[EM] Single-winner Methods Empower Few?

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

First of all, this did end up later than I wanted. Other things have
been occupying my time, and though I've wanted to give a better account
than I have below, I think it's been long enough.

Second, the random selection I contrast to elections below more or less
forces some kind of multiwinner system, because otherwise the variance
would be unacceptable. You can't randomly select a president (well, you
could, but it wouldn't be a good idea to leave that much to chance).

(But on the flipside, that means the argument against elections isn't
just applicable to single-winner, but to multi-winner/PR as well.)

On 18/04/2019 13.06, William WAUGH wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 17, 2019 at 7:42 AM Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
> 
>     ...
>     It's also possible to argue that all forms of election will result in
>     some sort of rule by the few. I've ignored that here, because getting
>     into a discussion of how few are too few would distract from the point
>     above.
> 
> 
> Which few would rule if the form were Score Voting?

The short answer is: the politicians. If the system is good, the
politicians will be those who are better at governing; if not so good,
the politicians will be a group of people who are able to use their
preexisting power to control the method and the voters more effectively
than the method and the voters can control them.

The point of an election method is to find the best of a number of
alternatives. Inherent in the use of elections to begin with is that
determining who is the best is a difficult task, i.e. that not all the
contenders are well-suited. If all were well enough suited on average,
you could just do what polling organizations do: choose a number of them
at random (after compensating for chance).

For the classical argument, it's probably easiest to refer to the
ancient Greeks. When analyzing forms of government, Aristotle divided
them into three types (rule by one, rule by a few, and rule by many),
and furthermore into two categories based on whether the rulers only
ruled for their own benefit, or for the benefit of people at large. He
called self-serving rule by few oligarchy, and rule by few for the
benefit of the people, aristocracy. He then argued that elections lead
to some form of rule by few or a minority, i.e. to aristocracy or
oligarchy (for, as I understand it, a reason similar to what I said above).

One might argue that a rule of the skilled or extraordinarily able is a
good form of rule by a minority. That may be so, but it is nevertheless
a rule by a minority. Such an argument is, in effect, saying that
there's no problem with a rule by few; the problem is when that rule
becomes an oligarchy rather than an aristocracy. If one has no problem
with aristocracy *as such*, then keeping the system from degrading into
oligarchy is of course very important. Better election method contribute
to this by making it much harder for the rulers to twist the criteria by
which they're judged to something that favors themselves rather than the
voters.

But one could still have objections to all kinds of rule by a minority,
however effective or selfless. From what I understand, the Athenians
considered equality of power (that everybody have the same chance to be
part of the governing mechanism) as an extension of equality under the
law, and thus a right that citizens should have. If aristocracy is more
effective than democracy, that doesn't matter. It's analogous to the
thought that even if authoritarianism is more effective than
(representative) democracy and gets the trains running on time,
democracy is preferrable because people should govern themselves.

Alternatively, one could argue that education and wisdom of crowds make
sufficiently large random assemblies not that much worse than elected
assemblies, to the point where one loses more to the risk of corruption
(sliding into oligarchy) by going with elections than one loses by
mediocrity (so to speak) by going with random selection. The more
effective mechanisms like deliberative polls are, the stronger that
argument is. And the more oligarchy-resistant electoral democracy is
with good election methods, the weaker the argument.