Tuesday 19 March 2019

JS Mill on Brexit

Back in the 19th century, John Stuart Mill worried about a danger to democracy built into the institution of majority rule itself. Suppose almost all potential voters for a party view (Group A) view failing to win just over 50% of the vote as catastrophic, but know that their party cannot reach this threshold without the support of a much smaller Group B. If Group B can believably insist that it will not vote for the party unless it accepts their candidate as head of the party, it has wide scope for effective extortion, invoking the catastrophic prospect of a win by the other party (Group C) . As Mill put it:
Any section [Group B] which holds out more obstinately than the rest can compel all the others to adopt its nominee; and this superior pertinacity is unhappily more likely to be found among those who are holding out for their own interest than for that of the public. The choice of the majority [Group A] is, therefore, very likely to be determined by that portion of the body who are the most timid, the most narrow-minded and prejudiced, or who cling most tenaciously to the exclusive class-interest; in which case the electoral rights of the minority [that is, Group C], while useless for the purposes for which votes are given, serve only for compelling the majority [Group A+Group B] to accept the candidate of the weakest or worst portion of themselves [Group B].
     Mill’s words, especially the bolded ones, have kept coming back to me over the past few months as the Brexit process has lurched along. What are the votes of Remainers/BINOs/soft-Brexiteers useful for, in the present situation? Not for “the purposes for which votes are given,” if this these purposes are to shape policy, or to ensure that voters’ voice is attended to. Rather, the views of this group just shape the field of play for the contest between Theresa May and and the ERG over who can display the most obstinacy. 

     Mill hoped that proportional representation would overcome this problem, but of course this might simply move the just-over-50% cliff edge, and the disproportionate power of the obstinate small group, into Parliament. More elaborate institutional fixes are definitely worth thinking on. But for the moment I think partisans of democracy need to promote a strong norm against brinkmanship (aka brinksmanship). Brinkmanship is an effort to use a looming catastrophe to force someone to accept an outcome they don’t like (here’s an overview of the Brexit endgame that makes use of the concept). Brinkmanship only works if the person pursuing this strategy is able to convince others that she personally finds the catastrophe tolerable. In other words, as game theorists have argued for a very long time, brinkmanship often relies on ‘preference falsification’—politicians pretend they prefer catastrophe to not getting their own way. Even worse, the most effective practitioners of brinkmanship are those who authentically and obviously prefer something everyone else finds catastrophic to not getting their own way. In other words, situations in which brinkmanship comes into play foster deception, while rewarding intransigence and manifest scorn for others’ reasoned opinions.  

Democracy cannot possibly lead to positive effects in such circumstances. We get only a politics of winners and losers; what used to be widely known as the politics of kto kogo . Deliberately engineering a looming catastrophe for political purposes isn’t just reckless. It implies a contempt for democracy itself.  Those who practice extortion, whether with guile or without it, should not be permitted to use the machinery of democracy to facilitate it. 

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