Extract
Voting with intensity.
I. INTRODUCTION
Imagine that the following announcement is made two weeks before the next presidential election: We are supporters of candidate B who, as you know, is trailing G in the polls by four percentage points, 52-48. But we feel strongly about our candidate and the policies he supports. We hope that some of you who have planned to vote for the front-runner, G, or not to vote at all, can be convinced to vote for B. Toward this end, we promise that if B is elected we will contribute $1 billion to the environmental causes that G supports. This sort of promise is probably unenforceable, and it may even be criminal to make an announcement of this kind.(1) The hypothetical offer by some of B's supporters represents an offer to buy votes, or at least to induce some particular voting behavior, and vote buying (and selling) is considered antithetical to democratic principles in both popular and academic accounts. But there are a number of reasons to re-examine the conventional view of vote buying and selling. First, the potential for computerized voting and trading of voting rights means not only that new forms of vote selling are likely to appear but also that restrictions on vote trades will be feasible. If, for example, a seller could condition a sale on a specified use by a buyer, then some vote trading or refined proxy assignments might become quite attractive. Second, there is room for an improved explanation of the conventional ban on vote selling. Part of my explanation builds on an understanding of a collective action problem among sellers of certain kinds of goods. This explanation suggests where vote trading might be (and has been) tolerated, and it also provides clues for a general theory of inalienability. Finally, the conventional view pays insufficient attention to the likelihood of relatively intense voting preferences. Conventional markets enable intense preferences to be satisfied because participants can bid or substitute for things they very much want. Indeed, there are very few arenas where intense preferences cannot be satisfied. In most settings, however, wealth empowers players to satisfy their preferences, and this presents a problem where voting rights are concerned because these rights are often exercised precisely where we have decided to make decisions through politics rather than markets. The obvious question in the case of voting rights is whether intense preferences can be accommodated without shifting enormous power to wealthier citizens. Part II of this article sets out a brief theory of inalienability and locates voting rights in this theory, or explanation, of inalienability. Part III explores collective action problems among voters and works with the idea of likely and unlikely voters as separate groups. Likelihood (of voting) may be, but need not be, strongly correlated with intensity. An immediate payoff is that the collective action angle illuminates recent changes in corporate law, where vote selling is now sometimes tolerated. I suggest that these collective action problems offer an improved explanation of our present rules and intuitions even outside of corporate law. At the same time, they suggest some possibilities for change. Part IV examines the idea of accommodating intense preferences. In large-scale general elections, collective action problems are likely to doom a market or other means of extracting information about intense preferences. Indeed, there is the possibility of obtaining perverse results, and this is an outcome that (as we will see) seems abhorrent. Still, there may be room for careful innovation, with some market-like mechanisms, aimed at capturing information about intense preferences. II. INALIENABILITY, WEALTH, AND THE SURPRISING ROLE OF MARKETS A. The (Sensible) Conventional Hostility Inalienability requires explanation. Parties who choose to trade their goods and rights will virtually always be made better off by such trades. Legal rules against these trades are therefore unusual, not to mention inconsistent with conventional notions of liberty, and are likely to be motivated, or at least explained, by reference either to external effects on non-trading parties or to serious social policies. In the case of voting rights, there is something of a surfeit of plausible, but somewhat flimsy, explanations as to why it is illegal to sell or buy votes in general elections. Following some of the short-cuts cleared by Rick Hasen in an important recent piece, there is, first, the danger that legalized vote buying will benefit wealthy persons who may leverage their superior initial endowments into political advantage.(2) Implicit in this argument is either the idea of an imperfect capital market, for otherwise poorer people would borrow to win elections and then repay their loans with some of the fruits of political power, or the idea that politics is about things that markets can not or should not control. Vote selling might, for inst...See the full content of this document
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