fling93 loves fishies

On Finding Better Candidates

I generally don’t have much to say about the Alito hearings, as I don’t have a strong stake in the outcome. As a libertarian conservative, I don’t view a conservative court as a bad thing per se, especially since it seems to me that the big mistakes the Supreme Court court made recently — Raich and Kelo — have been largely due to the liberals.

But I do have a few things to say about the whole nomination process.

First off, Dahlia Lithwick has a piece at Slate on the Alito confirmation hearings complaining about the Alito hearings, comparing it to those of Roberts:

At his hearings, Roberts sounded the notes of “humility” and “modesty” repeatedly. Over and over, he emphasized the need for judicial deference—to precedent, to the other branches of government, and also to his colleagues on the court. He declined to answer dozens more questions than did Alito. But his casting of himself as a modest cog in a vast and complicated machine afforded real comfort even to those of us concerned about his substantive views.

At first blush, Alito’s approach appears simply to be a different flavor of judicial modesty: Where Roberts spoke repeatedly of deference to other institutions, Alito persistently defers to the legal process itself. He tells us, over and over again, that he approaches cases with an “open mind.” He says he would start analyzing any issue by closely scrutinizing the relevant statute. He insists—time and again—that he hasn’t yet fully studied the issue at hand and cannot therefore offer an opinion.

Of course, both of these approaches are symptomatic of a process where a candidate needs to be as bland and inoffensive as possible to avoid drawing too much opposition in the confirmation hearings. Any nominee voicing firm opinions on anything would draw instant controversy just like a Natalie Portman draws a fling93. This is how we end up with “stealth candidates” of “humility,” “modesty,” and “open minds” instead of more outspoken candidates.

Tenure

This flaw in the process reminded me of a similar flaw in the tenure process that I brought up in a comment a few months ago at Dan Drezner’s blog when he found out he was denied tenure by University of Chicago (by the way, since I keep track of all of my blog comments using del.icio.us, I was able to find it quickly). So, with the caveat that I don’t have any first-hand knowledge of the tenure process, this is what I said about it:

It seems to me that tenure hardly resembles a system that was designed by anybody with even a basic knowledge of markets. Just like with SCOTUS nominees, the incentives are to hide all of your political opinions. Is this really a desired quality in the ideal academic?

This is what happens when the goal of candidates is to not get shot down by anybody. The emphasis is moved away from brilliance and towards inoffensiveness…

After all, a brilliant legal scholar voicing strong opinions on abortion would immediately draw loud Democratic opposition (although minority opposition might not seem to matter in terms of the final outcome, a President may have political reasons for the confirmation hearings to not attract much public attention). Similarly any academic candidate known to have strong political views is more likely to draw opposition of somebody on the tenure committee. And it takes strong opposition from just one person to make a shambles out of your chances.

As I said in a subsequent comment:

The process will filter out a lot of outspoken people and those who embrace risk. Why would you want to do that? Heck, a person who desires tenure is likely to already be risk-averse in the first place, because people are rewarded amply for taking on risk in the non-academic marketplace. And as for outspokenness, what’s the point of protecting academic freedom of speech if most of the people who gain that freedom aren’t bold enough to use it?

The root of the problem is that the process focuses on finding negatives instead of positives. And of course, if you have enough people looking, somebody is likely to find something in almost anybody. Almost. Because potential candidates know about this process, some of them, like Roberts, will make sure to have as little of a paper trail as possible.

And this is true of a good deal of our political process. With all our special interests demanding the right to shoot down anything they object to, we end up with mediocre policies to go along with our mediocre candidates. Policies and candidates that nobody hates — but nobody likes either.

Condorcet

And this brings up yet another reason I hadn’t been blogging very often — the Condorcet method. As long-time readers might know, I’d planned a series of posts on electoral reform. So far, I’d covered the problems with plurality and also discussed one alternative, Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). I had meant to continue on to illustrate why the Condorcet method and Approval voting were both even better in selecting candidates that satisfied more of the electorate. But then I hit a snag.

Recall that plurality’s big problem is that it cannot handle more than two candidates gracefully. A strong third-party showing ends up spoiling the outcome, thus discouraging many excellent candidates from running (for example, McCain could not have run against both Bush and Kerry without handing the election to Kerry). IRV addresses this by using ranked ballots to simulate runoffs, eliminating the weakest candidate one at a time until there is only one left. It does a pretty good job, but is still susceptible to the spoiler effect, albeit to a lesser degree.

Condorcet uses a ranked ballot as well, but instead of performing runoffs, it runs simulated head-to-head races between every candidate (kind of like a round-robin tournament) and selects the candidate who would beat every other candidate (the tie-breaking process is a bit complicated, so I won’t go into that here). This does a better job of eliminating the spoiler effect, and my Condorcet post was going to illustrate that.

However, before I could write that post, I came across an argument against Condorcet that was articulated by Professor Matthew Shugart:

As for Condorcet, I must confess to knowing too little about its actual mechanics and how a voter might respond to it. I think a flaw that both Condorcet and approval share is the likely favoring of colorless, offend-no-one candidates. While I dislike plurality…I am no more favorable to a method that encourages candidates to avoid taking any clear stands in order to avoid losing in the simulated one-on-ones…

And he made other good points as well. So I think I’m going to revise my position and endorse IRV ahead of Condorcet (although Condorcet may still be useful in selecting policies instead of candidates — more on that in a future post).

Professor Shugart, by the way, is an expert on electoral systems and has an excellent blog. Be sure to check out his posts on how Proportional Representation (PR) would address our polarized political situation by giving voice to moderates (for more on PR, see the PR Library).

My mistake was to focus purely on the incentives of the voter (Condorcet is one of the least susceptible to tactical voting) and ignore the incentives on the candidates themselves. An important lesson if economics is going to be my field of study (or perhaps this is a sign that I’d be better off in political science?).

Incentives matter

After all, economics is all about incentives. Indeed, I finally read Freakonomics over the holidays. It’s that New York Times bestseller by “rogue economist” Steven Levitt along with Stephen Dubner. I thought I’d love it since I’d always had a thing for Rogue from The Uncanny X-Men, but instead I was rather disappointed (my take is pretty much the same as Antonella Pavese’s).

I did, however, enjoy the early sections where he talks about incentives and how policies can have unintended consequences due to their effects on incentives. This has long been a fascination of mine (for example, I think economic benefits intended to encourage marriages end up weakening the institution of marriage by encouraging people to marry for bad reasons). I thought the most interesting anecdote of the book was how a day care center tried to combat tardy parents by following the advice of economists and implementing a $3 late fee, which merely caused the tardiness to double because the economic incentive of the fee itself was more than outweighed by the fee’s detrimental effect upon the moral and social incentives. After all, the guilt that parents used to feel about being late could now be assuaged by a mere $3.

Likewise, both tenure and the confirmation process of SCOTUS nominees have unintended consequences on incentives. These systems appear to be designed to select candidates that satisfy the interests of those in power. Sounds fine in theory, but just like I overlooked the effect of Condorcet on the incentives on the candidates themselves, so, apparently, did the designers of these processes. And if there’s one thing that economics teaches us, it’s that incentives matter.

How to fix this?

How would I change things? Well, I need to give this more thought, but my idea would be to shift the focus away from negatives and towards positives. Don’t have a process where a tenure review board or a legislature searches for holes and weaknesses, but instead use a broader starting point where everybody involved lists those they think are most deserving. Note that brilliant and outspoken people are much more likely to make such lists, because they are more likely to inspire admiration from some and hatred from others. But avoiding hatred would no longer be a criterion. And nor should it be, lest we want to end up with nothing but flavorless candidates.

This will create a long and varied list, of course. So how do you narrow the list? Well… maybe this would be a good place to use IRV?