Appearance and Reality

My opinion is that one of the biggest problems we are facing as a society is that we have poor incentives for working on the big picture.  The way that we choose our political leaders encourages them to support policies that appear to be good rather than policies that really improve people's lives.  It is not simply an issue of replacing demagogues with good, honest statesmen.  We have to deal with the problem that the system encourages demagoguery.

In order to illustrate the problem, let's think of a policy that we will call policy x.  Policy x is a very bad idea.  It will ruin the economy and cause misery for millions of people.  However, this policy fits in with the way that people are naturally inclined to see the economy.  Thus people are likely to support a politician who supports policy x.  However, policy x will ruin the economy making it so that people will disapprove of the performance of the legislature.  The chance of any individual legislator of getting elected will depend on whether they supported policy x and on how the economy is doing.  Each legislator will lose some political support by supporting measure x, but they would lose more by opposing it.  The cost of bad economic performance is borne by all the legislators, including the ones who opposed the measure.

Suppose that instead of choosing our legislators the way that we do now, we instead asked the voters what proportion of the legislature should be replaced.  Then we could select the appropriate number of legislators at random and dismiss them.  We could then chose people at random from the population in order to fill the vacancies, perhaps requiring that they achieve some minimal score on an exam.  Under this different system each individual legislator would pay a price for supporting bad legislation.  They would increase their probability of being thrown out of office.

However, getting such a change implemented would be an uphill struggle.  Changes in the structure of government need to be approved by a super-majority of legislators.  These legislators will have little incentive to make this kind of change in the system since it is likely to increase their chances of being replaced.  Further is is uncertain whether voters would generally support such a change.  If the people had the power to directly change the constitution, they would be more likely to use that power in order to increase the proportion of political power that was exerted directly by the people.  In other words they would set up a system of initiatives and referenda that would allow them to vote on measures directly rather than going through the intermediary of elected representatives.  This would actually make this problem worse, since an overwhelming majority of the people would by definition support policy x.  If given the power to legislate directly, the people would be even more likely to support bad policies that looked good than an elected legislature.