Prominent political blogger Matthew Yglesias recently wrote an interesting post arguing that the proliferation of elections increases the difficulty of acquiring enough information to vote in an informed manner. He quotes a post by Jonathan Bernstein, which expresses bewilderment at the range of offices he voted on in a recent Texas election:
Yesterday was election day in Texas, and I voted. And I voted. And then I voted some more. If my count was correct, I voted fifty-two times. I voted for Governor, and I voted for U.S. House and Texas House and Texas Senate…OK, I didn’t actually know the candidates for the state legislature, by I did feel a bit guilty about that. I voted for Lt. Governor (which is a big deal here in Texas). I voted for Attorney General, and Commissioner of the General Land Office, and Commissioner of Agriculture, and Railroad Commissioner. I don’t know what the General Land Office is, no. I voted for judges — judicial judges, and the county judge, who is the head of the county government, not a judicial judge at all. I voted for more real judges. We know someone who is running for “Judge, County Probate Court No. 2.” I voted for her. I voted for District Clerk. I don’t know what kind of district the District Clerk is clerk for.
Yglesias himself comments:
[I]n US political culture, the answer to every government reform problem is always that things need to be “more democratic” and this often proceeds without any real effort to think about what you’re trying to achieve. There’s obviously a sense in which subjecting more and more officials to popular election is “more democratic” but if you think that what’s good about democracy is that it creates accountability you’ll see that asking people to vote for Commissioner of the General Land Office is undermining accountability.
No real people are paying attention to what these different offices are, what the incumbents are doing, how they interact, who’s doing a good job, etc. Special interests who are able to hire professionals to monitor elected officials for them, by contrast, are able to make out like bandits.
I completely agree with Yglesias that most voters know little or nothing about these offices, and that this creates an opening for interest group influence. I have made similar arguments myself. The problem is exacerbated by the reality that for most voters, it is actually rational to devote little or no time to acquiring political information. It’s also rational for them to do a poor job of analyzing the political information they do know.
At the same time, I am skeptical of the solution that Yglesias implicitly seems to advocate: making these positions nonelected offices. If the Commissioner of the General Land Office becomes a bureaucratic position appointed by the governor, that doesn’t eliminate the problem of voter ignorance. It merely shifts it to a different election. Now, the question of who the governor is likely to choose as the next Commissioner is added to the long list of issues at stake in the gubernatorial election. Realistically, most voters won’t pay any attention to the office when they vote for governor, and small interest groups will still dominate the process. Instead of doing so by influencing the election of the commissioner, they’ll do it by lobbying the governor and the state legislature. The US and Switzerland are unique in having an extremely large number of elections. But there is little if any reason to believe that interest group “capture” is more of a problem in these countries than in the many European and East Asian democracies where more government positions are held by appointed officials. Indeed, Switzerland is widely believed to be one of the best-governed nations in the world.
The lack of “accountability” that Yglesias deplores is caused not by elections as such, but by the sheer size and scope of the modern state, a point I discussed in greater detail here and here. Texas has so many officials because the state government has taken on so many different functions. Ultimately, the best way to increase democratic accountability to voters is to have less government. That will make it easier for rationally ignorant voters with limited time and attention spans to monitor the officials we do have.
The connection between voter ignorance and democratic accountability isn’t the only issue we should weigh when we consider how much government we should have. But it is an important one that is too often ignored.
UPDATE: I am not certain that Yglesias’ preferred solution to this problem is to have more appointed offices and fewer elected ones. I think some such claim is implicit in his statement that “asking people to vote for Commissioner of the General Land Office is undermining accountability.” Presumably, this means that he wants there to be a Commissioner of the General Land Office (or some other official tasked with the same responsibilities), but that the holder of the job should be chosen by some means other than elections. Reducing the number of elected offices and increaseing the number of appointed ones is in fact the solution advocated by Jonathan Bernstein in the post that Yglesias linked to approvingly. However, if that’s not what Yglesias means, I’m happy to correct the record.
orca says:
Ultimately, the best way to increase democratic accountability to voters is to have less government.
Isn’t that like lopping off our arms and legs to cut back on our medical expenses?
March 4, 2010, 7:09 pmruuffles says:
Sure, but you better not take away their toilets on the roadside.
Glenn Beck uses them for #2 on his way to the free library.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/us/05reststop.html?hp
March 4, 2010, 7:10 pmruuffles says:
Some interesting arithmetic. Ms Lucas suggests charging a $0.25 to use the rest stop. The article later states
If you charge $0.25, it would take 1.2 million visits a year, or 3300 visits a day, or 140 visits an hour. This is highly doubtful as it assumed 24 hours the same.
March 4, 2010, 7:16 pmIlya Somin says:
Isn’t that like lopping off our arms and legs to cut back on our medical expenses?
If all these government offices are as valuable to us as our arms and legs, sure. But most of them are not. Moreover, this ignores the possibility that much of what government does is either entirely unneeded or could be done by other organizations.
If you spend money on 100 different pills in order to improve your health and as a result don’t really know what most of them do, you may want to cut back on the number of pills you take, and try to limit yourself to a smaller number that you investigate in greater detail.
March 4, 2010, 7:19 pmnewrouter says:
idiot bureaucrats never heard of port a johns
March 4, 2010, 7:23 pmnewrouter says:
Glenn Beck uses them for #2 on his way to the carnegie
March 4, 2010, 7:26 pmfreelibrary.william d freismuth says:
This post reminded me that the worst mistake in government
March 4, 2010, 7:28 pmsince the civil war was not the direct election of senators.
ruuffles says:
Where is this, non-public-funded, private donation-funded library you use?
March 4, 2010, 7:29 pmJoe Confused says:
An overlapping-yet-distinct accountability problem is the lack of clear jurisdiction and responsibility, especially the blurred local/state/federal overlaps of the modern era. The simple model would allow someone with a decent civics class or Schoolhouse Rock to know whom to call. School sucks? School board or superintendent. Pothole? City Hall. Want a criminal law loosened or tightened? Governor/state rep. Foreign affairs? Prez./Feds.
But my school board blames a federal mandate or lack of federal funding, and the latest “Education President” wants credit for the handouts but wants to shaft the blame on the locals. The local cops live for DOJ/FBI grants, and so on. Every government office seems to have a staff of constituent aides whose sole purpose is to steer people to the right agency in the Kafka-esque maze. People call Congressmen to help with federal exec agencies — which “works” as a substitute for responsive bureaucrats because the Reps are elected and the exec bureaucrats are not. Some ‘crats respond to the Reps because they fund them, others are independent enough to ignore everyone.
It’s not so easy for smart lawyers, let alone average citizens, to figure out whom to call. Heck, high-level operators call each other to ask “who do I call about X . . . do you know someone?”
Even if Texas streamlined within Texas government, or the locals did internally, etc., the big driver on this problem are the vertical overlaps of fed/state/local, not the horizontals. Sure, I might get confused between a state treasurer, comptroller, or auditor, but that doesn’t compare to the fact that no local function is free of state and federal entanglement.
But from what I’ve read of his stuff, I don’t think Yglesias is up for cutting the feds out of all this.
March 4, 2010, 7:31 pmSteve says:
Yglesias’ post reminded me of the time I voted (yes, only once) in Cook County. There must have been 100 judicial positions on that ballot! Pointless.
March 4, 2010, 7:33 pmAnonsters says:
Sounds like it’s time to consolidate the Union into 1 government. Buhbye, States.
March 4, 2010, 7:34 pmDavid says:
There really is a reason for the existence of political parties, after all (who knew, right?). Turns out that it helps with this vast flux of otherwise indigestible information.
On a more serious note, there’s just as many offices to vote for, and probably more frequent elections, in New York, but I’ve never heard any liberal complain about that: the more so that there are at least 4-5 parties that are on the ballot more-or-less permanently, plus some number that have been set up by various candidates for the occasion: since New York allows fusion (candidates on more than one party row), this makes life interesting indeed: see, e.g, this sample ballot.
March 4, 2010, 7:35 pmAnonsters says:
This is terrible, just terrible.
There is… I shudder to say… SPANISH on this ballot. Egads! Zounds!
March 4, 2010, 7:45 pmSteve says:
I don’t see anything unreasonable about that ballot, although maybe I’m just one of the aforementioned non-complaining liberals. There are 7 offices on the ballot, 2 of which are uncontested, so what’s the big deal?
March 4, 2010, 7:52 pmwilliam d freismuth says:
This post reminds me that the worst change in government
March 4, 2010, 7:54 pmsince the civil war was not the direct election of senators.
It was the end of the spoils system and the installation
of civil service “reform”.
Yes Frank Hague was a boodler, but when he walked around
Jersey City in the evening and opened a call box to call
for a cop or an ambulance, one better show up right now.
Instead we now have people who have no accountability
to anyone, as long as they check each box in their “cover
your ass” procedures manual.
If the postmaster in a little town displeased enough
people, it made their elected patron look bad. They had to
perform. Were some of them grafters, of course. But they
had to satisfy the people or their boss looked bad.
Now, once they achieve tenure, they don’t give a damn
about anything.
Does anyone here think that school superintendants who
suspend a five yeart old for drawing a picture of a gun
would remain in office under a spoils system.
Current incumbents can pursue the mpost insane policies
secure in the knowledge that they will never be called to
acount.
Bring back the spoils system and make elected officials
acountable again.
William D Freismuth
Syd Henderson says:
What does the Working Families party have against Philip Minardo and Orlando Marrazzo, Jr.? Outside of them having multiple personalities?
March 4, 2010, 8:06 pmBobC says:
There is something worst than a ton of officials, bond measures. How the heck did people decide they had enough accounting and financing knowledge to vote on every debt financing?
March 4, 2010, 8:12 pmruuffles says:
More importantly, what is a mill and don’t they use percents like regular taxes?
March 4, 2010, 8:16 pmTom G says:
You know, this post makes one of the main arguments in favor of anarchy.
March 4, 2010, 8:20 pmI’m not joking.
Real people shouldn’t HAVE to know anything about electing officials, because real people should not have to worry about anyone ELSE making their day to day decisions. They should just be earning an honest living, enjoying their lives, and (if they want) raising families.
Before you dismiss anarchy, you might want to read more about it. It isn’t as simplistic as you probably think it is.
Baseballhead says:
Now there’s a sentence I never thought would be written.
March 4, 2010, 8:21 pmEric Rasmusen says:
I’ve thought about this too. Mark Ramseyer and I discuss it some, I think, in a late chapter of our Measuring Judicial Independence: The Political Economy of Judging in Japan, the University of Chicago Press, 2003, basically saying, like the post here, that there are advantages to both direct election and to appointment. It might be good if this were formally modelled.
Keep in mind that who gets these little jobs is always going to depend on who they know. With direct election, it’s which voters personally know the obscure guy running for dogcatcher. With appointment, it’s which party workers or friends of the governor personally know the obscure guy angling for the dogcatcher job.
And I suppose with a civil service system, it’s which current bureaucrats personally know the obscure guy applying for the dogcatcher job.
March 4, 2010, 8:30 pmnewrouter says:
the dog catcher job is very easy to privatize.
March 4, 2010, 8:38 pmAnonsters says:
Anarchist.
March 4, 2010, 9:22 pmUrban economist says:
No it’s more like cutting down on voodoo and homeopathic treatments to cut back on medical expenses.
March 4, 2010, 9:26 pmSkyler says:
I think Ilya wrote this without knowing what was on the ballot. The elected positions were not all that numerous or unusual.
U.S. Representative
Governor
Lt. Governor
Attorney General
Comptroller
Commissioner of Land
Commissioner of Agriculture
Railroad Commissioner (a very powerful position controlling oil fields among other things)
Justices/Judges (various courts and districts)
Members of State Board of Education
State Senator
State Representative
District Attorneys
and Five ballot propositions that ranged from unconstitutional to absurd.
How is this excessive? This is a synopsis of all the elected positions in the state this past election. There are numerous justices and judges listed but they are largely by district, so each voter has a limited number that he is allowed to vote for, just like senators and representatives.
I think Ilya is stretching to make a point that doesn’t really apply.
March 4, 2010, 9:33 pmArthur Kirkland says:
There is a legitimate point here, one that well-functioning political parties could help to address. But neither party is a reliable sifter at the moment — currently, the Democrats are dominated by tired party hacks and the Republicans have lost control to abortion extremists, gun nuts and End Timesers — which leaves most voters on their own, confronting a ballot of all-over-the-field candidates with limited information.
March 4, 2010, 9:44 pmGov98 says:
Eh… Elections provide accountability, and for the most part when everything is running swimmingly we reelect the people who are in their positions. However, the point of election is that when a judge does become known for coddling crooks or violating the constitution he or she can be held accountable. The Supreme Court Justices here in California face election, and thank goodness they do, so that 3 of them could be thrown out for their absurd decisions, since I don’t think a Justice has failed retention, and that’s the way it should be…because the Judges are deciding tough cases, but ultimately nothing so outside the mainstream as to make them unfit for retention.
March 4, 2010, 9:56 pmArthur Kirkland says:
The election of deceased candidates, indicted candidates, name-alike candidates, etc. contravenes that argument at least slightly.
March 4, 2010, 10:05 pmGov98 says:
Well I didn’t say they provide perfect accountability? What does anything perfectly in this fallen world? But Duke Cunningham, Tom Delay, Bob Packwood, any number of crooks, cheats, and liars have failed in reelection or chosen to forgo the process due to the accountability provided through the process, but agreed, it is not a perfect mechanism, but it’s about the best we’ve got.
March 4, 2010, 10:11 pmarbitrary aardvark says:
The libertarian party has done well in Texas running people for public weigher, on a campaign to abolish the office.
March 4, 2010, 10:19 pmnone says:
this ‘series’ of yours is tiresome.
i don’t doubt that you believe this reductionist claptrap, but that doesn’t make this master theory of yours about the unwashed dumb masses any less dumb. maybe if you got out of your sheltered rightwing faculty milieu and your heritage foundation cocktail circuit of subsidized ‘intellectuals’ and talk to some regular people and you’ll realize that voters aren’t as stupid as they think you are
the elitism that causes someone to buy into such superficially theorized ideas is hilarious. the nihilism is less funny, but no less illuminating.
i don’t think i’ve ever agreed with anything you’ve written. it’s not because i’m a “liberal” or you’re a “conservative.” kerr and volokh and bernstein and barnett routinely write stuff that makes me think and often persuades me to abandon my instinctive policy preferences (my appreciation for the latter two was slower coming). but those dudes write about law and you write about politics.
that’s why it’s appropriate that you’re engaging in these rigorous exchanges with and bouncing arguments off the noted public intellectual matthew ygwhatshisname.
kerr > volokh > post = bernstein = barnett >>>>>>>>>>> the formalist fiction gang >>>> unironic national review partisan hacks.
March 4, 2010, 10:24 pmegd says:
I’m not aware of any private donation based libraries (unless you count Wikipedia, the [original] Nixon Library, private law schools, or any other private institution), but I do frequent plenty of privately funded sources of information.
I have a number of books in my home that I purchased, and if I don’t like those, I can go to my local bookstore and purchase the information I need (although some stores offer information as a loss-leader, making it free). If that doesn’t work, I can access Westlaw, a service that (AFAIK) isn’t publicly funded, but relies on user fees.
In fact, I can’t think of the last time I went to a wholly publicly funded library for any type of information. But I’m still forced to pay for it.
March 4, 2010, 10:27 pmnone says:
this is pretty dumb man. i can almost assure you that there’s no better place to buy cheap books than your public libraries. the selection is ridiculous too at the big sales.
god i’m sick of these reductionist arguments. my neighbor doesn’t own a car but he’s still forced to pay for roads. i can’t recall the last time i benefited from corrupt govt war contracting but i’m still forced to pay for it and line dick cheney’s pockets. etc, etc.
March 4, 2010, 10:35 pmll says:
The Texas primary ballot was so long, at least in our major metropolitan area, because of the judicial jobs on the ballot, SCt, Court of Appeals, District Court, Criminal Court, JP Court…
The Court of Criminal Appeals was not on this time….I think….
March 4, 2010, 10:51 pmD.R.M. says:
Actually, in many counties in Texas, the county judge does have judicial powers.
The General Land Office controls public lands and state mineral rights. Not that particularly hard to guess from the name. On the other hand, the Railroad Commission has no power over railroads, but instead regulates the oil, gas, coal, and uranium industries. (Rail oversight functions are all lodged in the Texas Department of Transportation.)
March 4, 2010, 11:22 pmArthur Kirkland says:
true, that
March 4, 2010, 11:22 pmBlar says:
But if the governor is responsible for everyone in the government, then voters can effectively influence policy with a much smaller amount of knowledge. All they need to know is whether they like the outcomes or not. They don’t need to know who exactly is responsible, or how it got to be that way – just become more opposed to the governor if things go badly and more in favor of the governor if things go well. If some big corruption scandal breaks involving the sale of public lands, then a lot of people will turn against the governor. If some voters are unhappy about a lack of available public lands, they’ll be a bit more inclined to vote out the governor. If public land policy has some indirect effect that voters don’t like – maybe taxes are a bit higher because the state isn’t taking advantage of its resources – then people will be somewhat less likely to support the incumbent governor.
So the governor has appropriate incentives to keep the General Land Office functioning well even if no one has ever heard of it. This form of accountability works better with some offices than with others, depending on how visible the good or bad outcomes are to the voters (and on whether it’s important enough to a small interest group to offer enough to outweigh the effect on voters). But in many cases it can work alright (the mayor of Chicago will keep the snow plowed in order to keep his job) while requiring much less knowledge from voters than would be necessary to choose between candidates for 50 different positions.
March 4, 2010, 11:46 pmJayson Virissimo says:
Unless of course, when they can’t tell which consequences are the result of which Governor. Is our higher unemployment the result the increase in the minimum wage and increased payroll taxes from the last Governor, or from the free-trade bill passed by the current Governor? When policies take time to have an effect and the people don’t know who caused what, the whole accountability idea goes out the window.
March 5, 2010, 12:32 amvic5 says:
some more interesting arithmetic: why does it cost 300,000 to run a rest stop ???
March 5, 2010, 12:51 amPerhaps because the Govt. runs it- no !
orca says:
Every government office is important to somebody…even if it’s just the pol who holds it.
March 5, 2010, 1:25 amJHUbme_24 says:
A shot in the dark on a question of policy:
Perhaps we might have many of the mentioned politico-bureaucratic positions appointed by a small number of elected officials. But once appointed (with advice/consent of a legislature), the electorate might be allowed to force an election for the positions after a petition (with the support of a large number of the represented people) is filed. The goal of having the positions continuously filled is thus advanced while allowing for a democratic check on rampant abuse by the party in power. Though forced elections might be quite numerous, the barrier to forcing them might be set to be sufficient to prevent their inevitability, and so make election/recall petitions meaningful.
None of the above should be taken to mean that we should not prefer to strip politico-bureaucrats of authority. Yes, we ought to try to minimize and optimize government’s coercive purview. But, in a democracy (and a republic), there will always exist a dissonance between election outcomes and enumerated rights. Nonetheless we should strive to emphasize the better instincts of popular opinions. And post-appointment petition elections might be a strong option to explore.
March 5, 2010, 4:04 amCato The Elder says:
IMO, Matt Yglesias is a really disgusting person. He feels very at ease calling conservatives all sorts of wild slurs on his blog when the political winds aren’t blowing his way. I wish the VC would do better not to engage hyperbolic people like this — certainly he feels the same way.
March 5, 2010, 6:26 ammarkm says:
This is the issue representative democracy was supposed to solve. I vote for a few people to represent me, they take care of the details.
Except, they don’t represent me. Between a Democrat and a Republican, I am generally trying to guess which one will do slightly less to take away my freedom, and be less blatant about taking my money to buy someone else’s vote. And I know that even if the winners campaigned for “smaller government”, we’ll still get more government.
How about replacing the winner-takes-all election of representatives with a proxy system?
March 5, 2010, 7:09 amSuperSkeptic says:
SCOTUS is working on corporate representation, right? ;)
March 5, 2010, 7:56 amDavid M. Nieporent says:
But then you have a bundling problem, as with ab omnibus spending bill in Congress: you only get a single up-or-down vote on
March 5, 2010, 9:07 amthe whole thing, rather than a vote on a specific issue. If you’re happy with the governor’s tax and education policies, but there’s a scandal in the Land Office, you have to make a tradeoff that you wouldn’t have to if they were separate. Plus, there’s no real reason you’d be more likely to know about the scandal in the first place if it were an appointed position, so you’d have no reason to hold the governor accountable than you would the elected commissioner.
David says:
Bear in mind that this is a sample from Staten Island. In Manhattan or Brooklyn there’s a lot more to vote for.
Also, In NY there’s elections every year: the usual Presidential/off-year congressional, and then in the odd-numbered years you have mayoral and conciliar elections.
Anyhow, my point was, why single out TX for a proliferation of elective offices when it’s not exactly a new or indeed unusual phenomenon?
March 5, 2010, 9:36 amtickknob says:
18.ruuffles says:
How the heck did people decide they had enough accounting and financing knowledge to vote on every debt financing?
More importantly, what is a mill and don’t they use percents like regular taxes?
Quote
March 5, 2010, 9:55 amI have heard of mills. They are small. A mill is 1/10, or maybe 1/100, or is it 1/1000 of a cent. Anyway they are small, that’s all you need to know. If the Mayor wants to raise tax rates by some mills, vote for it, It isn’t going to hurt.
Gramarye says:
This is true as far as it goes, but given the low volume of information available about the Land Office now, how much reason do voters have under the status quo to know about any potential “scandal” in the Land Office? In Ohio, many of these down-ballot elections are simply ignored: a voter will vote for Governor, Senator, U.S. Representative, Auditor, and Attorney General, and maybe their state legislative position, but ignore almost every other election.
I think Jonathan Bernstein and, to the extent he agrees, Yglesias have the right of it: folding some elected positions into the executive branch proper as appointed positions would at least do no harm and might do some good. I don’t think Ilya’s reflexive proposals to abolish the positions entirely would work for all but a handful of positions. An elected county coroner could easily be an appointed county coroner, but that doesn’t mean that the county really doesn’t need a coroner. I assume that the real agenda behind the notion that we should just abolish the Land Office is that to do so, we would have to privatize every asset under its control, which I don’t think would sit well even in some conservative circles.
Looking at the General Land Office’s Web Site:
To eliminate the office of the Commissioner of the General Land Office, you’d have to eliminate the GLO itself. One could do that by transferring these responsibilities to other agencies, but I presume that Prof. Somin has no such intention, since that wouldn’t “shrink” government; it would merely rearrange it, causing him to lament even more forcefully about voter ignorance with respect to whatever agencies picked up the slack. Presumably, therefore, the point is that all state mineral, timber, grazing, and similar resources should be privatized, and this source of revenue denied to the government and instead diverted into private hands. (I’ve always considered it ironic that the government is often derided as being unable to “produce wealth,” and yet if a private company did exactly what the Land Office does … owning property and either leasing or selling it … the characterization of the exact same activity would be reversed.)
March 5, 2010, 10:00 amThe Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Political Ignorance and the … | Politics Blog says:
[...] GottaLaff wrote an interesting post today on  Here’s a quick excerpt  Prominent political blogger Matthew Yglesias recently wrote an interesting post arguing that the proliferation of elections increases the difficulty of acquiring enough information to vote in an informed manner. … [...]
March 5, 2010, 10:23 amAndy Rozell says:
County Judges in Texas have probate jurisdiction, although it’s only in rural counties that they exercise it. Most of the more populous counties have Probate Courts or County Courts at Law with Probate Jurisdiction. In the county next to me the County Judge handles most routine probates. There’s a procedure to assign a Probate Judge from another county for contested cases, and some types of disputes are handled in District Court.
As far as the reason for the multiple elective offices – it’s the result of a conscious choice made when our current constitution was adopted (1876). The people who wrote it thought that it was better to have a lot of independent elected officials with their own power bases than to concentrate power in the hands of the governor. The previous constitution had a very strong governor who appointed most offices.
So that’s the reason we elect the Commissioner of the General Land Office (which used to be responsible for issuing titles to public lands back when there were public lands)
and the Railroad Commissioners (which used to regulate how much oil and gas you could produce from any particular well, but doesn’t really anymore) and the County Clerk and the County Tax Assessor/Collector and the County Treasurer and so on and so forth.
At the local level, it does seem to impose a degree of gridlock on government – which was the point.
March 5, 2010, 10:53 amSpartacus says:
I consider myself a reasonably well-informed voter, but when I encounter a race on the ballot where I know nothing about either candidate, I simply do not vote on that item. I certainly don’t want to randomly choose the less qualified candidate, or the one I might actually prefer less, were I better informed. A random, uninformed choice helps no one. If only most voters were as honest about their own ignorance. If they think they have a reason to vote for a particular candidate, that is their business, but if most folks would simply leave blank those items where they admittedly know nothing, the problem would be alleviated.
March 5, 2010, 11:39 amBobC says:
This is what is wrong with the bond vote system. Your only criteria is how much it hurts your pocket book?
For me to consider forming an opinion on the measure, I would have to read AT LEAST 3 years of 10-Ks (or city equivalent), the complete risk analysis on the bond proposal, a random selection of their references to verify the intregity of their methodology, and the reports on the impact of all bond measures going back 15 years.
March 5, 2010, 11:39 amarch1 says:
In Richard Feynman’s book “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” there is an anecdote from the time the Nobel prize winning physicist served on a California textbook review board.
Since Feynman read the proposed texts with care and noted reasons for his ratings, the other members took to looking to him to validate and help provide rationales for the overall ratings. Feynman couldn’t comment on the board’s aggregate rating for one book, however, because he had not received a copy.
Turned out no one else had, either.
March 5, 2010, 12:20 pmAllan Walstad says:
Well, yes and no. It’s true that massive, pervasive government represents a virtually insurmountable knowledge problem for voters, regardless of how it breaks down in terms of number of elected offices. By reducing the scope of government, you make it possible for voters to focus their necessarily limited attention on policies and performances with respect to fewer, more fundamental government roles. In that sense, one can say it increases democratic accountability.
But what’s really important is to reduce the number of things for which government is responsible, and therefore accountable. In that sense, democratic accountability is reduced, in favor of market accountability, where people individually make their own choices with their own resources based on their own criteria.
March 5, 2010, 12:24 pmohwilleke says:
This is probably wrong. Political selection and an appointment process (be it a civil service appointment process or a political one) tend to select very different kind of people.
Political selection is heavily biased towards people actively engaged in electoral politics and skilled at raising money for campaigns and conducting political campaigns. Many people highly qualified to carry out of the duties of elected executive branch posts lack these aptitudes or are not inclined to incur the high cost in time and money necessary to run for them.
In contrast, the process of seeking an appointment involves much less time and money on the part of the applicant, and does not require nearly the skill set. The pool of people who know someone who knows a powerful politician is much larger than the pool of people able to run their own political campaigns.
Appointments, even political ones, also tend to set higher minimum standards for “resume qualifications” for the job. A part-time EMT active in party politics has a quite decent chance of being considered seriously in a bid for be county coroner in an electoral process, and a very low chance of being appointed to that same office as a political or civil service appointee.
Also, while voters in top of the ticket races can be quite well informed about the candidates, a senior politican with even a small staff and a brief amount of time allocated to review resumes, do interviews, and solicit advice from knowledgable people to make a more informed choice about candidate qualifications than members of the general public, particulalry in judicial appointments where judicial ethics prohibit campaigning on the judicial ideology questions most pertinent to voters and competence is hard to evaluate from the position of a typical voter. (The pool of people from whom elected officials are drawn v. appointed officials is also very pertinent for judges; it is probably that case that people actively involved in campaigns are among the worst groups of people from which to draw members of a reasonably impartial judiciary.) There are too many cases where it is pretty clear that a judge was elected based upon an incorrect belief that a judge was someone other than who he or she actually was as a result of similarities in their names.
Also, while many posts have political components, a great many (e.g. clerk and recorder, county treasurer, county surveyor, coroner) are highly meritocratic. Sometimes this is because the job has changed. A coroner traditionally was a chief homicide detective. Now, a coroner is head of a forensic pathology department.
The problem of having elected officials in these posts also isn’t limited to choosing the wrong people. Appointed officials are much easier to remove when they screw up than elected officials. And, in a meritocratic position the fear that a removal will be motivated by improper political purposes is pretty modest.
Voting can be good, but it is good only in races where there are genuine political issues for voters to resolve in an election and only when the voters have a meaningful likelihood of being informed enough to make those decisions consciously. Absent those conditions an election is little different than a lottery.
March 5, 2010, 12:35 pmohwilleke says:
Historically, the trend towards electing non-judicial state and local government officials dates from the 1810s and 1820s, at a time when the franchise was much narrower and voting took place publicly rather than by secret ballot, making information exchange easier.
The trend towards the election of judicial officials dates mostly from 1846 to 1853 (also the period when the Swiss constitution was adopted). Judicial elections were largely intended to select judges who would use the power of judicial review to find unconstitutional state laws following a period when elected executive and legislative branch officials were discredited following a series of three serious recessions in a row. The change had the intended effect — newly elected judges overturned far more legislation on the grounds that it was unconstitutional.
One reason that people were so unhappy with executive and legislative branch officials was that the franchise had just changed dramatically, but inertia had kept the old regime elected officials in place. The percentage of the population who voted more than doubled from 1824 to 1828, but it took time for pool of elected officials to come into harmony with the new larger electorate.
Another notable fact is that formalization of the practice of law as a distinct profession with an organized bar and formal law school system to qualify people for it didn’t come into being until the 1870s.
March 5, 2010, 12:47 pmohwilleke says:
Elected officials are far less accountable than appointed one. It is far easier to remove a political appointee (indeed at the federal cabinet level most posts are replaced at least once during a term of office) than it is an elected official. Colorado has seen several instances in recent history of local elected officials engaging in flagrant misconduct in office and yet holding onto those offices for many, many months. Elected officials in contrast, are swift to remove appointees found to have engaged in misconduct to limit their own political liabilities.
In areas that are highly partisan, it is also hard to replace an official even by election, because the knee jerk tendency of party affliated people who aren’t paying attention is to vote for a candidate of their party, and party officials are often powerless to prevent a renomination.
March 5, 2010, 12:53 pmWeekend Reading | Dueling Barstools says:
[...] Somin at Volokh commenting on a recent article by Matt Yglesias, which complained that there should be less elected positions [...]
March 5, 2010, 1:29 pmBlar says:
David M. Nieporent: From the point of view of an individual voter, trying to decide whether or not to support the incumbent governor, bundling can be a problem. But I’m talking about the point of view of the governor, looking at the governor’s incentives. And as long as the governor can expect some voters to be pushed over the edge into opposing him if he messes up on some issue, he has appropriate incentives to get that policy right. From that point of view, it doesn’t matter so much how individual voters are making their decisions, as long as some of them are giving some weight to the issue (in the right direction).
Jayson Virissimo: If the outcomes of a policy are distant and that makes them invisible to voters, then that is a problem – the governor won’t have the proper incentive to get that policy right. If a governor gets blamed for something that was completely out of his control (his predecessor’s policies, the national economy, or whatever), then that’s not so bad – his chances at reelection may be unfairly low, but he still has the proper incentives to make things go as well as possible to maximize those chances (unless he gets blamed so harshly that reelection becomes hopeless).
March 6, 2010, 3:07 am