It’s not clear to me that this lens is more valid than the opposite. Sure, passing up reform now could mean no reform for a while- but one could argue that in the absence of any reform, frustration and pressure is maintained, meaning the conditions for reform continue to exist, whereas doing inferior reform makes a large portion of people say either “Yes, we got reform, so now we should be happy”, or “Hey, we already tried reform, and it ended terribly. Why are they demanding we try it again?”
Lock-in effects are real, and I am concerned that settling for IRV will lock a barely-better system in place, when the conditions are currently ripe for a truly decent system to be implemented
I am sympathetic to your view, I have just never seen anything like it happen in practice.
The problem is that getting voting reform on the ballot requires a huge, focused effort in money and personnel. Once it hits the ballot, win or lose, the money is spent and the overwhelming majority of the people will leave. This is because, at least in American politics, they are either volunteers (temporary) or contractors who fulfill a specific function on a campaign-by-campaign basis (temporary) or an alliance of several orgs with related goals (temporary).
The reason it is IRV rather than Approval here is because IRV has a bigger and more established support base, with more money. This is mostly because IRV is older than Approval and is basically the only option with which regular people might be familiar. There isn’t an option available for putting a truly better system on the ballot, because there is no reservoir of money and personnel behind it.
If your frustration hypothesis were correct, then we would consistently see failed reform attempts rapidly replaced with superior reform attempts that succeed. But this isn’t the case, as far as I can tell. While I have not done research on this question I am a closer-than-average observer of politics, and I observe that when reforms come up repeatedly they aren’t improved. Instead, they are either basically the same (Net Neutrality, sugar subsidies) or differently-bad (encryption legislation, tax reform). All of these options are backed by large institutions, which can sustain a continuous effort over years and decades.
“Hey, we already tried reform, and it ended terribly. Why are they demanding we try it again?”
This is exactly how people usually react when a big reform push fails.
It’s not clear to me that this lens is more valid than the opposite. Sure, passing up reform now could mean no reform for a while- but one could argue that in the absence of any reform, frustration and pressure is maintained, meaning the conditions for reform continue to exist, whereas doing inferior reform makes a large portion of people say either “Yes, we got reform, so now we should be happy”, or “Hey, we already tried reform, and it ended terribly. Why are they demanding we try it again?”
Lock-in effects are real, and I am concerned that settling for IRV will lock a barely-better system in place, when the conditions are currently ripe for a truly decent system to be implemented
I am sympathetic to your view, I have just never seen anything like it happen in practice.
The problem is that getting voting reform on the ballot requires a huge, focused effort in money and personnel. Once it hits the ballot, win or lose, the money is spent and the overwhelming majority of the people will leave. This is because, at least in American politics, they are either volunteers (temporary) or contractors who fulfill a specific function on a campaign-by-campaign basis (temporary) or an alliance of several orgs with related goals (temporary).
The reason it is IRV rather than Approval here is because IRV has a bigger and more established support base, with more money. This is mostly because IRV is older than Approval and is basically the only option with which regular people might be familiar. There isn’t an option available for putting a truly better system on the ballot, because there is no reservoir of money and personnel behind it.
If your frustration hypothesis were correct, then we would consistently see failed reform attempts rapidly replaced with superior reform attempts that succeed. But this isn’t the case, as far as I can tell. While I have not done research on this question I am a closer-than-average observer of politics, and I observe that when reforms come up repeatedly they aren’t improved. Instead, they are either basically the same (Net Neutrality, sugar subsidies) or differently-bad (encryption legislation, tax reform). All of these options are backed by large institutions, which can sustain a continuous effort over years and decades.
This is exactly how people usually react when a big reform push fails.