Are democracies doomed to endless intense, intractable partisanship?
Model for Yes: In a democracy, there will be a set of issues. Each has a certain level of popular or special-interest support, as well as constitutionality.
Issues with the highest levels of popular support and constitutionality will get enacted first, if they weren’t already in place before the democracy was founded.
Over time, issues with more marginal support and constitutionality will get enacted, until all that’s left are the most marginal issues. The issues that remain live issues will be ones that have enough passion behind them to keep them live issues, yet slim enough support to make them intractable.
The result is a climate of intense, intractable partisanship. That doesn’t mean there’s no action, because the laws of chance say that each side will win occasionally. It just means there’ll be a lot of back and forth. A law gets passed, then repealed during the next election cycle. An executive order is made, then undone in four years.
If popular support can change, then even an intensely partisan atmosphere can change as well. There will be the appearance of being at a permanent fruitless standstill, even as policy does change regularly to accord with popular support.
So how does popular support change?
That’s a harder question. My dad once told me that “people won’t fight to gain a service, but they will fight to keep it from being taken away from them.” He made a $6 million bet on this and won, so I trust him. Can’t share details, sorry.
But under this model, you have a service or a right that’s right on the edge of majority support. The random jiggling of partisan debate eventually gets it passed. Then it gains a great deal of additional popular support, because now it’s a tangible reality rather than a hypothetical possibility.
So politics might work like this:
Stage 1 is shoring up the base. Getting the most ardent ideologues to rally behind a particular policy to get it up to, say, 33% support.
Stage 2 is horse trading. You make concessions to buy around 17% additional support, bringing it up to around 50% support. Then you keep it there for as long as it takes to get to 51%.
Stage 3 is the downhill slope, where you enjoy a rush of added support just for having won a vote.
One question I have is about stage 2. How does the price to gain additional support change as you approach 50% support? I could imagine that it increases, since you’re appealing to people with a worldview that’s more and more remote from your own. You buy the cheapest votes first.
But I could also imagine that right as you near 50% support, the price suddenly drops. If you only need 1 more vote to get to a majority, and you have 3 people who are prospective people to be that vote, I’d imagine they’d be bidding against each other to be that last vote.
But I also imagine that this would ripple out into the people who are slightly more supportive as well, so that ultimately you wind up with a fairly smooth price gradient that increases right up to 51%.
Effective politicians are mostly working in the “horse trading” stage. They need to have things to offer as concessions in order to buy what they really want. Activists are working in the “shoring up the base” stage. What they’re trying to do is find groups of people who are likely to support an issue without too much convincing, but just happen not to have heard about it yet.
There must be some grey area between stages. How do activists convince a candidate to adopt an issue and start spending their political resources on it?
Consider that 234 years ago, long dead individuals wrote in a statement calling for there to be “or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”.
Emotionally this sounds good, but consider. In a our real universe, information is not always a net gain. It can be hostile propaganda or a virus designed to spread rapidly causing harm to it’s hosts.
Yet in a case of ‘bug is a feature’, until recently most individuals didn’t really have freedom of speech. They could say whatever they wanted, but had no practical way for extreme ideas to reach large audiences. There was a finite network of newspapers and TV news networks—less than about 10 per city and in many cases far less than that.
Newspapers and television could be held liable for making certain classes of false statements, and did have to routinely pay fines. Many of the current QAnon conspiracy theories are straight libel and if the authors and publishers of the statements were not anonymous they would be facing civil lawsuits.
The practical reason to allow a freedom of speech today is current technology has no working method to objectively decide if a piece of information is true, partially true, false, or is hostile information intended to cause harm. (we rely on easily biased humans to make such judgements and this is error prone and subject to the bias of whoever pays the humans—see Russia Today)
I don’t know what to do about this problem. Just that it’s part of the reason for the current extremism.
Are democracies doomed to endless intense, intractable partisanship?
Model for Yes: In a democracy, there will be a set of issues. Each has a certain level of popular or special-interest support, as well as constitutionality.
Issues with the highest levels of popular support and constitutionality will get enacted first, if they weren’t already in place before the democracy was founded.
Over time, issues with more marginal support and constitutionality will get enacted, until all that’s left are the most marginal issues. The issues that remain live issues will be ones that have enough passion behind them to keep them live issues, yet slim enough support to make them intractable.
The result is a climate of intense, intractable partisanship. That doesn’t mean there’s no action, because the laws of chance say that each side will win occasionally. It just means there’ll be a lot of back and forth. A law gets passed, then repealed during the next election cycle. An executive order is made, then undone in four years.
Model for No: We do actually see dramatic changes in support for policy in short periods of time. In America, the Affordable Care Act, legalization of recreational marijuana, and support for same sex marriage have all increased.
If popular support can change, then even an intensely partisan atmosphere can change as well. There will be the appearance of being at a permanent fruitless standstill, even as policy does change regularly to accord with popular support.
So how does popular support change?
That’s a harder question. My dad once told me that “people won’t fight to gain a service, but they will fight to keep it from being taken away from them.” He made a $6 million bet on this and won, so I trust him. Can’t share details, sorry.
But under this model, you have a service or a right that’s right on the edge of majority support. The random jiggling of partisan debate eventually gets it passed. Then it gains a great deal of additional popular support, because now it’s a tangible reality rather than a hypothetical possibility.
So politics might work like this:
Stage 1 is shoring up the base. Getting the most ardent ideologues to rally behind a particular policy to get it up to, say, 33% support.
Stage 2 is horse trading. You make concessions to buy around 17% additional support, bringing it up to around 50% support. Then you keep it there for as long as it takes to get to 51%.
Stage 3 is the downhill slope, where you enjoy a rush of added support just for having won a vote.
One question I have is about stage 2. How does the price to gain additional support change as you approach 50% support? I could imagine that it increases, since you’re appealing to people with a worldview that’s more and more remote from your own. You buy the cheapest votes first.
But I could also imagine that right as you near 50% support, the price suddenly drops. If you only need 1 more vote to get to a majority, and you have 3 people who are prospective people to be that vote, I’d imagine they’d be bidding against each other to be that last vote.
But I also imagine that this would ripple out into the people who are slightly more supportive as well, so that ultimately you wind up with a fairly smooth price gradient that increases right up to 51%.
Effective politicians are mostly working in the “horse trading” stage. They need to have things to offer as concessions in order to buy what they really want. Activists are working in the “shoring up the base” stage. What they’re trying to do is find groups of people who are likely to support an issue without too much convincing, but just happen not to have heard about it yet.
There must be some grey area between stages. How do activists convince a candidate to adopt an issue and start spending their political resources on it?
I think the current era is a novel phenomena.
Consider that 234 years ago, long dead individuals wrote in a statement calling for there to be “or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”.
Emotionally this sounds good, but consider. In a our real universe, information is not always a net gain. It can be hostile propaganda or a virus designed to spread rapidly causing harm to it’s hosts.
Yet in a case of ‘bug is a feature’, until recently most individuals didn’t really have freedom of speech. They could say whatever they wanted, but had no practical way for extreme ideas to reach large audiences. There was a finite network of newspapers and TV news networks—less than about 10 per city and in many cases far less than that.
Newspapers and television could be held liable for making certain classes of false statements, and did have to routinely pay fines. Many of the current QAnon conspiracy theories are straight libel and if the authors and publishers of the statements were not anonymous they would be facing civil lawsuits.
The practical reason to allow a freedom of speech today is current technology has no working method to objectively decide if a piece of information is true, partially true, false, or is hostile information intended to cause harm. (we rely on easily biased humans to make such judgements and this is error prone and subject to the bias of whoever pays the humans—see Russia Today)
I don’t know what to do about this problem. Just that it’s part of the reason for the current extremism.