What Condorcet and Debt Ceiling Polls Say About the Average Voter
There’s always been an inherent tension between our society’s want to acknowledge the central role of the individual - as a voter - in democracy, and the need to have a somewhat competent government. That’s why Senators were originally elected by state legislators and it’s why we have a voting age of 18.
The debate over whether or not to raise the federal debt ceiling is highlighting this tension. TPM is reporting today that a plurality of Americans - 47% - oppose raising the debt ceiling. 34% counted themselves as undecided, but if we assume that they would split evenly if forced to make a count, there is a clear majority of the public that would oppose raising the debt ceiling. What are these people thinking?
You’d be hard-pressed to find a economist who thinks forcing the federal government to default on its debts is good policy. In fact, Congressional Republicans are only threatening to vote against the debt ceiling increase to extract some of their own policy goals from Democrats. So why is the public so ignorant in comparison to elites in the government?
Some academics have argued that the public isn’t really all that incompetent. Gerald Gaus argues in his paper ”Is the Public Incompetent? Compared to Whom? About What?” that the idea that there is an elite that is better at producing policy proposals than the general public,
assumes that (i) we know what sort of knowledge is relevant for “good outputs” and (ii) the experts or the elite have a lot more of it. We cannot even begin to provide an answer to (ii) unless we know (i).
Basically, if we want to say that elites are more competent at policy, we need to say why they are. But is that really true? What if it’s just obvious?
This is where Condorcet is relevant. Condorcet argues - intuitively - that the likelihood of a voting body making the correct choice is directly related the average voter’s likelihood of making the correct choice. As Gaus himself describes it, “if the judgment of the average voter has even a tiny bit better than random chance of being correct, the majority opinion is almost certainly correct.”
And yet we have with the debt ceiling an obvious example of the public coming up with the wrong policy choice. Using some pretty simple deduction, we end up stuck with the idea that the average voter would be more likely to make the correct choice on economic policy by tossing a coin than by using their brain.
We don’t need to satisfy Gauss’ strange set of requirements to show the public as less competent than elite policymakers. They’ve done that all on their own.
