Tag: democracy

Crashing the Party

Andrew Coyne says we should re-think how we choose party leaders. So here are my thoughts.

In a recent column in the National Post, Andrew Coyne argues that “it is time to rethink how we choose party leaders” ― at least if we care about the institution of Parliament, and don’t think that “MPs are nobodies, and the role of the leader is to look good on TV”. As someone who cares about Parliament, he argues that we should go back to “the classic Westminster model”, where party leaders are chosen by the party caucus ― like, say, in Australia. Mr. Coyne is not alone in making this point; Dale Smith has done so repeatedly (for example in this Policy Options post about his new book), and others have too. But, although they are among the more thoughtful observers of the Canadian political scene, their arguments leave a number of significant questions unanswered.

One is simply whether the benefits that they are promising us will materialize if the clock is turned back on the tendency to broaden, instead of narrowing, the constituency that chooses party leaders. Mr. Coyne argues that leaders chosen by their caucus would be “battle-tested and ready to do the job a party leader is supposed to do in our system: lead a caucus in Parliament”, as well as more accountable to the caucus. Moreover, leadership contests would not consume “the vast amounts of time and money” they now do. That last point is no doubt true, so far as it goes ― though while I hope that it’s not an entirely reliable guide to the reality of politics, if you’ve watched the original, BBC version of the House of Cards, you might be a bit skeptical about the intra-caucus leadership contests being any less immoral than the current Conservative leadership race that has prompted Mr. Coyne to write his column. Urquhartian cynicism aside, the frequency of leadership coups in real-life Australian politics seems to disprove Mr. Coyne’s argument that caucus members are be the best placed to chose an accountable and effective leader. If they were any good at it, why would they always be changing their minds?

Part of the reason is that, however much Mr. Coyne may deride this, and however much we may regret this, it really is a very big part of a party leader’s job to look good on TV ― and while caucus members know this, and start worrying when the leader’s polling numbers dip, they might not actually be the best at predicting who will do this job well. In the “audience democracy” described by Bernard Manin in his book on The Principles of Representative Government, leaders are more important than parties, in no small part precisely because of their ability to speak directly to voters through the electronic media. As I explained in an article in the McGill Law Journal, Manin’s “audience democracy” model fits Canada very well (I summarized that part of the article here). Again, this state of affairs may be a cause for regret, but it is a product of technological and social trends beyond our control; changing the way in which party leaders are selected won’t reverse them.

But suppose I am wrong about this, and reverting to having caucuses selecting party leaders would in fact be a useful thing to do. The other question that I have after reading Mr. Coyne is whether he proposes a legal intervention to force parties to adopt his preferred mechanism for choosing leaders. Parties, after all, are not going in the direction he is advocating ― quite the contrary. Delegated conventions used to be the norm, but they are a thing of the past now. Leaders are chosen by membership as a whole and, in the case of the federal Liberals ― as with a number of parties around the world ― it’s not even just by membership, but by self-identified “supporters” too. And though my instinct is to treat this is evidence that the parties know something that Mr. Coyne and those who agree with him don’t, the Tories’ current misery notwithstanding, it at least is conceivable that there is a collective action problem at work. The parties, and the public, would all be better off (let’s assume) with leaders chosen by caucus, but the one that moves to that system first will be criticized for being undemocratic, so no one dares take the plunge.

Would this prima facie case for legislative intervention stand up to scrutiny? One obvious problem might be that such an interference with the parties’ internal affairs might be challenged as a violation of the freedom of association protected by paragraph 2(d) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Even if the courts were to find a violation, there would no doubt be some material for an attempt at a section 1 justification, but I don’t know if it would be enough. I don’t recall any freedom of association cases about political parties, so any assessment as a matter of positive law would be rather speculative. But even putting a possible Charter challenge to one side, interference with the party members’ freedom should count as an argument, though perhaps not a conclusive one against legislation.

Another issue to consider would be the risk of a one-size-fits-all approach, given the vast disparities in the sizes of parties and caucuses. Many registered parties, of course, have no Parliamentary caucus at all; some others have a very small one, perhaps even a single MP. If leadership selection by caucus were mandated, that could create perverse outcomes ― including a party’s lone MP selecting his or her own successor as leader, should he or she wish to resign. Of course, it would be possible to write legislation so that it would apply to caucuses of a certain size ― but that seems to lead to perverse consequences of its own. A party would be forced to abandon an existing membership-selection system in favour of caucus-selection upon reaching a certain size, and possibly return to one upon falling below the threshold again, which strikes me as odd, though perhaps that’s just me.

Ultimately though, the idea of imposing caucus selection of party leaders runs into the same problem as most attempts at regulating parties. Why can’t the voters settle it? If caucus selection causes parties to have better leaders, then people will presumably vote for them ― perhaps especially given that leaders are so important in the “audience democracy”. The prima facie case for regulation assumes that voters would (irrationally) prefer a flawed but more “democratically” selected leader to a better one picked by a caucus. But while the voters’ irrationality should not be underestimated, this seems hard to believe. Would voters ― who do not seem to pay a whole lot of attention to party leadership contests in the first place ― be so beguiled by the claims of the more “democratic”  parties as to overlook substantial differences in leader quality?

It seems to me, ultimately, that Mr. Coyne’s complaint is less about the political parties that have somehow been so naïve as to abandon the virtues of caucus selection in favour of the vice of giving a broader spectrum of constituents a say in how they will be led than it is about voters who fall for the charms of TV-savvy populists. Ideally, he effectively says, we wouldn’t give them the option of voting for these populists at all, leaving them to choose among safe options vetted by the political establishment. The argument has its appeal, during a Conservative leadership race said to be led by a pair of populists, not to mention the Beeblebrox presidency south of the border. But can we count on party caucuses to stem the tide of populism for long? If they are thwarted by these guardians of political propriety, will not the populists launch their own parties (especially if a form of proportional representation, which Mr. Coyne favours, were ever implemented)? I have no firm views on this, but I am skeptical that caucus selection of party leaders, whether voluntarily implemented or enforced, can do us much good.

Constraint and Candour

The case for a constrained judiciary ― but also candour about adjudication

At the website of Advocates for the Rule of Law (ARL), Asher Honickman has posted a reply to my post here on “How to Do Constitutional Adjudication” (which was itself a reply to some of his arguments in a previous ARL essay making “The Case for a Constrained Approach to Section 7” of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms). I would like to respond, focusing mostly on what I have been referring to as “democratic process failures” and their relevance to constitutional adjudication. I think that Mr. Honickman mis-characterizes my arguments on this point, but perhaps that’s because they were not clear enough to begin with.

* * *

First, though, a note on what is, as I know from conversation, a persistent but perhaps unimportant disagreement between Mr. Honickman and me. I wrote that

law generally, and constitutional law in particular, contains an ineradicable moral and ideological element, so that there is nothing wrong with perceiving judges as being ― in part ― moral agents and political actors. [Moreover], the Charter‘s text itself makes it inevitable that that judges will be making decisions touching on morality and politics.

Mr. Honickman responds by conceding that “[t]he judge can no more divorce herself from her subjective experiences, beliefs and values than can the historian, the economist, or the physician,” but arguing that “it does not follow that judges should embrace their fallibility.” He wants judges to be “constrained by a ‘rule of law’ culture” that will limit, if not altogether remove, the negative consequences of the judges’ inability to be entirely objective.

I have no quarrel with this, but think this misses the point I was trying to make, which is that moral values and ideology are not just something that judges bring into the law because they are fallible, but something it is built into the law ― perhaps into the very concept of law. Mr. Honickman’s example is a telling one: history, economics, and medicine are supposed to be amoral. They describe the world and suggest ways to change it, but whatever values their practitioners bring to their craft are external to the disciplines themselves. Law is different. It has, Lon Fuller argued, an “internal morality.” It is, Jeremy Waldron says, inherently protective of human dignity. The Rule of Law, which Mr. Honickman wants judges to uphold, is itself a moral concept. (This view is not universal ― Joseph Raz, in particular, famously challenged it. But I find it quite persuasive.)

What I meant, then, when I wrote that law is necessarily moral and ideological was not only, and not so much, that judges will inevitably fail to avoid bringing their subjective values into their work ― though they will, and I agree with Mr. Honickman that this is regrettable. What I meant is that even when judges perform their work to perfection and only apply such principles as can be readily inferred from the constitutional text (the Rule of Law, federalism, and democracy, say) and many of the text’s explicit guarantees (I mentioned freedom of religion, equality, and protection against unreasonable search and seizure), they are already engaged in a moral and ideological endeavour. The proper response to the unreconstructed Marxist or the social justice warrior who dismisses the Rule of Law and the rest of it as bourgeois ideology is not to say that it’s not, but to admit that it is, and that you will keep sticking to that ideology because it helps prevent Gulags instead of building them. That said, in practice, little turns on the difference between these two responses.

* * *

Coming back to the issue of democratic process failures, my contention was not ― as it seems to me that Mr. Honickman took it to be ― that these provide a self-standing ground for judicial intervention, regardless of constitutional text or doctrine. The text, in particular, remains the overarching limit on judicial power, the law to which this power is subordinate. Doctrine is a more complicated case, and perhaps the ground of some disagreement between Mr. Honickman and me, because I would favour a somewhat less stringent approach to stare decisis than he might prefer. Still, I share Mr. Honickman’s belief in the importance of constraint.

My reference to democratic process failures ― as well as that to pervasive political ignorance ― was specifically in response to Mr. Honickman’s insistence that the legislatures’ ability to resolve moral issues means that judges do not need to do so. Legislatures, I argued, will often fail to address moral issues, or will address them in ways that have little to do with the voters’ preferences or interests, and much to do with those of the legislators. The point is not that courts have a roving commission to find out and correct cases when this occurs, but that they should not hesitate to make moral judgments ― when authorized or required to do so by the constitutional text (and doctrine) ― under the pretext that the legislatures will take care of this.

I originally spoke of democratic process failure in my comment on Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 5, [2015] 1 S.C.R. 331, where the Supreme Court held that a blanket prohibition on medically-assisted suicide was inconsistent with section 7 of the Charter. Although there were problems with the way the Supreme Court articulated that decision, its interpretation of section 7 was at least plausible ― and in my view correct ― in light of the constitutional text and the doctrine as it had developed in the years since the Court first answered that question in Rodriguez v. British Columbia (Attorney General), [1993] 3 S.C.R. 519. The point of my discussion of democratic process failure was to address concerns about the “counter-majoritarian difficulty” said to be inherent in judicial review. Because of such failures, it is not the case that judicial review is always counter-majoritarian (though of course it often is).

This example shows that any court empowered to review the constitutionality of legislation is ipso facto “empowered to correct ‘democratic process failures,'” ― and thus that Mr. Honickman need not worry that such correction “will necessarily be ‘instrumentalist,’ finding and affirming rights that are not supported by the Charter itself, but which, in the judges’ view, make for good social policy.” To repeat, the Charter‘s provisions remain the source of the court’s authority and at the same time the constraint on this authority, while democratic process failure is the reason for which that authority is invoked. Accordingly, when faced with what it thinks is a democratic process failure, the Court’s role is not to figure out the preferences of a majority ― which, as Mr. Honickman correctly points out, may not be determinate ― but simply to do the usual judicial task and invalidate the impugned statute or government decision if it is contrary to the constitution. At most, the presence of a failure obviates the case, if any, for judicial deference to the other branches of government.

I agree with Mr. Honickman that the questions that I raised about democratic process failures ― most basically, how do we know, and how can a court know, that one has occurred ― are difficult to answer, though it’s not clear to me that there can be “no objective standard” to help in the enterprise. But this difficulty does not undermine the case for judicial intervention, because, and so long as, that intervention is justified on another ground ― namely that of inconsistency between the government’s action and the constitution. Whether a democratic process failure has occurred might influence the deference that the court ought to show the government’s decision-making process, but the basic propriety of judicial intervention does not turn on the answer to this question.

Ultimately, Mr. Honickman and I might be disagreeing less about the judicial role than about democratic theory. Where I see “persistent inability of the democratic process to produce laws that majorities would agree with and find desirable,” Mr. Honickman sees “legislatures [that] do not base their decisions on the polls at any given time and look instead to the national interest.” The fact, which he acknowledges, that a passionate (or, I would add, strongly self-interested) and well-organized minority can prevail over the majority is not a bad thing in his view ― and, I suppose, fully consistent with the national interest. Even if democracy malfunctions, we should recall that it is “the worst system except for all the others” and correct its “imperfections … from within.” To me, this sounds like saying that because a free market is better than any alternative, we should not bother trying to correct market failures and hope that the market will correct itself, or that because government is necessary, our only response to government failure should be to improve regulatory mechanisms, instead of privatizing and deregulating. A few people accept the former argument, and many the latter, but to me, both seem fallacious. Democracy is indeed better than the alternatives, but if its shortcomings can be mitigated by means external to its normal processes ― such as judicial review ― then so much the better.

* * *

I share Mr. Honickman’s concerns about judges exercising their power without the constraints of constitutional text and legal doctrine. However, I do not think that the proper response to these concerns is to say that judges ought to be entirely non-ideological, and that they should leave matters of moral judgment to the legislative process, however flawed that process is. Like Mr. Honickman, I believe that judges should be enforcing constitutional rules, but I do not mind acknowledging the moral and ideological dimensions of many of these rules as well as the shortcomings of democracy, which judicial review can help remedy.

Yes Or No?

Post-Brexit thoughts on referenda, especially in the context of electoral reform

In the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, there is renewed debate about the lessons, if any, that it might hold for other democratic polities on the use of the referendum generally, and in particular for Canada about an eventual referendum on electoral reform. Many of those opposed to such a referendum have seized on the political ignorance and the acrimony on display in the United Kingdom to bolster their arguments. The problems they point to are real, but the case against a referendum on electoral reform is still not compelling.

First of all, it is important to note that the question of whether a referendum is the right way to settle a political controversy does not arise in a vacuum. If the issue has impressed itself with sufficient urgency on the public debate ― and in the Brexit case, this may be an open question ― it has to be resolved somehow. If not by referendum, then by a parliamentary vote. (Sometimes, adjudication or a reference to a court are also available, but not that often, so let’s discount that possibility here.) To say that a referendum is not the way to resolve the issue, it is not enough to point to that procedure’s flaws. It is also necessary to show that they are worse than those of the alternative. Moreover, it is not enough to point to one referendum that turned out badly (whatever “badly means), or to one successful parliamentary debate, to settle the question. Examples are useful, but to be persuasive, they have to be related to some underlying features that the procedures in question will usually, if not always, have.

Now, that political ignorance affected the Brexit vote, and would affect any other referendum, is not exactly a surprise. Ilya Somin discussed the data on political ignorance’s effects on the Brexit referendum in a detailed post at the Volokh Conspiracy, but those looking for a tl;dr can refer to this tweet from Google Trends showing that, after it was announced that the UK voted to leave the European Union, its residents started looking for answers to questions such as “what is the EU?” and what leaving it entails. Presumably, more than a few of these suddenly-curious people had cast their ballots without having any idea of what they were doing. There was also anecdotal evidence of “leave” voters having second thoughts after their preferred option turned out to have won. And given how little informed voters generally are, there is no reason to think that this particular referendum was an outlier.

There was also plenty of evidence of bitter divisions in the British polity in the aftermath of the vote. That too may be a feature of many referendums, though it’s not clear to me that it has to be a feature of all. I may be missing relevant information, but I do not know that New Zealand’s series of referenda on electoral reform was particularly divisive, and it is not at all obvious to me that a referendum on this topic in Canada would cause “deep divisions within Canadian … societ[y], divisions which [would not be] easily healed,” as Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef has implied. Referenda about issues seen as well-nigh existential, such as Québec’s future within or outside Canada, are divisive because the issues themselves are. Those about relatively pedestrian matters, such as the electoral system, are unlikely to be.

A referendum is thus highly likely to be affected by voter ignorance, and may, depending on the issue, prove dangerously acrimonious. But what about the alternative? As prof. Somin points out in a post asking whether “the Brexit vote prove[s] democracies should not use referenda,”

Elected officials may, on average, know more about policy issues than voters. But they need to cater to an often ignorant electorate in order to get elected in the first place. For that reason, policymaking by elected officials is often influenced by public ignorance no less than referenda are.

He adds that

In [an] election, there are many different issues on the agenda, which makes it hard for rationally ignorant voters to follow more than a small fraction of them. By contrast, a referendum can focus the voters’ attention on a single discrete question, thereby reducing the information burden.

And for divisiveness, it seems to me that a close election between two (or perhaps more) stark alternatives can be as divisive as any referendum, if we control for the importance of the issue. (Few elections are seen as being as vitally important as some ― though not all ― referenda.) The 2000 election in the United States left bitterness and division enough to last for two presidential terms and even beyond; and even the 2011 election in Canada left in its wake plenty of people who were convinced that the end times of Canadian democracy were at hand. Nor do I see a reason to see that ― again allowing for the significance of an issue to the public opinion ― having it debated in Parliament will turn out to be less divisive. As Andrew Coyne notes in a National Post column,

[r]eferendums are not themselves inherently divisive; rather, they are usually called precisely when the public is most sharply divided — so divided that the issue cannot risk being decided by ordinary means. If you think Quebec was divided during the two referendums on separation, try to imagine the mayhem that would erupt were the Parti Québécois to try to rip the province out of the country by a simple vote of the legislature.

In an op-ed in the Globe and Mail, Mel Cappe and Janice Gross Stein cite “the debate on the right to assisted death in Canada [as] an example” of enlightened parliamentarism, concerned at once “with interests of the majority” and “the rights of minorities.” But they conveniently forget to mention the fact that this debate only happened because of, and took place within the bounds defined by, a decision of the Supreme Court. Moreover, assisted death is an issue on which there seems to be, a fairly broad, if vague, consensus (though there is probably less agreement on the details than on general principles). If the debate in question was a relatively dignified one, that likely had a good deal to do with this consensus, and not only with the form it took.

There is another characteristic of parliamentary decision-making worth mentioning here. Not always, but more often than not, parliamentary votes are whipped party-line votes. If the leaders of the parliamentary majority decide that they want their caucus to vote a certain way, they will almost invariably get their way. In such cases, meaningful deliberation before a vote is a parliamentary ideal, but not a parliamentary reality. Thus, on an issue decided by party-line votes, parliamentary decision-making amounts to treating the last election ― in which that issue may well have featured only peripherally if at all ― as a sort of referendum-by-proxy on that issue.

So I don’t think that, as a general matter, referenda can be ruled out as a democratic decision-making procedure, as profs. Cappe and Stein suggest. At the same time, there issues that lend themselves to resolution by referendum much better than others. I am skeptical of arguments to the effect there that “constitutional,” or “very important,” issues, or those decisions on which are irreversible, should never be decided by referendum, not least because these categories are  vague and therefore liable to be twisted an abused in public debate. I have argued here that even the contention that issues of rights should not be put to a vote in a referendum is a dubious one. However, Prof. Somin has identified a couple of other factors that are more useful to draw the line.

First, prof. Somin writes that

referenda are often likely to be particularly poor mechanisms for making decisions on issues that involve complex tradeoffs with other priorities. … Legislators are more likely to have the time and expertise needed to study the tradeoffs in at least some detail.

Put another way, a referendum is only appropriate when it should be reasonably clear to at least a modestly diligent voter what each option involves. In a post on his (excellent) Public Law for Everyone blog, Mark Elliott points out that in the Brexit case,

[a] slim majority of those who voted may have expressed a desire to “leave”, but what that means is such an open question as to render the referendum outcome largely meaningless. … [T]hose who voted ‘leave’ … could not have been expressing, and did not express, any clear view about what the UK’s future relationship with the EU should look like precisely because no vision of that relationship was on the table.

The same was arguably true in the 1995 referendum on Québec’s separation. When one ― or more ― of the options on offer in a referendum is too vague, whether because it involves complex tradeoffs or because no one has bothered clarifying it, a referendum is not going to be a good idea. (It is worth noting, by the way, that this problem can affect elections if they are treated as referenda by proxy. As Emmett Macfarlane has been pointing out on Twitter, those who insist that Canadians want electoral reform because a clear majority of them voted for parties that supported it fail to mention that these parties were not very clear on what version of reform they favoured, and did not agree among themselves.) But if all the options are reasonably clear ― as they could be in a referendum on electoral reform, provided that the alternative(s) to the current system were actually specified in advance ― that objection is irrelevant.

Second, prof. Somin points out that

[r]eferenda might also be useful when it comes to issues where there is a serious conflict between the interests of elected officials and those of the general public. Most obviously, the former often can’t be trusted to deal objectively with issues that directly affect their own grip on power: electoral districting, campaign finance, and so forth. In such cases, the superior knowledge of politicians often actually does more harm than good, since they can use it to advance their own interests and the expense of the people.

This warning is relevant to the issue of electoral reform in Canada. Indeed, this should be blindingly obvious, given that every single party in the House of Commons (with the possible exception of the Bloc québécois) is supporting that electoral system which it believes will maximize its political power. Even profs. Gross and Stein concede that parliamentarians will “not always” have the best interests of the majority in mind. When we can tell that they do not, the case for a referendum becomes much stronger.

In my post on whether minority rights can be put to a referendum vote, I wrote that I was happy to live in a representative, not a direct, democracy. Many public decisions do involve such tradeoffs and uncertainty that resolving them by referendum is likely to be a bad idea. But that is not always true. In particular, it is not true of electoral reform. And sometimes, we can tell that our elected representatives are trying to help themselves at our expense. Again, that is true of electoral reform. When both of these factors are present at the same time, a referendum sounds like a very good idea. Let’s vote.

Ideas of the Marketplace II

What we can learn from thinking about the marketplace of ideas as a market

In a very interesting post over at EconLog, Bryan Caplan considers what he describes as the “dogmatic libertarian” claim that all markets work well, as it is applies ― or, rather, doesn’t apply ― to the marketplace of ideas. The marketplace seems to reject this claim, which suggests that it cannot be true. Prof. Caplan agrees that it is not, and makes two further observations. In reverse order, they are that “[t]ruth doesn’t largely win out in a well-functioning market for ideas, because consumers primarily seek not truth, but comfort and entertainment” (emphasis prof. Caplan’s), and that while “[m]ost markets work well … the market for ideas doesn’t … [b]ecause ideas have massive externalities. … The market for ideas … works poorly because strangers bear almost all the cost of your irrationality.” I think that’s largely right, but want to add a couple of additional points regarding prof. Caplan’s second observation.

First, while it is often true that we do not internalize the costs of our irrationality, this is less true in some contexts than in others. Most obviously ― this a point that Ilya Somin makes in his discussions of political ignorance ― we do internalize a much greater share of the costs of our bad decisions, and also of the rewards of the good ones, when deciding for ourselves, in our private lives, than when we vote or, more generally, act in the political sphere. Even in our private lives, we pass on some of the costs of our irrationality to family, friends, and sometimes the broader society as well, but we do absorb a much more substantial fraction of these costs. This is perhaps a trite point, and prof. Caplan might only have been referring to the marketplace for political ideas (political in a very broad sense), but I think it’s worth spelling it out.

More interestingly, I think, it is also the case that, even in politics, there is a way in which people can be a made to internalize at least a small fraction of the costs of their bad decisions in the marketplace of ideas: democracy. This, I think, is what H.L. Mencken’s famous quip that “[d]emocracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard” means. The theory is only partly true, because as prof. Caplan says, in the political sphere “strangers bear almost all the cost of your irrationality,” but self-government ensures that you bear at least a little fraction of the cost of your opinions and decisions. When you vote for a lousy politician, or convince others to do so, you increase ― albeit usually by very little ― your odds having to reap the consequences of the lousy policies that that politician will implement. By contrast, in a dictatorship, the few who decide typically bear even less of the cost of their views than the voters in a democracy, because they are even better able to pass these costs on to others, while those who do not (which is to say, almost everyone) are even freer to know nothing and believe everything, since their ignorance, credulity, and irrationality have no impact whatever on anything. If you think that voters and politicians are bad in democratic countries, just compare them to the people and the rulers in authoritarian ones. Once again, Churchill was quite right to say that while democracy is a bad system of government, others are even worse.

The second point I wanted to make might be too obvious for an economist like prof. Caplan to discuss, but bears repetition by a lawyer writing for non-economists. That the marketplace of ideas may be malfunctioning as a result of massive externalities does not justify intervention by the state in order to make people internalize these externalities or prevent them from occurring. Market failure may be real, but so is government failure ― and there are situations in which government failure is more severe than the market failure government intervention purports to correct. Indeed, this point is, I think, more widely accepted (albeit not necessarily in these terms) with respect to the marketplace of ideas than for just about any other market. Distrust of, and opposition to, censorship, in the face of widespread evidence of malfunctions in the marketplace of ideas reflects, at least in part, an understanding that giving the state the power to rectify these malfunctions would be disastrous, both because the state is a bad judge of ideas and because this power would be abused in various self-interested ways be the people entrusted with wielding it. Unfortunately, people often fail to transpose this understanding to their analysis of other markets. Yet there is no reason why they should. The marketplace of ideas is just not that special.

Thinking of the marketplace of ideas in economic terms ― assuming, in other words, that it is a marketplace more or less like any other ― is, I think a useful exercise. (I attempted it here already.) It both allows both to sharpen our understanding of the marketplace of ideas itself (and of the related markets, such as the one for votes), and can serve as a reminder of some broader truths about markets and regulations that we intuitively sense when thinking about the marketplace of ideas, but forget in other contexts.

The Core of the Case against Electoral Reform

Why the concerns of those who want electoral reform do not move me

When I wrote about the constitutionality of electoral reform, I did not want to discuss its merits, beyond saying that I did not believe it had many, or the process by which it should be determine upon, beyond saying I favoured a referendum. While I thought it important to mention my positions in order to avoid my constitutional opinion being interpreted as self-serving, I did not mean to argue for them, not least because I did not think I had any arguments to make that would be very interesting or original. Prompted by some of the comments I received, I have thought about these arguments again, and come to the conclusion that one of them may be of some interest, because it is seldom if ever made.

The two main problems that electoral reform is usually said to address are those of “disproportionality” and “wasted votes.” Disproportionality refers to the discrepancy between the percentage of the votes received by a party and its percentage of seats in Parliament, any such discrepancy being, in the view of those who make this argument, undemocratic. Wasted votes are those that apparently do not serve to elect anyone ― that is, under the first-past-the-post system that we now use, those cast for candidates who do not win the riding in which the votes are cast. Proposed reforms ― ranked ballot and mixed-member proportional representation are the main options, if I understand correctly ― address these issues in different ways and to different degrees, but I take it that those are who support reform are usually motivated by these concerns. (Or at least, those who support reform on grounds of principle rather than partisan interest.) There are other arguments for electoral reform, of course, such as that ranked ballot is supposed to make for kinder, gentler politics (like in Australia, I guess), or increased voter turnout (like in Switzerland, I suppose) but they strike me as speculative at best.

Here’s why concerns about disproportionality and wasted votes do not move me. Imagine a simple election between two candidates ― like the run-off stage in a French presidential election. Say the winner gets 55% of the vote, and the loser gets 45%. But the winner gets the prize, the French presidency for example, 100% of it, and the people who voted for the loser go home and their votes have no apparent effect at all. On the account of our would-be electoral reformers, this election results in substantial disproportionality, and a large fraction of the votes cast in it is wasted. Its democratic character should, therefore, be regarded as very questionable. Except that, of course, nobody actually thinks that. Similarly, nobody thinks it undemocratic that a party with, say, 55% of the seats in Parliament gets to govern 100% of the time while that Parliament exists, and nobody seems to say that the votes of the opposition parties are “wasted.”  The disproportion between 55% of the seats and 100% of the power is actually more significant, both in sheer numbers and, more importantly, in effect, than, say, that between getting 40% of the vote and 55% of Parliamentary seats. Yet it is only the latter that is said to be somehow undemocratic. I just don’t see how that is the case. The complaints of the proponents of electoral reform sound in principle, but they strike me as selective and inconsistent with what they are happy to accept in other situations.

For my part, I am no more bothered by the disproportionality or wasted votes in the elections for Parliament than by the same “problems” that arise within Parliament itself. What concerns me is how to limit the ability of a Parliamentary majority, however constituted, to harm both the opposition in Parliament and the citizenry at large ― including its supporters of course ― while it is in office, and how to prevent that majority from entrenching itself so as to become impossible to remove from office at the next election. Electoral reform is not a solution to these concerns. (Indeed some version of it may ― though this too is a speculative argument ― make the entrenchment problem worse.) It is therefore, in my view, an unnecessary disruption of our politics, and a distraction from the issues on which we should be focusing.

NOTE: Feel free to comment, but I doubt I will respond unless I think your observations respond directly to the point I’m making.

Acting Like Grown-Ups

Is there a point to legislating when judges can do it for us?

I would like to elaborate on a point I made in my last post, which discussed arguments at the Supreme Court on Monday about whether the suspension of the declaration of unconstitutionality of the across-the-board criminalization of assisted suicide should be extended. I said that while it is true that, with the decision in Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 5, [2015] 1 S.C.R. 331, the Supreme Court has laid down the constitutional foundation on which an eventual legal framework for the regulation of assisted suicide will have to be built, it would still be better if elected officials ― and through them, the citizens of Canada ― took responsibility for the building. As I noted, the argument of Joseph Arvay, who made the case against the extension, implied that this was not so ― that the judicial process was sufficient to construct this regulatory framework, with no need for legislative intervention, save perhaps for “bells and whistles.” And indeed, what’s the point of the plodding work of legislation if the courts show us the way to go?

This question does not only arise in the context of assisted suicide. Indeed, as the Supreme Court noted in Carter, the declaration of unconstitutionality that it issued in that case was tailored to its specific facts, making “no pronouncement on other situations where physician-assisted dying may be sought” ― so that legislative action is certainly necessary if these any of these other circumstances are to be encompassed by the regulatory framework. But the issue I have in mind is, if anything, even more pressing in other cases. The legalization of same-sex marriage, more than a decade ago now, is one obvious example. It could ― and would ― have been effected through the judicial process, as court after court struck down opposite-sex definition of marriage. There was no need for Parliament to intervene. But Parliament did intervene, after a notorious bit of political theatre involving a reference to the Supreme Court. Was that a good thing? I think it was.

Probably not because legislation can, as the federal government argued before the Supreme Court on Monday, generate “buy-in” from stakeholders, or broader social acceptability, than a judicial decision. This sounds like an empirical claim, and while we cannot run a controlled experiment to verify it (we cannot enact the same policy by legislation and by judicial decision for the same population and see which generates more social acceptability), we can consider some indirect evidence. For example, in the United States, marriage equality seems to have been easily enough accepted, despite a couple of well-publicized instances of officials defying the Supreme Court’s decision to mandate it. By contrast, President Obama’s healthcare reforms remain deeply controversial, despite having been put in place by legislation. It would at least seem that the way in which a rule comes into being does not foreordain its acceptance or rejection by the citizenry.

Rather, I think that a polity taking responsibility for its laws by enacting them democratically, even if it is spurred to do so by judicial decisions, is a good thing in itself, regardless of the felicitous consequences it does or does produce, or at least the worthy and responsible thing to do. My thinking here is inspired by Jeremy Waldron, and specifically by an argument he makes in his paper called “How Law Protects Dignity.” Building on Lon Fuller’s idea that rule-based governance only makes sense if one regards human beings as responsible and capable of self-direction ― as endowed, indeed, with dignity ―, Waldron writes that

legal systems … work by using, rather than short-circuiting, the agency of ordinary human individuals. They count on people’s capacities for practical understanding, for self-control, for self-monitoring and modulation of their own behaviour in relation to norms that they can grasp and understand. (7)

However,

[e]ven when the self-application of general norms is not possible and institutional determination is necessary, either because of disputes about application or because application inherently requires an official determination, still the particular orders that are eventually issued at law look towards self-application. (7)

People ordered to pay damages tend to pay up without the bailiffs seizing their property; even convicted criminals are often allowed to show up to serve their sentence at a pre-determined date without being forcibly brought to prison by the police. Prof. Waldron concludes that

[t]he pervasive emphasis on self-application is … definitive of law, differentiating it sharply from systems of rule that work primarily by manipulating, terrorizing or galvanizing behavior. And as Fuller recognizes, it represents a decisive commitment by law to the dignity of the human individual. (8)

Conversely, though, the dignified thing to do for a person is to engage in self-application of the law, instead of waiting to be physically coerced into compliance.

Prof. Waldron writes about the application of law to individuals. And he cautions elsewhere about the potential problems that can arise if we start applying dignitarian ideas to groups, especially to groups such as nations and states. Still, I think that it makes sense to transpose his ideas about the self-application of the law to the level of political communities.

This transposition goes something like this. Constitutional law is the law that binds the citizens of a polity in their collective political action. And, like other forms of law, it counts in the first instance on the people and, especially, the political actors application its rules to themselves, which is why I get so exercised when they do not. However, perhaps even than with other areas of the law, constitutional law is subject to disputes about its application. As with other areas of the law, courts are often called upon to settle these disputes. But it remains the case that, as with other areas of the law, self-application matters even in the realm of compliance with specific court orders. A community’s self-application of constitutional judicial decisions can take many forms ― and the enactment of legislation that implements judicial decisions, even if it is not strictly speaking necessary, is one of them. It is the political equivalent of a judgment debtor writing a cheque to his erstwhile adversary. It is the dignified thing to do.

Or think of it, if you will, a sign of acting like an adult, of doing what one has to do, instead of having others do things for you and to you. Even responsible adults sometimes have to be reminded of their obligations, and they might not always be as graceful as one might wish in complying with them. Still, it is a sign of maturity and responsibility when they do end up complying with them on their own, instead of being dragged kicking and screaming, like an unruly child might be. Our polity does not always live up to this ideal. We often let provisions declared unconstitutional remain on the books, for instance. (The prohibition on prisoners voting, struck down in Sauvé v. Canada (Chief Electoral Officer), 2002 SCC 68, [2002] 3 S.C.R. 519, but still a part of the Canada Elections Act (as par. 4(c)), is just one example.) But it is ironic and sad when, as was the case on Monday, defenders of individual rights argue that we can freely dispense with the effort of making good on our constitutional commitment to respect them because the judges can do the work for us.

It Won’t Help

This is yet another post on the duty to vote. Here, I address arguments according to we have such a duty because if everyone votes, the quality of election campaigns and, possibly, of governance, will be better than under the current state of affairs, where some people vote, and others do not. This argument, like the information- and legitimacy-based ones that I addressed previously, is instrumental, in that it sees universal voting not as an end in itself, but as a means to achieve another desirable result. And indeed this result ― campaigns and governance (is there even a difference between the two anymore? was there ever?) that are oriented toward the public good rather than to pandering to specific segments of the population ― is a most desirable one. But can it justify a duty to cast a ballot?

Susan Delacourt has argued that if voting were mandatory, people tempted to engage in electoral chicanery destined to depress turnout among their opponents would refrain from doing so. Presumably, the same thing would be true even in the absence of a legal mandate, if they knew that everyone believed voting is obligatory. I have also seen suggestions that employers would more readily allow employees time to vote on election day. Yet it is already illegal to prevent people from voting, and employers already have a legal obligation to allow their workers three consecutive hours in which to cast their ballot. I do not understand how the existence of a duty to vote, whether legal or moral, would change the calculus of individuals already prepared to break the law.

Ms. Delacourt also worries that “[s]ome of the dumbing-down of discourse” that plagues our elections “has taken place because political campaigns have become preoccupied with simply getting out the vote (often with shiny baubles) rather than a debate of ideas.” Andrew Coyne has expressed the same concern, writing that “[a]ll of the parties would be … happy if voters outside their base got lost on the way to the polling station. Elections today are not about reaching out to uncommitted voters, so much as motivating yours — typically out of fear of theirs.” (Emphasis in the original)

Yet, tellingly, neither Mr. Coyne nor Ms. Delacourt has offered any evidence that the politics of nations with mandatory voting are more high-minded, or less prone to “the dumbing-down of discourse” or resort to wedge issues than ours. It is from Australia, the country that inspires the defenders of a duty to vote, that the Conservatives have imported Lynton Crosby, the purported guru of wedge issue campaigns ― though, in fairness, the use of wedge politics responds to much broader trends, which I briefly described here, and which affect all democracies, regardless of whether they make voting mandatory. The Australian habit of changing Prime Ministers every year, or perhaps after every poll, also does not strike me as a sign of good governance. There is, in short, little reason to believe that a duty to vote is a panacea, or even a moderately useful remedy, for what ails our politics.

On the contrary, Ilya Somin points out, a duty to vote might make things worse. The people who tend to abstain when voting is voluntary are on average more ignorant than those who vote and, as Jason Brennan notes, empirical studies suggest that even forcing people to vote “doesn’t cause uninformed voters to become any better informed.” An electorate enlarged by the existence of a duty to vote is thus a more ignorant one. The trouble is, as prof. Somin explains, that “[f]or fairly obvious reasons, relatively ignorant voters are more likely to be influenced by simplistic 30 second ads than relatively well-informed ones (who, among other things, tend to have stronger preexisting views).” After all, the problem for the parties does not end with getting voters into a polling booth. Even if the voters get there on their own, they must be made to pick one party rather than another. And if simplistic ads, wedge issues, and fear are the most effective means to do that, these are the means the parties will resort to. With voters who do not care very much about politics and only vote out of a sense of duty, this is even more likely to be the case than with others. A duty to vote, then, might mean more rather than less “dumbing down the discourse” and reliance on wedge issues.

A duty to vote will not improve the state of our electoral politics any more than it will make politicians take the interests or opinions of the voters into account, or make our democracies more legitimate. It will neither prevent those who are inclined to break the law to interfere with other people’s votes from doing so, nor discourage political parties from engaging in the sort of campaigning that debases our public affairs and prevents thoughtful discussion of policy issues. In short, in my view, a duty to vote simply cannot achieve any of the purposes that its proponents invoke to justify it. Having dealt with the instrumental arguments in favour of this duty, however, I still must address the deontological one according to which voting is simply a matter of civic duty. I will do that in the next post in this series, probably early next week.

Is It Legit?

I am continuing my series of posts about the duty to vote ― or nonexistence thereof. Earlier this week, I addressed what I called information-based arguments: claims to the effect that we must vote in order to contribute our views, either about what political option is best for us, or about which of them will make for better government in the general interest. I had addressed the gratitude-based arguments in an earlier post. Here I take on a different sort of argument, which I will describe as legitimacy-based. It is the idea that it is necessary for people to vote because the continuing legitimacy of our democratic political arrangements depends on widespread participation. If abstention rates are too high, democracy itself is at risk. This argument, in my view, is both empirically and normatively problematic.

Let’s start with the normative problem. The legitimacy-based government (like the information-based one) is an instrumental one: it considers that voting is a duty not for its own sake, but for a ulterior purpose. In order for democracy to endure and thrive, you ought to vote. But not everyone agrees with this purpose. A democratic society does not expect or require all of its members to be democrats. There are authoritarians in our midst, and there are anarchists. I happen to think that they are wrong; most people presumably think so too. But they are entitled to their opinions, and I do not see why they would have a moral duty (still less, of course, how one could justify imposing on them a legal duty) to nurture a political system with which they disagree.

Very well, you will say, but what of the majority who do believe that democracy is the best political system, or at least the worst except all the others? Don’t they have a duty to vote in order to reinforce this system? Indeed, there is some threshold of participation below which an electoral system can lose its legitimacy and will be in danger of being replaced by less democratic arrangements. The situation of Québec’s school boards is a case in point: the commissioners and chairpersons of the boards are elected, but in 2014, only 5.5% of the province’s voters bothered to cast a ballot ― and the government is now planning on scrapping the elections. (To be clear: I have no idea whether, in that instance, less democratic means worse.) But is the theoretical possibility of this happening enough to justify a duty to vote?

Nobody actually thinks that everyone must vote in order for an electoral system, or the result of a given election, to be legitimate. The Québec secession referenda were not illegitimate because turnout was “only” 85.6% in 1980 and 93.5% in 1995. Nor were Canadian elections grounds for legitimacy concerns when turnout fluctuated around 75%. Of late, however, it has been substantially lower ― around 60%. But for all the worries about the vitality of Canadian democracy that these numbers have provoked, they would be reasonably high for presidential elections (never mind, say, mid-terms) in the United States. I’m not sure anyone worries about the survival and legitimacy of democracy in the United States, at least not because of turnout figures ― though to be sure there is no shortage of people who would like them to be higher. The same goes, to the best of my knowledge, for Switzerland, where turnout in the three federal elections held since 2000 has consistently been below 50% (45.2% in 2003, 48.9% in 2007, and 49.1% in 2011).

All that to say that while there is some turnout threshold below which the viability of a democratic system can come into question, it is quite clearly situated well below the turnout levels actually observed in Canadian elections. Quite clearly, nothing like near-universal participation in elections is necessary for a well-functioning democracy. It is thus not at all clear that an individual’s commitment to democracy translates into a duty to vote. Besides, that commitment can be expressed in any number of ways other than voting, a topic to which I will come back in a subsequent post.

The legitimacy-based argument sometimes has a somewhat different focus, reflecting a concern not with the vitality of the democratic system as such, but with the legitimacy of specific governments. Thus Andrew Coyne worries that “‘[m]ajority’ governments are now formed in this country with the support of barely one in five adult citizens — about the same as elected governments a century ago, when women were not allowed to vote.” In his view, this amounts to “a crisis of democratic legitimacy.” As with the concerns about the legitimacy of democratic politics as such, it is not clear that the crisis is real. Was there a crisis of democratic legitimacy during the presidency of Bill Clinton, first elected in 1992 with 43% of the popular vote on a turnout of 55.2%, and thus the votes of 23.7% of the registered voters, re-elected in 1996 with 49.2% of the votes cast out of a turnout of 49%, and thus the support of 24.1% of the registered voters? If there was, why is it that more than 60% of the American people apparently approved of that job he had done by the end of his second term? Actually, I doubt that Mr. Coyne or others who trot out this particular argument really believe in it. It is a nice rhetorical flourish, and nothing more.

The need to preserve the legitimacy of our democratic system or even of the governments that it produces cannot justify a duty to vote even for those who accept that this need is a pressing concern ― which is not everyone in politically free and pluralistic societies. There are at least a couple of other arguments in favour of such a duty that I have not yet addressed, however. I try to do so shortly. And if you are worried that I will miss your favourite one, do not hesitate to tell me about it!

Vote Did You Say?

I am finally beginning my promised series of posts arguing that we do not have a moral duty to vote. In this post, I address arguments in favour of such a duty based on the idea that elections are an information-gathering mechanism. When the information collected through elections is incomplete because some people did not vote, governance will be defective and likely skewed. To avoid these problems, everyone has to vote. Such arguments come in distinct flavours, and I will address two of them specifically, but they also suffer from common problems.

* * *

The first and perhaps more common version of the information-based argument in favour of a duty to vote starts with the premise that by voting we provide those who look at electoral outcomes ― including, first and foremost, the politicians whose jobs depend on them ― with information about our needs and preferences. People who stay home fail to do that, and politicians ignore them in their decision-making as a result. Thus Susan Delacourt has written that “a disengaged public makes it easier to govern — or worse, ignore troublesome issues and constituencies (youth, for instance).” The tendency of some groups not to vote, and the (alleged) tendency of politicians to ignore their (alleged) interests as a result is a particular concern of those who favour this argument.

Jason Brennan has addressed this concern in some detail (he calls it the “demographic argument”) in a post over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians. The most important point he makes there is that “the argument seems to presume that voter[s] vote for their self-interest. But we have overwhelming empirical evidence … that they don’t vote their self-interest. Instead, they vote altruistically, for what they perceive to be in the national interest.” And while the people who do vote are likely enough to be mistaken about what is in the interest of those who don’t, people who tend not to vote and, in particular, “[t]he disadvantaged are much more likely to be mistaken in their beliefs about what it takes to help them,” (emphasis Brennan’s) because their levels of political ignorance are even higher those of the people who do vote. If these people vote out of a sense of duty, politicians might start taking their expressed preferences into account (though as I’ll explain below, that’s doubtful), but that won’t make them better off. A duty to vote will thus not make for better or fairer governance.

* * *

The other version of the information-based argument in favour of a duty to vote gets off to a better start, because it assumes that voters are indeed non-selfish. As Andrew Coyne has put it,

Voting isn’t like buying a soft drink. When you cast your vote, you aren’t just making a choice about you and your needs. You’re helping to make a collective decision about providing for everybody’s needs. The broader the sample of voters, the more representative of everybody it is likely to be — rather like the census — and the greater the combined stock of experiences and insights brought to bear. Conversely, if some “free ride” on others’ willingness to vote, the whole of the community suffers. You owe your fellow citizens your counsel, in other words. You benefit because they vote. You owe them no less in return — just as you owe them your share of the cost of public services.

The trouble with this reasoning (Prof. Brennan has called it the “public good argument”) is that the problem of political ignorance is even more acute for it than for the “demographic” one. If what we care about is collective wisdom, then some people ― especially, as it happens, people who tend not to vote, but also, in reality, a great many of those who do ― would actually help the community not by voting, but by staying as far away from the polling stations as they can.

Now, people who find this argument attractive will often say that the whole point of a duty to vote is that it will get people to become more engaged with and less ignorant about politics. Trouble is, as Prof. Brennan points out that, that “there are a bunch of empirical studies on this looking at various natural experiments, and the answer is no, compulsory voting doesn’t cause uninformed voters to become any better informed.” And it’s pretty obvious why this should be the case. Acquiring information relevant to voting is difficult. There is a lot to learn, both about the world and about what the politicians plan on doing to it. Learning takes time, energy, and ― a non-negligible point ― a willingness to confront “inconvenient truths” that make you uncomfortable with your prior beliefs. As Ilya Somin pointed out, it is “rational for most voters to stay ignorant, given the low chance that their knowledge will make a difference.” It is telling, I think that the defenders of a duty to vote mostly just say that it will spontaneously cause people to become better informed and more engaged ― not that there is in fact a duty to do so. They realize that, unlike the duty to vote, a duty to become a competent citizen is a very onerous one. (Of course, it is also possible to be an informed and engaged citizen without voting. I’ll develop this thought further in a separate post.)

* * *

The arguments and counter-arguments I have canvassed so far all presume that voting is a reasonably effective information-gathering mechanism. To think that voting tells politicians what the voters want or that it is a way of aggregating their wisdom about how best to run government, you need to think that it produces a relatively intelligible message, and also that politicians are able and willing to actually understand and act on this message. But these assumptions are unfounded.

Voting in an election is actually an incredibly bad way of sending any sort of message to anyone. It is a choice between, realistically, two or three options; perhaps a few more, depending on the voting system and the circumstances of each election, if you pretend that every candidate has a chance. And each of these few choices ― certainly each of the ones that have any chance of winning ― comes with a full panoply of policies (however vague) on all sorts of topics (however trivial), boasts (however exaggerated) about its leader’s character , and insults (however unfair) for its opponents. A vote can be based on any of these policies, boasts, or insults, singly or in combination. Or it can be based on whose name came first on the ballot, or some other utterly irrelevant consideration.

So how do we know what message a given set of electoral outcomes conveys? If, say, the Conservatives win on October 19, will it be because they hate the niqab, because Stephen Harper is the devil we know, or because Justin Trudeau is just not ready? That’s a trick question: nobody will know the answer. As Hans Noel explains in a very useful essay called “Ten Things Political Scientists Know that You Don’t,” “[t]hese narratives are created after the fact by people who want you to think one thing or another.” Even if the adage vox populi vox dei is true, an electoral outcome is no more than a Pythia’s mumbling ― to be interpreted by self-interested priests.

Things get even more muddled once we account for the possibility that people who show up at the polling station out of a sense of duty will not actually vote for anyone at all. Canadian advocates of mandatory voting tend to favour the inclusion of a “none of the above” option on the ballot. And those who believe that there is a duty to vote will typically say, like Mr. Coyne, that “[y]ou could … decline the ballot, or spoil it, or otherwise register your dissatisfaction with the choices on offer” ― you just need to show up. Needless to say, if you are voting “none of the above” or, a fortiori, if you are spoiling your ballot, you are not sending much of a message, whether about your own interests or what you think the country’s interests are. (By the way, Australia, a country from which the proponents of mandatory voting often say they draw their inspiration, does not have a “none of the above” option, and actually forces voters to rank all the candidates to cast a valid ballot. If both a Communist and a Marxist-Leninist are running in your riding, you need to say which you like more. Although there no Communists and no Marxists-Leninists in Oz. Their parties are actually much crazier than that.)

If you think that I just dislike democracy, or our version of it, you are mistaken. I share Churchill’s opinion that democracy is an imperfect political system, and indeed the worst one ― except all the others. I appreciate the blessings of political choice ― such as they are. I just don’t think that an electoral system’s purpose is to send any deep messages to the politicians or to anyone else. It’s to provide a mechanism for choosing people who will make decisions and, importantly, to ensure that the people in charge know that they are replaceable on relatively short notice, which tends to keep them somewhat honest. Our political system does that reasonably well. Pointing out that it’s useless at something it’s not meant to do is not a criticism at all.

There actually exists a much better mechanism for aggregating people’s preferences and putting their knowledge in common. Unfortunately, politicians tend to impede rather than support its functioning, and do their utmost to ignore its lessons even when these are clear. It’s called the market. (Nobody thinks, however, that a person is “free riding” on the market’s information-gathering by refusing to participate in it and thus contribute his or her “insights” about what the prices in that market should be.) Mr. Coyne points out that “[v]oting isn’t like buying a soft drink.” That’s quite true, but not in the way Mr. Coyne suggests.

As prof. Somin often says (sorry, I’m too lazy to track down a specific post for reference), when people make market decisions, they have a strong incentive to become informed about the choices available and their consequences, because the decision they make will affect them a great deal. Voters lack this incentive, because the chance of a single vote affecting anything is very small. (That is true, by the way, under any voting system ― not just first-past-the-post.)

Moreover, the market allows for much more fine-grained decision-making than do elections. Getting a can of Coke in preference to a Pepsi doesn’t commit you to, say, buying an iPhone instead of a Samsung, and leasing a Ford car instead of just taking the bus. But voting does ― you cannot vote for, say, the Conservative policy on health transfers, the NDP policy on anti-terrorism legislation, the Liberal policy on marijuana, and none-of-the-above on kowtowing to the dairy cartel. Indeed, voting for a party is the equivalent of committing to Coke, Apple, and Ford for the next four years.

Again, that’s not to say that we should scrap voting altogether. The market isn’t the best mechanism for making every decision. But so far as information-gathering is concerned, it is greatly superior to voting. If we really cared about having as much information as possible about people’s preferences, and about maximizing the use of their individual knowledge for the public good, our governments would regulate less, and let the markets decide more. Instead, even when the market sends very clear signals, such as that many people prefer Uber to the taxi cartels, politicians turn a blind eye to these signals, unless they actually try to stamp them out by regulating even more.  Politicians, I conclude, are not actually interested in information about what people want. They will say otherwise, of course, but actions speak louder than words.

* * *

Making the case for a duty to vote on supposed information-gathering properties on the electoral process is a perilous exercise, because elections are simply not are intended to aggregate information. They serve to choose Parliaments and, indirectly, governments. A vote does not communicate much of a message either about a person’s own needs and preferences or about his or her views as to how the country ought to be governed. When you vote, nobody can tell what it is that you are trying to say. Besides, when people make their views clear in the marketplace, politicians tend to simply ignore them, or even try to eliminate the market’s information-gathering abilities. The information-based case for a duty to vote is not a persuasive one.

But, you might say, it’s not the real case for a duty to vote. Please stay tuned. I’ll address other arguments over the next few weeks. And if you’re worried that I might not address you personal favourite, please get in touch, and tell me about it!

Must We Vote?

There’s exactly one month to go until election day. It’s as good a moment as any to announce a series of blog posts that I will publish over the next few weeks, to argue that, contrary to what is often said, there is no moral duty to vote or, in other words, that it is not wrong to stay home on October 19. I won’t be saying that you ought to abstain. If you believe that there is a candidate or party who will move the country at least somewhat closer to your policy preferences, by all means, go and vote for him/her/it. If you believe that there is a candidate or party who will move the country noticeably further away from your preferences than the others, then you should probably consider voting strategically to prevent this from happening. The claim I will be defending is that if you think that all the options on offer are roughly equally good or, more likely I suspect, equally bad, then you are under no obligation to vote for one them, or even to go and spoil your ballot.

I will be making this argument on grounds of political morality, not law. Of course, if there is no moral duty to vote, then it would be wrong for Parliament to require people to do so, as the Liberal Party, in particular, has mused about doing. On the other hand, even if there were a moral duty to vote, it would not follow that Parliament would be justified in using the threat of legal sanctions to force people to comply with it. Nor would it follow that the imposition of mandatory voting would be constitutional. The case for a moral duty to vote should be easier to make than that for the enactment of a law mandating voting. It is this easier case that I will address.

More specifically, I will address, in separate posts, a number of arguments I have seen made in favour of a duty to vote (or indeed of mandatory voting laws, which I take to presuppose the existence of a moral duty to vote). I have addressed one such argument a couple of months ago, when I argued against a claim to the effect that we must vote in order to honour and express our gratitude to the people who helped win and preserve the right to vote, whether against domestic opposition or foreign enemies. Over the next few weeks, I will address three other such arguments. One holds that we must vote because election results are useful information about the state of affairs in the nation, and we owe it, whether to our fellow citizens or to the politicians whom we elect, to do our part in generating this information. A second, perhaps somewhat similar, argument is that the existence of (and actual compliance with) a duty to vote helps improve the quality of election campaigns ― an improvement which we are in dire need of, and from which all would benefit. The third argument I will address is that it is necessary for us to vote in order to preserve the legitimacy of our democratic government.

Perhaps this list of arguments for a duty to vote is incomplete. If I am missing your favourite one, please let me know. I am open to expanding my post series, and even to changing my mind if you persuade me to do so. (Please do not tell me that we should all just vote for your favourite candidate, or against the one you particularly hate. I have done my best to keep this blog non-partisan, and remain committed to this position.) Feel free, as well, to suggest related topics that I might cover as part of this series. For instance, I will probably have a post on people who, far from accepting that they have a duty to vote, believe that they actually may not do so, even though the law says otherwise. And of course, I will have a post to respond to comments and criticism, if you are so kind as to provide some.

In short, I would like this to be a conversation, something like a slow-motion seminar maybe. Whether or not we convince each other in the end, at least the quality of our arguments on this topic, which is pretty sure to be much discussed after, if not before, election day, will hopefully be better as a result.