always deliberated in secret, but in 1993 started to release transcripts of their meetings on a 5-year delay.
I broadly agree that releasing transcripts __soon enough to let voters directly act on them__ directly undermines the whole point of secret deliberations, but it still seems like an obvious good idea to release them after a LONG delay, like maybe 50 years.
I don't think this would appreciably help with accountability, but it would be good for historians, it potentially acts as a weak-but-nonzero safeguard against the legislature becoming permanently corrupt, and it seems harmless if you set the delay high enough.
In a partisan environment, "the politicians who supported it" can be reasonably approximated as "the ruling party" and "the politicians who tried to stop it" as "the opposition". Exceptions can be made for politicians who publicly spoke out on one side or the other.
> (p2) the quality of their argument
Depends what you mean by quality. I want lots of influence given to asymmetrical weapons but I want to minimize the influence of symmetrical weapons. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
An argument can be "better" in the sense of being more persuasive even if it only uses symmetrical weapons, but that's not the kind of "quality" I'd like to give influence to.
Interesting review. In particular the concluding comments.
Let me as a contrast give an entertaining example of how high-level politics is carried out in Sweden, which is a rather different type of democracy than the US. (Sweden is sometimes uncharitably described as a someone-has-talked-together democracy.)
Sweden did something dramatic in the mid-1990s: The government totally revised - and significantly scaled down - its old age pension system. It is an interesting story from a US perspective, and should be for ACX readers more generally, since trying to do something with the US social security system is regarded by everyone as the "third rail" of US politics: Touch that, and you are dead. How did the Swedes none the less succeed, also with no-one protesting in the streets (compare that also to the recent modest pension retrenchment poor old Macron barely managed to squeeze through the French political system). Here is the story, including (translated) quotes from Urban Lundberg, a Swedish historian who interviewed key actors and analysed the process:
The Swedish pension reform was facilitated by a high-level, interparty working group which met between 1992 and 1994 and prepared the reform proposal. Lundberg describes the working arrangement as follows:
"The will to compromise was apparent in the way the pension committee worked, which in my interviews was described as very close/confidential ("fortroendefull"). The idea was first to agree in the committee. Then the agreement should be anchored in the respective party leaderships. Only after that should mass media and the general public be informed. [The shared opinion was that] No one would win on a new principled fight over pensions. Thus the desire was for any price to keep the discussions of the working group away from the public. Even the internal discussions in the parties were held under strict control....Officially the committee did not work to create a new system but to "reform" "improve" and "modernise" the old. The Social Democrats made this an absolute condition for even considering participating in the committee. It was strictly ruled out even for the Conservatives to say something different." (p 30-31, own translation from Lundberg).
Within-group psychology also played a part in bringing about the path-breaking pension outcome. It turned out that the members representing the two most antagonistic parties, the Social Democrats (Anna Hedborg) and the Conservatives (Margit Genser), liked each other. Lundberg interviewed Anna Hedborg:
"I think it played a role that Margit Genser represented the Conservatives. She is a very independent and systematic person. She loves logic. If you challenge her with a very logical line of reasoning she cannot resist it - and I am a little like that too. Könberg [representing the Liberal party] is also a bit like that. We are all very issue oriented, somewhat engineering types...Somehow I thing it was a very lucky mix of persons. Both that we were the persons we were and then not more than us." (quote from Lundberg 2001, 32; own translation)
Lundberg argues that this favourable personal chemistry created a "we" identity among the committee members, and made them define the situation so that "we" have to convince "them" (the leaders of the respective parties) that "we" are right. This bonding between high-level committee members, making them present a united front vis a vis outsiders, is rare even in Scandinavian politics. In probably helped bring about the path-breaking outcome.
The general take-home point is that elite-elite interaction during a political reform phase involves a complex social process, where actors must find out if they can trust opponents to stick to informal deals. The core structure resembles an assurance game. Each elite will be wary if they can trust other elites to cooperate, rather than to defect and reap the benefits of attracting disaffected voters. Reputations for being cooperative or uncooperative (which depend on political culture and traditions) act as signals in this game. In addition to reputations, elites can employ strategies such as self-binding (publicly announcing their intentions), bonding and reputation-building (e.g. engage in joint committees) to signal their intentions to other players (where deception may also be part of the game). It must be borne in mind that the world of elite politics is somewhat similar to a village community, in the sense that most people know each other and expect to meet and interact also the day after the reform. Hence social controls (including the risk of social ostracism) discourage disloyal behaviour, and help make informal agreements stick.
References:
Lundberg, Urban (2001) Socialdemokratin och 1990-talets pensionsreform. [Social democracy and the 1990s pension reform.] In Joakim Palme (ed): Hur blev den stora kompromissen möjlig? [How was the big compromise possible?] Stockholm: Pensionsforum.
See also:
Lijphart A. 2001. The pros and cons - but mainly pros - of consensus democracy. Acta Sociologica vol 36, p. 129 - 139.
Good ol' Lijphart. Takes me back to my undergraduate days.
Yes, he's a classic.
A good description of how the culture of elites can affect their positions and decision making processes. (You could say, it's almost like an open conspiracy.)
The Swedes aren't very prone to protesting in the streets in any case. And Nordic people in general have a lot of trust in authority.
Not surprising for peoples who have ruled by kings for millennia.
Um, no, I don’t think that is the reason.
>How did the Swedes none the less succeed, also with no-one protesting in the streets
Succeed in the sense of swindling the electorate, by masterfully papering over the conflict between elites' interests (ostensibly "antagonistic" at that) and that of the masses? Seems like an important point to clarify.
It is debatable if the Swedish retrenchment of pensions was necessary to ensure long-run macroeconomic sustainability or not. In this ACX context, I would put a parenthesis around that question, and instead emphasize that the Swedish story shows that democracy is not a frail system that works only on sunny days: Democracies are also able to make hard decisions. The assumption that democracies are not able to do this, has been an influential critique among "democratic overload" scholars, and has formed the rationale for - among other things - isolating Central Banks/Treasuries from government/political control.
I guess the question is, just how democratic the optimal "democracy" should be. Obviously the unwashed masses don't have the first idea about which unpopular policies are crucial for their own good, but then what the actual feedback mechanism is supposed to be in the first place?
Charitably, this seems unduly optimistic that people other than the masses know which "unpopular policies are for their own good". Certainly it's notable that democracy has over the last two centuries outperformed all other systems of government (insert Churchill quote of your choice here), suggesting the masses might actually be better at picking the best policy rather than whatever form of expertise is deployed in other systems. Those who are down on democracy have a tendency to hold views unlikely to receive democratic mandates (e.g. actual Nazis, decarbonise now zealots, proponents that schools should have an oath of allegiance to Brittany Spears) which they believe are necessary unpopular decisions. It's likely that people are better at voting for their own good than those frustrated by democracy give them credit for.
I do question how a democracy is meant to function with any feedback mechanism other than direct election though. Any other system, including primaries or party lists, inserts a separate level of control between the demos and the representative. Whatever process that means democracies make good decisions is threatened if your choices are limited to a narrow field controlled by small groups (from a transatlantic perspective the last couple of US presidential elections seem to be good examples of this). Democratic feedback should be direct to representatives, because that's how democracy corrects for erroneous decisions.
Democracies may have outperformed other systems of government but causation might be working there in the reverse direction. Maybe democracy is something that develops when things are going well.
Another question is to what extent the system of government we call a democracy is actually democratic. In the Swedish example here, it seems that the people were presented with proposed policy as the only alternative, as a fait accompli.
The opening focus on votes is a bit unfortunate because the later discussion of lobbying dynamics reveals that votes are a minor issue. If an approach based on secrecy were to be really beneficial, it would need to involve secrecy at all stages of drafting and passing legislation. But not only would this require a sweep of other unrealistic changes to the political process to even attempt to secure confidence and accountability, it also starts from a naive belief that politicians who are 'free' (in Bentham's sense) would act more in alignment with public interest. The reality is that our social and economic structures drive a lot of unpopular policy making; lobbying might grease the wheels and get certain things prioritized but much of the same legislation would get passed anyway.
I agree. The whole thesis while plausible seemed to run against the evidence presented around voting. Floor votes are ostensibly the most transparent part of the process and apparently the least affected by money while the earlier parts of the process are harder for normal citizens to observe and are more influenced by money.
agree particularly with that last sentence. my summary of the book review is "i see problems downstream of a transparent process: therefore a good solution to these problems is to remove the transparency".
most striking was the bit about policy makers feeling unable to change their position when debating in front of an audience (voters): the proposed solution is immediately to remove the audience. meanwhile, you and i discuss things in public online spaces (like here), where updating one's beliefs in response to new evidence is considered **noble**. it's just assumed that culture like that can't be replicated in a political environment, but (1) i've never seen that challenged with any rigor and (2) it conflicts with the other widely held notion that public policy is _downstream_ of culture (e.g. that gay marriage became legal only after it gained traction at a social level). particularly with the latter view, even if pursuing secrecy were more _pragmatic_ than pursuing cultural changes, the latter might give more benefit for the same level of effort given just how widespread are its effects.
I don't mean to be flippant, but I cannot get past this citation:
(Ansolabehere et al. 2003:116)
I can't read the rest until I understand and pronounce that name and I already gave up. Is that real?
https://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/stephen-d-ansolabehere/ as far as I can tell. What an odd objection.
I thought it was more an amusing comment on a truly remarkable name. Maybe my sense of awe didn't come through.
"As requested, the final draft of HR 49302, read in full by our clerk, Kevin Imnotsposedtobehere..."
We say that the influence of special interest groups and wealthy individuals is a violation of political equality, where "a democratic society realizes political equality if and only if influence on political decisions is insulated from features of persons other than (p1) their desire to participate in politics, (p2) the quality of their argument, (p3) their relevant expertise, or (p4) their unique position to advocate a particular cause".
But how do we know that special interest groups and wealthy people aren't disproportionately high on (p1), (p2), and (p3), in which case they should disproportionately influence politics? Maybe what we want is not political equality (which we may have in some sense today) but more power taking the side of issues that we're on?
As my Substack points out today, there is NO transparency of real-time (meaning within two days of) Congressional actions. To get such data, you have to pay between $4800 and $9000. dollars. There are reasons for this. There are real legislators causing the lack of transparency. If we want to endeavor toward mental health, we should first find a way of putting our feet on the ground. Then Scott et al can bring in as many charts as he'd like.
Point of order: this is a Your Book Review, so while it's on Scotts blog, the author is currently under a vow of anonymity.
Democracy is indeed dying in darkness, because real legislators are doing thiings in real time (even in the last four weeks) to hide transcriptions of live Congressional hearings. These people have names and their actions can be empirically traced. I have no idea why this thread isn't connected to any on the gound realities.
see Extra! Extra! Read All About It-- for Only $9,000
Why Democracy in America Has Been Hobbled by President Biden and Ironically by the Very Democratic Senators Who Most Recently and Most Fiercely Told You They'd Promote Transparency
ALEX RAKSIN
JUL 7, 2023
It’s not only to the Biden’s fault though he has given many speeches about the necessity of open democracy. I put it on him in the peas because you need to put it on someone. Nevertheless, the entire Democratic leader ship with that exception of maybe two senators is not willing to commit itself to releasing transcripts of hearings in a timely way In 30 years of journalism I received dozens of transcripts, live hearings true interaction (as Hegelian as you can get on the hill. It ain’t much, but it’s better than nothing. And anyway developed nations. That do not transcribe. The words of their highest elected officials are by definition not democracies.) also the POLITICO that you see is entirely different from Politico Pro, and political premium, which issue bulletins and full transcripts every other minute. The argument the Senate is using for failing to release live hearing transcripts is that the technology is difficult and expensive the federal news service provided full transcriptions of all house and senate, full and sub committee hearings for a pittance. Congress has never been about rationally or cost-effectively leading the nation. It’s about craft I just didn’t think the legislators wanted to be so honest about their perfidy.
To corrections because I dictate to Siri I meant to say graft GRAFT not craft. And the federal news service has been doing this 31st century technology since the mid-20th century.
Many good points here, but I couldn't quite get through it. Am I an outlier in having a deep aversion to the misuse of the term "terrorism"? Threatening to shift one's influence to the opposing party might be reasonably called intimidation, but even that would be stretching the point in the context of professional political machinations.
I live near D.C., and the local joke is "Drive North till you smell it, then East till you step in it." Politics is their full-time job, and they all understand the nature of the transactions in question.
"Terrorism"? ... you lost me completely there.
I believe that's the actually original meaning of the word, with actions intended to force political compliance on electors as a whole a development of the term in response to mass democracy. If you think about it the actions of an Andrew Jackson supporter threatening violence at a hustings and Al Qaida are just different ways of attempting to force political change in a direction of their choice.
I think the original meaning came from the French Revolution & Reign of Terror.
The word "terror" literally just means fear, and "terrorism" is just any systematic action that tries to make the other side comply by fear. This can be state terrorism which comes from the state (almost every dictatorship uses state terrorism in various forms), or it can come from other groups. Either it's against the whole public (like the 9/11 attacks from islamists) or against anyone who would speak for the opposing policy (for example extremist right-wing or left-wing groups), but also something like criminal gangs who terrorize shops to make them pay money.
The way it's used in the article is a weak form of terrorism, but makes totally sense to me.
Seriously?!?
He starts out defining terrorism as "simply threatening physical violence against anybody that didn’t vote in the appropriate manner.", which is perfectly fine.
But then he immediately follows up with "He wants the citizenry to essentially rule by terrorism, threatening to put legislators out of a job if they step out of line.", and a couple of instances later, "Legislators are currently accountable in the sense that they might be voted out of office if their constituents are unhappy with their performance. The citizens rule by a kind of terrorism."
He is > literally < calling the proper and correct operation of democracy "essentially... terrorism" and "a kind of terrorism". How can you consider this a defensible use of the term? Under this reasoning, any correct operation of a well-accepted system of governance which sometimes causes fear can be called "terrorism".
In a well-ordered society, would-be criminals are motivated not to commit crime at least partly by fear of punishment. Under your definition, this would be terrorism.
Sorry, these are just objectively incorrect uses of the term.
Worse: In this day and age, with people intentionally misusing that particular term in bad faith for political gain, it's wildly inappropriate.
As I said, it made sense to me and didn't strike me as odd. Of course, the term "terrorism" is usually used with a very negative connotation nowadays, especially since 9/11. But I don't find it odd to use it in its literal meaning, which per se is neither positive nor negative.
Perhaps that has to do with me being a non-native speaker, with German as my primary language. Or me reading a lot about history, where the usage is closer to its literal meaning.
I agree that the article seemed to have interesting points but wasn't really written in an interesting enough way to hold my attention.
>Kogelmann also cites the problem of asymmetric information. The problem is essentially that interest groups tend to form around issues that have concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. This incentivizes a small, well-organized minority to spend a lot of time and energy monitoring Congress, usually pushing policies that do not benefit the majority.
This whole section seems to boil down to "people being heavily and passionately involved in politics around issues they are knowledgeable and care strongly about is bad".
You highlight the NRA and Corn Subsidies, and conclude they are bad because nra positions (not expanded on) are unpopular, and because corn policies don't benefit the majority.
I struggle to think of any policy that actually benefits the majority. The civil rights movement? All about helping minorities. Welfare? Most people aren't on it. National Parks? Waste of money maintaining wilderness far away from me I will never see.
I don't think that a policy should be disregarded just because it doesn't, in a vacuum, benefit everybody. The government is an amalgam of millions of policies that don't all touch everybody, but everybody gets something. Further, I don't think a policy is bad just because it is "objectively unpopular". If something is supported by people who ar knowledgeable and care strongly about it, but doesn't fare as well when the general public hears a 5 second blurb and makes a first impression opinion, we shouldn't just automatically fight those in the know.
People too lazy or apathetic to actively involve themselves in politics have only themselves to blame. Why would we handicap people who actualy want to spend their time working to make the country we all share a better place?
> Why would we handicap people who actualy want to spend their time working to make the country we all share a better place?
I believe the argument being made is that these sorts of policies actively make the country a *worse* place.
As for such things as welfare and civil rights, the question of justice and social obligation comes into play; people may not personally benefit from the specific initiatives in question, but everyone does benefit from living in a just society that provides for human flourishing- and even if they don’t, we may very well still have the obligation to provide such.
Many would argue that widespread gun ownership benefits everybody as a shield against tyranny/ potential good guy with a gun scenarios, and that corn Subsidies benefit everybody by maintaining our agricultural base.
Anybody can make an argument that any policy they support is good for everybody, and it's hypocritical to just decide the policies you like are the good ones and anything else is working to make the world a good place.
Anyone can make any argument but that doesn’t mean such arguments are correct.
Anyone can make any argument correct when they get to decide on the criteria for correctness.
How do I benefit from "living in a just society that provides for human flourishing" if I don't personally benefit from the specific initiatives in question?
The author essentially concedes this point when he flips his position and calls for proportional representation for the purpose of empowering minority viewpoints (presumably ones that he likes, as opposed to the examples he cites of viewpoints he doesn't like). There's a lot of politically motivated reasoning being passed off as neutral philosophy here.
I think it's not about benefitting everyone, it's about benefitting everyone on average. The idea with corn subsidies is that they make corn farmers (and people who use corn) while making everyone else a little poorer, and this mostly balances out except that it also distorts the economy and makes it less efficient, thus harming everyone on average.
I think you conflate two different concepts here: the people you described should absolutely be encouraged to participate in the political debate, they should be heard and be able to bring forth their best arguments. This is both true for the corn subsidies and the National Parks. The review and the book agree with you that this is a good thing.
And to make this clear before the main point, those people should *not* make the decisions themselves. They should have to convince others, the politicians, of their points. I hope we can also agree on that. If every lobby group can just make their own decision, this ends badly.
But what the review points out: it's perfectly possible to have those interested people engage, argue, bring forth their points to the decision-makers, and so on. But then, after that, we can still keep the deliberations and the votes of the decision-makers secret. That is what the book advertises for.
This does have some drawbacks, for example that the engaged people might think "they did not decide how I wanted them to, probably the decision-makers did not understand my arguments". But the review does discuss these points, and whether or how far they can be mitigated. And it comes to the conclusion that the advantages outweigh the drawbacks.
Those graphs are American only, right? I've never seen any similar information coming out of European countries. Now this could mean that nobody's taken the data from those countries yet - but it could also mean it's an America-specific problem (likely an impact of congressional lobbying being far more advanced over on your side of the Atlantic).
I think lobbying is quite advanced in Europe. You don't hear about it because it's less visible, and the amounts are smaller because American federal lobbying affects policy for a rich population half the size of Europe and likely more of world GDP.
The 70s were crazy all around the world, which is why neoliberalism started then even outside the US..
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/why-did-growth-slow-after-1973/ (scroll down to get the links to the posts directly before & after)
Mmm. I think it is fairly clear that secret voting would *decrease* the influence of lobbyists somewhat. It wouldn't eliminate it. One obvious tactic would be that lobbyists could simply find people who genuinely hold views helpful to them, and finance their campaigns. Because the candidate's position is genuine and idealogical, lobbyists wouldn't be worried about them defecting, even if they couldn't track their votes. Indeed lobbyists already do this.
I am more worried than the author of the book and this review about the downsides of secret voting. If we have no idea how any representative actually votes, we are essentially voting for plausible, charismatic, good speakers. None of these are obviously desirable attributes in a decision maker.
Policy jurys (where all legilslature votes are carried out (in secret) by a randomly selected jury of the general population) both eliminate lobbying (or very nearly so), and retain the legitimacy of votes by tying them directly to the electorate's wishes. Of course they have problems of their own (if you like the idea of representatives being experts with better understanding than the electorate, you lose that), and no one has ever actually tried them on a large scale.
>One obvious tactic would be that lobbyists could simply find people who genuinely hold views helpful to them, and finance their campaigns.
My impression is that this is basically already how it works. Lobbyists aren't going to politicians and paying them to take positions contrary to ones they took previously. They might nudge on the margins, but their main concern is ensuring "their guy" is in a position of power to begin with.
"Legislators’ votes in committee used to be secret"
But was there much uncertainty in 1958 among lobbyists how Senator Johnson voted on the corn bill in committee?
It sees like the Australian ballot is secret mostly because it's too much work per ballot to figure out how each voter voted from talking to them and to people they know. In contrast, there are only 100 Senators and 435 Reps so it would pay lobbyists to figure out who is voting how with a high degree of accuracy.
If they're telling the truth or not trying hard to conceal it, sure -- but why do you think it would be easy (or even possible) to figure out the vote of someone who stayed silent or was deliberately deceptive about it?
These ideas don't seem novel. When was the book published and what is the full name of the author? Really feel like a book review should include those details upfront.
Meg Greenfield's _Washington_, from 2002, is a very insightful book about the trade-offs between transparency and opacity in congress. It mostly laments losing the latter, when smoke-filled rooms free from the press allowed for horse-trading. That book is full of salient anecdotes across many decades. I'd argue it is a much better book than whatever book this review was about, but I don't feel like I got to know this book very well.
Looks like this one: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/secret-government/814DECB6C5700C6A1BBA8D1400CDDEFA
Published in 2021, written by Brian Kogelmann.
It feels like this account of money in politics is undertheorised.
Firstly, "political equality" may entail that individuals with more money are not entitled to extra political influence, but this does not seem to carry across straightforwardly to interest groups. We do want the tech industry to have more influence on government than the tallow manufacturing industry, precisely because there's more money there, so its interests matter more.
Secondly, it's important to differentiate between a concentrated interest getting outsized political influence due to co-ordination issues, and a minority group with deeply felt feelings about an issue. There are millions of individual gun owners in the USA, that's a classic diffuse interest, and to the extent the NRA has persuaded them that guns are a vital interest that should determine their vote, that's classic democratic politics.
Thirdly, threatening to run advertising against a candidate as retaliation seems legitimate and indeed desirable. If Sen. Whitehouse wants to vote against the interests of the fossil fuel industry, they are performing a public service by pointing that out. The Senator's real problem is that "Whitehouse Hates Coal" is a slogan that will cost him more votes than it wins him.
Finally, the reason to control legislators is not just to prevent them voting their self-interest. It is to prevent them having sufficient "slack" as to vote their (necessarily narrow, unrepresentative) conception of the public interest, at the expense of the public's view. The whole reason these lobbying groups exist is because there are lots of broad interests that don't get naturally represented in the legislature.
My assumption was that the attack ads were on unrelated issues. If the fossil fuel industry wants to run an ad saying "Senator Whitehouse is terrible because he'll make your fuel and energy bill more expensive.", fair enough. If they say to Whitehouse that if he doesn't vote in a way the lobbyists like, they'll run an ad saying "Here's a video of Senator Whitehouse kicking a puppy.", that's unhelpful. I don't know if this actually happens.
It's normally the former. But even when on the rare occasion it's the latter, so what? If a politician doesn't want voters to react in horror to a video of him kicking a puppy, he shouldn't kick puppies, and if he does kick puppies he should own it. More generally, I am much more suspicious of candidates who want to suppress true information or persuasive arguments regarding themselves, than I am of the organisations who want to bring it forward.
Interesting throughout, though too dry to "win". From my German view: a) Bismarck said:"Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made." really famous quote here. b) many votes in parliament are secret, but mostly they are strictly along party-lines. Which is fine as we vote for parties, not politicians, really. Following voting patterns of a single politician seems pointless - his party will take care, undoubtedly. - c) Rarely only (abortion/euthanasia), a vote is declared "free" - and the CDU-guy may vote NO while his party leader votes YES. And the SPD-lady YES. Even then, the vote is usu. secret. - d) Most fun are moments, when all in a party/coalition vowed to vote YES - and one defects anonymously (Heide Simonis in 2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heide_Simonis ) Or an unloved candidate overplays her hand: Andrea Ypsilanti (the dissenters were pushed to take a handy-pic of their vote to proof they did not secretly dissent. They did then choose to dissent publicly as well.) - Seems Bismarck was kinda right all along.
"the agenda that I’m trying to push with this post."
I'm glad the reviewer admits to having an agenda; this is more transparent for them than however they are serving the book, which they admit doesn't help the point they want to make.
The issue with transparency, or the lack of it, is that:
(1) We've had non-transparent public voting. We've seen how that goes, from rotten boroughs to the scene Dickens exaggerates about the election in Eatanswill:
https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200182973/
"In this chapter, Mr. Pickwick and his friends visit the town of Eatanswill while it is in the throes of an election. The two political parties are the "Blues" and the "Buffs," each party being represented by a partisan newspaper. The town populace is divided equally between the parties, and the agents for the candidates use all their wiles, including bribery and drink and other underhanded means, to win votes from townspeople in the opposing camp.
...After the speeches of the two candidates were given, each promising his utmost to do everything in his power to benefit Eatanswill, the mayor called for a show of hands and declared the Honourable Samuel Slumkey the winner. Mr. Fizkin demanded a poll which then took place amid much frenzy and inebriation. Ultimately, the Honourable Samuel Slumkey was indeed declared the victor."
https://victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/pickwick/election.html
"The young radical Charles Dickens sums up his derisive attitude towards electioneering even in the name of the fictitious East Anglian borough holding the bye-election: Eatanswill (eat-and-swill). The twenty-year-old former parliamentary reporter's take on the nation's much trumped up representative democracy involves underscoring its follies, rather than, like Hogarth's scathingly satirical scenes in The Humours of an Election (1754-55), exposing its hypocrisy and immorality. As Bruce Kinzer states regarding the continuity of dubious election practices after the passage of the Great Reform Bill in 1832, "Heightened party conflict and the persistence of bribery and treating (plying electors with food and drink) meant that the cost of contesting elections remained high", ensuring that the wealthy (the traditional aristocracy and the newly rich industrial capitalists) would continue to control election outcomes."
The secret ballot is also open to accusations of fraud, ballot stuffing and the like, but at least we've tried the opposite method and we know why it doesn't work.
(2) It's not following Congress or the Dáil or Parliament that is the problem. People know about the laws getting passed, or not passed, as they come to affect them. Televised proceedings are transparent and have shown how few representatives bother to turn up, how long-winded and technical the proceedings are, and how honestly it really is boring to watch the sausage being made.
We also know about "the room where it happens", the "smoke-filled back rooms" and so on, where we the public assume most of the dealing is done. We know about lobbyists and special interests. We know about the pork barrel, and most of us don't mind that so long as our town gets jobs and money out of it, and to heck with the rest of the country.
People are rather suspicious of local representatives that get elected and then decide, once they arrive in Congress or the Dáil or Parliament, that their job is to be statesmen and look after the good of the nation and worry about their place in history. We voted you in to look after us first.
The problem is that we don't get to see the room where it happens, where the deals are done. Then outrage happens when scandals about cosy arrangments and 'tit for tat' deals where I scratch your back and you scratch mine and one hand washes another. Outrage about the Covid parties (and that happened in most countries, it looks like) where the general public were being cajoled, coerced, lectured and forbidden from free movement or association, where you couldn't go visit your sick granny in the hosital, where you had to stay masked in separate rooms and be treated as the next thing to a leper if you tested positive. Meanwhile, our leaders who imposed such restrictions were packing in the tables close together for their supporters (meaning the moneybags donors) at parties and celebrations and functions to beat the band, because the rules are only for the little people.
They forget that they are public representatives, which means servants of the public. They are voted in to represent us and our interests, and they are our employees. They don't get to go for "I went for a drive to test my eyesight" in the middle of a lockdown they agitated for, and that in this case it was unelected advisors who did it was really stoking the outrage.
SPADS, special advisors, little friends - all the unelected ones with the whore's prerogative:
https://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2011/03/power-without-responsibility.html
There's enough of that already, without giving even more anonymity and lack of accountability to them.
See the recent mini-scandal about the national public broadcaster in my country, which is funded by a combination of public money (the licence fee) and advertising revenue. It eventually came out that at least one of the 'stars' (in their own inflated opinions) was being paid over and above the public salary figures given out, and that there was a lot of under the table money being passed around (e.g. the five grand for flip-flops).
https://www.newstalk.com/news/pac-letter-states-tubridy-and-kelly-to-be-questioned-on-payments-since-2017-1484951
https://www.irishmirror.ie/showbiz/rte-spent-5000-flip-flops-30395814
I very much doubt he's the only one, and it's likely this was going on for years. The people involved all treated it as their own little club where they paid off each other, and didn't even consider their fiscal responsibility. And it would still be going on if it hadn't been exposed mostly by accident.
*This* is why the unwashed masses want transparency: because you can't trust any of the bastards.
Dickens is fictional evidence: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/generalization-from-fictional-evidence
Three points:
1. The people get a secret vote while the legislators must be public because the legislators are the servants of the people and not the other way around. Would you hire someone and allow a stipulation that you could not check on their work?
2. The policy for large lobbyists now is to pay all sides to gain influence. They have enough money and there are few enough legislators to do this. They likely will pay one side more - so they can say to the other, "If you move towards me I will change this." This will not change by adding secrecy.
3. Proportional representation just makes it harder to get rid of legislators, because they're then (partially or wholly) picked from a list of party hacks, rather than politicians who actually have to get out amongst the people and can be fired by concentrated effort. Their job is then to satisfy the party only.
This was a pretty good review to read.
Having working on the Hill in the late 70s, I have some fly on wall knowledge another aspect of secrecy in "negotiation" - the horse trading and the whipping process.
The book seems to focus on the legislative branch. I wonder about the judicial process. US is essentially the only country in world with grand jury process and it's secrecy. (Maybe Liberia too?). I'm conflicted.
At trial juries deliberate in secret, but may be polled after verdict to confirm unanimity.
Settlement negotiations and plea deal negotiations are done in secret.
I detest settlements that are sealed.
I'm not sure how I feel about cameras in courtrooms, but I think that courtrooms must be open to the public. I do appreciate live audio access. Audio access seems to give the necessary transparency without the spectacle.
Minor correction: Sheldon Whitehouse is a current Senator, not a former Senator.
Isn't political equality the assumption that swallows the argument? With the right definition of political equality, one could justify virtually any system of government!
I don't think this fully grapples with the logic behind the secret ballot. Look around the world (starting around the time nominal republics came to displace unconstitutional monarchies) and see how often a single political party or dictator gets entrenched in power. Without a secret ballot it's very hard for anyone to "vote the bastards out"*, as they will be punished by the incumbent. It's true that politicians today may feel "terror" at the hands of voters, but it's not comparable to the threat governments can impose on their citizens and it hasn't resulted in a single party being dominant.
*That requirement is why Popper rejected proportional representation in favor of first-past-the-post.
> Some are highly articulate and can shape political discourse around their ideas. It would be undesirable and probably impossible to try to deny outsized influence to thought leaders.
The Athenians would disagree, hence sortition.
> The legislator can promise up and down to vote in favor of that amendment, but will have no way to actually prove it. With no way to verify that the exchange took place, the lobbyist would soon give up.
A legislator who has announced his retirement is ending the iterated game described and cannot receive more campaign contributions or "bank" more reputation by doing lobbyist bidding. Studies have been done on how such legislators behave in their last term. Garett Jones is aware of them. Is Kogelmann?
I don't see what proportional representation has to do with the Philadelphia Convention. Political parties as we know them know didn't really exist back then, so there were no parties to be proportionally represented. The fact that the right to vote wasn't extended nearly as far back then as it is now is entirely separate from how those votes translate into representatives.
> Transparency is supposed to increase trust in government, but according to this study by Pew [url], trust in government did not increase and arguably decreased after the 1970s transparency reforms.
This reminds me of Matt Yglesias on the media: many people falsely believe the media was more trustworthy in the past, though we know now they deliberately kept the public in the dark about many things. It's just that now with the rise in transparency & decline in gatekeepers we get more info on media (and government) failings.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-you-cant-trust-the-media
In both cases there is the sense that the real problem is the people:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/the-real-problemhtml
And once one inculcates that it's hard to maintain democratic idealism (related to what Dan Klein calls the "Romance of the People"). But you can't dissolve the people to replace them with another, and it's hard to reform a democratic system to be deliberately less democratic (perhaps 10%, per Garett Jones). The proposed reform of secrecy here would seem to remove the actual purported benefit of democracy, in which case one could just go to 0%.
You can have proportional representation regardless of parties, as in the Irish system. People vote for individual candidates in a multi-seat constituency. They can be party members or independents. Votes from eliminated candidates - or excess votes gained by elected candidates - go to the next candidate on the list. You can vote 1, 2, 3... for as many candidates as you care to.
Obviously party members tend to do well when it comes to vote transfers between them, but the basic system is independent of parties, whatever form they take.
That just sounds like ranked choice voting rather than proportional representation.
PR is what we call it. The effects lean towards proportionality, more so as constituencies grow larger. In Ireland they have 3 to 5 seats each.
I suppose any system will lean more towards proportionality in larger constituencies, but I do think that voting systems like this encourage it.
I think ranked choice is way better. PR can devolve into endless coalitions that give power to the swing factions to advance their favourite cause. The Green Party in Germany arguably got to kill nuclear due to this system
Ranked ballots should allow independents and alternative parties to exist as more than rare exceptions while tending to maintain clear winners who have fuller agency and are clearly responsible for their policies
I wonder if making campaign contributions cash or in-kind anonymous might not help.
Seems incredibly naive to think that the problem of lobbying could be solved by simply closing meetings. Lobbyists would still have relationships with the reps, would receive reports from their friends on the substance of closed sessions, and of course, can still observe the outcomes, for just a couple objections that would seem to be enough to nullify the argument.
I found this very unconvinciing. Lots of comments above have already noted that lobbyists/insiders generally would quickly figure out which legislators vote which way, but I don't think anyone has very explicitly mentioned the reason: there are very few of them. When there are only a few hundred votes up for grabs, experienced political actors literally tally every one. That doesn't happen in constituencies with tens of thousands of voters (though beware, big data will figure it out, and may already know how you vote).
The whole lobbying/special interest groups argument just seems very naive. The book/review author seem to think that if the special interest group have some difficulty identifying exactly who voted on which bill because of a secret ballot, that they will just pack up and go home? Why? Even the analogy with the secret ballot for elections doesn't support this idea. Do politicians not campaign because they are unable to identify which way specific voters vote? No, they just campaign in a slightly different way...
I think the idea of enabling legislators to speak more freely is misconceived as well. I don't want my legislator to speak freely. I want her to be tightly constrained by the requirements of truth, specialist knowledge, and representing my interest. In particular, I don't want my vote for a legislator to mean that that person can go to Westminster/Washington and do what the hell she likes. I see the voters as hiring a legislator for specific job, and she should not be speaking outside the bounds of that job.
I dunno, this rubbed me up the wrong way all over... which perhaps means that I should spend some time thinking harder about it. Maybe there's something there that I'm missing.
I disagree with the claim that the reason citizens elect representatives is because of their difference in opinion. I want my representatives to make decisions on issues where I have no opinion because I don't have the time or expertise to form one (like "What interest rate should the central bank have?"), but on issues where I do have an opinion, and there is therefore a possibility for differing opinions, I mostly would prefer they agree with me. This isn't perfect, and I acknowledge probably some of my opinions are wrong, but the first factor (them having opinions where I don't) is much more important.
Generally, this post had some interesting points, but I forgot it was even meant to be a book review until the last paragraph.
Don't know how this one made the finals, they admit they didn't even finish the book.
>and their every action is extensively documented.<
If this is true, then we know exactly who is lobbying them and how, it'll all be there in the documents.
>Kogelmann argues that we should reject the intuitive appeal of promissory representation because it will inevitably lead to pandering: politicians supporting policies they know to be bad or ineffective because of popular support.<
This is, of course, the heart of the entire argument; we should increase opacity so that we can ignore the desires of the citizens we dislike. All the nonsense about lobbyists is sleight of hand.
>terrorism is an even more effective tactic than bribery. Instead of making a contribution to a legislator to try to get an amendment added, the lobbyist can instead threaten to donate to a primary challenger<
Telling the store owner if they don't refund you you'll be shopping elsewhere; you know, terrorism.
>In theory, proportional representation should reduce the legitimacy gap. If any viewpoint large enough to constitute a minor political party is given at least one seat at the table, we have good reason to believe that that viewpoint will be considered in debate. <
No you don't. Why would you? You just said women and slaves were ignored in the Philadelphia Convention, and they surely had more people holding their viewpoint than your imagined one-seat party. Or is the argument that the one seat will be able to tell everyone that they were ignored? You know; transparency?
> You just said women and slaves were ignored in the Philadelphia Convention, and they surely had more people holding their viewpoint than your imagined one-seat party.
But they had zero seats at the Convention, right? That's the whole point? I'm confused about your objection here.
> Or is the argument that the one seat will be able to tell everyone that they were ignored? You know; transparency?
I think this idea is described favourably in the OP as "testimonial accountability".
IS that the point?
"If any viewpoint large enough to constitute a minor political party"
The implication seems to be the group is too large to ignore now. But they aren't, as proven by PC supposedly ignoring well over half the population.
If it's just a seat at the table, you can cut everything after "viewpoint".
> The implication seems to be the group is too large to ignore now.
Hmm, okay, I don't see that implication. I interpret "viewpoint large enough to constitute a minor political party" as just a minimum size requirement, to avoid having to include super-tiny fringe groups. That is, it's not "too large to ignore", it's "large enough to be worth addressing".
The book and the review have better logic than most of the comments.
This strikes me as the old problem of comparing an imperfect implementation of one system to a perfect theory of another. I cannot imagine a world where sufficiently motivated lobbyists couldn't discover or predict how their legislators voted. In such a system we've just introduced yet another inequity between interest groups and the general public.
As other posters have written, the comparisons to the pre and post-1970s are laughable. So many things changed during that time period that you can't show causation this way. Also, having a few committee votes be secret is very different than the kind of total secrecy the book seems to be advocating.
The basic assumption here that evil (?) moneyed interests can only influence legislators by rewarding or punishing them for votes is false. In general, people with money can influence politics in many ways. George Soros got a lot of soft on crime DAs elected, just by contributing to their election campaigns. On the right, the Koch brothers have done similar things. Basically, if voters can choose to vote for candidates based on "the kind of people they are" then people with money can choose to donate based on that as well.
In general, I would expect high-status people to learn all the "secrets" anyway. There are hundreds of people in the legislature, and each of those people has a small army of staffers, IT techs, whatevers. If you can convince even one of those hundreds (maybe thousands) of people to spill the beans about what someone said in the supposedly secret session, all the benefits of secrecy evaporate. We could very easily end up in a situation where titans of industry and the head of the FBI know how all the congressmen voted, but the general public does not. Seems pretty dystopian to me.
In general, I think people overestimate the dangers of "money in politics" and underestimate the dangers of the creeping hollowing out of democratic institutions in favor of bureaucratic ones. We already live in a hybrid system where the director of the SEC can wage a private war on cryptocurrency with nary a voter or a new law in sight. Similar things could be said for many agencies, especially the intelligence ones. Rather than worrying about money in politics, we should worry about whether Congress is even relevant in 2023.
This is a very good case for choosing a legislature by sortition, so that they can legitimately deliberate in secret like a jury. It is a terrible case for secret deliberations by elected representatives: it will select for a group of legislators even more sociopathic than the ones we have, people who are unusually adept at hiding their true preferences and blaming others for their misdeeds. Proportional representation is a very poor substitute for sortition here, since it still empowers political parties, and success within a party will still be unrelated to actual voting behavior and thus select for the same kinds of sociopaths. The root of the problems he is trying to address is the badness of elections: either making elections less bad, or making government less dependent on elections, are promising solutions, but making elections worse by removing electoral accountability is not.
Secrecy would not stop lobbying or even slow it down much. As this review notes, lobbyists care more about the amendment process than the final vote. The lobbyists are totally certain who introduced their amendment, because they're the ones who wrote the amendment and gave it to the congressman!
I'll give another example from my personal experience. I'm a bureaucrat who has no power whatsoever to make independent decisions: everything I do must be approved by a political appointee. And yet I get lobbied constantly, because the lobbyists know from my job title that I must be the one who talks to the political appointee about certain issues.
Another one to add to already large pile of Americans trying to come up with a better way of doing democracy while studiously ignoring the fact that many other democracies both, (A) already exist, and, (B) already do it better.
This one at least briefly mentioned the possibility of proportional representation, but then had to throw in a comment about how it was still, apparently, a matter of debate as to whether that is better than first past the post. That made me think: how many states have moved from FPP to PR, and how many have switched in the other direction? I can't think of a single case of the latter (I don't think Greece's bonus system counts as FPP), but dozens of the former.
The last is a very interesting argument, but it doesn't necessarily mean that PR is better than FPP. It could also just mean that it's very hard to switch from FPP to PR, and not quite so hard to switch into the other direction.
Arguably, PR does not work very well in countries like Italy or Israel because they have such a huge number of tiny political parties that it is very hard to form coalitions. Once you are in this situation, it's impossible to switch away from it, since you need some small parties to agree, and they would have to agree to their own doom.
It's a little like unanimous votes. Almost everyone agrees that it's extremely bad for the EU that most votes need to be unanimous among all countries. But it's impossible to change because you would need an unanimous vote on that, and there are already too many members to ever achieve that.
After I posted that I asked ChatGPT about it and it pointed me towards Italy, which did, to significant degree but not completely, switch back towards a nearly FPP system, but the Constitutional Court eventually threw it out.
Israel raised the minimum percentage threshold to enter parliament to reduce the number of minor parties and it worked. They raised it three times in fact, so it now sits at 3.25%, a fairly sensible number. Another way to do it would be to set a maximum number of parties that can be in parliament; I'd recommend it be eight.
The EU introduced qualified majority voting, successfully getting rid of the requirement for unanimity on a wide variety of questions, proving that it can be done.
Thanks, I wasn't aware of the reforms in Italy and Israel. So perhaps I am a bit too pessimistic about changing those systems. Though the results seem to be mixed at best. Both Israel and Italy currently still have 12 parties in their parliament, which seems very much to me, and it does not seem less than before the reform. The Israelian government clearly suffers from the large number of parties in the current (and previous) coalition. In Italy it seems a lot more stable at the moment. So perhaps the reform did help there.
For the EU, you are right that qualified votes have been extended to a lot more areas in 2014, so yes, it can be done sometimes.
Israel only elected 10 parties. Two were added after the election, presumably from splitting. I think this is a bit unfair to blame on the election system. But, yes, 10 is still a bit too many. Maybe they could raise the threshold to 4%, which I believe is the most common setting for it.
Of the latest Italian election only 8 parties got proportional seats (one party only a single seat via that method) and 2 others only got seats via the direct FPP part of the election (each time only a single seat).
The Italian election system history is distressingly complicated...
Ah, interesting. Thanks for the explanation!
>Israel raised the minimum percentage threshold to enter parliament to reduce the number of minor parties and it worked.
Worked in what way? Certainly not in terms of the number of lists entering the parliament. (And I say lists, not parties, because the lists can be agreed upon by coalitions of parties, so the number of distinct organizations in Knesset might have just as well actually increased.) (Of course the real goal of raising the threshold was assumedly to keep the Arabs out - which didn't work either.)
Sorry, I wrote that badly. I meant to say that they attempted to raise the electoral threshold and succeeded in doing so three times. This clearly demonstrates that it can be done, which was the point I was trying to refute.
Yes, they'd need to go a bit higher to reduce the number of parties further. Israel is uncommonly fragmented in its society and I'd suggest that it represents the worst case scenario for making PR work.
It's somewhat hard to imagine what Israel would look like under FPP given that it doesn't use any electoral districts at the moment and also given the settlement situation and also given the many minority groups I imagine drawing districts would be a nightmare.
It's also humorous to see this arcane term "first past the post" thrown around as if it's some specific, obscure method of voting, and not just "the literal definition of voting." In common parlance, when one says "Let's take a vote on it", it's *always* implied that it's a "first-past-the-post" vote. Because that is always what voting has meant, for all of history, until about 5 minutes ago. But you don't want that to be the case, so you use an obscure term to 'other' the concept of voting itself. No. Voting is when you vote on something and the thing with the majority of votes wins - always.
And of course new voting systems would rarely be overturned, because the people who got elected using the new system obviously benefit from it and wouldn't allow the old system to return.
There is also no benefit to other systems, because they all inevitably turn into the same two ideological-party system in the end (see e.g. any number of European countries with the typical setup of "one, or at most two conservative parties that always vote together, vs. the liberal party + labor party + green party + social democrat party + socialist party + communist party that always vote together.
I lived through my country, New Zealand, switching from the old system to a PR one and the old system was very consistently called FPP to distinguish it.
Three separate referenda were held at various times putting FPP and PR against each other in a very clear and simple ballot. There were only two options: FPP or PR. And, under this "ancient and honourable method of voting" that very same "ancient and honourable method of voting" lost every single time!
So what do you do now? Discard it because it produced the wrong result?!
What has happened is that the two old main parties are still big enough that they can change back to the old system unilaterally, but they choose not to do that because it would be a very unpopular action for them to take.
And if you think there is no real change anyway then it shouldn't bother you what electoral system is used. Personally I think the change it quite significant.
I think the third and best choice is FPP with ranked ballots. Stable and clearly accountable governments from FPP and the ability of third parties and independents to challenge them without strategic voting to interfere
Ranked ballots kill partisan incentives. In Alberta I recall a ranked ballot Progressive Conservative leadership vote where #1 and #2 initiated a dogfight between them. Everyone put #3 as their second choice and they easily won when the second place candidate's votes went to him
In contrast I think PR still allows lots of room for partisanship for its own sake as well as choosing special interest policies that give you a secure base
Personally my favourite would be PR with ranked ballots.
I think voting for ideologies as represented by parties rather than people with personalities is a better recipe for getting what you really want.
When there are more than two parties to pick from I think partisanship is a great thing.
If someone is pushing for a change to the voting system, the only logical explanation would be that that change benefits them.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-alaskas-new-voting-system-helped-deliver-historic-win-us-democrats-2022-09-01/
Lo and behold, the same 'tribe' pushing for these alternative voting systems gets their new voting system put in place and... immediately uses it to seize power for their political party - against the wishes of the majority of the electorate, 58% of which would have preferred someone from the other party.
Lots of countries have "these alternative voting systems" and none of them are dominated by one party winning all the time. Any advantage, if it even happens at all, is quickly washed away.
Ok, I read the article now and it contradicts your point. It says that she would have won under a plurality system anyway. However while reading it I recalled how that election actually went and I see your point. I still don't agree with it though: it really seems to me that Alaskans showed their inexperience and lack of understanding of the new system by not casting second preference votes. They likely wont make that mistake again.
Alaska also tried really hard to make a ranked voting system as messed up as it possibly could. I've never seen another like it. The first ballot could end up with thousands of names on it in the future if people feel like messing with it, that's not good design.
Nah, it's perfeclty clear that Alaskans showed their understanding of the new system by, e.g., casting second-preference votes for a Democratic candidate, and he's pissed about that, because instead of a poll in which a majority vote wins, he'd like some kind of party-list system in which the Republican party is entitled to Nick Begich's votes.
I'm not trying to be sardonic here, his position here just literally is the exact reverse of the position he took half-a-day earlier. My suspicion is, he's intellectually committed to neither. His posts start making much more sense once you assume he's simply committed to his in-group (which, I don't know, somewhere on the right, far far on the right where you literally cannot see a difference between liberals and communists), wants an electoral system that delivers wins to his in-group, and believes the current one does that, while any proposed changes to it are evil plots to take those wins away.
Yeah, that's probably the case. Alaskan Republicans are not really like other Republicans, being more independently minded. I also checked the numbers and not really enough people failed to mark a second choice on their ballot to make a difference if they had.
The third placed candidate withdrawing from the second round was also very destabilising and unusual, another symptom of poor election design.
Unfortunately Americans in general are very reluctant to look beyond their borders for possible solutions so they have to relearn everyone else's mistakes the hard way. Still it has been great to see a bunch of these new election systems take root at the state level around America, long may that trend continue, after all the status quo is not delivering popular outcomes.
Anyway, you seem to be interested in election systems; I dug up an old comment I made about how the US election system ended up so weird and just now posted it to my Substack. Perhaps you'd like to read it:
https://macrothinking.substack.com/p/how-us-politics-got-messed-up
>Voting is when you vote on something and the thing with the majority of votes wins - always.
Well, not always, for example not in FPTP. And not in representative democracy, which is precisely why the issue of whether the composition of the elected body is proportional to the electoral vote arises in the first place.
>In common parlance, when one says "Let's take a vote on it", it's *always* implied that it's >a "first-past-the-post" vote
Yes, we all fondly remember that when we had to pick where to go for class dinner, we would divide the class in subgroup, and the option supported by the majority of the subgroups (rather than the majority of the voters) would be the winning one. Also, those whose idea happened to win the first time had the faculty to unilaterally re-determine the groups, and to tailor their composition such that their proposals would win even when opposed by a clear majority of voters.
I swear, lots of anti-left comments on this blog are pure "Charlie Brown had hoes" stuff
So you admit these new voting mechanisms are leftist schemes.
I am a huge fan of the political system of Switzerland, and obscurity is one of their main (and unconventional) political principles. It's called "Kollegialitätsprinzip" (principle of collegiality) and says that the government confers secretly, and after their decision all members of the government need to stand in for this decision towards the public.
This is much more remarkable than it would be in other countries because Switzerland does not have coalitions, but rather the government is formed jointly by all major political parties, from left-wing over liberals to the far right-wing.
It's not 100% obscure. For example, each member of the government has a department where they have to be the active part, work out laws, negotiate with the parliament etc., and you usually know how they think about questions concerning their own department. But in general the principle is respected and makes the government much more obscure than in other countries like Germany or the UK.
I have never paid too much attention to this principle of the Swiss system (there are a LOT more unusual and remarkable quirks), but the review made me update that it might be more important than I thought.
Funny how it's always "left-wing" and "far-right". Even when there are literal communists in the government, they're never described as "far-left".
This was a deliberate decision, and does make sense. In Switzerland there are a moderate right-wing and a far-right party, but only one left-wing party in the government. (On federal level.) I was referring to those concrete parties.
In principle, a far-left party does exist in Switzerland ("Alternative Liste"), but it is too small to be represented in the government. (The government only has 7 members.) It is represented in some regional governments.
If I ask Sen Senny to add rattlesnake protections to the law, then I can verify the modification is in the law, even if all meetings and votes are secret. Only the law has to be public.
While I enjoyed reading this, I’m surprised the author of this review resorts to “see correlation? causation!” and seems to totally omit the potential that members of a secret convention wishing to push their agenda would be incentivized to record AND leak recordings from these conventions, if not to the public then at least to the SIGs and elite...which destroys much of the proposed benefits. The essay pushes secrecy as a solution (and there’s merit in trying!), but it does so without discussing or thinking through what new equilibrium might manifest and mitigations one could take.
The Gilens and Page study is probably not a good proof that the US is an oligarchy. See https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-study
"Important for the current discussion, political equality does not seem to be realized in many modern democracies (despite very high levels of transparency). The classic example of this is the 2014 paper by Gilens and Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” in which the authors demonstrate that legislators in the United States are highly responsive to the preferences of interest groups and economic elites, but essentially unresponsive to the preferences of average citizens. "
There are at least three scholars from reputable institutions who claim to have refuted this conclusion (link below). I haven't looked into it closely to see who's right or wrong, but I did have a similar objection of my own: the opinions of regular people and elites are highly correlated, so wouldn't you come to the conclusion that elite opinions don't matter if you control for popular support and then plot elite support vs. probability of legislative success, rather than controlling for elite support and then plotting popular support vs. probability of success? The original authors don't do this (as far as I can tell), even though it's an obvious thing to try
https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-study
I think secret ballots in the legislative -- paraphrase-able as "The thing which is wrong with Congress is that it is not like Among Us" -- are a terrible idea.
Everyone in Congress wants to advance their own career to some degree, if you don't play to win, you will probably not go much further than a leaflet distributor in politics. At any time, the percentage of Congresspersons whose own career is optimally advanced by making the notional majority succeed is less than 50%. The opposition has the incentive to make the other party fail fast and fail hard. But the backbenchers of the party with the majority would also personally benefit from a spectacular failure ascribed to their party leaders, which will open up prestigious positions for them (if they can hang onto their seat while the voters punish their party).
The rational thing would be to vote against the interests of your own constituents. If your supporters are strongly pro-NRA or pro choice or anything like that, nothing will drive them to the ballot boxes like new laws against their pet interests.
If you don't have attribution to bad decisions (like failure to pass any budget bills), the only thing the voters can do is collectively is replacing all of the legislative. The quality of the legislators will probably change for the worse during each such replacement. After two iterations, I would expect you will mostly get demagogues campaigning on burning the system down.
My model of politics is that during election season, candidates make promises to both the voters and their donors, which may be at odds. The book review makes it sound like a forgone conclusion that when you remove outcome based incentives, the politicians will defect in their alliance with their donors instead of defecting in their alliance with the voters. Call my cynical, but I am doubtful about that. Even when the donors can not control how they vote, they still get preferred access. If you have a diffuse public good on the one hand (like curbing climate change), while you have a very concrete human interest on the other hand (like your golf buddy who worries about the economical sustainability of his company which employs thousands of your constituents), it is very human to pick the concrete particular interest (it is not like climate change killed anyone you know personally, and anyhow the fraction of CO2 emissions your buddy is responsible for will not make a difference anyhow).
"Anticipatory representation", where the smallfolks vote for the incumbent administration if life is good and against them if life is bad is also available to the special interests. Lobbyists can simply reward outcomes instead of voting patterns. The 1%er Interest Group could simply commit to rewarding all the representatives if their tax cuts bill passes. This would be twice as costly for them as just rewarding the ones who voted for them, and also remove the individual selection advantage of corrupt representatives, but still allows for the creation of a misalignment between the personal incentives and the overall effect on the electorate.
The idea that any plenary debate can actually be aimed at finding consent seems absurd. If you have a few hundreds participants, everything remotely interesting will get leaked.
Like presidential debates, college debates and talk shows, parliamentary debates are performed solely for the benefit of the audience. I am somewhat sympathetic to the argument that they are largely obsolete in the age of youtube and podcasts.
The bonmot that "Laws[ ...] like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made" from 1869 feels as true today as it was back then. The horsetrading needed to pass laws a la "I will support your special interest law if you later support mine" is obviously not happening on public record, because such backroom deals -- which I would argue are centrally where the future of the law is decided -- will obviously happen with the smallest viable number of participants.
Of all the suggestions made by this book review, I could maybe get behind the idea to make congressional committee deliberations non-public. I doubt it would help much with big lobbyists figuring out what goes on, though. As the saying goes, three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. If you have instead a comittee of a few dozens, you only have to have a few informants (who are unaware of the identity and number of other informants) to be kept up to date.
The issue here is there are three conceptions of what representative democracy’s trying to achieve, and opacity only makes sense for one of them (my made-up names:
1) Substitute Direct Democracy: The ideal is that the policies and laws that are enacted are those which would win a referendum. Direct Democracy on that level is impractical for whatever reason (could be too much going on, equally could be “no one has the time to learn about all this stuff”) so representative democracy is a good enough for government work substitute for either public opinion, or what public opinion would be if the public knew more (but had the same beliefs and preferences).
2) Selective Democracy: We want the best people to make laws, and we want everyone to have a say in selecting the best people.
3) Corporatist Democracy: Different parts of society want different things and have different interests, but we only have one government. The solution is a grand bargain where different groups compromise and get the things they most care about (eg. farmers get price floors in exchange for fishermen getting protective quotas and factory workers getting safety regulations - all of them are a minority on their own so in a direct democracy they’d be sunk). Some of them also have contradictory interests. In parliament, their representatives can all meet up to hammer out a deal. This is much more European than Anglo-Saxon and I’m only including it for completeness, but the US has historically done it to a limited extent between regions.
Opacity is really an argument for 2 over 1; lobbyists will get around it fairly easily, but the public won’t. That means representatives don’t have to pander to voters/can listen to experts/can meaningfully debate and convince each other, which 1 doesn’t want but 2 does (3 probably doesn’t either, but it assumes a different sort of electorate who only/predominantly care about getting their specific priorities). Opacity (which was really killed by the internet, not sunshine laws) is probably the easiest way to shift towards 2, but longer terms, 1-term limits and possibly either indirect elections or approval voting might also work. The main thing would be a cultural shift towards people wanting 2 instead of 1.
My biases are entirely in favour of conception 1, so if I’ve undersold 2 or 3 then I apologise.
Among the many problems with the proposed system, is that it is based on a simplistically narrow misunderstanding of how lobbying works.
Lobbyists do not simply talk to congressmen and offer them thinly-disguised bribes for votes, whether floor or committee. They also talk to congressional *staff*, both personal and committee. Talk to them, take them out to expense-account lunches, offer to do their homework for them with carefully-prepared white papers on whatever subject those staffers are rushing to become experts in, and offering them high-paying lobbying jobs when their staff term is over.
This is a path to real influence that doesn't require "bribing" congressmen. But it is also a path to *intelligence*. One staffer might not tell a lobbyist everything, might even lie to protect his boss's interests. But talk to a dozen, and you'll know what you need to know. Including who voted for what, if it matters.
The most likely outcome of a "secret" government, is one that is still transparent to lobbyists and other powerful interests, but hidden from the voters. I vote "no".
There's a hell of a lot of discussion of the USA here, but there are other countries in the world and it would seem informative to examine how they address these issues - eg. proportional representation is the status quo in many countries
Strongly disagree.
All your ways of mitigating costs are flawed. Anticipatory legislation doesn't work since people don't know which politicians are voting for the bad thing, and which ones are voting for the right thing. And if things stay bad, they can't tell whether flipping back would make things worse or not, because they have no idea what their elected representative is doing.
Gyroscopic legislation doesn't work since people don't know whether those archetypes will actually votes in those interests. And it would be very profitable for special interest groups to prop up someone in those archetypes who will actually vote against what people suggest.
And this hope that special interest groups won't find out who's defecting seems naive. As another commenter suggested, they can test bribing different groups for different outcomes to test for defections. Hell, a large part of the work special interest groups do is achieved by them directly convincing representatives, not just bribing votes in ways the politicians disagree with.
So many things changed in around 1970 that tying them all to this increased transparency seems wholly unfounded. Do you disagree with the lead hypothesis surrounding increased crime and incarceration, and instead attribute the rise (and later fall) to increased government transparency?
If you want to stop money from influencing politics, consider just limiting donations.
There's one argument which this piece doesn't address, but is nonetheless quite important. Sometimes politicians don't see the whole picture. It's not malice, it might not even be incompetence, but it's possible to introduce legislation that affects a small and very specific minority (think people without mobile phones, people with a specific disability or condition or believers of a niche religion) in a very significant way. Even in proportional systems, it's impossible to give a seat at the table to all such tiny minorities, and even if it were, it would effectively amount to opening up the debate to anybody who is interested.
If the debate is transparent, even if 99% of citizens don't care, there are a few that do, and those few are often willing to bring the issues up. If we removed transparency for the process, we'd still have to provide some kind of summaries so that people and NGOs would know which viewpoints were considered and rejected and which genuinely were just never thought about.
One of major reasons why citizens vote in private is to save from the consequences of voting against whosoever ends up being the winner. If the citizens votes are made public, it will incentivize governments to single out the dissenters.
Even if they are on the winning side of a vote, they could still suffer negative consequences, a la Brendan Eich.
Really sorry, but I am not familiar with what happened with Brendan Eich. But, you are correct, if on the winning side voters can suffer consequences for their votes being public
Brendan Eich donated to the winning side of a citizen-lead ballot initiative. However, most of the people (or at least the loudest ones) in his industry were on the other side, so they lead a successful effort to get him kicked out of the company he founded.
I really wish I could get through this but it's just too dry. Can anyone summarize the key takeaways?
"Some individuals have no interest in politics, and no wrong is done to them if they have less influence than individuals that are very interested in politics. "
I don't have the words to adequately express how false this is.
"If legislators voted by secret ballot, this resolution mechanism would cease to function. Say that a lobbyist makes a contribution to a legislator hoping for an amendment to be inserted into a bill. The legislator can promise up and down to vote in favor of that amendment, but will have no way to actually prove it. With no way to verify that the exchange took place, the lobbyist would soon give up."
Laughably easy to disprove. Why on earth would you suppose a lobbyist would need to rely on public/official sources for information on how votes went? We already have "secret" discussion of all three branches of government leaked to (friendly to the leaker) media and we are supposed to believe that the vote counters/observers will be incorruptible?
"The NRA operates on a similar dynamic. It spends a good deal of its time and money on the task of making sure its members are informed about one particular issue, resulting in policies that are objectively unpopular among Americans."
Strike three.
"I have only touched on the first three chapters of Kogelmann’s book. The rest is also interesting and worthwhile, but somewhat distracts from the agenda that I’m trying to push with this post."
This contest isn't a partial-book review, Author, nor is it a place to push agendas. On that basis I will not be voting for this review in the final tally and I encourage others to avoid doing so as well.
I was honestly astonished that a review that openly stated that made it to the finals. Absolutely agree, would never dream of voting for it on that basis alone.
Yeah, this is not a book review, just a political statement which takes ideas from a book. Whether I had agreed with the central thesis or not (I think treating lobbying as illegal bribes is a much better idea than making policy-making secret), I don't understand why this not-a-review is a finalist. Or is every review submitted a "finalist"?
I have long been an advocate of actually sequestering the legislators. If it is important enough for a jury trial, it is important enough for running the country. They should be in a fortified bunker with no communications access during session.
I feel like the take that less transparency would = less interest group influence both unlikely and not necessarily desirable.
First of all, I just find it unlikely that moneyed interests would not come up with ways of influencing legislators with secret votes. Legislators would still come from parties, because parties are one of the main ways we simplify political decision making. Interests groups could buy influence with party leadership, who still need to run and win elections, and then lean on them to elevate "true believers." This is exactly what has happened with the conservative legal movement. There's nothing to stop a given appointed judge from deciding to just become a liberal, but the Federalist society has become very effective at identifying conservative 1L's, rearing them into successful lawyers who agree with the federalist society leadership (and their donors) on >90% of issues, and then getting Republican politicians to appoint them. The same could easily happen in this kind of system.
Second, I'm not totally convinced that special interest groups having influence is a bad thing. When we say "special interest group" we think "bad," but we're all part of one interest group or another. I think the NRA is bad and corn subsidies are silly, but I'm glad that organizations like Planned Parenthood have influence in Washington and like federal grants to public transportation in the Bay Area. Reforms that made interest group influence align more closely with their relative size would be awesome (say, abolishing the senate), but I don't think eliminating influence is necessarily a good thing. I think that the idea of moving to proportional representation is essentially admitting this. You're just going from a system where lobbyists represent groups and lean on legislator to one where the lobbyists are the legislators. Like, instead of the UAW paying a guy a bunch of money to get Hakeem Jeffries to like their bill, they spend a bunch of getting him elected and then he argues for the bill in committee? Maybe that's better, but I honestly don't think its substantially different.
Identity-based representation makes the problem of gerrymandering much worse, and also disadvantages younger voters who are much less likely to have someone like them in congress.
Also even if you fix the problem of congressionals voting for *corporation's* interests, you exacerbate the problem of them voting in their *own* interests. You don't need to lobby a congressperson if they have stock in your company.
What a horrific book this is.
Transparency is bad - secrecy is better - what? The point of transparency is so that interested parties can at least have some possibility of understanding what is really going on in terms of legislative operations.
Nor is the author's/reviewer's understanding of how money corrupts politics, well based in reality. It isn't any one thing - it is everything. For the top tier - throw money on both sides of the donkey/elephant divide. For the next tier - focus on on side. For the next tier down - focus on key states/senators. etc etc.
It isn't just about votes either. Money also brings in consultants ranging from staffers to "free" help pre-writing bills (see ACA).
Hot take - would a more secret system as proposed work better if there was transparency in how often politicians voted contrary to their public statements? So - we know when politicians frequently lie, but we don't know how they vote on individual committee decisions and in votes on legislation?
See https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/.
"In order for citizens to hold legislators accountable for their actions, citizens must follow congress, which they do not do."
"Removing the audience allows participants to make mistakes more freely and eliminates the incentive to pontificate and grandstand instead of discussing substantive issues."
These two ideas seem to be in opposition to one another. Either citizens don't care enough to follow the process, or they care too much to get anything done. What gives? I think the way Congressional debate happens in practice takes advantage of both ideas. It's a forum for addressing the public if you're Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Jesse Jackson, AOC, etc. What better place to gain a public name for yourself and ascend to higher office than to blast your principles as broadly as possible.
Alternately, you can bury seemingly important bills in a lot of parliamentary procedure or discussion of minor amendments that you expect to be defanged before passage anyway. While everyone is debating the $5 million amendment that changes a minor point on abortion or guns or whatever, virtually no discussion focuses on the other 1,000 line items from the $2T bill. If ever someone asks why some provision that shunts millions of dollars to ~20 wealthy families for the next 5 years, there will be some minor amendment that an AOC or MTJ can introduce to distract the public.
This means the things that are discussed are either 1.) too idealized/polemic to implement as policy directly, or 2.) too boring to care about. The intent is to only have the public pay attention when you actually want them to pay attention - and to use the spotlight to distract the public and thereby manipulate the effect of 'transparency'.
Yet we still have lots of laws getting passed, and many of them clearly involve complicated debates and compromises. But if Congress is all a big show, where are the debates happening? At dinners/parties/etc. outside the official halls of Congress. In other words, Washington will find a way to deliberate in secret no matter what sunshine policies we put in place. Does it really matter whether that debate happens in a fancy building built by the public or in a fancy building built by private individuals?
I'm not convinced any of the policies proposed would have a measurable impact.
This is an interesting, if somewhat biased, review of what looks to me like a deeply impractical solution.
Being that there is nothing new under the Sun, and to counteract our tendency to focus on things most recent, it would be useful to consider historical precedent in any discussion of various governmental system models.
Before looking at alternatives we first need to enumerate the key performance indicators to serve as the basis for evaluation. The ones most often heard today are GDP growth, economic inequality, and, less often, national security. This is natural because these KPIs are measurable and and well-known. However, an intense focus on such factors betrays a strong recency bias. In my view, the best indicator of success for a system is its longevity, because longevity implies ability to successfully compete and withstand shocks. Let us consider the most prominent examples.
The system that was most often used by our species would appear to be autocracy. After all, it had persisted for the vast majority of recorded history. Still, a closer look should undermine what might appear to be a strong record informs us that individual autocratic polities tended to have much shorter lives, persisting frequently for mere decades. The most notable exceptions thrived mostly in antiquity and were such household names as the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and Roman empires. Notably, the latter two survived longer than 400 years.
A somewhat more successful system in terms of pure longevity has been what I call, for lack of a better term, an oligarchic autocracy. Under oligarchic autocracy the power of the autocrat is significantly constrained by the counterweight of subject grandees. Most of the world-historical empires were organized this way, including Egypt, China, and the Holy Roman. Their record looks impressive, but their success was generally achieved on the backs of long-suffering working populations, and they tended to be vulnerable to frequent change of dynasty and violent upheaval, leading even more suffering.
A point worth noting about the above two systems is the manner of their final dissolution. In every case an end of a long-lived autocracy was disastrous collapse, no matter what revisionist historians will try to tell you.
Direct democracy by this metric does not look good at all - Athenian being the most successful with a lifespan of only about 200 years. Representative democracy did better: the Roman republic endured for about 400 years, depending on how one counts. Both systems succumbed to elite capture before violent demise.
Less frequently discussed is the system of elective autocracy with oligarchic elements. To my knowledge there have been two, one lasting about 300 years and the other exceeding a whopping 1500. This Methuselah of governmental systems was none other than La Serenissima. From the earliest beginnings, her system consisted of a popularly elected autocratic ruler, who notionally had absolute power but in practice was usually obliged to consult with subject grandees, whose support was indispensable to his initial election. After some growing pains, and just in time for Venice’s meteoric rise, the problem of familial capture of the position was resolved, and thereafter the succession had been mostly peaceful and usually went to the best-qualified member of the elite. An important wrinkle of the system was that the doge was liable to be deposed and killed if his policies led to palpable disaster. Judging by the rarity of popular uprising, the system was generally beneficial to Venetian plebes as well, even after they effectively lost the vote. With respect to transparency, deliberations of the ruling council were notionally secret, but in reality all excision-makers were participants with complete information at their disposal.
Perhaps the winning system, should it ever become possible, would be to have an elective autocrat who is subject to deposition and execution following an annual popular vote. After all, few things concentrate the mind more effectively than threat of death. We may recoil before this notion as barbaric, but our descendants may not be so picky.
I can concede that the drawbacks of transparency sometimes outweigh the drawbacks of secrecy, possibly even most of the time.
However, that hardly means that increasing secrecy is either the best or most feasible solution to today's problems in politics. Let's consider negative ads, for instance:
> The threat is plain: step out of line, and here come the attack ads and the primary challengers
But why do negative campaign ads work in the first place? They work because a vote against my opponent is equivalent to a vote for me. So it works in countries with single-seat districting systems, especially if there is a two party system and first-past-the-post voting system... the U.S. uses all of of this! Take away the two-party system or the single-winner districts, and suddenly negative campaigning is somewhere between worthless and much less effective than positive campaigning.
It's hard to get voters to care enough about the voting system to want it changed. But since transparency (unlike first-past-the-post) is affirmatively popular with voters, It doesn't seem easier to abolish transparency than to abolish single-seat districts.
I can concede that the drawbacks of transparency sometimes outweigh the drawbacks of secrecy, possibly even most of the time.
However, that hardly means that increasing secrecy is either the best or most feasible solution to today's problems in politics. Let's consider negative ads, for instance:
> The threat is plain: step out of line, and here come the attack ads and the primary challengers
But why do negative campaign ads work in the first place? They work because a vote against my opponent is equivalent to a vote for me. So it works in countries with single-seat districting systems, especially if there is a two party system and first-past-the-post voting system... the U.S. uses all of of this! Take away the two-party system or the single-winner districts, and suddenly negative campaigning is somewhere between worthless and much less effective than positive campaigning.
It's hard to get voters to care enough about the voting system to want it changed (and when they do campaign to change it, for some reason they often ask for only a minor improvement, such as Instant Runoff Voting in single-seat districts). But since transparency (unlike first-past-the-post) is affirmatively popular with voters, It doesn't seem easier to abolish transparency than to abolish single-seat districts.
> The complete solution he proposes is proportional representation.
Does Kogelman really stress the value of opacity above that of proportional representation, as this review seems to imply? This part makes me wonder.