Politics as Rational Decision Making
This is part of my constitutional design series
I hope this post will serve both as a foundation I can build upon for the rest of the series, and as a preview of the type of the analysis you’re likely to see in the rest.
Constitutional design is kind of a game theory problem, where you model the incentives of different political actors and how they would behave given certain constraint. Unlike in traditional game theory, however, political actors aren’t solely self-interested. The incentives of a political actor are in my view a combination of three things:
Political views. Here I’m interpreting political views broadly to include not only issue positions like pro-life or anti-death penalty but also attributes like knowing enough about policy to write smarter law. Everything that makes up which policy a politician would write or support to improve society. Often these views aren’t super concrete or consistent, especially when societal polarization is low.
Note that rationally following your political views doesn’t always mean passing bills you think are good. Often it’s necessary to sacrifice your less important political positions to win re-election so that you can continue to realize your more important political positions.
Personal interest. The two biggest examples here are acting to make oneself rich (ie corruption) and acting to keep one’s job or get a promotion (though as I wrote above this can also be a rational way to realize one’s political views).
Norms. Politicians sometimes act in clear opposition to their personal incentives and political views due to norms. Why people follow norms is a divisive question; the consequentialist frame is that a person follows norms so that others will follow the same norms and everyone ends up better off.
I will mostly treat these incentives as the only determinant of action, so a political actor will act to optimize the same incentives no matter their position, pursuant to the norms they think apply to their position. Obviously, this isn’t always true. A politician’s political beliefs, personal interest, and norms may change based on their position. Maybe after seeing enough cases, a judge starts to believe more in the norm of judicial restraint. Maybe a president’s political views evolve as they observe more of the inner workings of politics. These aren’t unimaginable and you can observe it in practice - Supreme Court justices’ partisan drift is probably one example. I’ll try to acknowledge cases like this where I think this model breaks.
Candidates also often act irrationally in response to their incentives, just like all humans do. But overall, I think my model applies really well to politics, and is the right one to use when thinking about constitutional design.
The Public’s Incentives
So that’s politicians. But I think these same three categories also apply to voters/the public:
Political Views are similar when applied to voters as politicians. These are the views about how to make society better.
Personal Interest is a voter acting to make themselves better off. This has more overlap with political views with voters than it does with politicians, given people’s tendency to rationalize their interests. But they’re also sometimes clearly different - wealthy suburbanites often voted against their personal interest when they voted for Biden just as working class voters voted against their personal interest by supporting Trump.
Norms on the voter level usually mean scandals. People may vote for the opposing party when their preferred candidate has a bad scandal, under the norm that people who do [xyz] should not hold office. Voters also enforce democratic norms sometimes by punishing politicians who act to undermine democracy, although this can also be justified in terms of political views and personal interest.
If you thought politicians were too stupid to rationally pursue their incentives, voters will shock you. The main reason I still think this model often works for voters is that the large sample size means that any voter’s individual irrationality generally cancels out. Moderate candidates perform better, presidents perform better in a better economy, and scandal-ridden politicians underperform in elections.
Democracy
These voter incentives lead directly to the rationales for democracy.
On political views, the rationale is that of collective intelligence the “wisdom of the crowd”. Society as a whole will, on average, have better beliefs and values than any one elite group of people could have. Maybe you think your group’s beliefs are better than other people’s, but a big part of democracy is also pluralism and liberalism. There are going to be different people with different beliefs and and values and the only fair way to settle them is with equal political power under democracy.
On personal interests, the rationale is that giving people a say in their governance ensures that they are treated well by the government. People will make the best decisions about their own government because they have skin in the game, as they say.
These aren’t the only justifications for democracy. People might be drawn to violence if they feel their views aren’t being represented in government. Or maybe you aren’t a utilitarian and just think people “deserve” a say in their own governance. But I do think these are probably the most important ones, and I’ll reference them a lot in this series
Everything above seems pretty intuitive, I hope. So what is the point of stating it explicitly? How does it differ from the way we normally speak about constitutional design?
Let me give one example from the politician side. Discussion around political mechanism design (at least in the US) is dominated by the concept of “checks and balances”. Congress can impeach the president, who can nominate Supreme Court (SCOTUS) justices, who can overturn laws.
But these are true checks only if the different entities have different incentives - different political views, personal interests, or norms. If Republicans control both the Senate and Presidency, they are almost never going to impeach their own president, and the president is rarely going to veto laws coming out of their legislature, because it is not in the interest of their political views.
This is the type of rigorous thinking that I feel is not done nearly enough in ordinary discussion about constitutional design. Politics is never going to be a fully rigorous subject, but I hope you’ll find that this series provides an adequate level of rigor for the subject.