Seeking Consensus: Navigating a crowded decision-making environment with quadratic voting and how the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County did it.

• Author: Prewitt, Matt
• Position: RETHINKING BUDGETING

Budget decisions today are often made in an environment of high conflict and low trust. This is not surprising given that conflict is up, and trust is down in the United States, generally. The share of people who think that most other people can be trusted has declined in the U.S. by about one-quarter over the past few decades. (1) This has real consequences. Seven in ten Americans think low trust between fellow citizens makes it harder to solve problems. (2) The good news is that there is a desire to repair this problem. Six in ten Americans think it is "very important" that the level of confidence people have in their fellow citizens be improved. (3)

There are many causes of the decline in trust. One cause with salience to local government is the state of the institutions in which our democratic discourse takes place. Many institutions have not evolved and adapted with the times. For example, the simple "majority rule" vote system has been at the center of American government since the founding of the republic. (4) However, the majority rule voting system can create a polarizing, conflict-inducing dynamic. This is especially true when complex, controversial issues, like local governments are increasingly required to deal with, are oversimplified into a binary choice. This is often the case in a local referendum but is also often true in votes undertaken by elected representatives--such as when they vote yes or no on budget proposals. The traditional majority rule system forces people to pick a side and discourages them from investigating potential areas of compromise. (5) The result is that the system (e.g., government) loses legitimacy in the eyes of those who lose the vote. It also misses an opportunity to learn more about the range of preferences that participants have because their choices are reduced to a small number of options (e.g., yes or no).

Local governments are the true laboratories of democracy, making them the ideal place to experiment with new institutional forms designed to address these problems. (6) In this article, we propose the use of an alternative voting system called "Quadratic Voting" (QV). We will show how QV can outperform traditional voting systems and how it can be applied to budgeting decisions using the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, Tennessee, as a case study. In budgets, there will almost always be more proposals for how to use a local government's resources than there are resources available. Thus, there is high potential for conflict and, thus, high potential for decision-making systems that help manage conflict.

QUADRATIC VOTING VERSUS TRADITIONAL VOTING SYSTEMS

In traditional voting systems--sometimes called "one person one vote" (1p1v)--participants are only able to express the direction of their preference for a ballot item (i.e., yes/ no). There is no way for participants to express the magnitude of their preference (i.e., they are not able to express how strongly they feel about any issue). This lack of nuance has consequences. To illustrate, let's consider a few familiar 1p1v scenarios.

Tyranny of the majority. Oftentimes, a decision-making body must consider a proposal that is important to a specific group of people. For example, residents of a minority neighborhood might want a new park. However, the elected representative for that neighborhood might have difficulty getting support for the proposal from a majority of elected representatives, no matter how badly the residents of that neighborhood want the park. Many council members may vote for other uses of funds. Even if the other council members are not opposed to the new park, a lack of enthusiasm could doom the proposal to failure in a competition for resources.

Squeaky wheel. 1p1v systems can face the opposite problem in which passionate minorities dominate the decision-making process. Because the voting system does not allow them to express the magnitude of their preference, the minority finds other ways to do so, like filibustering the deliberation...