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Hi Matt,

Of course I agree that studies of voter ignorance do not yield evidence of some fixed, immutable characteristic of citizens. It is also certainly true that different voting systems provide different incentives to acquire relevant political information. The pertinent question is whether implementing approval voting would incentivize the acquisition of political information to a sufficient degree that we could be confident in claiming that the mere transition to approval voting alone would have all the benefits that Aaron claims it would have. I am s... (read more)

Adam_Gibbons4y4

Thanks, David. I should have been clearer. I certainly don’t support interventions that incentivize greater regard for future generations without also attempting to improve the overall quality of decision-making.

In the article above, Aaron claims that a transition to approval voting would benefit future people. For reasons outlined above, I am skeptical of that claim. It is unclear whether greater responsiveness to the preferences of the electorate’s middle would bring about greater regard for future generations. Moreover, the evidence from p... (read more)

David_Moss

Thanks for the clarification, I strongly agree with the position described in this comment.

Adam_Gibbons4y1

Actually, upon re-reading my comment, I see that I somewhat inaccurately represented my own views. Instead of:

"In general, I think the case for approval voting outlined focuses too much on the supply-side of politics and not enough on the demand-side."

I should have said that there is a combination of focusing too much on the supply-side of politics and overlooking problems on the demand-side.

aaronhamlin

Replied at the bottom by accident. Starts with, "Hi, Adam."

Adam_Gibbons4y7

Hi Aaron! Thanks for the interesting post. I am very sympathetic to the criticisms of plurality voting you outline, and I agree that alternative voting methods are worth pursuing. This certainly seems like a tractable problem (one which we’re already making headway on) and, like the study of institutional design more generally, I believe it is unduly neglected. With that said, I’d like to sketch some reasons to moderate our confidence in the purported benefits of a transition to something like approval voting.

I take it that part of the moti... (read more)

Matt_Lerner

I can think of one reason: rational ignorance is partially a consequence of the voting procedure used. People have less of an incentive to be ignorant when their votes matter more, as they would with approval voting. I don't have a strong stance on this, but I think it's important to recognize that studies about voter ignorance are not yielding evidence of an immutable characteristic of citizens; the situation is actually heavily contingent. In the first few pages of The Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan makes (implicitly) the case that voter ignorance isn't a huge deal as long as errors are symmetric: ignorant voters on both sides of an issue will cancel each other out, and the election will be decided by informed voters who should be on the "right" side, in expectation. Caplan claims that systematic bias across the population results in "wrong" answers. My point in bringing this up is just that the existence of large numbers of ignorant voters doesn't have to be a major issue: large elections are decided by relatively small groups. Different voting procedures have very different ramifications for the composition of these small groups.

David_Moss

I'm curious why you say this given that you earlier noted the problem that a large part of the electorate "are in all likelihood systematically mistaken about the sort of policies that would advance their interests." Making people give more regard to future generations seems to be of extremely unclear value if they are likely to be systematically mistaken about what would serve the interests of future generations. This seems like a consideration in favour of interventions which aim to improve the quality of decision-making (e.g. via deliberative democracy initiatives) vs those which try to directly make people's decisions more about the far future (although of course, these needn't be done in isolation). But perhaps I am simply misunderstanding what you mean by "directly incentivize greater regard for future generations"?

Adam_Gibbons

Actually, upon re-reading my comment, I see that I somewhat inaccurately represented my own views. Instead of: "In general, I think the case for approval voting outlined focuses too much on the supply-side of politics and not enough on the demand-side." I should have said that there is a combination of focusing too much on the supply-side of politics and overlooking problems on the demand-side.

Age-Weighted Voting

Adam_Gibbons5y12

Interesting post! Some comments:

(1) "Education levels are rising, so younger people are on average better educated; they also have a more recent education, so are therefore more likely to be more up-to-date on contemporary knowledge."

I think this ignores models of rational voter ignorance. Levels of political ignorance have been consistently high since empirical research into the phenomenon first began, even while education levels have increased. Why? Well, if you take seriously models of rational ignorance, voters in large electoral democracies ... (read more)

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