To analyze the problem, I asked myself, "How do people decide who to vote for right now?" And to answer that question, I had to enter the realm of supposition, since I don't know how other people pick a candidate - I only know how I do it! A quick brainstorm lead me to the following possibilities:
Most of these reasons seem less than rational to me... I hope I'm wrong, but I have to believe that most people do not spend the time (or have the time) to get deep into their choices for candidates. Sure, we all want to vote for the person who will maximize our self-interests (whatever those may be), but this is easier said than done! As Richard R. Lau, a politics professor at Rutgers said, "I don’t think very many people are persuaded by detailed policy analysis, or arguments, or things like that; because most people don’t have the interest to pay attention to those things ... many people don’t want, and most people can’t deal very well with, a lot of information."
Single-platform. "The one who will increase spending for NASA gets my vote every time!" A response to current events. "So-and-so worked for a bank and my bank rejected me yesterday, so that settles it for me." Party ticket. "I'm a Demopubrican and their candidate can count on my vote." Habitual/Historical. "I've been voting Demopubrican for sixty years and that's good enough for me." Novelty. "These ideas are all new, so must be good." Emotional. "I feel good about myself and the future when I hear this guy make a speech." Platform studies. "I like the majority of the things this person says they will do and what they have voted for in the past." Social pre-voting. "All of my friends think the Demopubrican is the best, so I'll vote their way."
Some people might want to dance around the issue, but I think for the vast majority of us, when we vote it's a little bit better than choosing at random. Hey, I know I'm guilty! Sure, for some key elections and seats I'll do a load of homework, learning about them as people and as to what their voting records have been, but for most races I'll just pick a candidate for one of those really illogical methods on my list and hope for the best. I feel guilty about it - like I'm being a bad citizen, but I just don't have the time to study up on everybody!
Politicians are totally unique because they are humans - trillions of variables all slapped together in one body! It was all becoming too confusing for me so I sought an analogy. What else are totally different from each other, yet share a common system of ratings to differentiate them? The answer that jumped to mind was: Movies!
This then, is the goal for the second half of the future of grassroots organizations - to go beyond just finding a better person to vote for and hit the problem from the other side at the same time: Help the voters do a better job at picking the candidate that will do what they want. We need to work together to move from information overload to information summarization!
Here are the steps to making this happen using a politician rating system, as I see them:
- Determine what metrics will be of most use to all voters.
- Build a generation model to populate these metrics.
- Organize to collect the data required to feed the generation models.
- Publish the rating results for all candidates in a cross-tab fashion so they can be compared.
This sounds like an idea that I've sat on for a while. Folks get matched up on dating sites like match.com - there ought to be a similar mechanism for finding who you'd vote for, based on a profile of preferences, rather than which candidate spent the most money on their campaign.
ReplyDeleteThe general profile could be built using questions where your interests can be represented as sliding scales, but these may be built on questions so that the answer isn't directly supplied by values input by the person building the profile (on the notion that answering an array scenario-based questions results in more honest answers than rating yourself).
I just thought of another way to (if nothing else) encourage folks to think about what they're voting for and why. A game like simcity where you make decisions as a congressman, senator, governor or US President. You can run the budget into the ground and dole out support checks willy-nilly or bring back the 18th amendment (repeal the 21st?), illegalise abortion or legalise the weed for recreational consumption. The trick with making the AI for the game is to generate some consequences without introducing publisher bias (though bias may be introduced by the end-user). Two end users can play the same circumstances, but consequences can be based on the thinking of others who have similar profiles. That way it's more about assessing the player than educating them about how choices A, B and C will bring about a national cataclysm!
ReplyDeleteThe problem here is coming up with a set of purely objective metrics that aren't squishy - plug in the same data and you get the same result out every time. Unfortunately that kind of metric is going to be difficult to model and even more fun to populate - hence the need to organize a grassroots organization to assist!
ReplyDeleteThe game idea sounds cool, but the trouble would be building the sets of underlying assumptions (and supporting AI) that everyone agrees upon, even within a given pool of similar profiles. Gosh, look at the on-going disputes (and differences) between just the Keynesian and Austrian School theories!