High voter turnout is often celebrated as a sign of a healthy democracy, with election officials viewing strong participation as evidence of public engagement and political legitimacy. On Terms of Engagement, Professor Jason Brennan joins cohosts Archon Fung and Stephen Richer to examine whether higher turnout actually strengthens democracy.
It's axiomatic within most democracy and election administration communities that high voter turnout is a good thing, and higher turnout is a better thing. Secretaries of State brim with pride when over 80% of the state votes in a November presidential election.
But does this actually matter? Is there any evidence that governance is better if more people vote? Is there any evidence that the political body is healthier if more people vote?
High voter turnout could be a sign of fight-for-your-life politics or broad discontent with the status quo, or high turnout could sweep in voters who might be passionate about one political contest but know very little about the other items on the ballot.
Professor Jason Brennan of Georgetown University will join Terms of Engagement on Tuesday, October 6 to discuss these questions. Professor Brennan's published work includes "Against Democracy" (Princeton University Press, 2016) and "Debating Democracy" with coauthor Hélène Landemore (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Voiceover:
You're listening to Terms of Engagement, a weekly show from the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School, featuring Ash Center Director, Archon Fung and Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy, Stephen Richer. Now let's get to the show.
Archon Fung (00:32):
Hey everyone, this is Terms of Engagement. Welcome. I'm Archon Fung, a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
Stephen Richer (00:42):
And I'm Stephen Richer. I'm the former elected Maricopa County recorder, and I'm now a lecturer at the Kennedy School and a fellow at the Ash Center.
Archon Fung (00:50):
And we are recording this show live. So if you'd like to join in the conversation, please type in your thoughts in YouTube or whatever platform you're watching on, and we will try to incorporate your comments and questions into the conversation.
Stephen Richer (01:06):
Okay. We've got a fun one for today, but before we get into that, I need to note, as I always do, that Archon and I are speaking on behalf of ourselves and only on behalf of ourselves, not on behalf of any Harvard University related entity. And same with Professor Brennan. He is not speaking on behalf of Georgetown University. He is just speaking on his own behalf. Today, we're questioning something of a sacred cow in elections in democracy, which is higher turnout, higher voter turnout a good thing? The longstanding election administration podcast titled High Turnout Wide Margins is often accepted without any scrutiny as two things that are good for the elections community. Many election offices consider it to be part of their duty not only to make it easy to vote, but to actively encourage people to vote such that we will have higher turnout.
(02:02):
And of course, there are scores of voting rights groups whose mission it is to drive higher voter turnout. But do we accept that premise? About 50% of eligible Americans will likely participate in this upcoming November midterm election. Is that better than 40%? Is it worse than 60%? We're going to explore those ideas today and Archon's going to introduce our guest to do it with us.
Archon Fung (02:27):
Great. Our guest today is Jason Brennan, who is the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business. There aren't too many political theorists who are controversial, but Jason is certainly one of them. He's a theorist who works at the intersection. He's mostly a political theorist, but he takes the empirics of voting and how people vote very seriously. One of his earlier books, The Ethics of Voting, argued controversially that many, maybe most people have a moral obligation not to vote if they don't take efforts to inform themselves to be quite knowledgeable. And from Against Democracy, which has become a standard reference, and somebody already in the chat has commented about it, it's become a standard case for that the uninformed shouldn't be voting to set policy. In 2021, he went head-to-head in a debate with my friend Hélène Landemore, who's an advocate of direct and deliberative democracy in a book called Debating Democracy.
(03:39):
And very recently he wrote with Christopher Freeman an essay called Against Laissez-Faire Democracy and Economics and Philosophy. Jason, welcome to the show.
Jason Brennan (03:51):
Hi everybody. Thanks for having me. Great to be here.
Stephen Richer (03:54):
Appreciate you being here. So I guess just start with the broad question. Is higher voter turnout an inherently good thing? Let's say let's frame it in the American context. In the margins, let's start within the margins. Is it better for the United States of America if we have 60, 65% of eligible voters voting in this coming November election as opposed to 50%?
Jason Brennan (04:20):
Yeah. What a great question. And it's a really complicated question too. I think it's like asking are people good on average? And it's like we have to weigh so many different factors at once. It's hard to take a really strong stance. I like to think of it like adding more voters to many people seems valuable for its own sake. They just think it's part of what it is to be self-government that we actually govern ourselves. And if 35 or 50% of us aren't participating, it's really hard to argue that we are engaging in self-government. And I think that's a perfectly valid thing to worry about and be concerned about, but there are other costs and benefit as well. So one is simply increasing who votes on the margin might change who the voters are. On average right now, we have the typical person who's voting tends to be the more politically exercised person.
(05:04):
They might be a bit more ideological, they might be a bit meaner. They might also be a bit more knowledgeable too. And the people who are staying home tend to be more moderate, but not ideologically moderate in the sense of strongly committed to moderate policies, but more like they just don't particularly care that much and they kind of average out. They have fewer and weaker opinions and they also tend to be less informed. So how it affects voter quality is an interesting question. There's also a question about when you're thinking about... I think people often have an idea that if you increase voter turnout, you're just increasing the amount of democracy total. But I think it's more like increasing the amount of democracy on this one knob decreases the amount of democracy on the other. So there are other things we care about like do your votes actually matter and count?
(05:45):
And the more people who participate, the less any individual vote makes a difference. So we reduce the efficacy of individual voters. That's not decisive, but it's a thing to care about. There's questions about political equality and simply increasing the number of voters doesn't necessarily affect that because it depends upon who votes. So just to take a hypothetical, imagine right now we have 50% of people voting and it's like 50% of rich people and 50% of poor people, and I wave my magic wand and I get all the rich people to vote and I keep the number of poor people the same. We have more voters overall, but we've now skewed the demographic results and that might have anti rather than pro-democratic effects. So I think for that reason, even if you disagree with everything I've ever written in any other paper of mine or book of mine, you might think, well, just simply increasing turnout is just one possible value among many. And then it depends on who turns out and how they vote and things like that, whether it increases our other democratic values.
Stephen Richer (06:40):
So I get the information quality, some voters might be better informed than others. And I certainly get the your vote is "less valuable" if there's a million voters than if there's only 10 voters as far as what percentage of the electorate you command. But in terms of the representativeness of society, isn't the argument for that then that it should be 100% so it's perfectly representative of the people in the society?
Jason Brennan (07:10):
In a sense, if you had percent voting, you might get that, but there's other ways of doing it that are cheaper and easier. So I mean everyone here, we've all done statistics, we've all written papers using stats and so on. And one of the things we learn is that if you want to get a representative sample, that might mean getting a smaller group of people rather than more. So independently of me, right now in political philosophy, there are a huge number of people, including you mentioned Hélène Landemore earlier, who are very excited about the idea of what are doing what's called lottocracy or deliberative polling. And their worry is in every country, including countries with much higher turnout in the United States, you don't get proportional voting. Even in Australia with compulsory voting, the reality is that privileged, higher educated, richer people vote at higher rates than others. And they've tried their best to get to 100%, they haven't.
(07:56):
So some people who are very much seen as committed hardcore Democrats think the way we fix the problem of representation is not by trying to get more people to vote, but trying to get fewer people to vote. So they advocate things like maybe for this particular question, we randomly select say 500 citizens and they and only they get to vote. Everyone has equal eligibility to vote, so we're all starting off as equal. But then after we run this election or a lottery, those people get to decide this question. And because it's done by lottery and equitable, we are much more likely to get a proportional number of people and it's more representative rather than less. The other reason why it might not be more representative even if everybody votes is this perverse effect of what happens with how we use our votes when our votes don't count for very much.
(08:40):
So if you're asking me what I want to listen to for music an hour from now, and I'm the only person who gets to decide, I'm going to think kind of carefully about it and I'm probably going to pick [inaudible 00:08:50].
Stephen Richer (08:50):
Okay. So we're not going to invest much if we know that everyone else is voting too.
Jason Brennan (08:56):
Yeah. So the problem then becomes if they know their votes don't really make much of a difference, they might not use their votes the way we want them to. There's this widespread belief that voters vote for policy. They have their opinion and they vote for the party that matches their opinion. And there's a lot of research that shows or suggests that's not the case for many people, in part because they sort of know their votes don't count for much. So they're mostly using them for kind of social signaling. I do things like I root very loudly for the Boston teams, like the New England Patriots and so on. My rooting doesn't make any difference to the outcome, but it does have social effects. It means things like if I'm down at The Lansdowne Pub next to Fenway and I say stuff about how much I love the Red Sox, somebody will buy me a Sam Adams and it'll be great.
(09:42):
So I have all these expressive reasons to be overly bubbly about my teams and so on. And it's expressive. It's not really about using my vote basically for-
Archon Fung (09:54):
Decisional. Right.
Jason Brennan (09:54):
... decision making power.
Archon Fung (09:56):
So what do you-
Stephen Richer (09:57):
Yeah. Go ahead.
Archon Fung (09:57):
I feel like for a lot of your work, you focus on the consequences of voting and in particular whether they add up to good or bad decisions for society. Is for you that the primary way in which we should assess voting systems or individual acts of voting is how it cashes out in terms of a good or bad public policy decision?
Jason Brennan (10:24):
Yeah. That is my official view. So in Against Democracy, really that book should have been called One Cheer for Democracy rather than three cheers or something. But we very consciously decide to give it a title that'll be more provocative and sell more copies. I said that in the preface, that's not something special or new, but I like to think of it as I'm a big fan of democracy, but I kind of like them in a way I like Iron Maiden. I don't think it's perfect as a band and I think it has some flaws and same thing with democracy. So some people value democracy for its own sake. They just think it's inherently just regardless of what it accomplishes. I'm not on board with that. I have my reasons in that book where I try to go through all the arguments people have given for thinking it's intrinsically just and why I don't think they work.
(11:09):
Some people think it's about what it expresses. I'm not personally on board with that and I have a bunch of responses to the arguments. So I personally tend to treat democracy as a tool. It's a hammer for producing good government. It's so far the best hammer we have. We don't yet have a thing that tends to work better, but we also know that it's a flawed hammer. And I think frankly, most of my friends, like you mentioned Hélène and others who are writing about this stuff in writing defenses of democracy, they also agree that it's flawed. I mean, Hélène is extremely critical of every democracy we find in the world.
Archon Fung (11:38):
Sure.
Jason Brennan (11:38):
Yeah. So they're all trying to find ways to make it work and behave better than it does. We're just disagreeing on the margins about what's the best possible experiment to try to improve it.
Archon Fung (11:49):
Right.
Jason Brennan (11:50):
But even if you don't agree with that, even if you don't think that it's the only thing that matters, you probably think it matters. So imagine you had a system that was perfectly equitable, everyone's vote counted and everyone participated, but it was a system in which we just time and time again shot ourselves in the feet. We just kept making incredibly stupid self-destructive decisions. You probably wouldn't like it. You'd probably say, "That's a pretty serious flaw, even though it has these other virtues." So I think almost everyone agrees that making good decisions is at least one of the important reasons we have democracy, even if they don't think it's the only reason.
Archon Fung (12:21):
Right.
Stephen Richer (12:21):
This gets back to a conversation that Archon, you and I had earlier on in this show, maybe episode, I don't know, one of the first five episodes, which is democracy an ends in itself or is it a means to securing what Jason called good government? I think I, at the time, said securing civil liberties and securing economic liberties. And so I guess it goes a bit to that fundamental vantage of how you see democracy, but is there any statistic bodies of academic research that shows that just having higher participation yields better government, better in delivering services, better in making people happy? I understand that that would certainly be the case if it's only 1% of the country can participate because then it looks like an oligarchy or maybe even an autocracy versus 50%. But is there anything in the body of academic literature to suggest that 70% yields better governmental results than 50%?
Jason Brennan (13:18):
Yeah. It's a great-
Archon Fung (13:19):
I don't think so. I don't know. What do you think? I mean, it's a huge debate about whether democracy performs better than autocracy on peace, welfare, a bunch of these different goals that people want. Yeah. But Jason, what do you think on that?
Jason Brennan (13:31):
Yeah. I mean, you can definitely find papers that say that, but the issue is you can find a lot of papers that say the opposite and they have about as much support. And one of the reasons for that is that there is this question about the correlation between good governance and higher turnout. And the question is the direction, the arrow of causation where you have a lot of papers that suggest the better the government is, all things equal, the more turnout you get rather than more turnout leads to better government.
Archon Fung (13:54):
Right. So if you're in Scandinavia or something, turnout's quite high, et cetera.
Jason Brennan (13:59):
Yeah. There were some papers looking at say what compulsory voting has done and they look at natural experiments, like what happens to people to move to Australia? For instance, New Zealanders who move to Australia. They're culturally very similar. Do they become better informed? And the evidence back, the papers I'm thinking of are saying, "Not really."
Stephen Richer (14:18):
Oh, okay. Yeah.
Jason Brennan (14:19):
Yeah.
Stephen Richer (14:19):
So I want to pause there because we have been talking about it to date about does democracy create good government to find in some way that we can measure? But also the question is, does democracy create a better citizen or a happier citizen?
Archon Fung (14:34):
Right.
Stephen Richer (14:35):
You're suggesting that, or the research you're citing says that moving to Australia where voting is mandatory doesn't all of a sudden make that person happier or something?
Jason Brennan (14:48):
I'm not sure about happier. I don't know if anyone's measured that, but not necessarily better informed. And keep in mind, the paper I'm thinking of is from 2014, so it might be out of date at this point. So yeah, that's the concern. I think as far as whether citizens are happy or not, that's variable around the world too. And there are all these other factors that affect that. I would say I think we have pretty good reasons to think that American politics is making American citizens less happy because it's turned into the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry. Take that. I'm not going to say it, but I have a certain phrase I like to say that ends with the Yankees and has a four letter word at the beginning of it. But it's in a sense all tongue in cheek. It's like, yeah, I want the Yankees to lose every single time, but I don't really hate Yankees players.
(15:35):
And I've been in Yankee Stadium wearing Red Sox gear and no one is actually mean to me. But then at least in American politics right now, the visceral hatred we have for people on the other side is really high. And that is making us miserable. I don't want to say that that's true of other countries, but I think that's true here.
Archon Fung (15:51):
Right. So Jason, I was thinking in the last couple of days about this conversation, and I wanted to ask whether our kind of moment of democratic backsliding, if you agree that we're in one, I certainly think that, has made you think differently about the value of people being committed to voting and participating. And so I'll tell a little autobiographical story. I've tried to convince many, many Harvard presidents to make that Tuesday in November a holiday for the university so that people could go do poll work, talk about the elections, talk about how great American democracy is and how much of a treasure it is. There's still no voting holiday, so I haven't convinced anyone successfully. And there's lots of reasons for that. Everybody wants some kind of holiday on the academic calendar. You can't have all of them. But one argument that I constantly get is, well, I just don't think it would increase turnout that much.
(16:48):
It doesn't take students that long to vote in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And my response, which has been unpersuasive is, well, it's not really about turnout. It's about socializing the idea that the university and everybody in it should be committed to the democratic enterprise. And I would want the holiday, even if it didn't affect turnout at all, or even if probably against your outcome story, even if the average Harvard student was less informed and so their input contributed to a worse decision, I would still want that university holiday. And in this moment of democratic backsliding, I think I'm more right and the other position is more wrong because I would love more Americans just to be committed to the democratic enterprise than I see looking out there right now. So have the times altered your view at all?
Jason Brennan (17:41):
That is a great question. I love it because it leads to a kind of government house philosophy question, like what we say to some people versus what we say to the others. I have a class right now where we're talking a lot about why we have certain social practices and I have to keep telling students, my explaining the social practice is not the same thing as debunking it because you often have that effect. And also, by the way, if Harvard were to do this because of how Harvard works, all the other universities would copy it. So you're right that they-
Archon Fung (18:11):
That's why I keep going back to these presidents. Like, hey, [inaudible 00:18:13]
Jason Brennan (18:13):
Yeah. I know. If you guys do it, others will. No, you're absolutely right. I totally agree that there's been democratic backsliding. I know that's somewhat controversial, but I think the balance of paper shows that that's the case. And the issue is not so much that people have become dissatisfied with democracy for the reasons the deliberative Democrats are dissatisfied or the reasons I'm dissatisfied or the reasons that Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels are dissatisfied. They're dissatisfied and then they move to authoritarianism. We know that this is generally speaking, there are a couple cases of authoritarianism seem to have worked out well for the short term, but we know that it's generally speaking a lot better than the alternatives we've tried. And people get upset with what we're doing and say, "Well, let's do this other thing that's way worse." So it might actually be better for the country right now if they had a stronger democratic ethos.
(18:57):
And frankly, Harvard's educating the elite. I think it'd be better if the elite had that ethos because what tends to happen when the elite gets the opposite attitude is that they start becoming paternalistic, let's push the people around, let's lie to them, let's manipulate them. When we get in power, we have to just act in ways that are pretty nefarious because we can't trust the people. And that in turn leads to them acting in pretty authoritarian ways, though they often know how to couch it in democratic language. So yeah, I think in a sense, we have a lack of commitment to what's good about democracy. Even I see this first book called Against Democracy and people are pessimistic about democracy in the wrong way and they're turning to worse alternatives.
Archon Fung (19:38):
Right.
Stephen Richer (19:38):
Yeah. What do you think of that? And I do want to get to the questions. I appreciate a few questions from Tom, from Dominic, and from Mark and Greg in there. But just pulling this thread a little bit further, what do you make of the fact that actually it's inversely correlated with the wellbeing of society, the turnout, because if you're really motivated to turn out, it means that the government might very adversely affect your situation. For instance, a lot of the people who are saying that we're in a moment of democratic backsliding are probably the most likely to turn out. And over the last eight years, we've had pretty high turnout as far as the United States goes. Did you buy that, Archon? I'm going to put you on the spot here.
Archon Fung (20:22):
Yeah. I mean, I guess I'm a little bit with Jason on this. It depends. I mean, I think right now in an era of high polarization, people are showing up in high numbers as you say, and there are some bad consequences of that. But I don't think that's because of the turnout. I think that's because of the underlying polarization.
Stephen Richer (20:49):
No, because of the turnout. But isn't it correlated and maybe causing the high turnout? For instance, if you think that the ICE is completely unchecked and is endangering your community, then that might motivate you to vote. And I'm not sure that that's the type of turnout that we would say, "Well, that's healthy for society. That's healthy for democracy."
Archon Fung (21:11):
So I guess it depends on your read of that situation, right? I mean, I think that's a real kind of policy judgment and that you might not agree with that, but some people might be turning out because they're making a real judgment that this is a bad public policy. Whereas putting on the blue shirt or the red shirt without much probing beyond that, I think Jason would agree with it, that yields worse consequences. So just adding on, Jason, I wonder whether you think the minimal informational case for turning out. So Amartya Sen makes this super famous argument that no famine has ever occurred in a democracy because the government knows if it allows a famine to occur, it's going to get kicked out. It's not actually that hard to prevent famines even in poor countries. Ergo, that's why you don't see democracies have famines. And at no point after India transitioned to democracy did it have a famine.
(22:20):
And so there I'm thinking, the minimal informational case is people kind of know when things are going really bad and the vote is an escape hatch to express that preference. And I actually think that Donald Trump, a bunch of his platform issues in 2016 were of that character is like a lot of people weren't happy about globalization. A lot of people weren't happy about the forever wars. A lot of people weren't happy about immigration. And the center left, center right was just not able to allow those views in. And then so you get a bunch of people banging on the outside because they're quite unhappy with this baseline judgment, Donald Trump is elected. I mean, so simplistic of course, but something like that. And maybe if there is a blue wave election, that's some indicator also of some minimal threshold being kind of violated down and people saying, "No, we don't like this."
(23:21):
So you don't have to have a lot of information to make that judgment. And maybe it's like the case for voting as an insurance policy against super bad outcomes.
Jason Brennan (23:35):
Yeah. I mean, I agree with Sen, obviously, and I think that kind of argument works most of the time. We should be careful though, because there have been times we can talk about say the fourth or fifth federal election in Germany in 1932.
Archon Fung (23:51):
Yeah. Right.
Jason Brennan (23:52):
These things are going very badly. Let's try the other people. It was the worst thing that could have ever happened.
Archon Fung (23:56):
Yeah. Yeah.
Jason Brennan (23:59):
And there is this question about how good people are at retrospective voting in the first place because there's a lot of going on vibes and people are surprisingly bad at that. There's this research that suggests if you had someone who... Imagine there's two different candidates. Candidate A does a really good job for three and a half years and stinks for the last half of the year. And candidate B is bad for three and a half years and stinks for the last half of the year.
Stephen Richer (24:22):
Oh, recency bias.
Jason Brennan (24:23):
That's good. Yeah. Recency bias.
Archon Fung (24:24):
Yeah. Recent. Yeah.
Jason Brennan (24:24):
They're good for the last half year. And overall, this guy's way better than this person. This person is the one that doesn't get reelected, this person does get elected.
Archon Fung (24:30):
I think we know that's true, right? Yeah.
Stephen Richer (24:32):
So what do you make-
Jason Brennan (24:33):
Yeah. Go ahead.
Stephen Richer (24:34):
I was going to say the academic portal writes in the chat that this is all well and nice. You guys are taking pot shots at democracy, but ultimately it's democracy or something else. So is that really our endpoint is it's superior to other forms of government?
Jason Brennan (24:52):
Yeah. I think that's resting too quickly on what we know. I feel like this is maybe a little bit self-congratulatory for the field, but I feel like we're in a really good place in democratic theory right now in political philosophy and political theory, because I think there's a good understanding of what is not perfect about democracy as we find it. We know what the flaws are and we basically know what causes those flaws. So now we're engaging in a kind of, excuse me, informed speculation about possible reforms that could fix it. Everyone who's out there, including me, even if I call myself an epistocrat in some of my work, I'm still talking about a form of mass governance and mass self-governance. The lot of crowds are talking about a form of mass self-governance. The people who want to engage in different kinds of direct democracy, they're talking about reforming the system. Others as well who have different proposals.
(25:42):
Everyone is sort of saying it's not as simple as, I don't know how to put it, the BMW is better than the Mercedes. Let's buy the BMW.
Archon Fung (25:49):
Right.
Jason Brennan (25:49):
It's this BMW might be better than the Mercedes, but there's a problem with the transmission, there's a problem with the engine, there's a problem with the tires. Can we engineer a better solution and make it even better than it is? And we should do that in part because if we don't, what happens is when democracy messes up, people turn back to the alternative, which is what we need is a strong man to just boss everyone around. We'd have our own Vladimir Putin here in the United States. We'd have our own Vladimir Putin in the Netherlands.
Archon Fung (26:21):
I mean, I think that's a really good point. And I wonder, I mean, I've certainly evolved toward a more constructive position on... And I wonder if you would think that you have as well in response to Academic Portal's question, right? So Academic Portal, I'm thinking, I don't know, 10, 20 years ago. I don't know when Democracy for Realists came out, but it was around that time. I think there was a pretty polarized debate in political theory around now people should participate less. They don't want to participate. The side's argument, Larry and Chris, Democracy for Realists, maybe you, Jason, Against Democracy, and then me full on the participatory democracy side in all of these ways. And I think you're right. There are now is a pretty good point in which I think John Dewey would be happy. There's a lot of creativity in thinking about, okay, let's take human psychology and cognitive limitation seriously, but take the desirability of participation seriously.
(27:19):
What can we do to make democracy work better keeping the values with these constraints? So Stephen, your question about, or your initial thing that triggered this episode, are there too many ballot questions in Arizona and California? That's like table stakes kind of discussion. And another one that somebody wrote in and we'll talk about is should we consolidate local elections to the same dates as state and federal elections or is that a bad idea? All of these things are trying to get at what Academic Portal's, what the real question is, like, can you make it work better?
Stephen Richer (28:00):
But both of those solutions, so as I wrote in an article recently, I said, "We've got to have fewer items on the ballot because it's impossible for voters to be well-informed about all of those items." And similarly, with some of the conversation about should we have elections on odd years such that we can sort of split when candidates are talking about themselves and voters can be better informed. Is everything that we propose in those formats getting at the information that voters have, and is that a fair presumption that a better informed voter then leads to a better government? Are we even accepting that?
Jason Brennan (28:40):
Yeah.
Stephen Richer (28:41):
I think some of the people in the chat would say, "Well, we've got a real problem with people who don't know what's going on and that therefore we have a bad government. And if they were just better informed, then we would have a better government." Do we buy that?
Archon Fung (28:55):
It would be helpful. It wouldn't be bad. It wouldn't solve all the problems. There's a lot of problems with government.
Stephen Richer (29:02):
Yeah.
Jason Brennan (29:02):
I was actually at the Kennedy School, I don't know what year it was, but years ago, and some student asked me that very question, "Why presume that?" And I'm like, "I'm not sure if I believe that." And she said... And I had a marker with me and I picked, I'm going to say, "This is my magic wand." And I say, "Imagine if I wave my magic wand, I make every voter significantly more ignorant than they are in the following measures. Would you be against me waving this wand?" And she's like, "Absolutely." And I was like, "What if I have this other wand and I wave and I make them much more informed about these things? Would you think that's a good thing and worth doing?" She's like, "Absolutely." I'm like, "Do you want there to be civics education for children?" So I think we all recognize that it's not as simple as voter quality determines everything.
(29:41):
Obviously, a huge amount of governance is done by my neighbors, literally my neighbors. I'm in the DC area. So I was telling you guys before the show, the government is surrounding me. I'm not in the government, but there's a commander in the Space Force and the State Department's right there. They're the ones that really run the government and a lot of depends upon the quality of their work. It depends upon the quality of our representatives, depends upon all sorts of other things. But it sure seems like having not only better informed voters, but voters that are voting instrumentally would be really important because one of the worries that-
Stephen Richer (30:13):
What do you mean by that?
Jason Brennan (30:15):
Well, so a good putting is why do people vote in the first place? So the theory that I was taught in sixth grade was I have the information I know about the world and my personal values, which don't have to be selfish values, just the things I care about. And on the basis of the information and my values, I form something like an ideological bent. I then go and look and find the party or candidate that best matches that and I vote for them. Or if they have no chance of winning, I vote for a pretty good approximation. We all do this, and as a result on election day, the will of the people, or at least the will of the large segment of the population gets realized. So we call that an instrumentalist view of voting. We have different words for it, but basically popular sovereignty. It's a way of getting the will of the people in.
(30:59):
The worry is that voters know their votes don't count for very much and treat them accordingly. So for most people, the main thing that happens when you take a stance politically is you get social rewards or social benefits. If I were to walk around my neighborhood saying that I love the Republican Party, people would be like, "Oh, icky, I didn't know you were one of them. You can't come to our parties anymore." So if I tell people that I like the Democratic Party or if I put up a sign that says, "In this house we believe," people are like, "Oh, you're a good guy. We like you. Come to our party. Be our friend." And that's happening in mass. In the same way, it explains a lot of sports behavior. And so there's a lot of rooting for the team.
(31:35):
And so one of the questions we have is, do people vote Democrat because they're pro-choice or are they pro-choice because they vote Democrat? I don't know about that particular issue, but for many issues we have this evidence that when the party changes its mind, you change your mind and you don't even know that you changed your mind. So as an analogy, I like the restaurant Nandos Peri Peri. If I went in there and they were serving tofu instead of spicy chicken, I'd go somewhere else. But we have these cases where the party switches positions, like the Republican Party in 2016 is a good example. They switch positions on trade. Most partisans also switch positions on trade. That's not necessarily a bad thing. They could change their mind. I mean, free trade's right, but whatever. They could change their mind in the basis of new evidence.
(32:14):
But the funny thing is you poll these people and they go, "No, no, I've always thought that." And if that seems weird, the psychology is exactly what happens in sports. So I mentioned the Lansdowne Pub before. Right now at the Lansdowne Pub, there's a guy named Jimmy sitting at the bar and he's having a Sam Adams. And in 2004-
Stephen Richer (32:31):
A little early.
Archon Fung (32:32):
Yeah.
Jason Brennan (32:33):
Jimmy's always there.
Archon Fung (32:34):
Jimmy's there. Yeah.
Jason Brennan (32:36):
In 2004 in October, if you ask him about Damon, Johnny Damon, he's like, "Damon's an awesome guy. We love him." And then when Damon leaves us to go to the Yankees, he's like, "I always though he was overrated. That guy sucks, right?"
Stephen Richer (32:51):
He's a bum.
Jason Brennan (32:52):
Yeah. He's a bum, right? He's not lying. He sincerely thinks that, but he doesn't even know he changed his mind.
Stephen Richer (32:58):
Okay. But how do you know that that's the way in which the causal factor is working? Dominic says, "Isn't that actually... Maybe aren't you misreading it in that voters moved in the Republican Party away from free trade agreements and therefore Donald Trump came about and was successful rather than Donald Trump waking up one morning and saying, 'I don't like free trade' and therefore it filters down to the voters."
Jason Brennan (33:22):
Yeah. Looking at any one particular study, you don't know if it's decisive, but the worry is that there's just so many studies that have that same result where for one, we ask a lot of voters, "Do you even know what your party stands for?" And a huge percentage of them can't identify most of their policies. For a lot of voters, you can... I got to use another prop. I don't have a piece of paper, but we hand them a piece of paper and this is a tissue and say, "Here's what your party stands for. Do you agree?" And we lie and tell them it's actually the other party's thing. And they agree with it and we give them their actual platform from their party and say, "This is from the other party, what do you think?" And they're like, "It sucks." And they disagree. And then again, even Converse back in the '50s and '60s was getting this result.
(34:01):
You poll people about what they believe over time and their views vacillate, but they don't know that they vacillate. You just ask them, "Why did you change your mind?" And the most common response is, "I didn't change my mind. I've always thought this." So it seems like in many cases, and this is not true of every voter, what's happening is not you vote for the party because you agree with it, but rather you agree with the party because you vote for it in exactly the same way that I don't care. Drake Maye, I support Drake Maye because he's a patriot. I don't support the Patriots because they have Drake Maye. Yeah.
Stephen Richer (34:31):
But what about the wisdom of the crowds? Yes, the individual is capricious and yes, the individual is occasionally irrational about his judgment preferences. But generally speaking, if we have a large enough population that is at the polls, we get it right more often than we get it wrong.
Jason Brennan (34:51):
Yeah. That's a great question. And it's also worth noting that there's different theorems about why the crowd might be wise and they have different implications. So for instance, something called Condorcet's jury theorem, it's not about percentages, it's about raw numbers. Condorcet's jury theorem doesn't say any 1% of the voting population. It's about the total number of people that vote. So Condorcet had this thought that if you have independent voters voting on some issue, it doesn't have to be binary. It turns out it could be multiple answers. They're voting on some issue and the average voter is more likely than not to get it right. Then as you add more and more voters, the chances that you make the right decision goes up to basically one, probably equals one. I had a paper back in, I don't know, it was like 2008 or something where I put in really optimistic assumptions or trying to inflate the value of a voter. And even under those optimistic assumptions, it was like the marginal value of a vote gets to be under a dollar, somewhere well below 100,000 voters in the US.
Stephen Richer (35:45):
Right.
Jason Brennan (35:45):
So Condorcet's voter theorem doesn't tell you need math. It tells you you want 10,000 people or 20,000 people to vote. It doesn't say you need 120 million or 240 million. There's the miracle of aggregation says that if voters are ignorant and they're deciding among things, because they're completely ignorant, they're effectively... The ignorant people just vote at random and then the informed people will end up carrying the day. Imagine it's like there's two choices, 98% of people are ignorant. So 49% of people vote this way, 49% of people vote this way. The 2% of informed people vote for the good one and they win. And there's another complicated theorem called the Hong-Page theorem that Hélène likes to talk about, which says that diversity of thought and diversity of mental models can increase the cognitive capacity of the group as a whole. I think all these things can be true under certain circumstances, but the real hard empirical question is whether it applies to what we are doing when we're voting at the polls.
(36:36):
Even Landemore, one of the reasons why she's so critical of aggregative electoral democracy is when this stuff is supposed to work is supposed to be deliberation. We're arguing with one another and giving her reasons. It's not supposed to work when we just go to the polls and check a box. And both these other two theorems have the problem of what if I'm not actually independent? I just copy what my neighbors do. So I'm not an independent, because we're modeling people like they're a coin flip. And what about if it's like the previous-
Archon Fung (37:04):
Yeah. Then you only have one voter if everybody's glomming on and bandwagoning.
Jason Brennan (37:08):
So they both require a degree of independence that we just know regardless of whether people thinks people are smart or not, they're not independent in the right way. So it works. The wisdom of the crowd thing works great for how many jelly beans are in this jar. It's not as clear if this is effective for who should be the recorder of Maricopa County.
Archon Fung (37:28):
Right.
Jason Brennan (37:29):
Whatever that even is, that's the thing.
Stephen Richer (37:29):
Hey. Hey.
Jason Brennan (37:30):
It's like I actually want to know what you think about that. I actually wanted to ask you about that because that's such a great example of-
Stephen Richer (37:35):
Oversaw elections.
Jason Brennan (37:37):
Yeah. You were getting elected and I would imagine, I bet you agree, maybe you don't, but that the majority of people who voted for you don't quite know what you do for a job.
Stephen Richer (37:45):
Previously in 2020, yes. Post-2020 was a little bit of a different situation just because of the heightened profile of the office and its responsibilities. Absolutely. Is that problematic? I don't know. I hoped it was always humbling for elected officials when you find out that only something like 8% of the people who were voting on your race actually could identify your name among five different other names. I can tell you from having interacted with a lot of politicians, it does not have that humbling effect necessarily. And is that problematic? I don't know. In the general election, it becomes more about vibes and about partisan identification and just vaguely if you have a, are we going in the right direction, wrong direction? And I don't know that that's necessarily bad, but again, my solution would be to shrink the number of elected offices such that those that we are voting on, we have a higher chance of being informed.
Archon Fung (38:44):
What about-
Jason Brennan (38:44):
Notice though that if you do that, in a way, you're increasing democracy on one measure, but you're decreasing it somewhere else because you're making it so people are more likely to be informed and invested in this particular decision, but you're removing decisions from them and taking them away from the people. Which I think goes back to this concern I have about what I call the tragedy of the democracy. Every democratic decision making process or every way we try to design democracy is always selecting one value at the expense of some other value. There's no just maximizing democracy overall. There's if we increase the amount of cognitive buy-in and representation over here, we're decreasing it over there and now we're making these tragic choices.
Archon Fung (39:26):
Right. Stephen, what would you do about the 70 referendum issue? What would be your path to making that tragic choice as people get to decide on less, maybe only 10 ballot issues?
Stephen Richer (39:39):
I mean, I think all the things that we're talking about, whether it's the participatory democracy, is we're vesting authority in a select number of individuals. Now for American history, that's been a legislative branch. For the participatory democracy component, it might be a randomly selected group of citizens, but I think that the legislative process is an iterative process that requires prolonged thought and give and take. And so yeah, I would say more of that should be delegated to the one body that is ultimately democratically accountable, the legislature.
Archon Fung (40:18):
So I do like the idea of reducing the number of referendum issues. So there's a mechanism, I think it still exists in Oregon, the Citizens Review Commission, and I believe it's randomly selected. It's at least a citizen jury. And what they do is they review all of the ballot measures and write a voter guide for the pro and con case that everybody in Oregon gets. I think I've got it right. Somebody will correct me, I'm sure, if I've got the details of the mechanism wrong. But then, I mean, you could have some sort of citizen jury look at the 70 in Arizona and say, "Okay, well, we as randomly selected people, we recognize that the cognitive load is way too high. No ordinary person could master all 70, but we think that these 10 or these five, whatever your number is, are particularly important to put to, we the people of Arizona and then select it that way."
(41:19):
And then I don't know what happens to the others. Maybe they get kicked back to the legislature, maybe they get tabled. I'm not sure, but this is in the spirit of Jason's kind of creativity about how to make these trade-offs and maybe get to some sort of more optimal frontier.
Stephen Richer (41:38):
Yeah. I don't know. But okay, I must say that our friend Sean Hellman has given us a little bit of a hard time in the chat because he says, "This is a lot of words. This is a lot of talk. This is a lot of theories. But if given your magic wand, Jason, that you brought out earlier, what would you do to improve the quality of our democracy? You said that you're an advocate for democracy, but do you want to change a widget within the Mercedes or you want to upgrade to the E-class in Mercedes? What is upgrading to the E-class democracy?"
Jason Brennan (42:16):
Can I only do one thing or can I do many things?
Stephen Richer (42:18):
I would say let's keep it to under three, under four.
Archon Fung (42:21):
Yeah. Your top three or four.
Jason Brennan (42:23):
Top three or four. One is get rid of first pass the post voting because thanks to Duverger's law and so on, I think this explains why we have two parties and why we're so polarized.
Archon Fung (42:32):
So PR.
Jason Brennan (42:33):
Yeah. Proportional voting, I'd be in favor of that.
Archon Fung (42:36):
I didn't expect that one.
Jason Brennan (42:38):
Oh, yeah. I think a lot of what's especially dysfunctional about the US I think is related to that. I don't think that will happen because the party leaders know that the system works on their behalf, so they're not going to change it. But I would get rid of that. I think it would make us happier and healthier and would lead to better government. I'd like to do something to get people better informed. Even though I have a lot of radical ideas, let's try something easy at first. Let's literally bribe them. Just bribe people to know stuff.
Stephen Richer (43:02):
Bribe people to know stuff, not to vote, but to know stuff.
Jason Brennan (43:05):
To know things. Yeah. Bribe them to know things.
Stephen Richer (43:07):
But then you're giving them a test, right?
Jason Brennan (43:12):
Yeah. And the test is a tax refund. A couple weeks before the election, you get to take what's called the voter achievement day test. It doesn't determine whether or not you get to vote, but you come in and we ask you a bunch of basic questions about politics, like who's your representative, what are some laws that have been passed, et cetera. And if you get a good enough score on that, you get $1,000 tax credit, maybe you get a B on it, you get a $500 tax credit, you get a C, $100 tax credit, you get a D or F, you just don't get any money and that's it. Just bribe people to know things. I think they would vote better. And once they know that stuff, they'd probably be more likely to vote. It's not anti-democratic and it probably pays for itself.
Archon Fung (43:46):
Well, I'm sure they would vote because I mean, you've got this kind of sunk thing. You're on the train already, right?
Jason Brennan (43:52):
Absolutely. Pay them to know the things they don't know. They don't know things because their votes don't count for much, so just fix the incentives and I bet we get better behavior. I'd like to try that. And then other than that, that's when you get into the question of we have all these proposals on the board for bigger structural reforms. We don't actually know if they will work better. And the only way to do it is to have small towns and small states and small governments try them and see what happens. So we need to experiment. Maybe Alex Guerrero's right, maybe I'm right, maybe Landemore's right, maybe Bob Gooden's right, but we don't really know till we do it. And in a way, you're right, these are all words. We're in an era of informed speculation about things that could work, but we don't know till we do it.
Archon Fung (44:33):
So you're for laboratories of democracy around improving voting and voters?
Jason Brennan (44:38):
Yeah. When we try something, if it has a problem, maybe we can fix it. If it doesn't have a problem, we can try scaling it up, but we don't really know what's going to be better until we actually implement it. I think of it like imagine it's like the year 1750 and people are writing all this speculative work about why representative government would be better than true monarchy. We're kind of doing that right now, but about how to fix democracy rather than how to replace it with something.
Archon Fung (45:01):
Yeah. Okay. So I mean, I certainly ask myself this question a lot when I was reading Against Democracy years and years ago, but Bill Houser, William Houser asked it right now, "Who gets to decide what counts as political competence on a voter exam without baking in elite biases and what would give greater voting weight to knowledge? Oh, and well, I guess, would you, at one point I think you would have, given a greater voting weight to knowledgeable citizens in order to produce better governance?" So maybe just the first one. Well, both of them. Yeah, I think they're both good.
Jason Brennan (45:37):
The second one, I think we should experiment with that, but I don't know for sure. The first one, who gets to decide what comes with political competence? The odd thing is I think democracy gets to decide. You do one of these citizen juries, you randomly select a few hundred people.
Archon Fung (45:50):
Oh, they make the exam.
Jason Brennan (45:50):
They write the exam because it's this weird thing where if you ask most voters, what does it take to be a good voter, they have a very good account of what it is to be a good voter. They have good standards. They just don't meet the standards. It's kind of like if you've ever taken a test where you're like, "I know my organic chemistry test is tomorrow. I know I'm supposed to know what a ketone is, but I don't know." That's where they are. They know what they should know. They have a good account of what counts as an informed voter. They just don't know the answers.
Archon Fung (46:13):
That's hilarious, right? Because you grab one bucket of people in universities like you and me, and it might be knowledge questions. Who's your senator or mayor? And then some other people say, "Well, do you know what the price of eggs is?" And if you don't know what the price of eggs is, maybe you have no business being there.
Jason Brennan (46:31):
Yeah. I always say milk, but yeah, I think it's a perfectly valid question to go on the exam. What's the average price of milk in the United States or average price of eggs? I think that matters. That should go on the exam.
Archon Fung (46:39):
So you think maybe it shouldn't be you and me-
Jason Brennan (46:40):
So that democracy decides what counts as an informed voter and then use that to bribe people on what counts to get them to be informed.
Archon Fung (46:48):
So you think it shouldn't be you and me and 10 other political theorists making the exam? Probably not.
Jason Brennan (46:51):
I mean, maybe one of us should be on it, but it doesn't have to just be us, right?
Archon Fung (46:55):
Yeah.
Stephen Richer (46:56):
Yeah. So I guess just to sort of bring us full circle here and to close this out because we've taken up enough of your time, but we are very appreciative. Come November 3rd, less than a month from now, Archon, are you going to say yay if the number of eligible voters crosses 60% who participate in the November election? And Jason, are you going to say yay or just be like, that's a data point and doesn't really matter?
Archon Fung (47:30):
I would definitely cheer. I mean, for me, more is better because I think I weigh the outcomes and knowledge a little bit less than the civicness, especially in this moment. Yeah. I don't know. Jason, what about... I mean, does it matter? Would you be upset if it were like 35, 40?
Jason Brennan (47:50):
Yeah. I don't have a magic number. For me it would be, if I see there's high turnout, I'd wonder why, and then I would post hoc determine whether or not I think that was a good thing or not. It's an output. It's not an input necessarily.
Archon Fung (48:00):
Yeah.
Jason Brennan (48:00):
Yeah.
Stephen Richer (48:02):
Yeah. I think I've got to... I'm probably on... There is some number below which it drops where I say, "Okay, this is problematic for a whole bunch of reasons as far as is it even democratic at that point? Is it reflective at all?" I mean, all of Jason's previous points taken, and I understand that there is, even when there's high turnout, there's going to be certain groups that are going to participate disproportionately, but when does it get problematic? Below 30% or something like that. But above that, as long as obviously I would care from the administrative access, was everyone able to vote if they wanted to vote. But beyond that, no, I'm going to be focusing on the results come November.
Archon Fung (48:46):
That's interesting. I'm not always for higher turnout. So on this debate about... The main argument for glomming local elections onto the same date as federal elections is turnout, right? In a strict local election, turnout is really low, 10, 15, 20% in some places. And so a bunch of people are saying, "Well, let's just have it on the same day." My worry, which it's not mine alone, a lot of people worry that, "Well, if you did that, then people would be voting on red blue issues and they wouldn't be voting on the school bond override or whatever." And I guess I'd rather have a small number of people, 20, 30% thinking about those local issues in that election. And that at bottom is an informational and quality kind of concern. Yeah. Definitely.
Stephen Richer (49:39):
Okay. Well, thank you very much, Jason, for being here with us today. We appreciate your time and we appreciate everyone's time who was on the chat with us. Lots of great questions. Hopefully we were able to weave in a few of those. We always do enjoy them. And then Archon, what about next week?
Archon Fung (49:55):
So I think next week we're going to have the... Well, not the opposite case because here we've been talking about the tweaks, but an argument for universal civic duty voting. So our guest will be Miles Rapoport, who was an Ash Center fellow years ago, and he has written a book with EJ Dionne called 100% Democracy that advocates for basically the Australia and Brazil requirement in the United States that everyone vote.
Stephen Richer (50:25):
All right. Well, that sounds good. Well, we will see you all next Tuesday. Thanks as always to our production team and thank you to Professor Brennan and you can follow him or see about his work on the Georgetown University School of Business website, and we will see you all later.
Archon Fung (50:39):
Yeah. Thanks for joining, Jason. Good to see you.
Stephen Richer (50:42):
Thank you.
Jason Brennan (50:43):
Thanks for having me.
Voiceover:
Thank you for listening to Terms of Engagement. Email us your questions, suggestions, or thoughts for future episodes. You can find an email address in the show notes below. See you next time.