Tag: voting

Honduras

You say “Military Coup” like it’s a bad thing.

The constitution of Honduras has an article 239 which specifically prohibits not only the reelection of a president, but also proposing to reform it. It’s a neat idea – remember I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Thomas Paine had recommended something along the same lines with respect to monetary policy.

President Zelaya proposed a referendum to overrule (without legal justification) this article of the constitution, and was told by the Supreme Court that he couldn’t. He then had the ballots printed abroad and attempted to carry out the referendum illegally, and, after votes by both the Congress and the Supreme Court, the army was ordered to arrest him. Which they did.

Hat tip to Half Sigma, whose line is that this is no coup, but a simple exercise of law.

Assuming ½σ has the legalities straight (since Honduran constitutional law is one of those odd gaps in my knowledge) I would still say that whether this is a coup is merely a question of definition. The question matters to many people because they have an unjustified prejudice against military coups. I’ve been thinking sympathetically about the concept of the army removing the government for a while, so the idea that a coup might be legal strikes me not as a paradox but as a ray of sunshine – if nothing else, it allows me to post some of my thinking about the future of Britain without being a terrorist.

The advantage of a definition of coup that ignores the legality is that it allows me to describe what happened even in situations, like this one, where I don’t know what the law precisely is. There has been a military coup in Honduras, which I think was probably a legal one. There, isn’t that an efficient description of the situation?

The thing about constitutional legalities, as I suggested in my recent post on Iran, is that they never ultimately matter because there’s no forum where they can reliably be resolved, the competent court always being in effect one player in the political game. Some of the participants may be influenced by their perception of the legal situation, but that’s the only importance of law.

The court made the legal decision to have the president arrested, then the army made the political decision to obey the court rather than the president.

As I said in a comment at UR, For law to be preserved, law and government have to be two different things. If the law overrules the government, then it is not law, it is government. If the government can decide what the law is, then similarly, it is not law but government.

Iran Elections

Here’s what I believe about Iran:

First, I support the concept of national sovereignty. There should be no interference in the internal affairs of Iran that fall short of invading it and declaring it a protectorate. This is not so much a moral principle as a practical one – attempting to change a country’s government, with or without local allies, is an act of war.

I don’t know whether the election of Ahmedinejad was legitimate. Very possibly it wasn’t. Quite possibly it was – our view of the national mood both before and after the vote was skewed by the greater visibility of the Tehran population relative to the rural population.

The rural population is much more conservative than the city population. If we assume for the sake of argument that the vote was counted fairly, then what we are seeing resembles in some respects the situation that arose recently in Thailand. There, Thaksin Shinawatra had the support of the countryside, but was deposed by the capital city.

The difference in that case was that the Bangkok middle classes controlled the armed forces, and were able to take power through them. In Tehran, the questions appear to be whether the government is prepared to put down the revolt violently, and if so, whether the security forces will follow orders to do so.

Ultimately, the conclusion is that a government cannot survive on the support simply of a backward rural population, even if that population constitutes a majority. Note that the Islamic Republic was originally installed by the city population.

Of course, the protesters are not calling for an end to the Islamic Republic, only for the change of government they claim the election should have produced. That means they could win without the country falling into chaos (unlike, for example, the Chinese protesters of 20 years ago). If it becomes accepted that the election was rigged, there could be a very peaceful transition. Even so, if that were to happen, the proof that the Tehran mob can overrule the election result (honest or not) will not go away.

Maybe the more important conclusion to draw is that a truly national election is a very bad thing. The last few US presidential elections have produced great criticism of the “Electoral College” system, but that system is essential for producing an uncontested result. If the election is decided by the total number of votes over the nation, then it becomes too easy to add extra votes in areas where one site dominates. If you only count constituencies, then both sides can closely observe the process in the areas which are close, and in the areas which aren’t, it doesn’t matter, because the side which has the ability to rig the vote has no reason to. In Iran, suggestions that ballot boxes were stuffed with fake votes in parts of the country are plausible because the side that make the claims are not well-enough represented there to stop it.

The great advantage of democracy is that it gives the government enough legitimacy to stay in power without the massive intrusive social control that modern dictatorships normally require. Doubts over the count undermine that legitimacy, so it is essential that counts are visible enough to be trusted. That is much more important than that the system used is perfectly “fair”. I am quite disturbed that, where we have grown to trust the fairness of elections, we are throwing away their verifiability in exchange for better fairness.

Euro Elections

Great result for UKIP, obviously, but the rejoicing slightly tempered by disgust at two seats going to the Greens (again).

It can’t be said that the UKIP vote was a fluke, but though they may keep many of the votes in a general election, those votes won’t do them as much good. The drop in turnout from 2004 to 2009 was close to the total UKIP vote. Even supporters of the EU now realise that it doesn’t make any difference who sits in the European Parliament. The only thing at stake in a Euro election is the salary and expenses package. This is immensely valuable to a small party, so supporters of small parties are motivated to vote. Also there’s a kind of poetry in electing anti-EU MEPs, so UKIP do much better than other small parties.

As an aside, I was amused by the delay in counting the results in order to wait for other member states who voted at the weekend. Pretending that there was a single Europe-wide election simply drew attention to the fact that there wasn’t. The BBC’s web coverage was particularly annoying, as results in other countries were reported only in terms of the EP “groups” – so for instance if you look at the Ireland results, you’re left trying to guess which parties won seats – “Left” got two and “Socialists” got two – what are they (I think its Labour and Sinn Fein, but I don’t know which are which). “Liberal” gained three and “UEN” lost four – quite a shakeup there! I suspect that’s Fianna Fail changing groups, but if I want to know for sure I have to look somewhere other than the BBC.

Because elections happen so rarely, it takes many years for people to learn how to use them. It wasn’t until the 1980s or even 90s that tactical voting really got going, and voters are still learning that in EU elections, they can vote for whoever they want. The tactical voting will really make itself felt in the next general election, and any prediction based on “swing” will be completely off, as the measured swing will go to Conservatives or Lib Dems depending on which one is more likely to beat Labour.

The Rise of the BNP

Fraser Nelson has an article in the current Spectator on the rise of the BNP.

The story he tells is that “Britain has never been racist”, but that voters are being deceived by the BNP’s “devious ploy: distracting public attention from the racist reality of the BNP by representing itself as ‘the helpful party'”

Nelson’s estimate of the stupidity of the ordinary Briton is impressive, but I suspect it is he that is being deceived. My own impression (not, I confess, based on any very deep connection to the man in the street) is that at the very least a large minority of the British white working class is quite racist, but knows perfectly well that it is not allowed to say so. Previous far-right political movements have failed, not because voters have disagreed with their racism, but because they have perceived accurately that the movements will be crushed by the establishment by any means necessary. The public likes a strong horse.

The BNP’s current softer facade is succeeding, not because voters are fooled by it, but because they see that it makes the BNP harder to exclude (and because the weakened establishment has itself lost authority). They can look an elite political journalist in the eye and tell him that they will vote BNP, but they’re not racist, oh no, that would be wrong, and they can suppress a smirk, and think to themselves, “yes, this time we might actually be going to get away with it”.

Maybe I’m the only one to think of this possibility, but I don’t think so, because it is the only thing that explains the establishment’s terror at what is, by the numbers, still very much a fringe movement. I really don’t know how many people in Britain are racist, and nobody else does either, because those who are are afraid to say so. If the political momentum ever goes to the BNP, then its secret followers will feel free to stand up and say what they believe. I would not rule out the possibility that they are already a majority, but don’t know it. The anti-racist consensus might be blown away like Ceaucescu if they speak up and find that they are strong. That would make the determination of the establishment to clamp down on every racist squeak a necessity rather than an overreaction.

Ah, the dilemma of the left-winger, who believes that the working class is entitled to rule, and yet unfit to do so. I would laugh aloud at their discomfiture, if the stakes were not so high.

Update: BNP Failure

Strictly Voting Systems

One striking thing about the successive controversies over Strictly Come Dancing is the apparent lack of attention to detail paid to the technicalities.

When it first occurred to me that John Sergeant was likely to win the competition, I spent a while trying to work out whether the judges would be able to get rid of him somehow. I was handicapped by not knowing what the scoring system was, or how many couples were supposed to get to the final.

A day or two later he announced he was quitting, and, after kicking myself for not seeing that coming, I immediately wondered how they were going to handle being one couple short in the last few rounds.

Neither of the two questions I spent time pondering seemed to occur to the show’s organizers. They’ve now got round to explaining in detail how the scoring works. Even there there are oversights; I think it is an error to give both couples in a tie the higher number of points, although it doesn’t matter this late in the competition. Last week’s judge points should have been 2.5, 2.5, 1, rather than 3,3,1. That could have made a difference earlier in the competition.

However, I would take a more drastic approach. Collapsing the judges’ votes into an ordering of the contestants is throwing away information to begin with. It might be better to keep the actual points awarded by the judges, and then add the popular votes, scaled down to the same maximum. For instance, if there were a million votes, each judge point would be worth 1000000/160 phone votes. (about 6000). Apart from making the actual number of votes more important, that would encourage the judges not to bunch their votes into the 8-10 range all the time.

These type of shows have been going for years and years; I still think the problems appearing now are all because previously they never took the voting seriously, and would just cheat if they didn’t like the way it was going. Having people like Undercover Economist Tim Harford discussing it now is a real step forward. Maybe next year’s competitions will be designed by people who’ve heard of Arrow’s Theorem.

Update

20:05 – phone voting is currently going on to select the last two.

Scores carried from last week are

Rachel 5 (3 judges + 2 phone)
Tom 4 (1 judges + 3 phone)
Lisa 4 (3 judges + 1 phone)

Tom ranks above Lisa because in a tie phone votes are worth more than judge votes.

The points from the judges this evening were

Lisa 3 (80)
Rachel 2 (79)
Tom 1 (73 or thereabouts, I can’t remember)

So the running total is:

Rachel 7 (3+2 judges, 2 phone)
Lisa 7 (3+3 judges, 1 phone)
Tom 5 (1+1 judges, 3 phone)

So Tom needs to win the popular vote to make it to the last 2, while the girls each just need to come second to make it.

Again, the compression of the judges’ votes has been very evident – no vote lower than an 8, no vote from 3 of the 4 judges lower than a 9. Len and Arlene, I think, each gave 9 to Tom’s first dance and 10 to the other 5 dances. What’s the point of being there if they can’t say which dance is better?

Democracy Fails

It’s now official. Respected political journalist John Sergeant has agreed with BBC producers that the task of selecting the best celebrity ballroom dancer of the year is too important to be left to the public. If the voters were given a free choice, they would probably choose him, despite his evident lack of ability, and therefore he has felt it necessary to pull out.

What a good job this is the only area where we let the general public decide something by vote!

Best quote: “I know a bit about voting“

Second best quote: Google News

John Sergeant pulls out of Strictly Come Dancing
Times Online – all 1,017 news articles ยป

Another voting conundrum

Voting theory has a new mystery to explain. In what may turn out to be his greatest contribution to an understanding of electoral politics, journalist John Sergeant has made it onto week 9 of Strictly Come Dancing.

Let no one be under any illusions about this – he could end up winning the whole thing. The presenters tell us that half the contestants’ marks come from the four judges, and the other half from the phone-in vote. The final will be on phone-in votes only. Sergeant always gets the lowest votes from the judges, and yet never finishes in the bottom two once the viewers’ votes are added.

This could not have happened in the past. In years gone by, if telephone votes looked to undermine a program, the vote would simply be rigged. These practices were exposed last year, and they would certainly not be able to get away with it for Strictly this year.

An obviously similar event was the MTV Europe “Best Act Ever” award – won on Thursday by Rick Astley.

The key fact is that people cannot be assumed to vote for the “right” reason. Why vote for the best dancer, when annoying the judges is more fun? Why vote for the best Mayor of London, when Ken Livingstone or Boris Johnson will be far more entertaining?

If Sergeant does win, the TV producers will have to find a way in future to make the show workable despite perverse phone votes. The things they try may turn out to have relevance for politics.

Voting – altruism and other motives

Voting once again seems to be under general discussion for some reason.

Alex Tabarrok at MR links to an article by Gelman and Kaplan, which points out that while the benefits of voting are small (because of the very tiny probability of one vote changing the result), they affect millions of people. If I am a little bit altruistic – say, if it is worth 10 dollars to me to make some other person 100 dollars better off – then the actual benefit of changing the result can easily be bumped up into the billions, which could make it worth heading off to the voting booth even with a one-in-ten-million or so chance of changing the outcome.

The fact that so many people make charitable donations – where doing 100 dollars of benefit costs 100 dollars plus some overhead – implies that the 10% coefficient I use above is very plausible.

(To be clear, we’re not just talking about cash benefits here. I might consider it a benefit worth $100 to me to have someone else sent to university, or treated for a disease)

The Gelman and Kaplan argument is so obviously correct – not just logically sound but the real reason why people do actually vote – that I’m embarrassed to have spent so much time looking for alternatives.

Is everything rosy with democracy then? Unfortunately, I think G & K stopped a bit too soon. After all, altruism is real, but it’s not the only motive out there on top of selfishness.

Let’s say I have a particular hatred of muslims. It might be worth $10000 to me to cause the death of a muslim. By changing government, I might kill thousands of them! That would be worth a lot more to me than a cut in sugar tariffs.

But is $10,000 realistic? It’s surely not that hard to get someone killed if you have a few grand to spend on it – we’d be up to our knees in corpses. But in normal life, the main cost of killing someone is the risk of being caught and punished. And plenty of people get killed anyway. Democracy isn’t just a way of having an effect (good or bad) on millions of people; it’s a way of doing so with total impunity.

The arithmetic I’m throwing around here isn’t really rigorous. What does it mean to say that I value a better house for a poor family at $200, or someone else prevented from playing online poker at $100, when I have no way of directly causing these things to happen? It doesn’t matter. The original question is: is it worth 30 minutes of my time to have a 1-in-10-million chance of causing a million poor families to get better housing, and to stop five million people from playing poker, and to cause 100,000 muslims to become dead muslims? (etc.) If those are the things I want, it might well be.

Is this good or bad? I think most people are more altruistic than anti-altruistic, at least towards their own countrymen. So voters should be expected to vote mostly for the general benefit as they see it, but perhaps be a bit on the warlike side. The impunity thing, though, has some nasty implications. The large-scale altruism expressed through voting is in some degree in competition with direct small-scale altruism, but the “effectiveness multiplier” of democracy is greater in the case of punishing others, because it detaches the harm from any responsibility.

Anti-altruism isn’t always a bad thing. A certain level of vindictiveness benefits society by discouraging anti-social behaviour, even in those circumstances where Homo Economicus would rather cut his losses. But I worry that when detached from the human scale, the natural willingness to punish individual enemies becomes a generalized animus against everyone resembling some enemy.

Finally, none of this contradicts Bryan Caplan’s critique of voters. The individual benefits come from the good feelings of believing I have had the influence I desired. I can still have those good feelings without putting in the effort to convince myself that the effects will be what I expect. “I personally stopped a million people from eating trans fats in restaurants”. If that gives me the good feelings, it would be silly to put lots of effort into working out whether it actually did anyone any material good. The costs of being wrong are tiny.

The Lords

I suggested in a comment at Tim’s that unicameralism would be OK, so long as it means getting rid of the House of Commons.

I was mostly joking. But maybe it’s worth thinking about.

On the anti side, there’s this amendment by the Lords to the Criminal Justice bill creating penalties for “Recklessly disclosing” personal data.

In order to rule that something is reckless, you need to have some idea of what normal practice is, to contrast against recklessness.

But in handling of data, there practically is no normal practice, and what there is is mostly terrible. We in the IT industry just make it all up as we go along. That’s what being such a young, fast-moving profession is all about. The high-profile failures that we’ve seen have been notable more for bad luck than for being worse than the rest of the industry.

I’m not saying that the current situation is satisfactory. But slinging around vague terms like ‘reckless’, outside of the context of the Data Protection Act which, for all its faults, at least tries to define the concepts it deals with, will not improve anything.

Business IT does not work to a level of reliability adequate for protecting confidential data, or for other critical functions. If we were to operate on a similar basis to the people who write software for planes or power stations, costs and delays would increase to the point where 90% of what we now do would simply not be worth doing.

And that has to be the answer for confidential personal information. If it really needs to be secret, it shouldn’t be on commercial-grade IT systems in the first place. If the state or a private business collects it, don’t be surprised when it leaks. Most of the time, the recklessness is in collecting it in the first place.

Back on unicameralism, I think the reason for this mistake by the Lords is a desire to defeat the government, to make them look weak, to get more votes. So if we didn’t have a Commons, we wouldn’t have had this bad amendment.

Perhaps.

Who Rules?

Mencius is taking a week off and has invited requests. The area I would like to see clarified is the analysis of how western democratic governments actually make decisions. Is the political show of parties and elections a fake, or do politicians really control policy? It often appears that the question of who really has power is answered differently according to the needs of the argument Mencius is making. Events which favour the Democratic Party demonstrate the all-powerful nature of the Universalist church, while victories by the Republican party are mere smoke and mirrors.

My thinking is that elected politicians have some freedom of policy within a “window” defined by what MM calls the “permanent government” : the bureaucracy, the unremovable congressional incumbents and the media. The day-to-day business of politics is therefore not “fake”: it actually drives policy in the short term. And because particular events at particular times can have long-term effects, electoral politics has long-term significance.

However, the predictable long-term trends of politics have nothing much to do with elections and elected office-holders. They are best described as the movement of the window of policy within which politicians can move, and are controlled by other forces: what MM calls the “Hexagon”.

Take an example from the UK – the market liberalisation of the first Thatcher government. Thatcher wanted these, and Callaghan didn’t, and so they happened after Thatcher was elected Prime Minister in place of Callaghan in 1979. That is politics working as normal people imagine.

However, the Heath government came to power in 1970 intending many of the same reforms. It was not permitted to carry them out. The unions opposed the reforms just as they did in the 1980s, but the elected government was not permitted to crush them as Thatcher later did. By 1980 the permanent government had come to accept the necessity of reform, and moved the window to allow it. The reforms happened in 1979-83 instead of 1976-1979 because of electoral politics, but they happened in 1979-83 instead of 1970-73 because of the change in the policies of the permanent government.

There is therefore only some truth in the conventional view of politics. That truth is magnified in popular perception by a unanimous rewriting of the past. Ted Heath, having failed to implement the Selsdon programme, became its opponent, and it is now generally assumed that the only reason the reforms happened in 1979 was electoral politics. More recently in the US it is now widely assumed that Al Gore would not have invaded Iraq, despite the fact that in 2000, as far as military action overseas was a left-right issue, the left was in favour and the right against, not to mention what came after.

On top of the real party political issues, then, issues that are not decided as the result of elections are later treated by history as if they were. when the permanent government’s policies are unsuccessful – such as the preservation of the economic-policy status quo of 1970s Britain, which was imposed on Heath against his will, or the invasion of Iraq, they are blamed on the politicians, who are generally slow to deny that the policies actually carried bout by “their” governments were really their policies (not wanting to look ridiculous).

Indeed, even the most intransigent of extremist, the most unlikely ever to change their mind on a subject, can be turned from one side to the other by the simple expedient of electing them to office and to the duty of defending the policies that they have opposed all their lives but cannot change. This is not hyperbole.

In that way, political questions that are determined by the permanent government become party political issues: the politicians in office defend the policies that they were forced to carry out, and the politicians in opposition have to attack the policies in order to remain relevant. It is almost beyond doubt that if the butterfly ballots of Florida had gone the other way in 2000, the Democratic party would now be the party of the Iraq War and the Republican party would be divided on whether to support or oppose it. Of course, it is quite possible that the course of the occupation may have been different in that case, but that is beyond what I can guess.
2014: dead link http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0213-01.htm updated to https://web.archive.org/web/20080522032238/http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0213-01.htm