[EM] Clean Government Alliance

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 01/16/2013 11:31 PM, Richard Fobes wrote:
> On 1/13/2013 10:53 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
>> ...
>> Consider a country that's leaning too far left for the population's
>> wishes. A right-wing candidate is elected. This right-wing president (or
>> PM, through parliament) starts moving to the right. For this, he or she
>> gets approval from the people and starts being considered a good
>> president or PM. Let's say it's "he" and "president". Then he continues
>> moving to the right (because he is right-wing, after all), overshooting
>> the optimum. Because he has gained some reputation for being a good
>> president, the voters continue to support him until he goes very far to
>> the right.
>
> If the country is left-leaning, then the elected leader moving further
> to the right will soon reach a breaking point, in spite of a "good"
> reputation.
>
> Specifically the "left" voters combined with the growing number of
> "moderate right" voters -- who will dislike his "right-wing" shift --
> will have a majority and will vote him out of office.
>
> So I don't see this as an example of term limits being needed.

The point is that the country is centrist. The right-winger is 
correcting an excessive leftist policy (in the eyes of the population) 
and thus builds up a reputation. The right-wing politician trades on 
that reputation when going further right, so he goes beyond the optimum 
and then, only when he starts proposing very right-wing policies, is he 
replaced.

I was thinking of something a bit like Thatcher in the UK. The "very 
right-wing policy" would be something like the poll tax, the proposal of 
which ulitmately led to her replacement. However, I was trying to not 
get into particulars so that one's own opinion on Thatcher wouldn't 
cloud the issue.

The general pattern I was trying to think of, in any case, was this: the 
society is too far in one direction (according to the people). Candidate 
X has a position solidly on the other side and brings the policies in 
that direction. As X pushes policies towards the center, he gains 
reputation for doing something well. Then as X goes past the center, the 
people think "we'll give him some time; he's been right in the past, why 
shouldn't he still know what he's doing?" And so it takes time before 
the people recognize how far off the other side X really wants to go.

Term limits mitigate this by forcing a replacement of X with Y (say), 
where Y doesn't have this pre-existing reputational wealth, and where 
the new election lets the people establish that they're not right-wing, 
they're centrists.

I have also been reading about predictor or ensemble systems (like 
weighted majority voting). In that context, it's like an expert that 
tends to be very right, but situations change and he suddenly stops 
being right. It then takes some time for his weight to be reduced, 
because he has such a high weight already. In dynamic situations (where 
experts may often shift from being very good to not being good at all), 
sliding window versions of WMV (or UCB) do better than non-sliding 
versions. I can find papers for this if you're interested :-)