Category: Political Science

We model legislative decision-making with an agenda setter who can propose policies sequentially, tailoring each proposal to the status quo that prevails after prior votes. Voters are sophisticated and the agenda setter cannot commit to future proposals. Nevertheless, the agenda setter obtains her favorite outcome in every equilibrium regardless of the initial default policy. Central to our results is a new condition on preferences, manipulability, that holds in rich policy spaces, including spatial settings and distribution problems. Our findings therefore establish that, despite the sophistication of voters and the absence of commitment power, the agenda setter is effectively a dictator.

That is from a new paper by S. Nageeb Ali, B. Douglas Bernheim, Alexander W. Bloedel, and Silvia Console Battilana, forthcoming in American Economic Review.  We already have ten (?) percent less democracy!  Of course you might think that who becomes the agenda setter has something to do with democracy, and indeed it is.  But in limited, roundabout ways…at the margin it is still not very democratic.

The size of the costs of climate change is a matter of frequent dispute, but current methods seem to leave out some important variables. In particular, how we will choose to bear and distribute our adjustment costs will bring complications and distortions of its own.

Consider, for instance, some recent economic estimates of the costs of climate change from carbon emissions. I have seen serious estimates in the neighborhood of five per cent of global gdp by 2100.

Whether or not that is exactly the right range, there is another issue at stake: it will also cost us time, energy, attention, and resources to decide how to bear the burden of that five per cent, or whatever the number may be.

In a very simple economic model, the cost of five per cent of global gdp is overcome rather easily. The global economy typically grows several per cent a year, and in good times a global rate of economic growth of three to four per cent a year is not impossible. It then seems that a five per cent shortfall can be overcome in a year or two.

If someone told you “the world won’t attain the year 2100 standard of living until 2102,” that might not sound so tragic to you. Instead it seems very far off and abstract. Who really has a very concrete sense of what to expect in 2100 anyway? Flying cars? Very cheap energy? From today’s vantage point it is hard to say. Your expectations for both 2100 and 2102 were already an uncertain blur, so having to trade one expectation in for the other makes the costs seem nebulous.

I suggest a different approach. Forget about the climate, at least temporarily, let’s say we had to play a political game where five or ten per cent of U.S. gdp is going to be redistributed from one set of groups to another. How well do we expect the politics of that dilemma to play itself out? Will those burdens fall on capital or labor, the wealthy or the poor, cities or the countryside? Should taxes go up or should other budgetary expenditures go down? You can imagine all the choices that would face us, and all the different coalitions and political battles that would result.

We encounter precisely such battles when the two parties square off over debt ceiling crises, as happened in 2011 and also this year. And what was the outcome of those negotiations? Virtually everyone agrees that America faces major medium- to long-run fiscal problems, but we haven’t agreed on what to do about them. And thus the recent debt ceiling negotiations ended up with some cosmetic adjustments to the budget and a lot of can-kicking. Whether the proposed remedy was a major spending cut or a big tax increase, it was possible to find enough legislators who didn’t want to do it.

If we end up applying those can-kicking tendencies to climate change scenarios, suddenly matters look a lot worse. Let’s say that the city of New Orleans was endangered by climate volatility. We could either incur an irreversible urban and territorial loss, or we could agree on some method of financing a remedy for the problem, typically with an associated opportunity cost.

The traditional American remedy in such situations is to borrow more money and figure out some way of paying the bill later. But will that still be viable say ten to fifteen years from now, when both fiscal problems and climate volatility are likely to be bigger issues yet? At some point the actual fiscal burden of all these decisions, including climate neglect, will need to be borne.

When the time comes, we are likely to bicker about how to pay the bills, especially as some of the can-kicking opportunities become impossible. And I fear that the bargaining process for how to confront this ultimate reckoning will itself be very costly. Political hostages will be taken, bipartisan cooperation may break down, reaching agreement may distract us from solving other problems (check out the UK history with Brexit!), and national decisions will become all the more politicized.

There is a classic problem in economics known as the rent-seeking game. In this dilemma, if say $1 million is up for grabs in the political process, how much will individuals spend trying to capture that $1 million for themselves, or alternatively trying to avoid being the patsy who loses the $1 million to someone else? One theorem suggests that we will be, collectively, willing to spend up to $1 million to fight over the $1 million allocation. Full rent exhaustion probably isn’t the right answer here, but the point is that when the stakes are large and the key policies are up for grabs, the political infighting grows correspondingly large as well.

So often we Americans are our own worst enemy, and fixing climate change may become another example of that.

The Singaporean polity is far more democratic than most underinformed outsiders realize.  Nonetheless it is frequently observed that the same party — PAP — keeps on winning elections.  Furthermore, there is an extreme method of gerrymandering, so PAP might win sixty percent of the vote and end up with ninety percent or so of the seats in the legislature.

Whatever you think of that arrangement, I expect it will prove difficult to undo.  In Singapore, civil service jobs are extremely important.  They are well paid and attract a very high quality of elite, and they are a major means of networking and advancing your own reputation, if only because so many other elites are in government as well.  (On top of that, the start-up scene is not so dynamic there, so the opportunity cost of public service is lower than in say CA or NYC.)

All that contributes to Singapore having an extremely high quality civil service.

But these networks have elements of natural monopoly to them.  If you are a talented Singaporean, of course you will view the PAP as the natural vehicle for your efforts, even if you disagree with a lot of PAP policies.  Working from within the PAP would be the most logical attempt to change the system, as there is “no other game in town.”  That is better for you, and it is better for Singapore as well.

So, if only for careerist reasons (put aside performance and reelection issues, though of course they are important), PAP is a self-replicating network that maintains a very high degree of influence over the Singaporean polity.  It is the network you have to join.

You could imagine the PAP someday suffering a shocking electoral loss, just as the election of Trump shocked many American elites.  But alternate parties would not have the talent infrastructure to staff their own regime with their preferred points of view, not with anything remotely resembling the current level of competence.  For better or worse, PAP affiliates still would be running most of the government.

And that is one reason — by no means the only reason — why it is difficult for Singaporean democracy to become truly contestable.

You will note of course that many American cities — some with roughly the population of Singapore — also keep on electing the same party repeatedly.  If you want to change Chicago city politics at the electoral level, working through the Democratic Party is probably your primary option.  And so this problem of natural monopoly political networks extends well beyond Singapore.