[extropy-chat] FEC to regulate internet

[Hal Finney]

Mike Lorrey writes:
> http://apnews.myway.com/article/20041013/D85MHF6G0.html
>
> Still think that voting for Kerry is good idea? Just wait until he gets
> in office and his special interest buddies and their left wing media
> get the FEC to clamp down on internet political speech. Mark my words:
> there will be gnashing and anguish (or, more likely, apologia and
> excuse making) from those who vote for him on this list. See the story:

I don't see much difference between either of the major party candidates
on this issue.  The net is as much a tool of the left as the right these
days, as witnessed by the insurgent success of the Dean candidacy and
such groups as moveon.org.  Most election "reforms" which put limits
on campaign spending and advertising are bipartisan.  The truth is that
both major parties have a shared interest in keeping other candidates out
of the public eye, and in mutually reducing their own costs.  Extending
spending limitations to the net could advance both of these goals.

What I find interesting is the role of money in elections.  Why is it that
to a large degree, the side which spends more tends to win?  Why does a
voter choose to vote for the side which spent more?  Is this a rational
action on the part of the voter?  And what does this tell us about the
kinds of institutions which will best reflect people's preferences on
policy matters?

At the core of the question is the paradox of voting.  In national
elections, the chance of a voter swinging the election is essentially
zero.  Most elections just aren't that close.  And in the rare case that
they are very close, almost a tie, the Florida debacle demonstrated that
elections become nondeterministic.  Things go to the courts and the
impact of one vote more or less will only have a small, probabilistic
influence on the outcome.

The bottom line is that if the only benefit of voting is changing the
probability that your candidate will get elected, it is almost certainly
not worthwhile to vote.  The change in probability is so small that the
costs and inconvenience of going to the voting booth would be much larger
than the benefits.

To get around this problem our social institutions try to provide
other motivations for voting.  We publish propaganda to try to make
people feel good about participating, about doing their "civic duty".
Some countries even mandate voting.

Given that these incentives have worked for a voter, and he is going to
drag himself into the voting booth, the question is then how much effort
he should put into deciding how to vote.  And here again the same sort
of reasoning suggests that the answer is, not much.  His vote almost
certainly won't matter anyway, so why should he spend time to study the
issues and the candidates?

The same propaganda that encourages voting also encourages informed
voting, so if his motivation for participation is due to this
influence, that might also encourage him to spend time to get informed.
However if he is voting because it is legally required, this would be a
smaller effect.  I would predict that the electorate in countries with
voluntary voting would be relatively more informed and interested than
the electorate in countries with mandatory voting.  I don't know if this
turns out to be true or not.

Even among people who want to be informed and make a good choice, it's
hard to say how much time they should spend at it.  Knowing who is right
and wrong on complicated questions of policy is extremely difficult.
The mere fact that so many people on all sides are very convinced of the
correctness of their cause is a fundamental paradox.  Even the experts
disagree.  Here's a quote from a poll of professional economists, via
Brad DeLong's blog:

"A third of the economists reckon the economy is in good or very
good shape; about half give a neutral response, and one in five deems
the economy to be weak. They are almost equally split about how much
responsibility the Bush administration deserves for the state of today's
economy. Just over a third assign some or all credit or blame to the
president; another third think he has had little or nothing to do
with it."

Given this uncertainty, and the fundamental unimportance of any one
person's vote, it is hard to justify spending huge amounts of time in
trying to make a better decision.  Most people seem to fall back on some
simple heuristics: choose a party and follow their recommendations;
ask your friends.  And apparently, listen to whichever side has more
advertising.

It could be that this last method, of voting for the issue with the
greatest volume, that is, the position that you hear advocated more
often, is based on tribal instincts.  In small tribes, the position that
you would hear most often is probably the one held by most people, and
on that basis is probably more likely to be correct.  It could be that
in modern society this is no longer such a good rule but our instincts
still guide us in this way.  When we hear a given argument made over
and over again, it has an impact.

The same effect is used in all advertising, but political advertising is a
little different because the personal cost of being wrongly influenced is
so much less.  If you buy something because it was advertised and it turns
out to be a waste, you eventually learn from this and become skeptical.
But such feedback is much less available in political advertising.
You don't experience such negative consequences from voting unwisely,
because for one thing your vote doesn't mean much.

An interesting difference is that product advertising tends to go on for
a while, so if you buy something and it's junk, you'll probably still
see ads for it.  Each time you see one you'll be angry about how you were
fooled and manipulated.  But political ads end when the election is held.
No one remembers two or four years later what ads were running and how
they were influenced by them.

I think this is one area our institutions could be better: do more to
help people remember the political ads which led them to vote the way
they did.  It would be great if, when a policy fails or a politician is
found to be dishonest, the media would dig out their old ads and run
them over and over again, reminding people of what fools they were to
fall for that stuff.

People talk about accountability in government, but ultimately it is
the voters who are accountable.  Yet they are never held to account.
They never have their noses rubbed in it when they make a mistake.
Voting would be a more effective institution if we had more mechanisms
for people to directly feel the impact of their votes, and to learn
which sources of information are reliable and which are not to be trusted.

Hal