This week, I finally read Bryan Caplan’s “The Myth of the Rational Voter,” which I had been looking forward to reading for some time now. I loved the book, as could probably have been expected by most informed readers given my own discontent with democracy as an institution and Caplan’s, as well as my recent fascination with economics.
That said, I’ve decided to take up a new hobby: proposing new electoral systems to circumvent some of the worst excesses of democratic government. Here’s my first approach, which I’ll call the dehumanization approach, by analogy with desalinization systems that remove a toxic element (salt) to create drinkable water from an unsafe source. The human element in politics is one of the things I think most toxic in democratic countries’ elections, because a focus on the “human side” tends to corrode rational analysis of platforms. (As a suggestive bit of evidence, consider this research bit from Stanford indicating that voters might choose candidates based on facial similarities.)
My proposed solution is simple: elect platforms, not candidates. Remove the candidates’ personalities entirely from the race, so that ideas alone determine the victor. You could so by creating an ordered list of essential issues and, for each, an spectrum of possible positions. Survey the American public on their preferences. Then survey the candidates (who are kept secret until after votes are cast) and perform a least squares analysis to determine which candidate comes closest to the mean positions and the median positions. One of these matches is the elected official.
Obviously, there are flaws with this approach, but I think it would be interesting to compare and contrast it with our current cult-of-personality-driven democratic elections in the US.