Elections Should not Matter

lessons from switzerland

There is only one country in the world that has really truly solved governance. That country is Switzerland. Only the Helvetic Confederation has all three of these virtues united in one state

1. Actual democratic elections

2. A multitude of parties (see my previous post on why this one matters)

3. Long-term stability in the ruling coalition.

The first two are almost impossible to coexist with the last. Democratic elections almost never elect the same party for long. And multiplying the number of parties multoplies that phenonemon. Yet here’s the Swiss National Council (lower house):

That’s a lot of parties

And here’s the composition their Federal Council (executive cabinet) over the years:

BDP more like BPD amirite

Not only is it remarkably stable. A similar figure for the United States would most resemble a bar code. The cabinet also enjoys wide support in the national council . The four coalition parties together control 160 out of 200 seats. Since elections are proportional, that means approximately 80% of voters are represented in the executive. And yet, no individual election matters much. But let’s back up. Why care about stability?

Future-Proofing Government

I’m stealing this from David Friedman, but don’t remember which of his writings.

Imagine you are presented with an unusually profitable opportunity to plant olive trees on your land. Perhaps the government is giving out olive tree tax credits, or labor is unusually cheap by way of an economic shock. However, olive trees only bear fruit after eight or nine years, and you have plan to retire and sell your farm in five years. Should you still do it, even though you will never eat or sell the harvest?

The answer is yes. Because you do not need to harvest olives to profit from olive trees. In five years, when you sell the farm, the farm contains five year old olive trees. Which are more valuable than newly planted olive trees or worse the lack of olive trees. Your decision to plant when a opportunity arose, pays you now in a higher sale price of your property.

Now imagine you are President of the United States. You are presented with an favorable opportunity to plant olive trees on federal land. In this case you should not take it. By the time your olive trees bear fruit, you are definitely going to be out of office. The next president will reap the profits of your decisions. And they are equally likely to be of the party you oppose as your own party. And when you leave office you do not receive any form of compensation for the investments you made.

Maybe you can appeal to voters to recognize the value of the investments you made. Or perhaps not, voters aren’t know for their reliable ability to asses the specifics of federal land management. Or really the ability to asses anything that is not directly visible to them. Better not to risk it and not plant their trees. The rational thing for the president is to always operate with an extremely high time preferance.

*Shocked Pikachu face*

The United States has a particular quirk that makes this even worse. Between the first week of November and January 20th of the next year there is a short period where the new president is elected, but hasn’t taken office yet. Sometimes—during particularly polarized times—you might value benefits harvested during an oppositional presidency of negatively. Those benefits only help them getting re-elected after all. You might even considering sabotaging them by planning a doomed military action during their presidency.

This is a very fundamental problem with democracy. It can not be completely solved. But it can be reduced. If the chance is high that you will be in power when the olive trees are mature, it does pay to plant them. If you circle back to the Swiss Federal Council, those politicians can rely on at least their parties still being in power ten years from now. Perhaps not them individually, but strong party unity makes that less relevant. Switzerland’s debt to GDP ratio? 17.8%!

Politics for Sale.

In the year of Our Lord 2022 Elon Musk spend $44B to buy Twitter. When he did it I thought he was being a fool. There is no way for him to make that back. The business decisions he made after that only reinforced that intuition.

Earlier this year Elon started using his newly bought network to promote the campaign of upstart presidential candidate Donald J Trump. He also invested $277M of his personal money in the republican campaign. Trump—being a man of principles—felt compelled to return the favor, stating he has “no choice” but to suppory EVs now.

Don managed to win. Ever since, Tesla stock has nearly doubled in price, currently standing at $1.34T, 13% of which is owned by Elon personally. Which amounts to ~$70T in increased wealth. So in retrospect I have to admit Elon made the right business call.

Honesty requires me to admit that a lot of that wealth gain happened over the course weeks and not suddenly in the wake of the election. Reasonable minds can disagree about how much of the evaluation increase is to be linked to the election outcome. My intuition says “a whole lot”. Yes, the Trump team have indicated they wil eliminate EV tax credits. But Tesla has said they support it. Perhaps their strategy to kill competition. Speaking of competition, the largest producer of EVs is China, and by a wide margin.

Who cares though?
Should we be okay with a billionaire buying the election? There are some reasons you might say yes. Billionaires tend to be smarter and more informed than the average voter, and they benefit when the economy does well. On the other hand, the motive for buying an election may be private gains as much as public gains. Just after the election, the S&P rose also. But it did not rise nearly as much as Tesla. And while an economy run by CEO has its advantages, advocates of this form have suggested turning unproductive people into biodiesel. Personally, I would rather drive an electric car and invite my grandma for Christmas dinner, instead of fueling my car with grandma and celebrating Christmas without her.

The general consensus seems to be that the nation most controlled by its billionaires is Russia, not an example to emulate. Others may say South Korea, which does a lot better on growing GDP, but isn’t doing great on the whole “not turning people into bio-fuel” aspect I also care about. So far there have been no reported cases of Koreans being used as bio-fuel, they aren’t literally turning people into bio-fuel so far. Koreans only burn in “Hell Joseon”, not internal combustion engines, which is still to far down the bio-fuel spectrum for my taste.

In the end I come down on “better to not have billionaires buy elections”.

Being concerned about billionaires buying elections has traditionally been seen as the home turf left-populists. Though I’m not one, I share their concern. People have pointed out that the amount of money going around in politics really isn’t that much in comparison to the total economy. But that’s the wrong dedominator. If you come up to me with a $10M bribe, I don’t think to myself “that’s less than 1/100 000 of Dutch GDP, I don’t care!” and neither would I expect politicians to. The low amount of money spend might indicate that the market feels like there isn’t much to gain. But that seems to be changing now.

What do you do about this. The conventional answer is to overturn Citizens United. But consider how little it would pay to buy Swiss elections. You’re not changing the composition of the Federal Council, unless you bring about a major political sea change. Even then, you might change it by what? One member? In America, all you have to do is to convince a few myriads of rural Midwesterners. Easy peasy.

No Joe Rogan of the Alps.

Who could be the Joe Rogan Of The Left? Could there be a Joe Rogan Of The Left? Was Joe Rogan the Joe Rogan Of The Left? These are the questions liberals have asked in their post mortems. Not for no reason. Trump on Rogan has in excess of 50 million views on Youtube alone. This does not include the people that listened to the podcast appearance through other means, which I understand to be the most common way podcasts are heard. It’s also the way I listen. We do not know the total numbers, but they probably exceed the 67 million people that saw his debate with Kamala. More than that, the Joe Rogan listener is got to be much more open to be convinced than the debate watcher. Donald himself—fyi—was only the climax of a whole MAGA parade that went on Rogan, all raking in massive views.

What are you? A MAGA Sandwich.

This is supremely sad. Joe Rogan is everything wrong with voters. He comes to his opinions in a fundamentally vibes based manner. Consequentially, he believes in a lot of crackpot theories. This is why he will bring up Graham Hancock time and time again, but he has only invited a mainstream archeologist once, only for a debate, and with Hancock no less. Only to shit-talk him afterwards. Luckily our elections don’t turn on the existence of advanced pre-glacial civilizations. But given that Rogan is evidently the news source that determines elections, the epistemic quality leaves a lot to be desired.

A common claim is that Joe Rogan is the “median voter”. This is supposed to be the reason his podcast is so influential. I do not think this is right. Rogan is only the median voter in sense that he is “between” Republicans and Democrats. You might well say Imane Khalif is the median Algerian, since she is between an ordinary man and an ordinary women in terms of her physique.

The median voter has a coherent worldview, and knows which party aligns with it. Or their community does, and they vote with their community. Joe Rogan is not the median, but the marginal voter. Amongst the greatest insights of Economics is that medians and margins are fundamentally different, and margins usually matter more.

To be a marginal/swing voter in an American presidential election, is to be a very unusual type of person. This person could have a well developed political vision, and both candidates just happen to adhere to it equally well (supremely unlikely, I have yet to encounter this creature in nature). Or—more likely—they just do not pay attention to politics at all, and are extremely manipulable and uninformed person. This is the type of voter that listens to Joe Rogan. You may think the avarage voter is not to bright, but you can trust that the marginal voter is much, much worse, at least when it comes to politics. But this is the voter who decides elections when they are close.

I do not know if Switzerland has an analogous media figure to Joe Rogan. But even if they do, it is not his listeners that determine the election. The Swiss are not governed by the wavering swing voter, the reliable, long term, median voter controls Switzerland.

The Agentic State

On the upcoming January 20th, The Republican will control the White House, switching away party control from the Democrats. This will be the fourth time in as many presidential terms that the partisan control changes. This is quite problematic. For a lot of policy areas there can be genuine disagreement about what the right policy is. But everyone should be able to agree that you should pick a policy and stick with it.

Should you drill for oil on federal land or leave nature undisturbed? Whichever one you choose is probably preferable to switching between stilling and non-drilling every four years. Because when you do that you still end up disturbing nature, while never getting the maximum amount of oil, at higher cost. There may be disagreements on how to best regulate any industry, but it’s never a good idea to switch between two different regulations on a regular basis. Firms now need to adept to both regulatory regimes, which makes their life much harder. This is bad enough in the domestic policy sphere, but God help us with foreign policy.

In 2015 Iran and the United States signed “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” popularly known as the “Iran (nuclear) deal”. Some other countries also signed, but nobody cares. This deal was designed to prevent Iran from nuclear weaponry. As far as I am aware, Iran kept to its end. In 2018 the United States withdrew. They reason why is simple: partisan control of the White House had changed.

I lack the knowledge to confidently say whether it would be better to sign or not to sign this deal, so I will not comment on that. But both options are clearly preferable to signing, then withdrawing three years later for no good reason. How will you credibly sign any deal with any country, when they know that your word is not worth the air through which it reaches your ears. Trump is now planning to strike a peace deal with Russia over Ukraine. How is Putin to take that deal seriously? He knows that the only person that feels any investment in upholding whatever deal they come to, is the orange creature in front of him. Any Democrat will not care one bit. If you want your words to carry weight internationally, you need consistent leadership. The United States lucked out that there was a bipartisan semi-consenus on foreign policy for a long time. Not the most reliable strategy, and it has since turned to dust in the face of polarization.

I didn’t want to dedicate a whole header to it, but you also don’t see this shit happening in Bern either.

---

Consistency: How It’s Made.

It is all well and good for me to sing the praises of the Swiss system, but I have to acknowledge how hard it is to replicate. Out of scores of democratic and attempted democratic countries worldwide, only the one Alpine nation arrived at these institutions. The closest thing to it is Singapore, who managed to do it by abolishing free speech and the lucky coincidence that their dominant party is actually good at their job, but even they are slipping

To create a second Switzerland may be too hard a task, but one could at least attempt to move in its direction. Here follow a few ideas:

The Deep State

Remember that foreign policy consensus I talked about. You can thank the deep state for that. What stopped Trump from using the DoJ some more in his coup attempts? Deep state again! The only hope of anyone stopping Trump craziness this term is deep state actors.

What is the deep state anyway? The term is often used, but rarely defined. I mean by it simply those parts of the executive branch that one president cannot unilaterally control or change. A characteristic example would be the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Any one president can only appoint four members at most out of fourteen total. This means that any president that wants to manipulate with the Fed for short term gain is unable to do so. You also prevent election whiplash. The Board effectively takes a average out of the last seven elections. If there is anything you want to do about this that doesn’t involve some sort of constitutional amendment, creating deep state institutions is the way.

Proportional Representation

Is every one of my posts going to be a secret ad for PR? I hope not. Even in this case PR is only part of the solution. Because while Swiss elections are proportional, and that is probably part of the magic. It is not sufficient. Many other nations have adopted the same form of election, but most did not become like Switzerland.

But even they are more like Switzerland than America is. The Netherlands has a coalitionairy form of government. Unlike in Switzerland, the composition changes over time. But there is always some level of continuity. Since WWII there nobody has ever formed been a governing coalition that did not have some overlap with the outgoing coalition. And of the three major parties and their fore-bearers (CDA, PvdA, VVD) each coalition contained at least two.¹ There is thus always someone to uphold the policy of the previous administration, and a guarantee that at least one—probably two—of the parties will have to experience the pain of ill-begotten policies.

Just Don’t Have a Head of Government

Now is left the task of explaining the gap between the Netherlands and Switzerland. The best I can do here is point to the things that make Switzerland unique and suppose that they may have something to do with it. I considered the ubiquity of referendum, but a lot of states also have that and it doesn’t seem to help much.

However, it turns out that Switzerland is basically the only country that doesn’t have a singular head of state and/or government. The only others example are Bosnia, which has one president per major ethnic group. Or I suppose you include places like Gabon with their “Committee for the Transition and Restoration of Institutions”. I don’t know the story behind them, but I also don’t think I need to.

It must be something about human psychology that we always feel the need to have a defined head of state. Some modern incarnation of primate social dynamics. Or maybe it’s just part of the recepy of what it means to be a state. In either case, nobody stops to think about whether it’s a good idea. Even in coalition governments, it’s a establishing force. Only one person can be prime minister. There is only one king of the hill. If you give people a hill to fight over, they will fight. I don’t know whether this effect plays on politicians, but it definitely plays on voters. In every election where the PM is running again, he enjoys the premierbonus, while coalition parties usually suffer. They are usually seen as selling out the the prime minister, with very little concrete examples of how. Just abolish the hill.

Alpha males. Then, and now.

[inb4 “monarchy”. Another post my friend, another post]

1. Except for the latest coalition, which only includes VVD. This is connected to the astronomic fall that the other two parties. Though it does contain NSC, which is a split from CDA.