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.
Politics is kind of a game theory problem, where you model the interests of different political actors and of voters and how they behave given certain constraints. Unlike in traditional game theory, however, political actors and voters aren’t solely self-interested. Their interests in my view are a combination of three things:
Political views, their beliefs about the government policy that would best improve society.
Personal incentives, their desire to personally benefit
Norms they’re influenced by
Constitutional design is the process of leveraging these interests in useful ways to accomplish good outcomes. These interests also (in my view) form the rationale for democracy: giving everyone equal political power is valuable because of what they’ll do with that power, which is determined by their interests.
Let’s dive in.
Politicians
Here’s what I mean by the three categories when applied to politicians:
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 incentives mostly means two things for politicians: acting to make yourself rich (ie corruption), and acting to keep your job or get a promotion (ie, winning elections). Though as I wrote above, acting to win elections can also be a rational way to realize your 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 interests as the only determinant of action, so a political actor will act to follow the same interests 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 incentives, 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 interests, 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
These categories are pretty similar when applied to voters
Political views: pretty much the same as for politicians. These are the views about how to make society better.
Personal incentives: 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 often voted against their personal interest by supporting Trump (given the two candidates’ differing views on welfare and taxes).
Norms: On the voter level, this is mostly scandals. People may vote for the opposing party when their preferred candidate has a bad scandal, under the norm that people who take the scandalous action should not hold office. Voters also enforce democratic norms sometimes by punishing politicians who act to undermine democracy.
If you thought politicians were too stupid to rationally pursue their intersets, voters will shock you. The main reason I still think this model 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 interests 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 group of elites 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.
For personal incentives, the rationale for democracy 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.
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 just feel that people “deserve” a say in their own governance, regardless of the consequences. But I do think these intersts are probably the most important rationales for democracy, 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 constitutional design in the US is dominated by the concept of “checks and balances”. Congress can impeach the president, who can nominate Supreme Court justices, who can overturn laws.
But these only function like checks if the different entities have different interests - different political views, personal incentives, or norms. If Republicans control both Congress and the Presidency, they are almost never going to impeach their own president, and the president is rarely going to veto laws coming out of Congress, 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 as rigorous as math, but I hope you’ll find that this series provides an adequate level of rigor for the subject.