Imagine you have a good friend Bob from business school with whom you have mostly lost touch. Then a mutual acquaintance, Alice, who has recently been with him, tells you Bob said:

1. That he ran into some pretty convoluted legal complications with his business and

   a) that he picked a lawyer and that the lawyer is handling it;

   b) that he’s handling the legal issues himself because he doesn’t trust lawyers

2. That he was going through some big health issue with multiple symptoms which gravely affected how he felt and

   a) that he picked a doctor who made a diagnosis and prescribed a treatment;

   b) that he’s treating everthing himself because he doesn’t trust doctors

3. That he decided his firm should build the next skyscraper in the city, full of innovative choices, and

   a) that he picked some big-shot engineer to design the project;

   b) that he’s designing the project by himself because he doesn’t trust engineers.

In any of these cases, you would be more concerned if your friend picked (b) instead of (a). The fact that we trust experts to make choices in our interest, choices we would not be able to make as well ourselves, is such an obvious trait of our lives that it feels weird to even point it out. This is the case even in the examples above where many aspects about the quality of the service are often unclear to the client even after the service was provided. By extension, we tend to be worried about people who, being so distrustful of experts, are willing to make all choices in their lives without talking to specialists. In other words, we think that, when faced with some types of problems, people are generally rational enough to pick an expert to help them achieve their objectives, but are far from rational enough to solve those problems directly (unless they are experts in the specific issue themselves, of course).

In political discourse, however, this distinction is almost never made. Either we treat voters as presumably rational on everything (which is the overwhelmingly prevalent view) or we treat them as all-around irrational. But we really should distinguish between these two types of rationalities. Voters are hopelessly irrational when choosing specific public policies, but are rational enough to pick representatives tasked with making public policy decisions. To clarify the terms, I should specify that when people use the word “rational” in this context they almost always imply a rational, self-interested person who casts their vote in order to increase the probabilities of their candidate or policy winning the election and with that realizing their goals. If they vote because they like to, or they feel it is their duty, independently of the consequences, they are of course still rational in a sense, but not in the usual meaning. A good deal of the current crisis of democracy - and of some past ones - derives from failing to realize this distinction.

Two of my favorite books are “The Myth of the Rational Voter”, by Bryan Caplan, and “The Myth of Democratic Failure” by Donald Wittman. You may find this confusing because the books seem to contradict each other. But in fact the books, to a great extent, talk about two largely independent phenomena - how voters can be irrational, and how democracy can work. Rational self-interested voters would be of great help for democracy to work. But it turns out it is not a necessary condition, both theoretically and empirically.

The failure to distinguish between the two is widespread. On the one hand, democracy enthusiasts will come up with ever more implausible explanations for why voters are indeed rational. On the other hand, the literature on voter irrationality is hardly enthusiastic about democracy. Caplan’s “Myth of the Rational Voter” states in its introduction: “This book develops an alternative story of how democracy fails.” Jason Brennan’s book, in turn, requires only knowing the title to reveal its skepticism: “Against Democracy.”

I do think highly of democracy - of the parliamentary kind, of course. In fact, even Brennan himself is fond enough of it that he wrote a kind blurb for my book. I believe we can square these differences.

The (ir)rationality debate

Everyone wants to save democracy - for good reason. Consistently democratic countries provide a kind of abundance, peace, security, and freedom without precedent in history. If democracy is “government of the people, by the people, for the people”, then many believe it is simple logic that it presupposes the people always know best. Hence, any type of suggestion that they might not know best on any circumstance must be an illusion, or the works of those who deliberately want to undermine democracy for their own benefit or pernicious ideologies. The problem is, the evidence for voter irrationality is abundant, as expected by theory. So we come up with ever more elaborate justifications for the evidence of irrationality we see and explain how, really, the evidence actually shows voters are being perfectly rational.

The view that voters are irrational is not hard to acquire. Indeed, it is the default position of people who only start to think about the issue. Our institutions then educate citizens that they are mistaken and that voters are perfectly rational. The hypothesis becomes an article of faith, so much so that trying to refute becomes much harder than the theory and evidence would suggest.

Let’s start with the theory. Regular democratic discourse, as we will find in reputed newspaper coverage, op-eds and the equivalent of the old “Twitter blue checks”, treats voter behavior as an application of the homo economicus hypothesis for public policy. A voter will examine their interests, see which policies will best tend to them, and accordingly vote for the policy itself (if it is an iniative, referendum) or for the candidate committed to implementing it. “Sure” - these thought leaders may think - “it is only an approximation, jus like homo economicus itself is an approximation. But it works as a model.”

However, a rational self-interested voter theory can’t work, even as an approximation. We have known this for ages. A rational self-interested person wouldn’t vote at all if what they want is to influence policy in the direction of their interests, because the probability that any one’s person vote affects the outcome is extremely small. While most people will concede this point, they will immediately retort - “yeah, but if everyone thinks their vote matters (or doesn’t matter), the outcomes do change.” This is true, but doesn’t alter in the least the fact that, whatever everyone else is doing, a purely self-interested rational person would not vote.

Considering that the theory posits that the rational self-interested voter is a paradox, we could very well skip dealing with the evidence, since no amount of evidence can make a contradiction true. But let’s concede them a first tweak. Let’s check the hypothesis - prima facie unlikely - that voters are not only self-interested, but also rational about everything, except the expected value of voting. That is, they assess policies pretty well and can see which ones would benefit them. But they somehow forget they are rational and that their vote is not really going to make those beneficial policies more likely in any meaningful sense.

First, on self-interest: is it true that voters mostly support candidates and policies they perceive to be in their interests? The answer is no. That this empirical finding surprises people is puzzling. I will bet that in the circle of people you walk in, no one chooses a presidential candidate based on how much they will personally benefit, and they would probably be reprimanded if they did so. But we assume (our assumptions always favor the rational self-interested voter hypothesis, you will see) that a significant majority of the voters we do not know, however, are doing that. Fair, judging general attitudes from the behavior of one’s close circle can be misleading sometimes. But the evidence shows that, in this case, what is true of your circle is true of the general populationt.

On rationality, the evidence is also negative. As Garret Jones shows in 10% Less Democracy (a good book with an unfortunate name, as I’ve said before), among countries with good institutions (good enough that the government “experts” really are experts), those which implement policies preferred by the experts instead of by “the people” fare better in those areas. The evidence can also be seen with the naked eye. As I write this, it is becoming consensual that the cumulative inflation during the Biden administration was decisive for the Democrat’s loss and Republican win. Any mainstream economist will recognize inflation does have some economic costs (tax distortions, infefficient wealth redistribution, menu costs, shoe-leather costs, etc). Those costs, however, are relatively small in the grand scheme of the economy, particularly in light of a less than two-digit annual inflation even at its maximum level. The reason people are so upset about inflation is that they believe the increase in the prices they face - for groceries, gas, etc - is due to bad policy, but that the increase in their own earnings is due to their own merit. In other words, because they are irrational. Many economists have pointed this out on Twitter, but instead of acknowledging the irrationality, many accounts are mocking them for failing to perceive that the people know better.

That should be it. The rational, self-interested voter hypothesis implies a contradiction, hence it cannot be strictly true. Even an ad hoc, implausible, modification of the hypothesis fails to be supported by evidence. It should be simple, but it is really hard to get people to accept that. Voter rationality seems to be “unfalsifiable”, not in the Popperian sense that a test for its validity cannot be devised, but in the sense that any evidence of irrationality will be justified with an ad hoc hypothesis.

Aggregation - the miracle that didn’t happen

You might know this story already. The statistician Francis Galton went to a country fair. The people there were playing a game in which the best guesses on the weight of an ox in display would win prizes. While there were some people who presumably were experts, such as butchers, many had no particular knowledge on the issue. Galton wanted to test how competent the people were on average, so after the game was finished he collected all the tickets and found that the average guess was 1,197 pounds, while the measured weight was 1,198. Almost perfect.

The reasoning, hence, is that maybe voters aren’t particularly rational as individuals, but if their mistakes are independent from one another, they cancel each other out and the median vote - the average of the voters - is a wise one. But the hypothesis has problems.

It still assumes self-interested voters. But even voters who are minimally rational - say, who think their vote is ten times more potentially decisive than it actually is - would still have no self-interest motive to vote. And we have evidence that they are not, as mentioned above. One could argue: “fine, so voters aren’t self-interested. The fact that they do vote shows they care, though, so we can assume they are trying to maximize their society’s total welfare. Aggregation still works”. I would reply that even if that was correct, we still needed to stop analyzing politics as if voters were self-interested. I would also point out that, unfortunately, giving up self-interest to save rationality doesn’t work either, which I will discuss below. Even if it did save rationality, aggregation would still fail, though.

People’s errors about policies are nowhere close to independent. As Bryan Caplan compellingly describes, the average person has very important biases about policies. Compared to experts, regular people are too suspicious of the benefits of trade, too suspicious of the benefits of interacting with foreigners, don’t understand that you want to save as much labor as possible instead of increasing it, and are too pessimistic about how the economy fares. Maybe you think that Bryan Caplan is just a neoliberal and of course he would suggest the people are wrong on these issues, but in fact he is the wrong one. But whatever your worldview, I’m sure I can find topics which you think should not merely reflect public opinion of the day - climate policy, human rights, health policy (such as vaccination), death penalty, funding of the arts, national defense. No one consistently holds that the majority opinion of the public should be followed at all times. What I see is many people rationalizing that for whatever topic they happen to agree with public opinion, voters should be sovereign, and if they disagree, they find some reason for why, on that specific issue, public opinion is not a good guide.

This means that the resulting policy from the aggregation of all preferences will be far from optimal. The miracle was an illusion. Still, academics have been trying to provide several lifeboats. I’ll go through a few. My point is far from being exhaustive, but to illustrate how much we bend to try to save the hypothesis.

“Actually, giving lots of power to populist presidents is good for the majority of people”

Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson and Ragnar Torvik (ART) are no fans of uncheked executives. In “Why Nations Fail”, Acemoglu and Robinson exhalt the virtues of the 1688 Settlement: "The Glorious Revolution limited the power of the king and the executive, and relocated to Parliament the power to determine economic institutions." Robinson and Torvik, in turn, have a paper arguing that “politicians in general and particularly political leaders, capture more rents and provide fewer public goods under a presidential system compared to a parliamentary one” and, consequently, “political leaders prefer to be presidents rather than prime ministers”.

As adherents of rational voter theory, they had a puzzle to explain, because voters often approve removals of checks and balances - notably, parliamentary oversight of the executive, the very essence of the Glorious Revolution so praised by the 2024 Nobel Prize winners. Unfortunately for the hypothesis that parliamentary oversight of the executive is central to what “good institutions” are, dogma has it that the rational voter can’t be challenged. Parliamentary oversight has to walk the plank (at least “under certain circumstances”, as the paper states).

ART build a model to explain that voters are acting in their own interest removing those checks. The reasoning is that systems with checks on the executive have lower opportunities for rent. Presidents are hypothesized to have a “political bliss point” with the right balance of personal rents and redistribution to the poor. If a president does not have to face checks on his power, he can capture all the rents he needs to be satisfied in that dimension, and then prioritize redistribution. With checks and balances, the rents captured by the president are too small to achieve his bliss point. So powerful lobbies seeking to prevent redistribution can bribe the president and get him closer to the bliss point. In ART’s model, there is one president (naturally) but also one legislator. The electorate - aware of all of this - votes to remove the checks on presidential powers so that he can achieve his bliss point and implement redistribution.

I find these assumptions simply wild. I can’t unfortunately have hard data on whether when voters approve more powers to a president they do it thinking that this way he will not be limited in his rent seeking opportunities and will be satisfied enough that he won’t be as easy to bribe. I don’t think anyone ever formulated such an hypothesis before ART. If anyone did, it certainly isn’t widespread. I have followed presidential politics all my life, though. And I am confident that voters who want to give more power to a president are almost always convinced he is the kind of president that is not in politics for rent seeking, or at the very least is less of a rent-seeker than the alternative. In the rare cases where voters admit they are voting for a corrupt candidate, what is emphasized is not that while the president may pocket a lot of money he also redistributes it, what is emphasized is that he pockets the money but “gets things done”.

The evidence provided by the authors in favor of their model - in the form of selected quotes - only shows that populists run with an anti-elite agenda. But that is unsurprising as can be, given that being anti-elite is often the defintion of populism. The cited speeches do not argue that unless the president’s power is unchecked, corruption will be too tempting for the president. They argue that unless their power is unchecked, they will not be able to implement the measures they are absolutely committed to implement if they can.

Another strange assumption is that there is only one legislator. Even when they “relax” this assumption, they don’t work with the assumption that a majority of legislators must approve a measure, but that all legislators have some probability of being the one legislator deciding by himself. This matters a lot, because a division of powers - having multiple politicians with the same legal powers capable of approving something by a majority of them - is a central mechanism for why parliaments can reduce rent-seeking. Having to bribe tens or hundreds of people instead of just one is either much more expensive (meaning there will be fewer profitable bribe situations) or implies much reduced bribes. As per ART’s model, though, politicians have rent-seeking but also altruistic motives. Facing a diminished bribe for approving the measure which goes against their altruistic motive, there is a good chance at least a majority - any majority - will choose the altruistic choice.

But probably the weirdest assumption is that populist policies are good for the majority of the population. When Tanya Singh reviews the literature on the issue, she provides this brief conclusion: “To conclude, the few studies conducted so far have highlighted populism as a damaging policy that has had lasting negative impacts on economies the world over. Though economic and political theory have long predicted the consequences of populism, there is a clear lack of empirical evidence when it comes to studying the phenomenon. Given that populism, both left-wing and right-wing, is on a rise, it is absolutely essential that more research is devoted to studying its result and consequences.” I believe the empirical effects of populism should be more studied, but maybe the reason they aren’t is that economists widely regard them as clearly harmful, even harmul by definition sometimes. “Looks good, but is actually not” is pretty close to what we understand populism to be. Directly related to ART’s hypothesis, one specific paper worth mentioning: "The Political and Economic Consequences of Populist Rule in Latin America" by Houle and Kenny (2016). Besides identifying several negative consequences for populism, they find that redistribution does not increase, even under left-wing populists, contradicting ART’s hypothesis.

In sum, for their model to work they use an unrealistic assumption for why people vote the way they do, an unrealistic assumption for how governments would work with more or fewer checks on the executive, and an unrealistic assumption for the benefits of the outcome.

How would the rational irrationality framework explain voters preferences for removing checks and balances? By noting that a stated preference for increasing the power of presidents is very common all over the world, particularly in presidential countries - in any situation, not merely “under certain circumstances”. If a president becomes dominant enough that he gets to ask this type of question in a public consultation, it always has a good chance of being approved. The countries that avoid populism consistently are those who do not have this type of consultation, do not have strong presidents, and have strong parties. They implicitly reject voter rationality on issues while keeping the assumption of rationality on selection of representatives.

Selective Bayesians

Ashworth, Bueno de Mesquita and Friedenberg write: “An important empirical literature evaluates whether voters are rational by examining how electoral outcomes respond to events outside the control of politicians, e.g., natural disasters or economic shocks. The argument is that rational voters should not base electoral decisions on such events, so evidence that these events affect electoral outcomes is evidence of voter irrationality.” That is, some scholars found that incumbents often fail to be reelected when some negative event beyond the politician controls happens. Those scholars conclude straigthforwardly - this is evidence of voter irrationality. If voters are rational, why are they on average more likely not to reelect a politician if a hurricane strikes?

ABF don’t think we can accept this evidence. They point out that a hurricane may be totally beyond the control of a politician, but a response to a hurricane is not, nor is preparedness for one. According to ABF, the hurricane provides new information on the quality of the politician. All this seems reasonable enough. But if voters are rational, shouldn’t they assume some baseline level of quality, and then update their priors upwards if the response is good and downwards if it is bad? Then average reelection rates should be the same.

The authors build a model for why this is not necessarily the case. “Suppose voters believe that the incumbent is, ex ante, more likely to be high quality than is a future electoral challenger. Then, if there is no hurricane, they reelect the incumbent. If, however, there is a hurricane, reelection depends on preparedness. With high preparedness, voters learn the incumbent is high quality and reelect her. With low preparedness, voters learn the incumbent is low quality and replace her. By giving the voters new information, the hurricane creates the possibility that the incumbent will lose—something that does not happen absent a hurricane.”

They argue, then, that an empiricist looking at data generated according to their model would find exactly the same pattern as described above - on average, incumbents lose more often when a hurricane happens.

As it is, we have two theories which explain the data. But ABF’s hypothesis has a problem. If a shock reveals more information about the incumbent which allows voter to tell with more precision whether the politician was high quality (re-elect) or low quality (don’t) then it should not matter whether it was a negative shock or a positive one, reelection rates should always drop, unless voters are selective Bayesians and only update on negative news. If not, the average mayor should be hoping that his city was not surprised by some really positive news. I find this implausible.

We also have some evidence against it. Brazil found large reserves of oil in the early 2000s. National law established that municipalities close to where oil was going to be explored receive substantial royalty money. As it turns out, cities with royalties had a higher reelection rate than those without.

The rational irrationality hypothesis would suggest, instead, that voters will often be affected by information unrelated to the quality of politicians frequently. Some will be lucky, some not. But - I would add - on average representatives and parties would be of reasonable quality.

Stuggling Spocks

Ali, Mihm and Siga investigate a puzzle: “why does zero-sum thinking prevail even in ‘positive-sum’ settings in which voters’ interests are largely aligned?” That is: why is it so common for voters to perceive a situation where the benefits can be very widely distributed as one in which someone’s gain must be compensated by another person’s loss? This is a particularly interesting defense of the rational voter theory because it does not assume that the collective decision is optimal; it instead attempts to explain suboptimal decisions.

They explain their mechanism through an example. You have three voters, Ann, Bella and Carol. They have to decide on a policy, using majority rule, p1 or p2. If p1 is chosen, each one gets a payoff of 0. If p2 is chosen, then two of them will get a payoff of 2, and one of them will get -3. Social surplus is 0 in the first case, and 1 in the second. Under total uncertainty, they would all choose p2, which has an expected value of 1/3, while p1 is zero. Under full certainty, the winners would choose p2, which will get approved. But if the voters know that only sometimes any of them will know whether they would be a winner or a loser under p2, then p1 would win, even though it is suboptimal.

They find that in cases similar to the above, it is rational for an uninformed voter to choose p1. Suppose Ann is making a decision. Her vote will only matter if one voter has chosen p1 and the other p2 . It is stipulated (I confess my reading doesn’t allow me to say for sure whether or not this stipulation is central to their results, I assume it isn’t so my critique won’t rely on that) that only a person who has learned they will be a winner will choose p2. This means the other person is either a certain loser, or uninformed. Since, also by stipulation, the probability of learning one’s condition is close to zero, Ann will assume there’s a 50% chance she will be a winner or a loser. But now her expected value of voting p1 is still 0, but the expected value of choosing p2 is 0.5*2 + 0.5*(-3) = -0.5

Their model generalizes this. Their main result is:

“Theorem 1. The inferior policy p[1] wins in a strict equilibrium with scarce information if the collective choice problem is adversely correlated. Otherwise the optimal policy p[2] wins in every equilibrium with scarce information.” (bold in original)

The problem I see is that to get to those results they keep two conditions from the example above which are debatable. The first problem is that the collective choice problem must be adversely correlated - as the authors say, in all other conditions, the optimal policy wins. Being adversely correlated means that the more people have already benefitted from the policy, the fewer people are likely to benefit from it. In the example above, the number of winners and loses is fixed. If two people already know they are winners, you are sure to lose. But that comes really close to a zero-sum situation, even if technically it is not really zero sum because the optimal policy still delivers overall greater benefits. So what this theorem says is that according to those assumptions, voters who face a quasi-zero-sum situation behave as if they are in a strictly zero-sum situation. I don’t know that this is particularly noteworthy. But more importanly, what reason do we have to think such adverse correlations are particularly common in real world situations where voters fail to approve positive sum choices? None of the examples they present suggest that, if the positive-sum arguments are correct, there would be adverse correlation.

A second problem with the model is that it depends on the voter assuming they are the pivotal voter. But we have seen above that a rational voter would never assume that, because the chances that such a thing would happen are vanishingly small.

And third, it is odd to assume that voters would not be able to acquire the relevant information to make a sound decision based on the merits because that is cognitively demanding, but also that the are smart enough to unconsciously solve the theorems from the paper. Which is it, calculating Spocks or distracted average Joe? If they would - most of them - solve the theorem unconsciously, how exactly?

There is a twist to their model, however. Unlike in the example above, voters might not know whether they are in an adversely correlated or an advantegeously correlated situation. If they receive information that suggests the situation is adversely correlated, and no information they are in the beneficiary group, they are more likely to reject the proposal, even if in reality the situation is advantegeously correlated.

But is this surprising? It is tantamount to saying that if voters act according to incorrect beliefs regarding the benefits of a policy, they will fail to choose the optimal policy. We have always known this. They argue that if your beliefs are incorrect, then it is rational to choose the suboptimal policy. That is one view of rationality, and it is well-established in the academic literature. However, that is not how most people view rationality. In regular usage, rationality implies making the best decision considering publicly available information. If a whole group of people makes the suboptimal decision because they are entangled in a poor information-gathering system, most people would not deem their decisions rational. Using an extreme example, most people don’t consider that those who drank poisoned Kool-aid in Jonestown were rational, but by the authors’ criteria they would have to be.

This is made clearer with their examples. Regarding the discussion on approving or not the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act during the financial crisis of 2008, the authors write:

While it was clear that the financial industry would profit from the proposed $700 billion bailout, there was considerable aggregate and distributional uncertainty about the broader general equilibrium effects of the deteriorating credit market conditions. Would a bailout be solely distributional, transferring wealth from taxpayers to CEOs, or would there be significant beneficial aggregate effects of bailing out financial institutions? Information on this score was scarce given the sheer complexity of predicting the effects of approving or rejecting the bill, and much of the information in the public sphere emphasized distributional considerations. In line with Propositions 7 and 8, our analysis suggests that the political debate was ripe for the kind of zero-sum thinking that initially doomed the EESA bill to fail. Our analysis also speaks to why, following the subsequent market crash, the EESA bill passed on its second vote; that crash produced clear information about the aggregate benefits of stabilizing the financial system, rendering the collective choice problem more advantageously correlated during the second vote.

In other words, decision-makers had reasons to believe the situation was zero-sum, so approving the policy was suboptimal. They then gathered elements pointing to it being positive-sum, which made then approve the policy. I believe the authors are correct in arguing that the uncertainty regarding the benefits was greater before than after the crash, and that it could even be considered rational not to approve the bill until it was clearer it would be positive-sum (even though maybe even after the crash that was not the best bill which could have been approved). I will note one incidental thing - they are talking about Congress, not about the population. Congress is the entity that was convinced by the supervening events. Were the bill subjected to popular consultation, the chances that it would be rejected seem very high to me - indeed, the Occupy Movement claiming to speak for the “99%” originated exactly because of a similar perception.

In sum, if we stick to the first, more stringent premises, their theory is conceptually interesting but of little practical application because of how unrealistic their critical assumptions are, and increasing the realism would significantly alter the results. If we expand the premises to allow for voters not to know the overall effects of the policy, it is realistic, but the results are trivial and they would not make voters rational in the meaning used in public discourse.

Ineffective Altruists

In “Voting as a Rational Choice”, Edlin, Gelman and Kaplan recognize that it would never make sense for a rational self-interested person to vote in large elections, for the standard reason - as the number of voters increases, the probability that a single vote would change the outcome goes to zero. To the extent that voting requires any effort, that effort is better spent on something with greater impact. They argue, however, that it can be perfectly rational to vote for the benefit of others.

Here’s the logic - suppose that if candidate A wins, all citizens will make $250 more. Considering how small the chances of a voter to change the outcome, that personal $250 would never justify him casting his vote. But if he cares about his fellow citizens, even if he cares less than for himself, it can still be rational to vote. Assume that they care 1/10 about the benefit for others as he cares for himself. This means that if 10 people get $10, he’s just as well off as if he had received the $10 himself. The authors show that because the probability of being decisive decreases with population size at the same rate as the benefit derived from seeing others better off increases, then it can be rational to cast a vote for the better candidate with a population of any size. Elegantly, the expected personal benefits are approximately the size of the individual benefit times the discount factor for the benefit not going to oneself (multiplied by a number which increases as the election is expected to be closer; without going into the math, their multiplier is 25). Hence, with an individual benefit of $10, a multiplier of 25, and a discount factor of 1/10, the benefit of voting to the voter would be $25, independently of population size.

The authors note, correctly, that many elections can involve much greater stakes than $10 per person. Personally, I would find numbers up to $10,000 per citizen plausible. They neglect, however, that a discount factor of 1/10 implies an unrealistic amount of altruism. The idea that if some ten random people happened to make $1000 more than expected the average person would be as happy as if they got $1000 themselves seems preposterous. Still, let’s be generous and stipulate 1/100. This would imply a benefit of $2500 for voting, which is not bad.

In my book, I accepted this reasoning and claimed that the rationality of voting was then an empirical issue. After reading Chris Freiman’s “Why It’s OK to Ignore Politics”, I now believe it was never an empirical issue to begin with. Here’s an explanation inspired by the book. We are assuming that, at least in expectation, the typical voter is more likely to effectively cast his vote for the truly more beneficial candidate than for the other one. Given that in a close election there are about as many voters for one candidate as for the other, the typical voter can’t be that much more likely to cast a vote for the best candidate, if the population is large enough. Suppose that each voter had a 60% chance of voting for the best candidate and a 40% chance of voting for the worse one. This seems like a pretty weak signal. Still, if there were only one million voters, the probability that the worse candidate ever won is merely 2%. As you increase the number of voters, it goes effectively to zero (by which I mean the software R doesn’t even compute it).

The amount of real information (as in signal, not noise) a typical voter will get regarding the candidate’s quality has to be extremely small if a race is close. In an election with 10 million voters, any real information that makes the average voter more than 0.01 percentage points more likely to cast the vote to the correct candidate would imply that the best candidate would already win in around 75% of the cases, and if the information would make the average voter more than 0.1 percentage points more likely to cast the correct vote, the best candidate would virtually always win, so the problem of close elections wouldn’t present itself.

This means that for the typical voter, the expected value would not be the $2500 suggested. The voter would enter a lottery where he would have 50.01% chance of making $2500 and 49.99% chance of losing $2500. The expected value of that lottery is 50 cents.

What cost should we assign to voting? Edlin et al. think it could be the case that voting costs nothing, because people find it enjoyable. That may be the case sometimes or even often, but then we have learned nothing about a rational altruistic voter. The interesting question to ask is not “Is it rational to vote if you like it?”. It is rational to do anything one likes. The question is “Is it rational to vote even if you don’t like it?”. We must examine the hypothesis that voting is work.

In that case, most people would bear the costs of the time it takes to vote. If median hourly wage is $28 and people on average take an hour in the whole process, that would imply a benefit-to-cost ratio of $0.5 to $28, or 1/56. Ineffective altruism indeed.

While I find the case against rational altruistic voters well-refuted, I still want to highlight that anyone unconvinced by my arguments and who wants to stick with Edlin et al.’s thesis should accept that the self-interested voter hypothesis cannot explain voter behavior, so whenever we are trying to understand electoral results we should not revert back to self-interest explanations because “Edlint et al. showed it can be rational to vote”.

Why does democracy even work, then?

We know why people vote, or at least we know why people think they vote, because in surveys they have told us. The problem for rational choice theory is that the answer is boring, and it is not clear that it makes people instrumentally rational […] In fact, models of expressive voting (Brennan and Lomasky, 1993; Schuessler, 2000, 2001) do produce predictions that are consistent with empirical evidence. The marginal considerations we saw above still operate with an expressive component. The expressive component could not be the whole story or voters should not be too upset if it turns out the ballot box where they cast their vote was compromised so their vote was not counted. But voters do get upset, which suggests expressing yourself is not the only factor, especially since many people want to keep their actual vote secret. Furthermore, if all one wanted was to express a preference then there would be no room for tactical voting and there is evidence that some vote strategically (Cox, 1997; Franklin, Niemi, and Whitten, 1994). Nevertheless the ‘D’ answer [N: the expressive voting answer], despite being simple, despite being empirically verified by stated preference evidence, consistent with aggregate data evidence, and, if not properly tested, corroborated by Barry’s and Knack’s evidence, does not find much favour among political scientists whether rational choice advocates or critics. Why? Because they want deeper reasons.

Keith Dowding, “Is It Rational to Vote? Five Types of Answer and a Suggestion.”

Before studying public opinion, many wonder why democracy does not work better. After one becomes familiar with the public’s systematic biases, however, one is struck by the opposite question: Why does democracy work as well as it does? How do the unpopular policies that sustain the prosperity of the West survive?

Bryan Caplan, “The Myth of the Rational Voter”

I could go on showing how attempts to save the rational self-interested (or altruistic) voter hypothesis fail, but it probably wouldn’t make much of a difference now. If a reader is unconvinced, another example won’t convince them. One thing which is likely working against them changing their mind is the fact that the most successful governments ever to exist are democracies. But the success of democracies does not require voters to be instrumentally rational. Within the right framework, voters need only apply some simple heuristics, much like they do in everything else.

There are three key characteristics of representatives which will make a parliament work better: virtue, competence, and legislator’s independent influence over society beyond their role in parliament. The first two are (or should be) pretty obvious. Virtue is the most straightforward - if the legislators care about achieving the goals of the society they represent, those goals are much more likely to be implemented. Nobody seems to dispute this, so I won’t belabor this point.

More competent legislators will be in a better position to evaluate the quality of proposed policies, as well as evaluate the reliability of whatever group is pushing for a policy. While I think this should be clear to everyone, there have been recently some arguments that the most, perhaps the only, important characteristic of a legislature is that it is representative of the population, and “representative” is understood in the statistical sense, meaning that any member of the population has an equal chance of being in the selected sample - which in this case would be congress. The proposed reform is called sortition or “lottocracy”.

One problem with the proposal is that policymaking is hard, even if goals are exactly aligned. Assume that every person in a country, and consequently every legislator, agreed that the role of government is to create the conditions to have the greatest possible value in the Social Progress Index, which attempts to measure a large number of progress indicators and produces a final number.

Should they adopt free trade? Many smart people disagree significantly about that. What material should be prioritized in schools? What should the crime prevention policy be? What about vaccination and health in general? How much money should be be allocated to each problem, and when should programs be killed and taxes lowered? Remember no values are in discussion here, the whole country wants to maximize its score in the Progress Index. Still, it is the case that smart, caring and dedicated people will often disagree on many of these issues. But those who are smarter, more caring and more dedicated will generally arrive at better answers.

If you find that implausible or elitist, I would point out that we apply the same logic to everything else. When a newspaper needs board members, not one will pick a random selection of its readers. No university picks a random selection of students, administrators and teachers to lead it. No football team picks their management from a random selection of fans (not to mention picking their players). When problems are hard, we use the best screening processes we have to put the most qualified in charge. Why would lawmaking be the one exception to this rule?

The misguided idea of sortition also provides a good contrasting point to explain why independent influence over society beyond their role as legislator is important. I will rephrase a point I made in this post.

The legitimacy of parliaments to make decisions for the entire society is not a god-given right. Anyone could perfectly well assemble a random selection of fellow citizens who would start approving “laws” which should be valid in the entire territory. Would anyone follow them? Doubtly.

Now imagine instead that sortition did get approved and random legislators “rule” the country. Parliament is discussing an issue and then it receives formal communication that the leadership of the military, civil service, police, states, cities, major companies, newspapers and the tv and movie industry all wanted a specific measure to be taken and that they would in fact act as if it had already been. Would they manage pull this off? Likely yes.

How good are voters - or electorates, more precisely - at picking virtuous, competent and independently influent representatives? I have already made the case in the book* that we have good evidence that representatives are likely more competent and virtuous than the average citizen, so I won’t repeat those arguments - I will take a different approach. One thing I did not cover is whether people are any good at selecting independently influential representatives. I’m unaware of statistical papers on this, so will have to rely on my own reasoning and observation. Still, I am pretty confident that this is where voters do best.

How in fact do people with very limited knowledge of politics, candidates, and positions decide who to vote for? The same way they choose a doctor, a lawyer or a civil engineer: relying on heuristics. If the candidate or party is already well-known, that is a good sign. The second-term Brazilian senator Romario de Souza Faria would almost certainly never have been elected had he not led the Brazilian soccer team to its fourth World Cup title in 1994. But while being famous helps, it is not always a sufficient condition. Being known as a person who knows politics is more helpful. It doesn’t hurt to look competent, so candidates always dress like very serious people. Impressive credentials are also good, all else equal, as well as being perceived as attentive to segments of the population the voter thinks are neglected. But the most important factor is what the people you trust think of the candidate or party.

People usually know someone who they perceive as more politically literate then themselves and will assign particular weight to that opinion. They will almost always be correct that the people they perceive as more knowledgeable than themselves is indeed more knowledgeable, even if they will often delude themselves into mistakenly think they are more knowledgeable than still others. That knowledgeable person recognized as such might be a family member (parents are particularly influential, so party affiliation is in large part hereditary), a university professor, a talk show radio host, a priest, a union leader, the people one follows online (increasingly so), neighbors, among others.

The job of a campaign is, hence, to inspire more trust than its rivals do. That is a very large operation. The first problem is becoming well-known. If one is not a movie or a rock star, it is extremely hard to be famous on a national, or even a local, base. The hardest thing, however, is to enter in the trust trickle-down network.

For earning the support on the higher echelons of the network, it helps a lot to be actually competent and have integrity. When people are empowering someone else, they will most often prefer that person to be honest instead of a crook - even if the person doing the endorsing is not the most honest themself. One knows what to expect from an honest person but not of a crook. (Another strategy is to appeal directly to some in the middle echelons of the trust network by saying things which sound good but that others are not willing to say, often because they sound good but are actually not. I will come back to this strategy later.)

As it turns out, this works reasonably well - which is to say, perhaps not quite as well as choosing a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer, but close. Doctors, lawyers and engineers will often disappoint us, yet we trust this recommendation-based system enough that we find those who ditch it in favor of making all these decisions on their own completely insane.

As for democracy selecting independently influential people, according to my rationale this is the very reason they are elected in the first place. If you think about it, one of the rarest complaints about parliaments is that the people there are not that influential in society.

Why do all these people vote - is it because it is (instrumentally) rational ? Surely not, we established it’s never rational to vote for accomplishing a specific goal, out of self-interest or otherwise. They vote to express something about themselves, to the people they admire, to the people they believe admire them, and even to themselves. They often find it pleasurable in itself, or they think fulfilling a perceived duty relieves them of guilty feelings. The process is in many ways similar to how people become a fan of some music. The network effects have a lot of noise and the process is influenced by outside factors. But the best tend to do well generally and the worst tend to do very badly. When we aggregate the results from this whole process, the representatives or their parties can be reasonably competent, honest, and, even more than reasonably, influential. Just like with music, though, your gain in prestige only happens if you do not come out and say “I voted for [X] because person [Y] said it was the best candidate”.

Some may object that they don’t find the level of competence and integrity in parliaments reasonable at all. My claim that it is reasonable rests on two points: 1) there is no other process which more reliably will achieve all three goals; and 2) the success democracies have achieved is unprecedented, as stated before.

Putting it all together - how does voting work well, how does it go astray, and what should we do about it?

I’ve talked about why people can be irrational while voting, and I have talked about why they can be rational. But what are the conditions for it to work well or not? Since the argument is that voting can produce reasonable outcomes when people are selecting professionals or “businesses” (parties, in the political case), then the first thing to dismiss is the idea of direct democracy. One may ask: but why can’t voters go through the same process when picking policies? Just favor the policy that those they trust more favor. There is some of that, but - because people vote to look good to themselves and to others - once the vote is on a specific issue, you may look like less of a fool giving your sincere reasons to vote for the inferior policy (particularly if your counterpart is no specialist either) than drawing a blank when someone asks you to explain your decision to vote for the superior one, or just admitting that person X said so.

But even when voting for politicians, sometimes appealing to rational irrationality can beat strategies based on network of most informed to less informed. Unsurprisingly to any of my readers, I will argue presidential politics has much more of this problem. For one thing, in a winner-take-all election, if a candidate who appeals to voters’ rational irrationality is elected, the harm can be much greater. In a parliamentary government, rational irrationality measures will depend on the concurrence of many more elected representatives. That is not easy to accomplish. An anti-vaccine legislator might have no problem with free trade; a proponent of doing away with the separation of Church and State might not be onboard with doubling the minimum wage; a degrowther would likely not agree with a climate change denialist. In a presidential race, there could be lots of disagreement during the campaign, but once elected, the irrationality of the president would have a special position. This argument has some similiarities with the “miracle of aggregation” mentioned above but also fundamental differences. In a presidential election all the biases affect votes in an independent form, and any candidate representating a combination of biases might be elected - hence, no miracle. In a parliament, legislators must negotiate and sustain a coalition. The process of negotiation contributes to weed out irrational aspects.

Further, the very fact that no individual legislator is that powerful by him or herself makes any promises to implement rationally irrational policies less credible. Because of that, a regular voter will often think that when casting a vote for legislator, the best thing is picking someone particularly competent, particularly committed with some interest group or cause the voter cares about, or who belongs to a party they trust. Which all conspire in favor of the trust network instead of the populist approach.

The greater importance of parties in parliamentary democracies - a widely recognized fact - is another contributing factor for fewer incentives for populism. A single person can rely on personal charisma to connect with large shares of the electorate. A party has to maintain a brand, and brands do not have personal charisma. The preferred strategy will involve cultivating long term ties with publications, think tanks, civil service, etc. All of this will make the candidate incorporate wisdom from several corners of life when making decisions.

Appeals to irrationality work better when those in the higher echelons of the network start failing to produce sensible recommendations in a way that anyone can see (even our rationally irrational electorate). A populist is often defined as someone who campaigns with a platform against out-of-touch elites. But sometimes elites are out of touch! When they are, the case that they are disconnected will be much easier to make.

Presidential politics will more often produce such out-of-touch elites. Because the risks of concentrating power at the hands of the president cannot be completely ignored, presidential countries come up with all sorts of legal (or practical) protections against political interference for the civil service, military, judiciary, academia. These corporations may acquire a self-sufficiency quality which increasingly will make them more likely to adopt stances which are either clearly self-serving, false, or both. I would note that, because elites can be out-of-touch, even some not usually inclined to populism will at times want to rely on “the wisdom of the crowds” for a course correction. It is a poor remedy. Irrationality is, well, irrational. Mobs marshaled for a cause can often just as easily be mobilized for a different one, with unwanted results.

Of course parliamentary democracies are not immune to all appeals to voter irrationality, and neither is being presidential the only contributing factor. Malapportionment, for example, will tend to distort how much an outcome in parliament reflects the negotiated opinion of the most influential sectors of society. This will more likely produce out-of-touch elites as well. Likewise, some technologies which make information spread more horizontal can favor those with a populist message.

Wrapping up

The “democracy works, so voters must be rational” meme seems to be hardwired in people’s brains - and when it isn’t, the hardwired meme is “voters are irrational, so democracy can’t work”. I will give it one more shot bringing back the examples from the beginning of the text. Are people not rational enough to define their own medical treatment but rational enough to choose a doctor? A lawyer, an engineer? If you answered yes, you probably don’t think that telling someone that he should trust an expert in some issues instead of deciding alone is diminishing to that person in the slightest. Why then can’t we enthusiastically embrace similar thinking applied to voting? For the benefit of democracy, I hope we do.

In times of political polarization, it is hard not to pick a side. When someone defends judging a person or group independently, that is, according to how they should act, instead of how they fare compared to “the other side”, they will often be called ‘naïve’ or ‘utopian’. Sometimes, it will be claimed - but rarely meant - that being impartial will cause great harm or be even worse than openly being on the other side.

“Not picking a side” does not mean to both-sides everything. Surely some groups or persons can behave consistently better than others, so generally preferring them is acceptable and welcome. “Picking a side” here means downplaying flaws on your side and exaggerating their qualities, while doing the reverse for the other side, either in an unconcious but often in a deliberate way. Being impartial, on the other hand, means trying to base the evaluation of a proposal, stated value, or track record, on their own merits, instead of on who the person or party is issuing it. Being impartial, in turn, does not mean you cannot trust some people or groups more than others. But if your stance is based on trust rather than the evaluation of the merit, you should be transparent about it instead of rationalizing the defense of a position you did not you use your own reasoning to get to.

Suppose the government, lead by A, announces several spending cuts to balance the budget. Opposition party B accuses the government of unnecessarily slashing essential programs, in a move which will only make party A’s funders richer but will decrease economic growth so that even the fiscal benefits will not be realized. An impartial person would try to evaluate each claim on its own merits, read about the economics of spending cuts, dynamics of economic growth, and the specifics of the proposed measure. They might very well conclude that it is too difficult to make up their mind on their own. Ideally, the person would then try to look for opinions from trusted experts who have built a reputation of being impartial themselves, not someone who would alwasy argue in favor of what one of the parties is proposing. In a polarized environment, even that might be too hard. Each party might have their own “experts” associated with them. In this case, admitting we probably have no idea is the truthful strategy and the one with the best consequences, in general.

For any level of influence you have in society, it will almost always be the case that you will have greater influence for promoting impartiality than you will have for helping “your side” win. This seems wrong to most people. Violations of impartiality abound, while it is obvious that some side always wins. That is all true, but it doesn’t make picking a side more effective than promoting impartiality.

How much does your position matter? If you are a regular citizen, it matters very, very little either way. As the advocates of picking a side make sure we all know, it doesn’t matter if you hold public figures to high standards; refuse to vote for anyone who does not meet them; vehemently condemn transgressions from wherever they come: it will change nothing. One of the leading candidates will still get elected; they will still act in ways you disapprove of; biased newspapers will still get subscriptions; etc. The advocates will then add: if one is worse than the other, shouldn’t we prefer the lesser evil? And if so, shouldn’t we work for the lesser evil to prevail?

We should definitely prefer the lesser evil, but it doesn’t follow we should work for it. Because just like when we are promoting impartiality, our actions also matter very, very little when we are trying to change the outcome of an election. The chances our vote will decide the election are close to nil; same with our posts. The type of stance taken by each regular citizen only makes a significant difference for the citizens themselves and for the people who interact with them – their family, friends, colleagues. And in this environment, being impartial is clearly superior to picking a side.

I concede that being a staunch supporter of a side can create some feeling of community with fellow partisans. The downsides, however, are much greater, and there are other perfectly good ways to create community.

In a polarized environment, we pick a side not because we believe it is highly virtuous, but because the other side is perceived as incredibly flawed. The thing is, even though we know we may not be on board with the most extreme views associated with our side, we tend to think everyone on the other side shares the extreme views associated with it. Further, we tend to incorporate as our own fundamental values positions we hold merely because the people in our tribe hold. All this tends to distance us from interactions we could greatly benefit from. Currently, we see political polarization affecting the quality even of family ties, which are the strongest bonds people have and the ones most independent of like-mindedness. When you’re impartial, however, and particularly when you show you don’t have any high praise for some politician your counterpart despise, people won’t perceive you as a threat and hence will be perfectly capable of engaging with you. Yes, despite the claims that you are naïve or warnings that you are “causing great harm”, nobody (or almost) will fight with you if you don’t pick a side. To be sure, it is not always the case that the best strategy, from a self-interest point of view, is being impartial. If the polarization is so extreme as to represent a personal risk, then surely it is pragmatic to pick a side. But in current polarized democracies, this personal risk is greatly exaggerated.

Not being partisan is also good for you independently of your relationship with others. People who are highly involved in politics have poorer mental health and even general health. Ford et al. find that political news can increase stress significantly. Sadly, they fail to conclude that being involved in politics is negative overall because they think it is important for people to feel angry so that they do engage in politics.

In sum, if you are not an influential person, the greatest consequences of being partisan or not falls upon your own well-being and of your close ones, and being impartial is greatly superior.

Suppose, instead, that you do have some influence. Maybe you are a columnist in a big paper, a respected academic, or a revered writer. People listen to you, and maybe you can change some votes. But our premise - that people are asking you to “pick a side” - is that we are in a polarized environment. Then, by definition, most people will have made up their mind already about which party they prefer. What your support will do is close people’s minds to whatever you have to say, not only about party politics but everything else as well.

If, instead, you are perceived as objective - and being objective is the most reliable way to be perceived as such - you will maintain your influence, which may affect even the policies of the party you don’t prefer. I believe the only good reason there could possibly exist to become a staunch partisan is that you were convinced, after careful examination, that the policies your party favors are much superior to the policies favored by the other side and/or that your party has much more virtuous representatives. In that case, being impartial won’t hurt your case, on the contrary. As you receive evidence of each sides’ good or bad policies and behavior, you judge them one-by-one. If you are correct, “your” party will still come out looking much better. And your credibility is spared in the process.

If you become a staunch partisan to promote “the lesser evil”, however, you will run into severe risks. The first is that you miscalculate the “amount of evil” and end up vocally promoting the greater one, lending it your credibility in the process. The second is that people will use your clear partisanship when you are arguing for the “fake” reasons to support the lesser evil to undermine your true arguments for the lesser evil. The third is it helps normalize bad proposals and bad behavior. The “next evil” might become much greater and acceptable than it would have been.

Extreme partisanship - who benefits?

If promoting partisanhip is as bad as I claim, then why do we see so many people arguing otherwise? Notably, if I defend that strong parties are positive for democracies, why do those same parties argue so forcefully in favor of political partisan participation? I believe this is due to parties being caught in a prisoner’s dilemma with respect to partisanhip-promotion. I’ll use an analogy to explain.

Apple and Google are two of the leading technology companies in the world, and fierce competitors in several markets. These companies compete to increase their sales, very often at the expense of the other company. For that, they are constantly innovating and trying to make the experience of their users more enjoyable, reliable and easy. But improving their own products is not the only strategy on which Apple and Google rely to secure more sales. They also promote an emotional connection between their consumers and the brands. This means some people will prefer a product because it was designed by Apple (or Google).

Is it good for consumers that the companies exist and are “strong” (in the sense that they are able to effectively coordinate their workforce around their projects)? Sure. The scale of their projects require them to be very large endeavors. It is hard to imagine how someone could produce an iPhone if all the engineers were working independently on their projects. Their competition has been incentivizing an array of innovations in the past decades. Is it good for consumers to willingly embark on the brand loyalty project? Surely not. The more that sales are dependent on loyalty instead of product features, the less incentive the companies will have for innovating and delivering good products at reasonable prices.

Likewise, policymaking is a huge task. We need large organizations capable of proposing and implementing measures which will benefit society while maintaining a general level of acceptance among the population. But increasing partisanship will only be of interest to the beneficiary party, and some supporters directly linked to specific measures.

Here’s the prisoner’s dilemma: even for this select few true beneficiaries, it might not be worth it overall. I believe most people join political parties because they genuinely want to make a positive difference. Even if you are skeptical that “most people” do that, then you might at least agree that the people we would like to see joining political parties should have this quality. Efforts at partisanship promotion, then, are not even necessarily in the interest of the members of political parties. A large share of them (the best share) will feel the way a bright-eyed engineer who was just admitted to Apple or Google in the hopes of developing revolutionary technology feels when tasked with some brand loyalty project. Considering that these partisan benefits tend to get cancelled by the efforts of the other parties at promoting partisanship in their favor, then a population which is much more flexible around partisanship is better for all involved.

Hence my recommendation for your new year’s resolution: tone down your partisanship. The first step would be not to deliberately downplay the flaws on one side and exaggerate those on the other. Then try not to do it even on an unconscious level. Assume more good faith from others, recognize that even people who might have awful politics can still have many other qualities. If you have little influence, this will have no effect on the state of politics, but neither would any other strategy. Your life and the life of those close to you will likely improve a little, though. If you do have some influence, you just might nudge the political scene towards a better situation.

Wait, I thought this was a blog about parliamentarism…

The best solution for affective polarization is parliamentarism (or, on the flip side, presidentialism is awful also for polarization). If hyperpartisanship comes from the top, as I have argued, then changing the party incentives should change its prevalence, and does. As Mark Copelovitch likes to say, it’s all in Linz, the rest is commentary. Three of the problems with presidentialism identified by Linz - winner-take-all, fixed mandates, personalism - directly contribute for political actors to promote polarization.

Winner-take-all - A president single-handedly determines how the executive works. On the one hand, this means building coalitions is less important (particularly when parliamentarism is combined with proportional representation). Yes, there are coalitions in presidentialism too, but they are composed in an environment of much greater bargaining power from the president. On the other hand, the very fact that one winner will get so much power and all losers will consequently have so little power raises the stakes considerably. Both hands incentivize political agents to play hardball, exaggerating their own qualities and arguing their opponents will represent a complete disaster.

Fixed mandates - If a president wins the election, they will have much less reason to be preocuppied with the people aggrieved. Except for the use of the convoluted impeachment process, avoidable with minimal concessions, a president is all but guaranteed to maintain all the powers acquired on day one till the end of their mandate. There will be plenty of time to reward loyalists exhalting the president’s qualitities and warning of the terrible dangers of any other option until reelection. If there won’t be the chance for reelection, then…, problem solved.

Personalism - Presidentialism is particularly suscetible to character assassination (and real assassinations too, but that is another topic). If one successfully smears a member of a party in a parliamentary country, the party may simply dissociate from that person and maintain its reputation. The party might choose to act that way even if the smearing is baseless. It will be less likely to cooperate with those who did the smearing, however. If my presidential candidate is smeared, though, the penalty one needs to pay for switching candidates are enormous. Not only will it be hard to build a connection between a new candidate and the electorate, the whole party and coalition will suffer, since the project is so associated with the person of the candidate or president. Dissociating from a sitting president is inherently risky as well. One will get less visibility, fewer posiion, less influence. It makes a lot more sense to both stick with the leader of your party (even if the accusations are real), and promote a counter-offense, smearing the other side as well.

Promoting parliamentarism on the individual level

Establishing parliamentarism would be the best thing to cool things down, but that is not the main topic of this post. I have written about the best strategy available for people who are not influential, and for those who are. As it turns out, asserting your preference for parliamentarism and refusing to support any presidential candidate or elected president because of your principled parliamentarism is a very effective way to maintain good relations and dialogue with people of significantly different loyalties, as I have noticed. Also - and I say this without a hint of irony, even if you may doubt me - it even does pretty well at parties, being perceived as an eccentric and harmless position. For the truly influential, a parliamentary stance will help strengthen congresses versus presidents even if a full switch of form of government doesn’t immediately happen. If you won’t be a parliamentarist for idealist reasons, do it for pragmatic ones.

Happy new year.

It’s not an uncommon conversation for me: “OK, you have argued for several flaws of presidentialism. What is an advantage presidentialism has over parliamentarism?” It’s a good question in general. If you want to get a sense of how careful some person is about interpreting evidence in a nonbiased way, ask them to explain what evidence against the position they are taking there is. Unfortunately for me, I am yet to find an advantage for presidentialism. This doesn’t make me look as an objective thinker. The problem is that presidentialism really is an inferior arrangement. It is the result of combining two different forms of decision-making which can be the most efficient depending on the circumstance into a form which doesn’t preserve the qualities of either form, while keeping the disadvantages. It is the car-boat of forms of government.

Just to make my point, I will state the obvious. Using a boat or a car can be your best option depending on your objectives. If you are going from your house in the suburb to the nearest mall, you will take the car. If you are going from a beach house to an isolate island with no land connection, the boat is best. A car-boat tries to the functions of both, and ends up doing neither well. For this reason, it exists as a mere curiosity because some people think it is cool.

Likewise, it won’t always be the case that you need a collective body for decisionmaking - even if there is a representation of someone else’s interests. In fact, in the vast majority of cases we don’t have a collective body, we just hire one person. In firms, the hierarchy is not of one collective body on top of another, it is one person who supervises several others with different functions, all the way down. It will be better to have one person being the agent rather than a collective body:

• The more time the principal has to observe the quality of service and effort exherted by the agent;

• The greater the capacity the principal has to observe the quality and effort;

• The shorter the time-span of the relationship;

• The fewer the number of principals;

• The smaller the probability the objectives assigned may be in conflict with one another;

• The more the interests of the principals align with each other;

• The more the principals have a similar understanding of what the best strategies are;

• The more the principals can interact with each other;

• The less familiarity the potential members of the collective body have with rules of order/parliamentary procedure;

Suppose you need help filing your taxes a given year. Are you going to hire one accountant (or one firm, which will assign one accountant) or are you going to set up a board of accountants? Obviously the first - but why is it obvious? The list above helps us understand.

• You have considerable time to observe the service - it’s not unreasonable to think that you can dedicate at least five minutes for every hour the accountant has put into it;

• You have familiarity with the information, you know how responsive your accountant is, etc. (even though there might be some quality aspects you migt miss);

• It is a very brief relationship, by the time you set up a board you would probably be late with your taxes;

• You are the only principal (which makes moot other items);

• The objective is pretty straightforwad - file the minimum amount of taxes in a perfectly legal way.

Everything indicates you are better off hiring just one person, and in fact no one ever establishes a board to file their individual taxes one specific year.

Naturally, if you change the signs on the above characteristics, it will be better to have a collective body. It may have stood out as you read that in the case of national governments, everything points to it being better to have a collective body as the main agent. I will still go through one-by-one:

• The population has very little time to observe the quality of service and effort exherted by the agent;

• The population lacks adequate capacity to observe the quality and effort;

• The relationship is of years at least (considering individual mandates) or of indefinite duration (considering the whole institution);

• The number of principals is literally the entire population and most often is in the millions;

• The sheer amount of different responsibilities a government has ensures the probability that several of the objectives assigned are in conflict is 100%;

• The interests of the principals vary considerably;

• There is great disagreement as to how to achieve objectives even when there is agreement on those objectives;

• Interaction among members of the population is extremely small relative to population size;

• MPs are invested in learning how to operate rules of procedure and have specialized staff dedicated to helping them;

Those are the extreme cases and arguably the easy ones. Absolutely nobody argues for a board for filing your taxes once; and almost nobody with any real influence thinks we should only elect a president, with no Congress whatsoever. But there are edge cases. Just like some trips you might be unsure whether walking or taking the car is the best option, in some situations it is not clear whether it will be better to set up a collective body to make the decisions or rely on a single agent.

Someone setting up a family trust might weight the advantages and disadvantages of each approach and ponder the factors above to see which option is best. In parliamentary countries, there are arrangements which make the government itself more collective (cabinet government) or more individual (prime ministerial). The list above helps illustrate why it is an ambiguous situtation. While parliaments have much fewer members than there are people in a country’s population, their full membership is significant. Interests will also differ significantly. Capacity to observe quality and efforts is much higher than in the general population, but is it high enough? My inclination is that cabinet government has been neglected, but I concede it is not as clear cut.

The important point, however, is that it is never better to try to have both - which is what the presidential system does. When a president must go through Congress, you get none of the benefits of individualized decision-making. There’s no agility, no cost-saving. It’s like sailing a car-boat across the channel.

If a president doesn’t have to go through Congress, the risks of not having a Congress at all are realized. One could argue that for executive functions an individual works well, but not for legislative functions. I don’t think that is plausible. Legislative and executive functions are extremely blurred. There isn’t any type of decision we do not expect presidents to have an opinion nowadays. The typical decision of a president is certainly of the kind that would call for a collegiate body if none existed. But the one that does exist is significantly restrained in its powers. It’s like trying to cross the channel with your car-boat in car mode!

“Why is there such a system in the first place?”, one could ask. The separation of powers arose because it was clear to elites that kings did not represent their interests as well as parliaments. Because those elites did not have enough power to strip kings of all their functions at once, separation of powers was the compromise solution. For that purpose, it makes complete sense. The whole theory of separation of powers created by Montesquieu is a rationalization of the institutions he already observed in England and which were still evolving and far from its best form. For advancing the interests of the population, presidentialism works as well driving up the river.

When some other institution wants to prevent a president from taking a measure he really wants to take, appeals to the president’s “popular mandate” show up very fast. “Who on earth is Judge X, Central Bank President Y, or Congress to go against a proposal made by a president who was elected by the whole population?”

The glaringly obvious fact is that no president is ever elected by the whole population. I will not even go into the fact that people vote expressively (though that also matters). Let’s assume votes are instrumentally rational, for the sake of argument. It is still the case that a very large share of the population are not voters, a very large share of those do not vote, and a sometimes larger or smaller but always significant share of those voted for someone else. An elected president will get a number of votes closer to a quarter of the population than to 50%, never mind 100% - which is, I shouldn’t need to stress, what the “whole population” is.

It gets a lot worse, though. In countries where there are more than two competitive parties, it is often the case that the president is elected only after a second round, because he could not achieve 50% of the votes in the first. It is not uncommon for the eventually elected president to have less than 30% of the votes in the first round, which would represent some 15% of the population who thought he was the best option from the start. Additionally, increasingly many voters actively dislike the candidate they end up voting for, but want to prevent someone else they dislike even more from winning.

If you point this out, people will raise objections which, though true, do not address the issue at hand. They will claim it is not reasonable to expect everyone to vote, nor unanimity regarding leadership. But having a legitimate government is necessary, so we must behave as if the outcome of the vote was the choice of everyone. Or, in Thomas Jefferson’s words:

the first principle of republicanism is that the lex majoris partis is the fundamental law of every society of individuals of equal rights: to consider the will of the society enounced by the majority of a single vote as sacred as if unanimous, is the first of all lessons in importance, yet the last which is thoroughly learnt

I happen to like this quote a lot, and fullly agree with it. But the point of the quote is that a decision taken by a slight majority should be formally respected just as much as a decision taken by unanimity. It’s a quote about the importance of abiding by the process. If a president won by a bare majority, no doubt he should have the same prerogatives as someone who won in a landslide. He should be allowed to make all the appointments reserved to the president, issue decrees, and live in the designed residence. Sabotaging their legally prescribed decisions goes against the rule of law. However, the authority to act according to legal prerogatives is rarely a problem for presidents elected with any majority. If they manage to be sworn in, it is rarer still.

When people invoke the “popular mandate” of the president to push for some policy change, they are trying to argue that even if some other institution has the constitutional prerogative to decide on the issue, that institution should recognize that “a president elected by the whole population” represents the will of the people better and do what the president wants. It is a moral argument, not a legal one. And as a moral argument, it absolutely fails given that presidents are as a rule elected by a share of the population which is not even that close to a majority.

Parliaments, on the other hand, resemble much more closely the varied interests of the population. And its members were all elected as well. If any institution can speak for the whole population, that is the one. Further, if they have approved - by majority - some law which gives an institution such as a Central Bank independence from the president, it means the interest of the whole population must be understood that way. Doing otherwise would is what actually be disregarding the decision of the majority. Jefferson warned, in continuation of the argument quoted above, that when one goes down that road, “no other [law] remains but that of force, which ends necessarily in military despotism.”

Some will say that the presidential election is the only one where the whole country votes for the same candidates, without geographic segmentation. But there’s no impediment for congressional elections to be that way. In Israel, voters do all choose from the same candidates in the whole country. But the people who believe the president has a “popular mandate” are never seen arguing for any country to adopt the Israeli model.

In sum, the idea that the president presumaly has the support of the whole population to make decisions not legally ascribed to him is an illusion. The next time a president tries to question Congress - or any other institution enabled by Congress to make decisions he is against - we might as well ask: “who is he to go against the will of the people?”

This is the second and final post on Parliamentarism and Economic Freedom. If you haven’t read the first yet, you probably should before getting to this one.

Having looked at how parliamentary and presidential countries compare in their economic freedom rankings and talked about theory, what does the academic research on the evidence tell us?

There are (unfortunately but perhaps predictably) few papers on the subject. I will rely mostly on the literature review by Murphy who identifies only two other papers (besides his own) which deal directly with the relationship between presidentialism vs parliamentarism and economic freedom.

• Mudambi, Ram, Pietro Navarra, and Chris Paul. "Institutions and market reform in emerging economies: A rent seeking perspective." Public Choice 112, no. 1 (2002): 185-202.

The authors select 29 countries they perceive as “economies in transition” at the time of writing. They run two regressions, using controls: the first examines the relationship between the level of economic freedom (as measured by the Economic Freedom of the World Report in 1995) and parliamentarism-presidentialism (as well as other independent variables), and the second, the relationship between changes in economic freedom in the period 1990-1995 and the same independent variables.

These are the results for the first:

And these the results for the second:

As long as PRES is not controlled for plurality voting, they find a positive and significant effect of presidentialism on economic freedom levels and change. My thesis says nothing about parliamentarism needing to be combined with plurality voting, and even if it is combined, the beneficial effect of parliamentarism for economic freedom would be so small it wouldn’t even be significant**. So what’s going on here?

Let’s look at the 29 countries they selected:

Argentina, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Greece, Hungary, Iran, Jordan, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, South Korea, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey***, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Following the pattern from the book, I have used italics for presidential countries, bold for parliamentary countries and no formatting for countries which are none. Jordan was dropped because the DPI doesn’t classify it as either parliamentary or presidential. Since the authors do not specify how they classified each country (though they relied on the CIA Factbook and the WDR), I once again follow the classification of the Database of Political Institutions 2017. As Jordan is a “neither”, I don’t use it in my own analysis.

A look at the countries reveals the selected “economies in transition” have some significant differences. Half of the parliamentary countries were communist until five years prior the observation. Among presidential countries, only Poland is formerly communist (yes, Poland is presidential according to the DPI and I choose to be consistent). The other “transition economies”, however, were much less in transition - they were capitalist all the time.

When I saw this list, I immediately hypothesized that the reason most of these countries had relatively lower levels of freedom was the fact that they were communist until briefly before. However, the authors include a control for Eastern European countries, which should capture this effect.

So I had no choice but to try to replicate their findings. There are some slight differences in my data, however. Instead of using data on plurality voting and form of government from Grofman and Reynolds, 2000 (I found the text but it did not come with the data), I used the DPI. I also did not use “number of electoral districts per million registered voters”. Their source for district data is the CIA World Factbook, 1998. I couldn’t find a clear way to get the info from the Factbook, so I dropped it.

Even though my changes to the approach are due to convenience, we could see it as a robustness test. After all, I changed very little. The results shouldn’t change much. Surprisingly, they are extremely different. This is my replication of their regression:

I ran twelve models, with robust standard errors like the original. Six used the 1995 data of the study, and six used data from 2022 (when the former communist countries would have had time to improve their scores). Parliamentarism has a negative coefficient only when I run the regression with 1995 data with no controls at all (reflecting that many parliamentary countries were formerly communist early in transition). After adding some controls, we get a positive coefficient for parliamentarism in all other 1995 specifications (but not significant).

When we run the regressions on 2022 data, parliamentarism has a positive and significant association with economic freedom in all specifications.

It seems the study is probably wrong, or very sensitive to slight changes in specification. I don’t believe that “number of districts per million registered voters” can have such a real effect and that parliamentarism is merely elusive for this one piece of data. I have made my data and code available if you would like to check.

• De Vanssay, Xavier, Vincent Hildebrand, and Zane A. Spindler. "Constitutional foundations of economic freedom: a time-series cross-section analysis." Constitutional Political Economy 16 (2005): 327-346.

The authors use a time-series cross-section approach, with data for the quinquennials between 1970 and 2000, and for 2001. The earliest data covers 53 countries, and the most recent cover 122. Their dependent variable is Fraser’s Economic Freddom Index. They find significant and positive results for parliamentarism, as the table below (from a replication in Murphy, 2022) shows:

We see that the positive relationship between parliamentarism and economic freedom resists to different specifications. By itself, I would not give too much weight on these regressions, since they leave out, for example, geographical controls. But the combination with my replication of the Mudambi paper above, which does include such controls, points to robustness. We have a very different specification and still we find parliamentarism to have positive results.

• Murphy, Ryan H. "The constitution of ambiguity: The effects of constitutions on economic freedom." Economic Affairs 42, no. 2 (2022): 240-258.

Murphy sets out to replicate the Vanssay et al’s study above. He first follows the exact same approach as Vanssay et al., but with the updated data. The results are mostly the same. Then he drops all of the data from Vanssay and uses only data from 2001-2019. As Murphy puts it, “These results are, if anything, far stronger evidence for the claims made in the original paper”:

Murphy runs some fixed-effects regressions with the same variables, and finds little which achieves conventional significance, but note that parliamentarism still has the expected sign.

He then changes approach and runs fixed-effects regressions with only one independent variable at a time. Now parliamentarism is once again positive and significant - and the fixed effects approach will address many of our concerns with endogeneity.

We once again see that parliamentarism has a significant relationship. I am not concerned with the other variables not included. For there to be ommited variable bias it would need to be the case that those variables not included in the fixed-effects regression contribute to a country becoming parliamentary and to a country’s economic freedom, but when we don’t include them we attribute the effect of the other variable to parliamentarism. I fail to see how that could be the case. This means I would say this paper brings some strong evidence that parliamentarism has a positive effect on economic freedom.

Unfortunately, that is not how the author read it. Not only is he unconvinced by the fixed-effects model, he ran another regression in which he checked whether parliamentarism had a positive effect on economic freedom in 2019, but controlling for their economic freedom level in 2000. That is, he checked whether the change in economic freedom was more positive under parliamentarism. And he found it wasn’t:

This leads Murphy to write in the abstract: “introducing almost any degree of identification draws results strongly into question.” I cannot understand why the change in economic freedom should drive the identification. Perhaps the benefits of parliamentarism are realized early, and presidential countries only later catch up. Lots of social phenomena work like that, like economic growth or life expectancy.

If we compared gains in life expectancy between rich countries and poor countries between the same years, the gains for the poor countries would be much greater. Does this mean being poor is better than being rich for a country’s health? Certainly not.

In sum, this is the state of the evidence. The literature is thin. One paper found negative results but my replication points to them actually being positive (again, do check my data and code). The other found positive results using a different approach, but wasn’t too rich. The third expanded the second one, found positive results with completely different data, and found positive results with a fixed-effects approach. The empirical literature points to the benefits of parliamentarism.

I recently had the chance to meet Alex Nowrasteh. The man is just as smart and nice as you’d think from reading his tweets and papers. While talking about my book, he mentioned how much he liked it, but that he missed a treatment of the relationship between parliamentarism and economic freedom - and that a friend of his suggested it was negative. I knew this was wrong and was sure I had addressed it in the book. I pulled out my phone, opened the kindle version and searched “economic freedom”. No results. Oops. Economic freedom, as research has shown time and again, is a major cause of development (besides the very real benefits of just giving more freedom to people). It should have been there. The next posts are how I will try to correct for this lapse.

What should make clear that parliamentarism couldn’t possibly be bad for economic freedom in any meaningful way is that all good things go together, and they all go with parliamentarism. Here’s a list of the top 30 economic freedom ranking, according to Fraser’s 2019 report:

Of the top 30, 22 are parliamentary and only 7 are presidential*. We can rest assured that, even if parliamentarism somehow had a negative effect on economic freedom if you controlled for everything else good it brings, this effect can’t possibly be so strong, given that the majority of the most free countries are parliamentary. But of course parliamentarism doesn’t have a negative effect on economic freedom, it has a very positive one. Indeed, that’s a central mechanism for why it performs better than presidentialism. The reason I must have left it out is that I thought it was implicit.

It was implicit to me because I argue parliaments make policies more rational (by avoiding the most pernicious effects of expressive voting/rational irrationality), as well as more cohesive (consequences of a horizontal division of powers instead of a vertical separation of powers) and balanced in terms of interests considered (through the application Political-Coasean bargains).

If we look at the share of justified existing limitations on economic freedom across all countries, however, we see they are a small set. When we encounter them, it’s usually because rationality, balance, or cohesion has failed. Take, for example, tariffs. Paul Krugman once said “If there were an Economist’s Creed, it would surely contain the affirmations ‘I believe in the Principle of Comparative Advantage’ and ‘I believe in Free Trade.’” But free trade is rejected by the great majority of people in all countries. This means that the more a form of government is influenced by rational irrationality (as I argue presidential systems are), the greater the chance it will limit economic freedom.

A lack of cohesiveness will also often promote limitations on economic freedom. Suppose there are several inefficient rules. For example, there might be a high tariff (which favors import substititution sectors in detriment of exporters) but also an export subsidy (doing the exact opposite). It would be better for both sectors to lift both limitations, but because of the lack of cohesiveness, they are caught in a prisoner’s dilemma whereby they prefer not to risk losing the assured benefit for a potentially illusory gain. Parliamentarism, you will recall, has much greater cohesiveness.

Likewise a lack of balance will tend to limit economic freedom. The most obvious example are legal monopolies on some business activities which are granted to people close to those in power. But any favoritism (by definition) involves a lack of balance in interests considered. Presidential systems, with their winner-take-all nature, are fundamentally unbalanced.

So we have a strong case for parliamentarism increasing economic freedom. At the very least, we have an ironclad case for it not being too detrimental to it.

On a second post, I will examine the (scarce) empirical literature on the subject. We’ll see that it also points to advantages of parliamentarim.

*As usual, I rely on the classification of the Database of Political Institutions.

The title of my book and this blog is an invitation to suspend the general skepticism regarding parliamentarism and evaluate it the way we evaluate other proposals (like capitalism and socialism). Extending the exercise, we should also ask: what is the case for presidentialism? Why should we maintain our support for so many countries stick to this system?

As I write in the book, the academic case for presidentialism is basically non-existent. Cheibub is considered the greatest authority for undermining the case for parliamentarism (readers of the book will recall I dispute he is persuasive), but even Cheibub never argues that presidentialism is better than parliamentarism. He only says that there isn’t such a difference. Persson and Tabellini argue in favor of separation of powers (also unconvingly, I claim), but they never address a key condition for presidentialism, so important in fact that no country which does not fulfill it is called presidential: the personalization of executive power.

The argument from tradition

An argument which became famous some years ago is Chesterton’s fence. According to this, one should not remove a fence if they don’t know its purpose. They should first learn the purpose and, if the conclusion is that it is not necessary anymore, then remove the fence. That is, if a practice evolved traditionally and we don’t really know how it became widespread and why, then the burden of proof for showing it is unnecessary falls upon those who want to change the practice. So, perhaps, we shouldn’t mess with presidentialism because it is part of tradition.

As an aside, I must say don’t find the argument usually convincing, and I believe nobody really does either. If we had to know what the people who invented some practice were thinking every time we proposed some change, we would condemn ourselves to stagnation. We used to have socities which behaved much like that, and they had very little progress. It was only after the innovation culture of the Enlightenment spread that the world entered the era of unparalleled progress we live in. My sensation is that people only selectively cry “Chesterton’s fence” when they can’t justify resisting a specific change. Change the subject, and the same people will remove fences without blinking.

But even if you find the argument persuasive, it doesn’t apply here. Presidentialism isn’t traditional in the sense of an evolved pracice which we don’t know the origins. It is only traditional in the sense that it has been practiced for quite some time now. We know how presidentialism came about. Montesquieu wrote “The Spirit of Law”, Americans used that to create a first version of presidentialism, and Bolivar used the American precedent to create the presidentialism which is most commonly applied in many parts of the world, notably Latin America and Africa. Presidentialism is not the result of tradition, it is the result of very old, very flawed, social engineering.

So why presidentialism?

This means that asking why should a country stick to presidentialism is absolutely relevant. What my experience debating this issue has revealed is that the arguments in favor of presidentialism, those which most people who do not support parliamentarism inevitably believe, are not to be found in the literature, because they are too incoherent to be published. The type of arguments people present are not in favor of a system of separation of powers, a collective legislature and a personalized presidency. They are arguments in favor of presidents against parliaments.

The conversations are almost always the same. I will present the case for parliamentarism, I will talk about the theory, the evidence, all of it. People will immediately retort: “that’s all well and good, but have you seen country X’s Congress? They are a bunch of [corrupt/incompetent/parochial/unaccountable/all of that together] politicians.” Let’s put aside that I don’t think presidents are better in any of those dimensions. The question I raise is this: if all of that is true, why should there be a Congress at all?

This tends to inflict cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, they believe deep down that parliaments - or at least the parliament we are talking about - are indeed as bad as they first claimed. But at a gut level they also realize that not having an elected parliament would open up all sorts of authoritarian possibilities for the president.

People usually don’t get to the point I’m going to make, but they could argue that the separation of powers is essential. OK, then why not have a personalized legislature and judiciary in the same way as the executive? We would have a president of the executive, a president of the legislature (also able to appoint and remove all of their “cabinet”) and a president of the judiciary with similar powers.

I have never seen anyone proposing any of these possible arrangements. Neither to have a single person concentrate all of the power, nor have three people heads of the executive, legislative and judiciary. Not in writing, nor in conversation. And I have heard or read all sorts of proposals.

So, no matter how [corrupt etc.] people think a parliament is, they still recognize, at some level, that it plays an essential role. And that means they have a much, much, harder task than I do. I try to demonstrate that the simple solution “parliaments should have the power to define government, in all its aspects” is the better one. Besides its simplicity, this solution has plenty of theory of evidence in its favor already. Their task, however, is to show that whatever the balance of powers between presidents and parliaments which has been implemented in a country just happens to be close to the optimal one, even though it is a relationship which varies considerably from country to country, and whose variation has little to do with Chestertonian trial and error and a lot to do with what the elites of the country understood at a theoretical level would be best at the time the constitutions were written.

A daunting task. I can’t see why we should still give proponents of presidentialism the benefit of doubt before they successfully complete it.

“Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

Milton Friedman

I have written about how surprisingly persuasive the parliamentary cause is. You might want to check the post, but I essentially make the case based on my personal experience. I have tried to persuade people of hundreds of things in my life, with little success. Parliamentarism is the one thing there is a good chance you will leave a conversation with me convinced it really does matter and is superior to presidentialism. When it comes to convincing people that advocating for parliamentarism is a good use of their time, alas, it seems I return to my general not-that-persuasive self. In this International Day of Parliamentarism, I am working to correct this.

Before making my case, let us get a few things out of the way. Yes, I am aware that the chances that the tens of presidential countries will suddenly realize the errors of their way and adopt parliamentarism are slim. Institutional inertia is a powerful force. But relative presidential versus parliamentary power is always changing, so being in a presidential country with little chance of going full parliamentary does not mean you can improve a bit, nor does being in a parliamentary country which will not become presidential overnight protect you from creeping presidential aspects.

My point today, however, is different. If you are anything like me, you do not put much thought on what t-shirt you will wear on any given day. You just grab whatever one is on the top of the drawer, particularly if you are in a rush. After reading “Shock to the System: Coups, Elections, and War on the Road to Democratization”, by Michael K. Miller, I have become convinced[1] that major constitutional change often happens in a very similar way to the one I pick my t-shirts. Arrangements linger for a while. Sometimes, a shock affects the system (hence the name of the book) which provoke major changes all at once. But the direction of change is not determined by a deep, society-wide reflection on what institutions will better serve the country, there is no time for that. What happens is that elites with influence over those directions – if they are inclined to implement inclusive institutions – will pick the type of institutional arrangement most prominent for them at the time. This often-hurried choice, however, will have long-lasting consequences.

Which brings me to a second book I read recently: “Constitutional Law and the Politics of Ethnic Accommodation: Institutional Design in Afghanistan”, by Bashir Mobasher. As many of us vividly remember, following the American-led occupation of Afghanistan there were fervent vows and high hopes of implementing a strong democracy in the country. The comparative political science consensus about the superiority of parliamentarism was even stronger then (that is, before the publication of Cheibub’s “Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, and Democracy”) than it is now. Yet Mobasher shows that, contrary to a common view that Americans do not push for presidentialism in other countries, that was exactly the type of constitution the suddenly extremely influential American officials sought.

Mobasher makes a compelling case that the constitutional design of a very weak parliament vis-à-vis the president effectively doomed the democratic prospects of Afghanistan, which, under a different, parliamentary, constitution, could have been much better.

Why did the framers of Afghanistan’s constitution pick presidentialism? Quite simply, it was the system they were more familiar with, the one they associated with strong democracy. Had the comparative political science consensus broken out of academia into the ranks of bureaucracy, the lives of millions of Afghans might have been completely different, and much better.

For me, reading Mobasher’s arguments is particularly sobering. Ever since I learned of the benefits of parliamentarism I noticed that Afghanistan had a presidential constitution and Iraq a parliamentary one, and that Afghanistan was faring much worse than Iraq, despite expectations being the reverse early on. When democracy was officially ended, and everyone was convinced that deep structural Afghan-specific factors were the whole story and that the constitution played no role, I was not convinced, but I was still completely unfamiliar with the situation so I would not pass judgment. Mobasher’s book shows that the constitution was a key factor (the key factor, in his view) for the failure.

Comparative political scientists could have warned about the risks when the constitution was being drafted. But they were not top-of-mind; a political scientist that did have an influence was a specialist in Afghanistan, and he argued for presidentialism. So did the American ambassador then – also not a comparativist – who argued Afghanistan needed a “strong president” and that a parliamentary monarchy was not a “modern” form of government. Can we blame those who picked their advice? I don’t think so. As I argue in the book, there is an unexamined consensus so strong we don’t even notice it, like fish don’t notice water, that local circumstances are the determinant factor for the failure or success of societies.

Millions of people have a less thriving life because of presidentialism. The causal relationship to any specific life, however is much more difficult to grasp than, say, in the case of someone who lost a limb due to war. But those consequences are still real. These people will miss more chances to be more prosperous; to be free to speak their minds; to live in a more comfortable house; to have secure access to food; to get proper health care. If advocating for parliamentarism can increase the chances that they don’t have to go through that even a teeny tiny bit, I think it is still worth it. But even setting that aside, advocating parliamentarism is a duty, so that we make sure next time there is a choice that must be made, we don’t impose upon any future society unnecessary challenges like those the Afghans had to face. Parliamentarism has to be the t-shirt on the very top of the stack.

[1] A loyal reader (my dad?) might be wondering if this means a radical change from the views I expressed, along with Otaviano Canuto, on the paper “It’s Evolution, Baby – how institutions can improve without critical junctures.” Though the book has tempered my views somewhat, by no means it was a radical change. First, “Shock to the System” deals with democratization episodes, while our paper is about increases in the inclusiveness of institutions in general. Second, Miller’s book in fact argues that the most reliable way to democratize and keep it that way is through an evolutionary path. While shocks catalyze democratization, the democracies they engender often don’t last long.

So goes the old joke: “How’s the water?” asks a fish to the other. “What on Earth is water???” is the answer. As jokes often do, this one captures a deeper truth. When we are very familiar with something, we might not even conceive of what it means not to have it. This seems to be happening with economic growth. For centuries, sustained growth was virtually nonexistent. Empires would rise and fall, languages and cultures change, populations migrate, but aggregate economic activity in the world would stay basically the same. Notably, even when there were spurts of economic growth, standards of living would still only fluctuate around the same baseline, because increases in populations would ensure that most people would only have access to the bare minimum to survive. The long term history of humankind is Malthusian. 

A few centuries ago, however, things drastically changed. What seemed impossible – a sustained improvement in standards of living – began to happen in ever more countries. England was famously first. While its GDP per capita barely increased from the 13th to the 17th century, in the subsequent years it went up around 1500%. Remarkably, other European countries and some offshoots experienced a similar process. The process spread to more and more countries and the world is now vastly richer than it has ever been. Today, very few countries have income per capita lower than England in 1700. Of course, it is a sad fact that even one country would have a lower GDP per capita in 2024 than England in 1700. But the reason this is particularly sad is exactly because we know growth can happen. A thousand years ago, this would be a fact of life.

The main quality of the GDP per capita statistic, however, can be a shortcoming as well: its simplicity. Thrown around like that, it can seem like a mere number. It is anything but. They reflect true revolutions in the lives of billions of people. More people today feel safe they will have enough to feed their children on any given day. More people have a roof to protect them. More people have access to education. More people live longer and overall healthier lives. They travel to meet their parents who live in a different city, or they do it just to know new places. They play musical instruments. They throw a large wedding party. They bury their dead according to their customs. All of those things are possible because of the world’s much greater productive capacity today.

There is a major caveat, however. Billions of people still do not enjoy standards of living that allow them to achieve anything close to their potential flourishing. The overwhelming majority of those people are poor people living in low and medium income countries. If growth were to stop, those people would never have the chance fully live the marvels of the escape from poverty.

This is important context when we talk about degrowth. The degrowth movement, concentrated mainly in the richest countries in the world, argues that we should try to reduce the amount of production and consumption in the world today. They argue that there is no other way to save the planet. The paragraphs above certainly do not refute their thesis, but it makes one thing clear: if they are right, it would be extremely sad.

Fortunately, though, they are wrong. There are many flavors of degrowth, but the one unifying aspect of the movement is expressed by the following syllogism: “The natural resources of the planet are limited. If the resources are limited, there cannot be infinite economic growth. If there cannot be infinite economic growth, we must limit our use of resources immediately, lest we have to face some collapse which would be much worse than an orderly limitation”.

The conclusion, however, does not follow from the premises. Many readers will suspect that I will dispute the assertion that it is impossible to have infinite growth with finite resources. Indeed, this is what most economists object to about the degrowther case. Their argument is that it is perfectly possible to have infinite growth with finite resources, because growth derives not from the resources themselves but from the ideas used to apply the same resources in much more efficient ways. Degrowthers respond that, by necessity, there must be some limit to ideas as well, particularly a limit to useful ones.

I plead ignorance on that debate. It does not matter for my case. The reason the conclusion does not follow from the premises is that, even if it were true that finite resources precludes infinite growth, this does not say anything on whether some growth is still possible, and that it might be desirable.

If it is true that infinite growth is impossible with finite resources, this is not only true now. It has been true forever. It was true when the first person used fire to cook a meal, increasing productivity. Should they have eaten their food raw? It was true when the wheel was invented, increasing production. Should it not have been? It was true at the time of the invention of the steam engine, the spinning jenny, Gutenberg’s printing press, the telephone and the bicycle. 

We see that the alleged impossibility of infinite growth in a finite planet is far from the decisive argument degrowthers make it to be. By itself, it is actually irrelevant for any decision regarding the sustainability of any mode of production. We have to know if a given level of GDP is incompatible with the capacity of the planet.

Degrowthers may protest that the current mode of production in the world is unsustainable. They would be right. Still, this does not show in any way that it is not possible to have much more growth in a sustainable manner. Total Natural Resources Rents (that is, the difference between the price of a commodity and the average cost of producing it) comprised only 1.64% of world GDP. This means that almost the totality of what makes GDP does not come from natural resources, but from how those resources are organized. There are numerous innovation possibilities – solar energy costs, to give an example, declined 89% in just one decade, and they keep falling. It may be possible that someday there will be no more ideas to improve the state of the economy, but for all practical purposes, right now we might just as well behave as if there was an infinite stock of discoverable innovations.

Having established that degrowth premises would be terrible if true, but that they are thankfully not, we should turn to the dangers of promoting such views. The first and most obvious one is – they might win. There is a real, even if not large, possibility that governments do reject growth and act to prevent it. Sadly, governments are perfectly able to stop growth if they so want. This would condemn huge swathes of the world population to a much worse life than they might have under growth. And – I regret to say – redistribution alone would not solve this. Even if we could perfectly distribute world income today without having the economy suffer – something we have no reason to believe is possible – world GDP per capita is currently 12 thousand dollars, below the poverty line in advanced economies. 

But there is a second danger, which I believe is much greater: the risk that efforts for building a sustainable economy get discredited altogether. Human tenacity is a powerful force. There’s little one can say to convince a person in poverty that they should not strive to improve their and their families’ lives. Degrowthers, by framing the discussion regarding protecting the resources of the planet in ways which will be wholly unacceptable to the people – and the governments which represent them – in the poorest areas of the world, will prevent innovative solutions which allow for growth while protecting those resources.

Sustainable Development must be the objective we insist on pursuing. It was agreed upon in Rio de Janeiro, in 1992, by more than 100 heads of states and representatives of 178 governments. It was correct then, and is correct now. Further, despite legitimate concerns with the rate of progress (and a few alarmist cries), the world is advancing, on both fronts. There has never been a period of greater decline in poverty than the one since the Rio Declaration. There has also been significant progress in renewables and environmental protection. Perhaps many would like to have seen much greater progress for the environment. I would too. I would also would like to have seen much greater progress in poverty reduction than we had. If we work harder, keep focus, and concentrate on actually worthy goals, we very well might.

Malapportionment is such a hardly used word that the spellchecker is screaming at me every time I write it. Yet however rare the word is, this thing is a great impediment for the proper functioning of parliaments, and hence for democracies.

Wikipedia tells us that “Malapportionment is the creation of electoral districts with divergent ratios of voters to representatives.” That is, whenever a representative must be elected by more constituents than one of their peers, you get malapportionment. The US and the Brazilian Senates are clear examples. A US Senator candidate running in Wyoming must win a race decided by 280,489 voters. In California, there are 18 million voters deciding the same two seats - a ratio of 64. In the Brazilian Senate, the ratio between São Paulo and Roraima is even higher - 94.

In lower houses, the problem is usually less dire, but can still be pretty serious. In the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, for example, there’s a rule that no state should have less than 8 deputies nor more than 70. This means that a Roraima vote is still ten times more powerful than a São Paulo vote even in the Brazilian equivalent of the House of Representatives.

Now even if malapportionment is not the most popular word, the concept itself might be pretty familiar to anyone who likes to think about democracy. But the conversation on malapportionment seems to always revolve around fairness. In the interest of full disclosure, I happen to think that the fairness case against malapportionment wins hands down. I don’t see any coherence in saying that “states should be equally represented.” But that is not the approach I am taking here. There are plenty of texts on that already.

What I am arguing is that malapportionment makes parliaments less functional. And because parliaments are central to the working of democracy (see, er, “Why Not Parliamentarism?”) , this is a danger for good governance.

Why do parliaments work at all? I’m using “work” here in a very narrow sense. Why do the decisions made by a group of people in a building have such wide consequences? Remember that old Seinfeld joke:

Jerry : I don't understand. Do you have my reservation?

Rental Car Agent : We have your reservation, we just ran out of cars.

Jerry : But the reservation keeps the car here. That's why you have the reservation.

Rental Car Agent : I think I know why we have reservations.

Jerry : I don't think you do. You see, you know how to *take* the reservation, you just don't know how to *hold* the reservation. And that's really the most important part of the reservation: the holding. Anybody can just take them.

Well, anyone can make their own parliament as well. I could gather a group of people and start passing laws tomorrow and claim everyone should follow them. It wouldn’t work, of course. It’s getting people to perceive parliaments decisions as binding which “is really the most important part.”

Parliaments work because they gather some of the most influential people representing different groups in a society to deliberate about an issue and see which proposal has a greater number of influential people backing it. It economizes on conflict. Suppose each member of parliament represents an equally powerful army. One way they could try to solve their issues is by waging war. After losses on the different sides, the side with most armies would win in expectation - since we are stipulating they are equally powerful. Alternatively, the leaders of the armies could simply gather around somewhere where they could all be heard and, after they seemed that all possible mutually beneficial arrangements had been exhausted, have a vote. Since the vote would represent the likely outcome of the war, they might as well skip the war and implement the decision. This makes the voting results extremely informative.

Now suppose that the representatives in the assembly had no relationship whatsoever to the power of the army they represent. There could be a 60% vote on an issue, but that might not represent at all the true forces at play. The stronger side, in the minority of the vote, could still think they might as well fight over it. This would make the assembly much less effective than it might otherwise be.

War is of course only the most extreme version of conflict, and force the most extreme version of trying to exert influence. Power has multiple sources in society, and can be expressed through the economy, media, and activism. The rationale, however, remais the same.

Now there’s a twist. Because people avoid conflict the vast majority of the time, the highly visible decisions of assemblies, following well-established procedures, which have created an expectation of being followed, can serve as anchors on what behavior may be expected from everyone else, even if those assemblies don’t exactly reflect the real balance of power. Parliaments acquire a power of their own. With time, that disconnect may grow. This creates for room for a different kind of conflict. The people who are overrepresented in the assembly with respect to how much influence they independently exert in society will have an incentive not to have the assembly realign representation in terms of independent influence. This will often be in their short term interest (and in the long run, they might well be dead or at least not have a seat).

The underrepresented sectors, however, will increasingly use their independent sources of influence to get things their way. Parliaments will be increasingly undermined. We will then progressively lose the main value they offer, which is a space for deliberation of alternatives and assessment of forces. In the end, outcomes will be worse for all involved, including those which are overrepresented. If the disconnect gets bad enough, the institution itself might lose all its power and society may resort to true open conflict, a disastrous outcome anytime.

Malapportionment is a chronic disease. It won’t destroy societies overnight. But it can, gradually and steadily, make them less and less functional to the point it may create open conflict. So we should avoid it as if it were an acute disease. Like - and I’m just thinking of an example here - the plague?

Update: the authors have clarified that not including State Capacity or GDP related variables does not change the direction of the presidential variable. I'm truly puzzled. Trying to organize my thoughts around this at the moment.

I believe one of the greatest shortcomings in how we have been producing statistical papers is the lack of attention to what controls should be included. While the absence of a control is vigorously (and often rightly) attacked, the inclusion of a bad control rarely raises concerns. This gives rise to the problem Garett Jones calls "Everest regression":  "controlling for height, Mount Everest isn’t that cold."

As Cinelli, Forney and Pearl put it (free here):

The problem of “bad controls” however, has not received systematic attention in the standard statistics and econometrics literature. While most of the widely adopted textbooks discuss the problem of omitting “relevant” variables, they do not provide guidance on deciding which variables are relevant, nor which variables, if included in the regression, could induce, or worsen existing biases. Researchers exposed only to this literature may get the impression that adding “more controls” to a regression model is always better. The few exceptions that do discuss the problem of “bad controls” unfortunately cover only a narrow aspect of the problem.

You should definitely check the full article, but let me try to summarize the issue. A good control will remove bias from an estimate, by not making the effect of an unspecified variable look like it is the effect of the independent variable you are examining. Classic example of a good control: if you run a correlation between the number of people who took their umbrella out of the house on a sunny day and the rain episodes, you would find that taking umbrellas would have a very large correlation with rain, and because it precedes it, you might infer umbrellas cause rain. If you control for the weather forecast on the day, however, the relationship would mostly disappear, as it should. 

A bad control, on the other hand, introduces bias into the regression. Let's say we want to examine the effect of drinking alcohol the day before a test and test scores. We run a regression, find a huge negative effect. But assume that we can control for the quality of sleep the night before (using monitors, for example) and find out that the effect mostly vanishes. Is this uninteresting? Certainly not, it gives evidence (assumed evidence, to be sure, I don't have real information on this) that the main mechanism which makes students do worse on tests is through bad quality of sleep. The problem arises when one tries to use this as evidence that drinking alcohol will not affect test scores. It will, because it will affect your sleep, and that in turn will affect the test scores. So if you want to assess the effect of drinking alcohol on test scores (instead of assessing the mechanism by which alcohol affects test scores) you should not control for quality of sleep. In this case, quality of sleep is an intermediate outcome, one of the cases of bad controls. 

Unfortunately, the inclusion of bad controls in the literature comparing presidential and parliamentary systems is all too common. A noteworthy example is the recent chapter by  Hicken, Baltz, and Vasselai (HBV) - which they generously shared with me - in the new and impressive  "Why Democracies Develop and Decline".  HBV set out to compare how presidential and parliamentary systems compare in achieving democracy. The problem is that they include in their model state capacity.

State capacity, as they put it, is comprised of "coercive capacity, administrative capacity, and legitimacy." Coercive capacity is "the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its territory." Administrative capacity is " capacity of the bureaucracy to design and effectively implement public services and regulations across a country’s territory."  Lastly, legitimacy "refers to agreement by the citizenry about the boundaries of the state and the rules for inclusion and exclusion."  

When HBV run their regressions, they find that while state capacity has a huge effect on democracy levels, parliamentarism does not. In fact, parliamentarism has a negative effect. 

But readers of the book will realize that state capacity is a clear outcome of parliamentarism. The main benefits of parliamentarism are directly associated with causing them, and the good outcomes listed in the book (economic growth, less inequality, less corruption) are derived from a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, a capacity to implement public services, and legitimacy. How could they not? How could parliamentarism have no effect on these variables yet still promote democracy? How can democracy be promoted when the State does not have those qualities?

As evidence that most people do agree that state capacity is clearly related to democracy levels, the huge relationship between state capacity and democracy levels is not the result of the chapter which seems to be getting attention, it is the negative result of parliamentarism (for example Democracy and Autocracy April 2021 and Justin Kempf's excellent Democracy Paradox podcast). This is probably because no one is surprised by the finding. In this case, what state capacity is doing in their models is serve as a control, which should not be there. 

I suspect that this chapter will be hugely influential, being a part of a book which has every element of an instant classic. I would regret if this meant that people would conclude that parliamentarism is not a major promoter of democracy. 

I'm not a specialist in voting systems. Because of my interest in improving institutions, however, I get asked about my thoughts on it with some frequency. Considering how I wish more people would share their views on parliamentarism, specialists or not, I thought it was only fair to expect of me to share my views on this topic too, so here it goes.

In short, I think voting systems might make a large difference, though probably not as large as parliamentarism, and I think that implementing such a reform would be at least as hard as promoting parliamentarism, if not harder.

Why I think the difference is probably not as large

I'm quite happy with the structure I applied to evaluate the parliamentary question in my book. Have it sanity checked, examine the theory, examine the direct evidence, examine auxilirary evidence. In all of these matters, I don't find the case for proportional representation (or the case for majoritarian representation, for that matter), as convincing as a transformative measure (but I'm not confident that it isn't either, as will make clear). 

Let's take the sanity check. Is it true that countries with proportional representation do that much better? Yes, to some extent. Most countries in Europe, the most developed region in the world, are not only parliamentary, but they also adopt proportional representation. If we examine presidential countries, the ones which have adopted proportional representation (concentrated in Latin America) seem to be doing better overall than the ones which adopt majoritarian elections (concentrated in Africa).  Parliamentary countries which adopt majoritarian systems can be very successful (like Canada, Japan, or Australia), but also not as successful as most European countries (like some Caribbean islands).

When we look at history, do we see that proportional representation was as important as parliamentarism for the great enrichment? I'm not so sure (but do correct me). When we look at the history of PR, we see that its adoption is relatively recent, when the advancements in institutions in Europe and its offshoots were already well underway. 

The success of countries which stuck to the majoritarian model also seems to point that PR is not that decisive. Yes, there are successful presidential countries too, but as I point out in the book, those seem to be exactly the ones that have the strongest parliaments, so they seem like parliamentarized presidential countries. But does it make sense to say that Canada or Japan are proportionalized majoritarian countries? Doesn't seem like it. 

When we look at theory, I also don't find the rationale as compelling. Yes, there is good theory in favor of PR, I quite like Huey Li's "Dividing the Rulers". But that theory seems to be particularly reliant on the rational voter assumption - that people vote their interests and their representatives defend those interests in parliaments. As I argue in the book, however, I see many reasons not to give too much weigh to the capacity of voters to hold their representatives accountable. Their main (and crucial) role seems to be in selecting reasonably competent and virtuous people which will be responsible for definig policy in a negotiated instead of a personalized way. And majoritarian elections can accomplish that.

What about the empirical evidence? I know one important study by Knutsen (feel free to point to others) which does find very large benefits from PR. Importantly, that study finds PR to be more important and more robust than parliamentarism itself, so that should count. But I fear that the restriction to democracies may introduce an effect of selection on the outcome, if there's something to the hypothesis that PR+presidentialism is a difficult combination. In other words, if we systematically drop the countries that have PR and presidentialism because they rarely become stable democracies, we will have more parliamentary+PR and presidential+majoritarian in the sample, so that the effect of parliamentarism might be attributed to PR. 

When it comes to auxiliary evidence, it doesn't seem nearly as clear as with respect to parliamentarism. First, I don't think that we have good studies showing differences in local government performance depending on PR or majoritarian in the same way as we have for "parliamentary" and "presidential" municipalities in the US. Why not? Most importantly, it seems that PR is very rarely used in companies, which can be achieved through the "cumulative voting" method which tries to ensure minority representation. Boards of directors are overwhelmingly majoritarian. To paraphrase the old saying, if PR is so good, why aren't people using it to get rich?

[Edited to add argument some thought was worth including] The point on the  the relative importance of parliamentarism or proportional representation may be clearer if we flip the argument. I think presidentialism is more harmful than majoritarian elections, if only  because presidential elections are the least proportional possible. We assign power to a single person. And in practice, in a separation of powers country, control of the executive seems more determinant of a country's policies than control of the legislative. 

Why I think it is at least as hard to implement as parliamentarism

Set aside the current relative popularity of parliamentarism and PR as causes. Consider what entails, in practice, switching from majoritarian to PR (or the other way around, as many propose for Latin American countries). The whole logic of who gets elected would change. That is the point of the reform. But if a country already adopts a system, we should expect that its politicians have a comparative advantage at getting elected under that same system. So the people responsible for implementing that reform would likely be those which stand to lose the most from it. 

What does parliamentarism entail for politicians in a presidential regime? For the vast majority, that they would be empowered. Of course, the current president of any country would not like to see their power curtailed. But such a reform could be designed in such a way that it would only be implemented after the president had left the office, in which case their opposition could be expected to greatly diminish. In fact, as I argue in the book, it can be a lot safer to be a former leader of a parliamentary country than to be the former leader of a highly personalized country. In his most recent book, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita shows that this was true of monarchs when creating and conceding powers to parliaments. I believe the logic still holds for presidents. 

One may object, however, that it is obvious that the relative popularity of parliamentarism and PR is not the same. The opinion in favor of PR is much more widespread than the opinion in favor of parliamentarism. I would agree, but point out that the relative neglectedness of a cause which, if given support, could be feasibly implemented, is an argument in favor of pushing for it, not against.

All in all, I support PR and hope it gets implemented. But I think that parliamentarism is still a better cause for anyone to push for, and particularly for me. 

"Perhaps one of the best indicators of overall performance among countries is the UN Development Program’s Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index, which measures the equal access citizens have to employment, health care and education. In this index, only 2 of the top 30 countries are presidential, and none of the them are in the top 20."

Why did I say that: I examined at the list of 30 countries in the UN Index and saw only two presidential countries: United States and Cyprus. Why it's wrong: the list includes Hong Kong - which isn't presidential, for sure, but is also not a UN country, so it should not have figured in the table. With its absence, Republic of Korea (presidential) becomes 30th. Second, I did not count Poland as presidential. I overlooked Poland because I personally do not consider it to be presidential. The thing is, the data I use, the Database of Political Institutions, does consider it that way, and I want to be consistent throughout. So while this does not change the fact that no presidential country is in the top 20 (or the top 24, for that matter) countries in the IHDI, the consistent approach would give four presidential countries in the top 30. 

Lastly, I should re-state I do not think this changes the conclusions. I also truly appreciate further corrections, however much I dislike doing these posts.

I try to back my statements here with as much published theory and evidence as possible. For this post, I won't be able to do that and will rely solely on personal experience. However, I still find that the pattern I have observed is significant enough it bears mentioning. Parliamentarism is the most persuasive cause I have ever advocated for. By persuasive I mean a cause which people do not see as obviously correct (as democracy and human rights, for example) but that, after reading or hearing the arguments for a while, they come out a lot more sympathetic to it. 

You may think that this is some sort of humble-bragging, just me writing about how persuasive I believe I am. Let me try to persuade you (ha!) it is not. I have taken an interest in public policy from a relatively early age and have tried to persuade people of several things which seem to me to have a lot of good theory and evidence in their favor, and the results are often disappointing. Whenever I try to present to skeptics the best case for ideas such as free trade, no zoning, congestion charging, urban density, cash transfers, no state-level language planning, nuclear power, the use of cost-benefit analysis, freer migration, among other proposals which I believe have a wealth of good arguments in their favor, the result is almost invariably frustration on both sides*. 

My experience arguing for parliamentarism, however, is the exact opposite. People start out extremely skeptical it could have much of an effect, and their intuition is that the direct election of a president is a good thing in itself. As we advance in the conversation, it is very often the case that the person comes out substantially more sympathetic to the idea. As I said, I do not have hard data on this, but I have had enough interactions by now to see a clear distinction. 

The people involved in these interactions (me and friends and colleagues) are the same, so if not the intrinsic persuasiveness of the argument, what could be biasing the result? There are two best candidates, but I think neither of them satisfactorily explain the difference. The first one is social desirability bias on the part of the people that talk to me or give me feedback. These friends and colleagues know how much time I have invested in making an argument in favor of parliamentarism and would not like to hurt my feelings. But if that is the main cause, why would they react so strongly against the idea before hearing it and gradually change their mind as we discuss the issue? They could very well give a general "congrats on your passion for this cause, nice job" and change the subject. But they do engage with the arguments, present a great number of specific objections, and seem to come out satisfied with the counterpoints I propose. The second possibility is that I just know a lot more arguments for parliamentarism than for the other causes. This is indubitably true, but I also think I know enough of the arguments for the other causes so that it would be enough to persuade the people I interact with. 

While I do not completely disregard the second possibility that I argue better in favor of parliamentarism than in favor of the other stuff, I am increasingly convinced that parliamentarism is indeed a persuasive cause in itself. If that is true, it could signicantly alter the cost-benefit analysis of advocacy for parliamentarism as I very roughly presented here and make it even more attractive. That would be great news.  

One of the most common critiques I hear to proposing parliamentarism in a given country is that “it may well work for Europe where legislators are particularly public-oriented and honest, but not in my country.”

Most people who argue this way do not realize that this argument is of the type that claims that democracies work only if a population is sensible enough, and that some populations just aren’t. While I would not dismiss it just because it is not socially desirable to state such a thing, I will note that it does imply this socially undesirable conclusion. The soccer player Pelé once said that he did not think Brazilians were ready to vote for president. He was heavily criticized at the time and anyone one who suggests such a thing will be equally criticized. Why is it so acceptable to suggest, then, that Europeans and Canadians know how to vote for legislators but not Latin Americans?

Parliamentarists, instead, propose that voters in any given country vote – for practical purposes – equally well and equally badly. In a parliamentary environment, they vote well enough such that the incentives the legislators face will steer the country in a better direction, and they vote badly enough in a presidential environment such that the country’s outcomes will be far worse.

People are often skeptical that the incentive framework can affect in such a way behaviors which seem so intrinsically connected to the morality of the agents. But that is an error, which has its own fancy name: the fundamental attribution error. As Wikipedia explains, this is "'the tendency to believe that what people do reflects who they are',[1] that is, to overattribute their behaviors (what they do or say) to their personality and underattribute them to the situation or context."

Here is an example on how a simple rule can dramatically affect how fair and efficient a distribution of resources is. Suppose two kids have to split a slice of cake among themselves, and that the marginal benefit of more cake is decreasing - that is, kids prefer to have more cake than less, but going from no cake to a little bit of cake is much more valuable than going from almost all of the cake to literally all of the cake. It is clear then that the most efficient distribution is to split in half. 

Kids may spend a lot of time arguing over who will be the decider on how to split. One may argue that he is fairer in general and the other more selfish. Then one may argue that they have a better sense of space and will do a better job dividing it evenly than the other. It may also be argued that one of them knows how to split in such a way that the cake's form is most intact. It is easy to see how all of these arguments may be met with distrust. If one of the kids is tasked with dividing the cake and assigning which portion goes to whom, we may expect that the divider may benefit themselves.

Now if the kids adopt the divide-and-choose method, they will easily get to the efficient solution. One kid is tasked with dividing the cake into two portions. The other will get to choose one of the portions for themselves, and the divider will get the remaining portion. The divider then has every incentive to be as fair as possible in the division, since he will get the portion which is perceived to be the worst by the chooser. Notice that if one of them genuinely is better in dividing cake without damaging the frosting, they will both agree this should be the divider.

Or think of what the equilibrium price is in a monopolistic market or a competitive one. Producers which follow the same profit-maximizing strategy will practice very different prices, making much more profit under a monopoly, and setting their production levels below the efficient level. This happens independently of any intrinsic altruistic motive in their part.

In this post, I will try to show through a simple numerical model, yet still realistic, that the choice over presidentialism or parliamentarism can have similar effects on the final behavior of an assembly.

Suppose 100 politicians have to decide on a project. They are all convinced that their own project is the best . They value that at 1000 (while the others value it at 0). The second best project has wider support, but is less valuable to each individual politician than their own personal project. Assume politicians each value approving the "common good project" at 100. Status quo is valued at 0.  

Now suppose presidentialism.

The president wants to approve his personal project. He won’t get the votes, unless he uses transfers, which are taken from everyone proportionally. Now the president offers 10 dollars for the first 50 people who vote for his project, independently of his proposal passing or not. Given he controls allocation of resources because of his privileged legal position, he can do that kind of promise.

For any individual person, the choice is either vote for the status quo or vote for president’s proposal, because the president has all the agenda-setting power. 

If they vote for the status quo, and it passes, they get 0 minus their share in the transfers the president made. Since the president's proposal did not pass, it will be less than 50, but not defined. Call that number X. Then they would get -X.

If they take the transfer and status quo passes, they get  0 (from status quo) + 10 (from the president) - X.

Better to take the transfer.

If they vote for the status quo and the president’s project passes, they will get -5.

If they take the transfer and the president’s project passes, they will get 5.

Bettter to take the transfer.

Taking the transfer is called a "dominant strategy" in game theoretic terms. No matter what others do, it is the best strategy from the politician standpoint. This means that, in equilibrium, the president's project will pass.

The transfers will cancel each other out, the net benefits will be the benefits for the president: 1,000.

Now suppose parliamentarism

All will have incentive to propose their own personal project, and promise transfers *if* project passes. Since they have no intrinsic executive power, that’s the only kind of promise they can make.

At least one person, however, may instead propose the common good project, and propose transfers to all the legislators who vote in favor.

Then the choices will be:

If they vote for the common project, and it passes, they get 100 (from common project) + 10 in transfers minus their share in financing the transfers, which depends on how many vote for the common project. Call this Y. Their benefit is 110 - Y.

If they vote for a personal project, and the common project passes, they get 100 - Y.

Better to vote for the common project.

Once again, transfers cancel out, and the total benefit will be 100*100 = 10,000. 

If they vote for a personal project and that specific personal project passes, they get 10 (in transfers) - Z.

If they vote for the common project and a personal project passes, they get -Z. 

Better vote for the specific project.

The total benefit, as in presidentialism, accrues to the proposer of the legislation, which is 1,000.

There is no dominant strategy at this stage. If the common project will win, better vote for it. If a specific legislator’s project will win, better vote for that. But, considering the incentive structure, all legislators will present their own project and offer transfers. The chance that any one legislator gets to pass their project declines, while the chance that the common project passes increases. The common project is a focal point. As the perceived probability that the common project will win increases, so does the expected value of voting for the common project. The common project becomes the expected outcome.

This model is extremely simple, but it allows us to see how changes in rules which do relate to the real differences between parliamentarism and presidentialism affect the outcome. A parliamentary model of decision-making allows for both greater total benefits, and more widely spread. Legislators appear much more selfish in the presidential system than in the parliamentary system, even though their preferences are exactly the same. These benefits should not be seem as so surprising - we are removing the monopoly on agenda-setting created for the president. The insight is not original, either. A related and much more elegant model which shows benefits to this type of political competition has been published by Brennan and Hamlin in their "A Revisionist View of the Separation of Powers". 

Like all models, it leaves out a very large number of issues. One point is that this portrays a small direct democracy and not a representative democracy. The transfers are financed by resources coming from the legislators themselves, not the public. A second point is that we do not have the figure of parties, all people are voting by themselves. I believe the lack of parties is a feature of the model. First, it is widely accepted that parties are not as strongly organized in presidential systems, marked by the politics of personality. Second, parties also have to solve the problem of collective decision-making in very similar ways as countries. Indeed, some adopt more "parliamentary" forms while others more "presidential" forms. Assuming parties assumes away an important part of the problem. 

A third point is that legislators are not exclusively self-oriented in any of the systems, nor are their preferences so homogenous. But the introduction of such altruistic characteristics, as well as variance among people, would make parliamentarism perform even better. Given that in the presidential equilibrium the benefits legislators get are disproportionately from participating in the presidential coalition and getting transfers (in this model, exclusively), one would expect more self-oriented people to be attracted to politics in that environment. In the parliamentary context, the common good projects prevail. More altruistic legislators would be attracted to participate in politics.

In any case, pointing out that details have been left out is not enough to properly criticize a model. One needs to show how the introduction of these details would change the conclusion. I don't see how it would. 

When I was looking for a publisher for my book, I considered adapting it so that it would fit a technology-related series. The editor kindly showed it would be a stretch to treat it as a technology book per se, and I agreed. But it is still worth emphasizing that parliamentarism is very much a technology. This matters a lot, because if people see parliamentarism as naturally arising from a place's culture (or worse, their psychology), then they will try to change the culture first (or, if they think it comes from psychology, they might even give up on any changes towards parliamentarism altogether). They will also resist saying that one arrangement is better than the other because this tends to imply one type of society, and the people in them, is better than the other. But if people realize that it is a technology like the steam engine or, more closely, a computer's operating system, then they may lower their guards in adopting it. Despite some nostalgia, the truth is nobody uses MS-DOS anymore; it is simply worse than Windows.

Parliamentarism is an algorithm. More precisely, it is a class of similar algorithms with some cruciallly similar characteristics, in the same way that there are several different versions of Windows. We always associate algorithms to computers and electronics, but the essence of an algorithm is that it is, as Merriam-Webster defines it, "a procedure for solving a mathematical problem (as of finding the greatest common divisor) in a finite number of steps that frequently involves repetition of an operation". As we see from Wikipedia, "The concept of algorithm has existed since antiquity. Arithmetic algorithms, such as a division algorithm, were used by ancient Babylonian mathematicians c. 2500 BC and Egyptian mathematicians c. 1550 BC.[12] Greek mathematicians later used algorithms in 240 BC in the sieve of Eratosthenes for finding prime numbers,[13] and the Euclidean algorithm for finding the greatest common divisor of two numbers.[14] Arabic mathematicians such as al-Kindi in the 9th century used cryptographic algorithms for code-breaking, based on frequency analysis.[15]" 

Here is their representation of Euclid's algorithm for the greatest common divisor of two numbers.

Now the essence of the parliamentary algorithm is extremely simple. The leaders of a country (or of any organization) should meet in an assembly and collectively decide, by majority vote, who should be the derivative leaders. The presidential algorithm is that the entire population of a country (or any organization) will vote on pre-selected choices for who should be the individual leader of the country. In itself, this is surely not a working algorithm no more than saying that "Windows is a Graphic-User-Interface", or that MS-DOS is a text-based interface. 

But, just like software, a more detailed view of how parliaments make decisions can also be expressed as a flowchart, as can be seen below:

Now even this flowchart is far from complete. Parliamentary procedure specifies several other rules that are not contained in this simplified flowchart. But the point remains that there are rules which can work independently of the participants. Sure, the behavior of participants matter for what sort of results we get, but that is also true of operating systems such as Windows and MS-DOS. 

Thinking of parliamentarism as a technology helps us understand how it could be that it is so superior to presidentialism, and why we should not perceive its adoption as passing any sort of judgement on the peoples who currently have to work under one or the other environment. Some technologies are just better than others. There is a learning curve, but the sooner we adopt the superior one, the better.

* San Marino would be a "neither" because it does not figure in the Database of Political Institutions. Given that the heads of government are chosen by the Council, it would most likely have been classified as parliamentary if they did appear in that database.

I read Robin Hanson's post "Comment Requested" and I think it relates a lot with an idea I have been thinking of for some time now. 

I believe a key aspect of why parliamentary organizations work better is that they rely on parliamentary procedure (despite its bad rap). Unlike debates on Twitter which have no specific conclusion, no order of business, no specification of who is qualified to decide on the matter, parliamentary procedure is an algorithm that developed over centuries through trial-and-error and is used by virtually all of the more functioning organizations. 

The stripped down version of the algorithm works according to the flowchart below

Link

Here is how this connects Robin's post. You might have an idea that you believe should get greater recognition and/or better inputs from knowledgeable people. You define who has standing (or this is previously defined - one group could be Mason Bloggers, for example). Then you present the text you believe should be approved by the whole group. Instead of the back-and-forth of replies in blogs or tweets such as we have today, the other members of the group would propose amendments to the text, which would be voted on by the other members. When a final text was ready for voting, it would be approved by a 50% majority, or killed. And then it would reflect the opinion of the collective body.

The greatest feature, I believe, is that mere nitpicking, changes of subjects, "what is truth really?",  would not be enough to prevent a good idea from developing. At the same time, if there are significant improvements to the idea, they would appear on the amendment part. 

Although almost all organizations adopt some form of parliamentary procedure very close to that, science works very differently. In peer review, we have an author, which receives feedback from reviewers, this feedback does not specify how the text should be changed exactly, only what the general gist of what is expected. The feedback from different reviewers can be contradictory. The author may think that he addressed the reviewer's concern but the reviewer disagrees. The author and other reviewers may disagree with what one reviewer would like to see changed, but the author will comply anyway. Frustrated with peer review, some thinkers revert to social media and blogs, which have their advantages but also very well-known disadvantages. Of course, this would have disadvantages too, but it is being proposed in addition to what we currently have, not as a complete substitute.

Until today, parliamentary procedure has depended on someone being able to consistently apply the algorithm, which is not extremely complex but not trivial either. This makes it expensive and dull. But it surely can be automated and have its use more widespread. I was thinking on how this could be made as an app, or even as a functionality of existing apps.

Any thoughts welcome.

I consider "Why Not Parliamentarism?" a "working book". In the same way many people publish working papers so that they can get more feedback before they publish the final version of their text, I wanted to publish what I had already written and get as much feedback as possible and then publish a modified version later on. Perhaps the part of my book which is getting the most criticism is the definition I use for parliamentarism: executive subordination to the legislature. This subordination exists in a continuum. However, because countreis tend to divide themselves as those with a lot of executive subordination to the legislature and those with little subordination, the categories of "presidentialism" and "parliamentarism" are still very descriptive. Although I am very satisfied with how it describes the idea we make of parliamentarism and the differences in observed behavior of governments and other types of organizations, many scholars are wholly opposed to it. For an influential part of political science, parliamentarism is defined by the presence of the confidence requirement. Przeworski, for example, writes: 

"While in parliamentary systems the government is elected by the legislature and in presidential systems by popular vote, the crux of the distinction is whether the executive can be removed by the legislature. Systems in which the government cannot be removed by the legislature are presidential; those in which it can be are parliamentary (or, where the president is popularly elected, mixed)."

But this definition is too restrictive, and clinging to it hurts not only our understanding of parliamentarism, but our progress prospects. That is, this debate matters a lot for our actions, it is not a mere intellectual exercise.

Definitions come in different forms: they can be legal, based on use, conceptual, or operational. Think of the word "democracy". In international law, it does not have a precise definition, but we do have a UNGA resolution which highlights some common features, including 

"respect for all human rights and fundamental freedoms, inter alia, freedom of association and of peaceful assembly, freedom of expression and opinion, freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, the right to be recognized everywhere as a person before the law and the right to take part in the conduct of public affairs, directly or through freely chosen representatives, to vote in a pluralistic system of political parties and organizations and to be elected at genuine, periodic, free and fair elections by universal and equal suffrage and by secret ballot guaranteeing the free expression of the will of the people, as well as respect for the rule of law, the separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary, transparency and accountability in public administration and decision-making and free, independent and pluralistic media"

For a usage definition of democracy we can look into a dictionary and find the very simple " government by the people ". 

Academics will concentrate themselves, however, on conceptual (or explicative) and operational definitions. The conceptual definition of democracy is cause for much debate. As Wikipedia tells us, " No consensus exists on how to define democracy – indeed, one study found that at least 2,234 descriptions of democracy exist in the English language - but legal equality, political freedom and rule of law have been identified as important characteristics." Overspecifying democracy is a known risk. Most people recognize that democracy is not merely a matter of calling one's country democraticn, nor does it equate holding elections. Lastly, there are operational definitions of democracy. Scientists want to study the phenomenon of democracy and, in the absence of a perfect definition, they use operational definitions which catpure important aspects of said phenomenon. In the case of democracy, there are several operational definitions: ranks above X in Polity IV, for example.

Coming back to parliamentarism. What reason do we have to define it exclusively as government subject to parliamentary confidence? It is not legal, for sure, no such binding definition exists. It is not from use either. If we look at the dictionary definition of parliamentarism (or parliamentary goverment) we variations of the Merriam Webster definition: "a system of government having the real executive power vested in a cabinet composed of members of the legislature who are individually and collectively responsible to the legislature." We see that this definition does include the confidence of the legislature, but it also includes aspects which most scholars will reject define parliamentarism: that the power be vested in a cabinet (many parliamentary countries have prime ministerial government instead of a cabinet government), and that the cabinet is composed of members of the legislature (many parliamentary countries do not have members of parliament as ministers). Most likely this overspecification is due to the characteristics of British government when the concept of parliamentarism was first being devised. So the argument can't be "check the dictionary".

Is it a definitive conceptual (or explicative) definition?  According to Carnap,  “[t]he task of explication consists in transforming a given more or less inexact concept into an exact one […]. We call the given concept (or the term used for it) the explicandum, and the exact concept proposed to take the place of the first (or the term proposed for it) the explicatum.”  The idea is to use a concept already in use by people intuitively and try to tear out what are the commonalities it has, and also what makes it different from other things. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy brings the following example: 

A widely accepted instance of a simple and largely unproblematic explication is the 2006 definition of ‘planet’ by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). The discussion about that term was triggered by a number of discoveries of objects in orbit around the sun that are similar to the nine bodies that had until then been recognized as planets. Since there was no binding definition of ‘planet’ at that point, insecurity arose about whether to call certain objects planets. The IAU member assembly established a definition according to which a planet is “a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit” (IAU 2006). This disqualified Pluto as a planet, whereas the other eight planets kept their status; and to a large degree the new understanding of the term ‘planet’ incorporated key aspects of the earlier use patterns, while at the same time being much clearer  

Does the confidence requirement satisfactorily capture what makes parliamentary countries distinct? No. Let us think of the "perils of presidentialism" as identified by Juan Linz:  winner-takes-all, dual legitimacy, fixed mandates, personalism. While the confidence requirement will present a huge blow to the winner-takes-all nature of presidentialism, by itself it may have many issues containing the other problems. I have already written about how Weimar Germany, a "parliamentary" country by this standard, suffered from the symptoms of presidentialism. A powerful president claimed legitimacy for himself (backed by influential thinkers such as Carl Schmitt). That president had a fixed mandate which allowed him to confront parliament without fear of losing his position. The figure of the president and the perceived incapacity of the parliament bred a kind of politics very much centered in personal figures. But we also see these problems in the failures of constitutional monarchies which were "parliamentary" by the confidence requirement. The fascist rise in Italy had an important participation of King Emmanuel III. Dual legitimacy, fixed "mandate", personalism. A similar scenario developed in Greece. 

The confidence requirement also leaves out countries with constitutions which do avoid many of the perils. Take Switzerland. Its government cannot be removed by a simple vote of non-confidence, so it is not considered parliamentary according to that definition. But the government is appointed by the Federal Assembly. This allows them to avoid the dual legitimacy problem quite well. The legitimacy of the government completely derives from parliament, not direct elections. Because there is no prime minister or president of Switzerland, they also avoid personalism and winner-takes-all. This means Switzerland functions very similarly to a pure parliamentary government.

Going further, is it not natural to think of parliamentarism as "rule by parliaments"? If so, it would allow us to include other important phenomena as part of one big phenomenon. Take, for example, Gary Cox's thesis that a main explanation for the credibility of sovereign debt is the parliamentary monopoly on authorizing the sales of sovereign promises. This credibility allowed England to borrow much more easily than other countries, which contributed to its development. Is this not an element of the establishment of parliamentarism in the country? I think it is. But it is not related to the confidence requirement. To stay with the English example, was the English Civil War of the 17th century not a conflict about parliamentarism? The first formal motion of non-confidence in the British parliament was in 1742. Was there no parliamentarism before then?

Having argued that executive subordination to parliament is a better conceptual definition, we can examine the confidence requirement as an operational definition. For that purpose, it is a generally good one. Unlike the more general concept of executive subordination, it can be verified from constitutions, it has a clear answer, and allows for quantitative studies. Indeed, many of the studies I cite use this very definition. It is far from perfect, however, as seen from the examples above. A more robust understanding of the phenomenon will rely on several different operational definitions so that we get a clearer picture. One such definition may well be the one I use in the book, adapted from Tyson Roberts. Roberts calls countries "parliament-based" if the executive is chosen by the legislature. I call them with the more familiar name: parliamentary. That would make Switzerland parliamentary, but not Weimar Germany nor pre-fascist Italy or monarchical Greece. This increases our understanding of the parliamentary phenomenon. I should stress: I'm not proposing we use one or the other, I'm proposing we use different operational definitions to get a clearer picture. Choice of the executive by the legislature is very far from capturing all aspects of parliamentarism, of course.

Several scholars will argue that I'm completely leaving out the concept of semi-presidentialism. But the introduction of the semi-presidentialism does not do away with the problem of a continuum of parliamentary prominence over the executive, it only includes more categories. After we categorize countries in presidential, semi-presidential, and parliamentary, we learn that semi-presidential countries also differ significantly, some are called "premier-presidential" and others "president-parliamentary" (and we still have no name for the Swiss system). But these even more detailed categories will not exhaust the differences either. Is it not simpler to think of a continuum?

Why it matters

Although the discussion above may seem purely academic with no practical consequence, the opposite is the case. The way we understand parliamentarism is very consequential for what actions we think are worth pursuing for strengthening it. If parliamentarism is reduced to having the confidence requirement, I fear it may induce complacency on the promotion of parliamentarism both for presidential and for parliamentary countries. For presidential countries, because such a huge step may be perceived as completely out of reach. This is a regular claim in the literature. But if we think of a continuum, we can take small steps towards that goal and implement it gradually (as was the case in various countries which are parliamentary today). For parliamentary countries, it may induce a neglect of a presidentialization of politics (a presidential backsliding, if you will) which gradually deteriorates the quality of governance and may eventually risk the stability of the whole system. So this is a call for initiative and vigilance. You can always improve your governance in a presidential country by more or less gradual actions which limit presidential powers. You should always prevent creeping presidential/personalized powers in your society as well. If you fight for every inch of democracy, then you should fight for every inch of parliamentarism as well.

One of the most common pushbacks I get when proposing parliamentarism is that it would not be feasible. I think, however, that the word feasibility has been used in political discourse in different aceptions as if they were all the same, and this leads to a lot of confusion.

Merriam-Webster's definition of unfeasible is  "not capable of being done or carried out". But there are different ways things may be not capable of being done, and a crucial aspect is to consider the amount of effort put into it. Some things are unfeasible independently of how much effort we dedicate to it. That is the case of perpetual motion machines and socialism* . Other things may be deemed unfeasible because they inspire so much rejection that they would never or almost never be implemented, even if they are feasible given implementation. Markets for kidneys could be an example. While there is no theoretical reason for them not to work, both the public and policymakers consistently reject them.

Often, however, people will say something is unfeasible because it is not popular. When people object that parliamentarism is not feasible, it may be this last meaning they have in mind, because parliamentarism is obviously feasible in both the first and second aceptions. It has been implemented in scores of countries, and is working better than any other governance arrangement and well enough for its proponents. 

This third meaning is a curious application of "unfeasible" for proposed changes. If any proposed change was already popular with both the public and policymakers, it would not be a proposal, it would be policy already. Every idea must start with at least being not popular, and frequently they start as downright unpopular because of status quo bias. What makes this objection more curious is that people will frequently proudly announce their utopianism. In my home country, it is common to wear t-shirts with a Bertolt Brecht quote: "Nothing should seem impossible to change." I would never go that far. Some things are impossible to change (entropy and conservation of energy, for example) and we should be very aware that they are impossible so as not to waste our time, at best, or aggravate problems, at worse. But things that can be changed surely should be perceived that way, particularly if the energy spent on changing them is much smaller than the benefits expected.

Which leads to a fourth, unrecognized, connotation of "unfeasible": uncool. I suspect that many people may reject ideas because they don't like the overall associations the ideas may have. They (all of us, really) reject them at a gut level, they anticipate others will do so too, which makes those ideas more prone to be called unfeasible. It is a good heuristic. We don't have the time to listen to all ideas in the world, if something sounds too weird at first glance, it probably is. But often we have good reasons to fight this first reaction, investigate deeper, and conclude that the uncool thing should actually be cool. We have gone a long way for such things as gay marriage, marijuana legalization and even parking requirements. 

Which brings me to the final point. This whole post is my very uncool way to invite readers to become "hipster parliamentarists" - propose it before it is cool.

*Of course some forms of socialism are feasible and have existed, but socialists consistently claim that those are not truly socialist, so I will respect their definition and conclude that the true socialism they argue for is the one which is unfeasible.