The faulty electoral syste -rant

[Tietäjä]

Inspired by the rant on obscure British election projects, and the discussion regarding the plausibility of the electoral system at large, I'm going for a long rant now. I guess. If this has been discussed already, then just skip it, but I hope to bring some new views irregardless.

First of all, in modern democracy, parliament, presidential, and so on elections are based on more or less direct vote. Each applicable voter (fulfilling the criteria of age and nationality or so in a given region) most of the time has one vote to cast, regardless of his personal wealth, background, or social status. The facts are the systems fundamentally have major differences. A Finnish electoral system, in what comes to parliament elections, pools total votes of a party in a region, ranks the runners of the party, and uses the rank to divide votes (ie. total party votes 300k, rank in party 3rd, effective votes 100k; even if you'd only have gotten 50k). This results in landslides for large parties and electoral alliances (Sauli Niinistö's 68k votes, a record, would have given lots of less popular people in his party some extra edge), and oddball situations where the person getting the most votes in a region doesn't qualify (the case of Tarja Cronberg in 2007 elections; receiving most votes in her region, she was outdone by an electoral alliance of a pair of left wing parties). Similar issues arise in presidential elections in the states, where there factual number of voters may also have nothing to do with the results. Finland used, up until 1990s, a presidential election system where the top voted would be put under scrutiny by a comittee and that comittee would elect the president - out of the candidates chosen by the people. These differences may seem large, but in most cases (perhaps with the exception of the comittee-chosen presidents, where there's an element of detailed recruitment choice), it makes little difference.

Issue #1: lack of information. Nowadays, in a nation of tens of millions of people, the candidates are distant and unknown to the people. The modern media manages to spread some information (the lately innovation of internet queries which allow you to compare your choices in a variety of questions to those of candidates), but people will still be far off from knowing the candidates exact enough to make a judgement based on all the information one should have. This issue can be confronted with decreasing the scale of the voting system, different regional systems as an example. (I'm aware most voting goes on on regional levels, but it's still talking about a scale of million(s of) voters). The people who have money, or who are backed up with large amounts of money (party support, private funding) generally have larger media visibility thus having better odds of being elected. As the system is supposed to work in a fashion where voters elect the person they feel is most suited to represent their opinions in the government, this leads to a flawed situation where sufficient information is only available of those people who have the money to advertise themselves. This has, in Finland for example, resulted in the parliament elections becoming a "dead celebrity graveyard" (when your career's over, you splash cash to get to the government). This closely relates to the adverse selection issue.

Issue #2: adverse selection. This arises from the lack of information and the incentive problems related to electoral systems. On one hand, there's the incentive for the candidates to cheat on the system. It's become almost an assumption nowadays, and candidates are pretty much expected to come with exaggerated promises prior to the elections. People would be surprised if they didn't. This excessive information may fool some people (the nurses in Finnish elections 2007 raced for a 500e per month wage raise - which was promised - now they're all over whining why it's not yet been included), which will result in an adverse selection in regards to the candidates knowing their agenda better than the voters. Adverse selection also happens on the form of "Donald Duck" votes - if there was a candidate under the name Donald Duck, he'd get elected to the Finnish government. Why? Frusturation and lack of trust towards the electoral system and the goverment causes people to cast protest votes. This is how Tony Halme got elected to the government at 2003, with a huge amount of votes. One could argue he's not very qualified to even represent an average citizen (Halme ended up with a sort of moral hazard - he didn't stay in the government long, having to retire after some incidents that involved alcohol, medicine, and firearms). Populism edges out here: you're being told what you want to hear, and once they've reached the government, they won't care - for a while. This kind of development has brought the parties close to each other in a point where it gets ridiculously difficult to make any major differences between them, as they'll all keep telling you the same under the elections.

Issue #3: Fundamentals. With the voting activity on steady decline (France is touted to have just reached it's all time low), there's a fair score of people who do not vote. To add to these, there are the insult votes. While it's also the point of the democratic system to express freedom of choice in elections, it could be argued that once we reach a point where a given amount of people simply don't vote the system has failed. Where this point of no return excists, is hard to define, but at least when we hit less than 50% (Euro Parliament elections anyone?), it's definately a waste of oxygen. Also, we could discuss the actual voting standards. There are people who will vote for the girl with the biggest juggs on the list, and so on. It's making a mockery of the system, but it perhaps proves the vanity of it, too.

Now we've reached to the point where we've elected our able and capable parliament. The parties will wrestle and trade for the minister seats, and a government is formed. On comes further problems.

Issue #4: Incentive issues. When a government starts up, there's little concern as they're off to a four year period. There's little action in the parliament, they attend the meetings when they're interested, and this year a certain female representative was found spending two weeks at the Caribbean for a headstart at the government. Goes on. Perhaps it was best for us all that she didn't attend. The group discipline is the first issue in a government that relates to adverse selection. It's very common for a party to agree on voting agendas, which kind of beats the purpose of a person vote and underpins the characteristics of the voting as a party vote. Give that you've voted on a person for certain opinions of his, which he can't present because of fear of being punished in his party for breaching the group line. The political "game" is beating the purpose of the parliament as an institution consisting of people representing people. The "we vote for this if you support us here" makes it more a game of Nash equilibrium where everyone barters for whatever they're interested in. Any promises made prior to the elections are quickly forgotten, as there's plenty of time until the next elections.

Issue #5: Cyclical development. Governments bear massive responsibility in the economics of a nation. They're often the side that approves different budged selections, and government spending. Early on in the goverment, they're likely to tighten up or keep a stable level, but once the next elections approach, there's a large incentive for populism. This, again, beats the purpose. Now the government will start working as people want. They'll fulfill as many needs as plausible in order to gain popularity for the next vote to come. The agenda is "If we don't win the elections, it won't be our problem, but if we do win, it'll be a problem for later - irregardless, it's better to take the chances if it'd help us win". The reckless budget policies that doesn't aim into healthy economic growth but to boost the goverment's popularity is defective for the nation. It can and probably will contribute into sharper business cycles, which is a thing very little people like. This sort of choicemaking comes down to the argument of "people don't necessarily know what's best for them". On the irony side, this is the argument often used to back up government controlling and restricting things, but it may end up a double-edged sword in a fashion where the government will just do what's necessary to gain popularity, irregardless of the effects.

What we're really left with in a modern democracy, is a government composed of people who have the wealth or fame necessary to get the required media attention to qualify. These individuals will then sport for more fame which will result in adverse, damaging descisions being made. Of course, there are the heavyweight politicians who seem to "qualify", but who're really just masters of the game. Suffices, that the electionary system nowadays doesn't really represent the idea of democracy - people electing people to represent themselves - instead it represents a media-biased populistic image. It could be argued too, that there's no reason to actually allow people to vote as a large part of them don't really give a ****, and those who do probably get pumped up with misinformation and cheats, and end up doing the adverse choices irregardless. The only reason why the goverments still survive is that the state has outside-goverment experts to cane them enough not to make them drive the whole nation into a verge of self-implosion.

A bloody long and useless drivel, excuse my boredom.