Slashdot Mirror
Barney Frank Defends Political Hypocrisy, Game Theory Explains It
HughPickens.com writes with a link to Steven I. Weiss's Atlantic article which says game theory can shed light both on what is happening in Washington and on how the bargaining power of its negotiating parties may evolve over time and comes to the conclusion that hypocrisy is essential to the functioning of Congress -- in fact, it's the only tool legislators have after they've rooted out real corruption. "Legislators do not pay each other for votes, and every member of a parliament in a democratic society is legally equal to every member," writes Congressman Barney Frank in his new memoir, Frank: A Life in Politics From the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage. For legislators, cooperation is a form of political currency. They act in concert with other legislators, even at the expense of their own beliefs, in order to bank capital or settle accounts."
Game theory sets out conditions under which negotiating parties end up cooperating, and why they sometimes fail to do so. It does so based on analyzing what drives individuals in the majority of bargaining situations: incentives, access to information, initial power conditions, the extent of mutual trust, and accountability enforcement. Instead of seeing political flip-flopping as a necessary evil, Frank suggests it is inherent to democracy and according to Frank if there's any blame to be doled out in connection with political hypocrisy, it's to be placed on the heads of voters who criticize legislators for it, instead of accepting it as a necessary part of democratic politics.
Game theory sets out conditions under which negotiating parties end up cooperating, and why they sometimes fail to do so. It does so based on analyzing what drives individuals in the majority of bargaining situations: incentives, access to information, initial power conditions, the extent of mutual trust, and accountability enforcement. Instead of seeing political flip-flopping as a necessary evil, Frank suggests it is inherent to democracy and according to Frank if there's any blame to be doled out in connection with political hypocrisy, it's to be placed on the heads of voters who criticize legislators for it, instead of accepting it as a necessary part of democratic politics.
What are you talking about?
Whether or not a policy is "good" has no bearing at all. Whether or not a policy is popular among the voters is the only deciding factor. If voters want a bad policy, they get a bad policy. If not enough voters want a good policy, they don't get the good policy.
There is no absolute assessment of whether or not a policy is good or bad. There is only an assessment of its popularity among voters.
Of course, there is a presumption that a good policy will be a popular policy. Whether or not that is even true is completely immaterial; the votes determine policy, not its goodness (by any standard).
Politicians who want to garner support for a policy must enter into dialogue with the other politicians (who will ultimately be voting for it). They can of course attempt to sell the policy on its own merits...but that only works among politicians that have the same political goals. The diversity of interests represented in any large political body makes such an approach relatively ineffective (in most cases, anyway). So instead politicians go with what works...and that is a simple scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours approach.
There are other complexities as well of course, such as lobbiests, prole votes for the politicians themselves, corruption, and so on. But through all that chaos the foundational tactic which forms the essence of how the game is played is: cooperation (as intended). And that is just a nice way of saying "collusion," in most cases.
Ah. I think I see what you mean. The key phrase is "The diversity of interests represented in any large political body makes such an approach relatively ineffective" - in other words, in the US, voters in different parts of the nation may want very different things. That's much less true pretty much everywhere else in the world, which might well explain why the US system is so different.
In a pure democracy, the voters in different parts of the US would have to negotiate directly with one another. That's implausible, so you have a representative democracy, and the representatives negotiate with one another.
When you put it that way, it actually makes sense. ... it still isn't how democracy was *first* designed to work, which is what I was originally thinking of - but it seems fair to say it is how American democracy was designed to work, and that's what I should have been thinking of. :-)
To be fair, most of those "Fox is the worst" studies are just terrible. Except in one or two cases they are opinion pieces disguised as scientific studies and a person is determined to be uninformed if they disagree with the questioners opinion. For example, this is the statement from one of the studies as to how they determine a correct answer:
Of course they used their own discretion to determine which groups are non-partisan and on which topics their opinion is the correct one.
The more interesting thing is that in one of the better studies (it still had some opinion questions but more simple fact based ones), while Fox viewers were rated the least informed about world events (in actuality just slightly below MSNBC and CNN but that is rarely mentioned) when broken down by political leanings it found that that the least informed were conservatives who watched MSNBC and liberals who watch FOX. People who watch the News channel more generally in line with their political leanings scored significantly higher.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!