Who Wants to Run? Incentivizing Better Participation in Politics

Full Transcript

Note: Transcripts are generated by machine and lightly edited by humans. They may contain errors.

Kevin Cool: If we want a healthy democracy, then we need to create the right incentives. It was December 10, 2020, and the Handforth Parish Council was about to hold a meeting on Zoom.

Councilor Cynthia: Hello, again.

Councilor Sue: Hello, again.

Kevin Cool: Handforth is a small town in Cheshire, south of Manchester, England. Looking around the Zoom screen, you see a collection of pleasant looking senior citizens, all volunteer councilors in Handforth.

Councilor Tolver: When do we plan to start?

Kevin Cool: But almost immediately, the meeting goes terribly wrong.

Councilor Tolver: Can we be assured that we won’t be thrown out of the meeting like we were last time?

Kevin Cool: This was supposed to be a procedural conversation — it was really a meeting about how to conduct meetings — but it was clear that the participants didn’t care for each other very much, and this wasn’t the first time they’d locked horns.

Councilor Tolver: Please let the chairman —

Councilor Brewerton: Ms. Weaver, please.

Councilor Weaver: If you disrupt this meeting, I will have to remove you from it.

Male Voice: You can’t.

Councilor Tolver: You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver. No authority at all.

Kevin Cool: One minute into their discussion, the clerk began ejecting councilors from the meeting.

Councilor Brewerton: She just kicked him out.

Male Voice: No, don’t —

Councilor Brewerton: She just kicked him out.

Male Voice: Don’t —

Councilor Weaver: This is a meeting called by two councilors.

Councilor Brewerton: Illegally.

Councilor Weaver: You may now elect a chairman.

Councilor Brewerton: No, they can’t because the vice chair’s here: I take charge. Read the standing orders; read them and understand them!

Kevin Cool: Several more councilors were ejected. Then a sense of order prevailed with the remaining councilors holding a 90-minute conversation about meeting procedures.

Councilor Sue: Wow.

Male Voice: Thank God for that.

Councilor Sue: Can I propose John Smith, please?

Councilor Cynthia: I’ll second it.

Councilor Smith: Thank you. My first point is to apologize to Jackie. Welcome to Handforth.

Councilor Weaver: Indeed, it’s nothing if not lively in Handforth.

Kevin Cool: But unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of it. Video of the meeting was shared online and became a viral sensation. The opening of the Handforth Parish Council meeting was viewed online more than 10 million times. It even inspired t-shirts as well as a book titled Do You Have the Authority?

Besides the humor and shock of watching a group of grey-haired public servants go at each other, there are bigger questions at play here. The council group was severely polarized, but their differences weren’t ideological. The councilors were frustrated. In truth, they weren’t set up for success. The council is run by volunteers — in this case community members with the time to participate — rather than those best qualified. As a result, those who serve not only endure the pain of this acrimony, they also get little satisfaction. Why would anybody sign up for this?

Democracy is often messy, but a poorly functioning government weakens people’s belief in the system. How do we make sure we have the right incentives so that our best and brightest participate in politics, and how can those incentives reduce polarization? We took these questions to Andy Hall, a professor of political economy at Stanford GSB and professor of political science at Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences.;

Andy Hall: One of the key things driving this wedge between politicians and voters is that it’s actually very hard to get people to want to run for office.

Kevin Cool: This is If/Then, a podcast from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where we examine research findings that can help us navigate the complex issues facing us in business, leadership, and society. I’m Kevin Cool, Senior Editor at the GSB.

You mentioned candidates, because one of the things that you’ve talked about is the need to attract more and “better” candidates, however one might interpret that. But incentives could be a part of that as well.

Andy Hall: A hundred percent. When you look into what’s going on with polarization and dysfunction in American politics, one of the most surprising facts that is pretty well documented in political science but not very well understood by most people outside of political science is that it’s pretty clear the polarization is disproportionately being driven by our politicians — by our parties and our politicians and our interest groups — much more so than voters.

Voters are actually not as polarized as you might think if you just read most media coverage of the American voter. On most policies, if you actually look at the distribution of what the American people as a whole think, it’s remarkable how in the middle they are on most issues.

Kevin Cool: So, the partisanship starts, to some degree, with the politicians themselves?

Andy Hall: Yes. And there’s something about the system by which we elect politicians and by which they design policy that leads to the vast majority of Americans sort of getting screwed by what happens and being very unhappy with both parties. And that’s how we end up with things like Biden and Trump running against each other when they’re two of the most unpopular presidential candidates of all time.

And what I argued in my book is that one of the key things driving this wedge between politicians and voters is that it’s actually very hard to get people to wan tto run for office. And if you look at the opportunities that particularly pragmatic people with high earning potential in society have, they have way better options than being a politician. And I don’t want to paint with a broad brush. We’re lucky to get some very civically minded politicians even despite this.

But one thing you will hear time and again, from members of the House especially as well as in state ledge, is the pay that they receive for the pain they have to go through of the constant campaigning and the constant fundraising and then showing up in Washington to get nothing done, it just is not a good deal. Most of them can go out and make 3x, 4x what they make in the House for none of the headache.

And so, if that’s the state of the world, who’s running? On average, I will tell you — and this is borne out in the data — it’s people with very extreme policy preferences who care so much about pushing through their extreme views that they’re willing to bulldoze through even though it’s a relatively unattractive job for a lot of people in their part of society.

And so, we end up with a lot of soapbox, culture warrior, extreme people running for office. And then voters who actually on average prefer more centrist candidates, they’re stuck. They don’t get opportunities to vote for centrist candidates nearly as much as they would like to. And in the rare cases where you get a centrist candidate into a competitive general election, they crush. They do incredibly well. It just almost never happens.

And so, that I think is fundamentally what’s going on with our candidates. And one of the things I argue in the book, and show some evidence for in state ledge, is in places where state legislatures have increased how much you pay state legislators, the legislatures, on average, become less polarized, because you get more centrist people to start running because they’re like, oh, this isn’t as bad of a deal.

So, an interesting case of that is Alaska. Alaska more than doubled the salary they paid state legislatures. The polarization of the legislature went down. And then they undid the policy and now they’re repolarizing.

Kevin Cool: You have a set of research that essentially looks at the effect that a person’s economic stake has on how much they participate in our democracy, whether it’s voting or some other kind of participation. You did one that looked at the effects of voting after someone purchases a home or buys property. What did you find in that study?

Andy Hall: The two main things we found was that after you buy a home, you become substantially more likely to vote in your local elections, right? So, turnout rates in local elections are often pretty low, especially since a lot of these elections aren’t held at the same time as higher profile state or national elections. And when you become a homeowner versus, say, being a renter in the same area, you become much more likely to vote.

On top of that, in terms of which kinds of elections you’re most likely to turn out for, you’re most likely to turn out, we found, for local elections where zoning issues are on the ballot. So, it kind of makes sense and it’s sort of an empirical validation of claims other people have made in the past.

There’s a very famous book called The Homevoter Hypothesis, and the argument is extremely compelling. It’s basically like who’s going to bother to do all the work to learn the issues in this local race and show up to this sort of off cycle election and vote? It’s not going to just be anyone. It’s going to be people who have especially strong incentives to care about the policy outcomes at the local level. And when you talk about local politics, one of the biggest issues, especially recently, is zoning — and that’s decisions over who’s allowed to build what where.

And this has been a big flashpoint in the NIMBY/YIMBY debates and the idea that, well, we need to grow the housing supply to make more affordable housing. But lots of people who own single family homes don’t want to allow increased development in their area. It’s become a big controversial issue. And much as Fischel has argued, what we find is that people who own homes have the strongest incentive to pay attention and vote on these zoning issues, and that’s exactly what they do.

And it highlights this more general phenomenon that we observe in all kinds of shared collective governance, which is if everyone participated, we could get a representative average of everyone’s views. But when there’s differential participation, we get the aggregated views of whoever has the strongest incentives to participate. And sometimes that could be a good thing because maybe those are the most informed people with the most skin in the game. But other times I think it’s pretty clear it’s a bad thing because it draws these sort of extreme unrepresentative people whose values or preferences actually don’t fit with the broader set of people to whom the policies are going to affect.

Kevin Cool: Well, it seems it would also affect it in terms of the demography of the voting population because young people tend to be renters, not homeowners. So, what is their economic stake or what is their incentive to participate?

Andy Hall: Yeah, I think there’s a couple ways to answer that. But when it comes to specifically homeownership, they’re much less likely to be homeowners, as you’re saying, and they’re much less likely to vote. Some of that is the effect of not being a homeowner, probably. A lot of it are these other factors that affect your decision to participate.

And we know that for a lot of reasons, older people are quite a bit more likely to vote than younger people. Interestingly, that relation has been weakening in some recent elections. Trump seems to have really galvanized some young voters in national elections. But especially in local races, it’s a very strong relationship.

Kevin Cool: What is it about the financial stake in particular that causes more involvement in democracy and voting, and is that the best incentive you’ve found in your various research?

Andy Hall: I’ll start by saying there’s really a puzzle behind that that makes it very weird, which is you might think it’s obvious. Like if you have more economic incentive, of course, then you should vote more. But when you think about it more, it turns out it’s super not obvious.

Because suppose you’re one of 100,000 people voting. No matter how much more you care than the other people about this outcome, you are never going to affect the outcome. Like statistically you basically have zero chance. And as the number of people voting goes up, your chance rapidly goes infinitesimally small. So, you could have incredibly strong — like your whole livelihood could depend on the outcome of this vote, and it still wouldn’t be “rational” for you to vote in that election because however much you care, your vote doesn’t carry the day. And so, economic incentives do not — it’s not clear that they should have a particularly strong effect in general on voting.

Now if the number of people voting is very small, then we might expect the effect should be larger. But in general, it’s not obvious that it should have an effect. And so, that suggests the fact that it does have an effect cannot only be this hyperrational calculation that because I have more at stake, it therefore benefits me to vote.

It has to be something a little bit more behavioral or sociological where by being a homeowner and caring about these things, you start to pay attention more and you have peers and neighbors and friends who pay attention more. You talk about it more. You care about it more. And that, for whatever reason psychologically, makes you want to vote more. And not just vote; do other things, too. And so, definitely it is a broader thing like that. And because it’s a broader and not purely rational thing, I don’t think it’s obvious that it’s the strongest intervention. I think in different cases you might explore lots of different kinds of interventions.

I’ll just give you an example. Some of the most interesting political science work on this phenomenon of getting people to vote has been on totally not economic incentives. So, you send people postcards, and they tell you, hey, FYI, your election’s coming up. Turns out that increases turnout. And we’ve run that experiment, randomized the experience at scale many times, and we’ve nailed it. It’s like you can drive an eighth of a percentage point of turnout with just reminding people to vote. That’s not very big. How can you make it bigger? Well, you can start to target people. You could start to tell them a little bit about why they should care. Maybe that does a little bit.

The thing that seems like it works a lot more is you start to bring on social pressure. And so, you start to send all these mailers that say, “Did you know? Voting is a matter of public record. Your neighbors, whether they vote or not, is public. After the election, we’re going to be sending your whole neighborhood a postcard that tells you who voted and who didn’t.” The first time they ran that experiment, it increased turnout by, I don’t know, six percentage points or something.

Kevin Cool: A guilt strategy.

Andy Hall: Yeah. And the funny thing is this is an academic experiment by some very, very well-known political scientists. And for years, it was just a super influential academic paper that was just wild. And then right around the time where everything else changed in politics, like around 2016, Canada started doing it. I think Ted Cruz is one of the very first people who did it. And now it’s regularly being used. I think there’s some evidence that because of that, the impact has gone way down.

All that is to say, over levers like social pressure could also be really important, as well as other things that are just harder to measure like your sense of the community, your sense that you’re part of a group and you’re all in it together and your voice matters. I think we don’t know how to manipulate that more, how to increase that sense. But these economic incentives might in part be tapping into those other kinds of senses, and that might be more or all of why they really work on some settings.

Kevin Cool: You’re listening to If/Then, a podcast from Stanford Graduate School of Business. We’ll continue our conversation after the break.

Let’s pivot to a different study that you did that essentially looked at how tech companies “pay” users to help them with governance. And one of the examples you used was a study that looked at Facebook who did this and had a tiny, tiny, tiny response: less than one percent, less than half of one percent, something like that. So, what can we learn from these mostly failed efforts to mobilize people to participate? And just describe for us a little bit what they did in a more successful example that used tokens.

Andy Hall: Yeah, for sure. I’ll start with some motivation and then I’ll answer your question. So, tech companies today, especially very large platforms, have ended up in this kind of bizarre position where they’ve been incredibly successful at creating their businesses. And because of the returns to scale and the network effects that are inherent on the Internet, they end up operating at enormous scale.

And I think a completely unanticipated consequence of that dynamic is that they’ve ended up — Think about Facebook or TikTok or Amazon, any of these large platforms — they end up in this situation where the rules that they set over how their service can be used and the algorithms they designed to recommend you content and so forth, have potentially large effects on society because they affect so many people.

And they’ve almost take on this sort of quasi-governmental power because they get to decide — and this is not what they got into business to do; it’s like an accident — but they now accidentally decide who can say what on pretty big swaths of the Internet or who can transact with whom, who can rent a house to who, and so forth. Like all these different examples. And as they’ve gotten into that position, it’s become a big problem for them because people don’t trust them to do it.

Because when you make societally consequential decisions — like one of the concepts we have in social science is the person or the actor or the process that makes that decision should be “legitimate.” And by that we mean its incentives, the incentives of the process, should be aligned with the people that it’s going to affect. So, if we’re deciding for the whole globe who can say what, the process by which those rules are set should somehow reflect the values and the preferences of all the people on the globe that the rules are going to affect. It’s really hard for a company to do that.

Company is usually run by a CEO, board of directors, shareholders. Their interests are not necessarily going to be aligned in that way. And it becomes very perverse for these companies because a lot of these decisions actually don’t directly have anything to do with their business. Where you draw the line on free speech or where you draw the line on what you can write into Google’s search bar, it really doesn’t affect how much money they make directly.

But indirectly, because these decisions are so fraught, indirectly it has big reputational effects on them. And that then has knock on policy and business effects. And so, they would like not to be the ones who make these decisions. And I think it’s pretty clear if it was done well, society would also be better off if they didn’t make those decisions.

You might think then, okay, government should make them. But these decisions are so specific, and there’s so many of them, and they cut across so many countries. Unless you have some incredibly effective high-capacity international governance system — which today has not been invented — you’re kind of hosed. So, what have they done instead? For more than a decade now, they’ve been experimenting with ways to build their own little democracies.

And the first experiment that I’m aware of specifically on voting — there are actually probably older cases — but the one that’s most salient was this effort to hold a global referendum on Facebook in the 2007 to 2009 period. And the idea was we’re going to update the rules about the platform, and we’re going to actually let people vote between two different choices. And I think it was this very optimistic idea that let’s put the users in charge and the company won’t be in charge of this societally consequential decision.

And the problem they found was exactly the same problem we have in democratic systems all over the world. As it turned out, people don’t really want to vote on abstruse complicated decisions where a lot of expertise is required. And especially when you’re logging on to something like Facebook, you’re there to have fun, you’re there to consume. You’re not there to read hundred-page policy documents and vote on them. And so, the turnout rate in this referendum was so low that it had to be abandoned. And for a while after that, people didn’t really try voting online for that kind of a thing anymore because it just didn’t seem possible.

Where our research paper picks this up is that recently interest in voting online has really gone up a lot. And the reason for that — it’s kind of funny; you might not anticipate it — but it’s really been in crypto. And so, when crypto took off, first it was Bitcoin. And a bit part of the ethos of Bitcoin was supposedly no one’s in charge of it. You can debate whether that’s true or not, but that was the ethos.

And then coming out of that, people started to build these other crypto projects, mostly on top of Ethereum, which is a different system from Bitcoin, in which they took that idea even further and they said we’re going to have a base of code, and that code can do anything. It could be a social media platform, it could be a financial service, whatever. And we’re going to have a little democracy where we actually vote on what the code says and how it runs and we can change it, whatever, through voting.

And they’ve hit the same problem, they don’t have high participation rates, but their participation rates are a lot higher than that global referendum I talked about on Facebook. And why is that? A lot of it has to do with how they designed the system. It’s not one person one vote; it’s one token one vote. You were talking about tokens earlier. So, you buy or you’re given these tokens. Each token gives you one vote.

But that system of token voting turned out to create this kind of incredible explosion of weird and wacky and creative experiments in how to get people voting. These projects are often quite committed to the project of getting the democracy off the ground, and they know they need sufficient participation to do so. There’s a bunch of different reasons we could get into for why they care so much.

Kevin Cool: You’ve identified, and also obviously in your research, worrisome trends or issues here surrounding polarization in democracy. How do you maintain some level of optimism, or do you?

Andy Hall: I’m relatively optimistic. I’m very concerned about the state of democracy in the U.S., and I think this election is going to be an insane stress test for a variety of reasons. Not only because we seem incredibly likely to have one candidate in the race who will just not agree with the outcome of the election if it doesn’t favor him, but also because both candidates are so unbelievably popular. And among other things because they’re quite old for presidential candidates.

And I think one of the things that is underemphasized in political science is just a lot of Americans have lost faith in the political system over the last 40-50 years, and I think they’re probably right to have done so. And political science is often held up as this puzzle, like, “Well, why have Americans lost faith?” And then you think about it, it’s like, well, let’s see. I mean, we had Vietnam. We had the Kennedy assassination. We had Watergate. I mean, it just goes on and on.

Kevin Cool: Banking crisis.

Andy Hall: Yeah. Yeah, of course. And so, that worries me because I think the more we lose faith, that’s a trap that’s hard to get out of. If you believe your politicians are super untrustworthy, then you as a voter, you won’t agree to any changes to the political system that would make your politicians better off.

So, for example, you will never agree that they should have their salaries raised. And that’s how I feel. I don’t think the people in Congress should get paid more today. And then that becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy because now you’ve made it a job people don’t want, and then you get really bad politicians you don’t like, and then that makes you not want to reward them for being politicians, and that makes the good people not want to run for office, and it becomes a completely self-fulfilling prophesy that you can’t really escape from. If you could pay future legislatures more or pay them based on their performance somehow, maybe you could get out of that, but that’s very hard to design, right?

Kevin Cool: Some kind of a grooming academy?

Andy Hall: So, that’s why I’m pessimistic because I think that loss of faith is really real and it’s hard to recover. And I think there’s this weird view among some political scientists that it’s all a perception thing, and faith should be high, and we just have to educate people more and they’ll learn to — And it’s like, I just think that’s complete nonsense. I think you just look at what’s going on in government and it’s like, of course people don’t trust it. And so, that’s going to be hard to fix.

The reason I’m optimistic nonetheless is the system is just incredibly resilient. And there’s just some baked in resiliency that if you actually look, for example, at how much policy reflects the aggregate priorities or preferences of voters, it’s remarkable how much it still responds even today in a world where we think it’s hyperpolarized, interest groups are super active, voters are super misinformed, et cetera, et cetera. It’s shocking that the system still has these mechanics baked in that are still making it respond in all different kinds of ways.

And then I think new technology is going to disrupt that, and that could be very problematic for reasons we’ve discussed with AI in the election. But I also think it’s going to create a bunch of new opportunities. I think we’re going to have a chance to redesign how people learn about politics with the use of AI. And I think AI eventually, if current trends persist, it’s going to change what the job of being a politician is like. And those changes are going to be so big that they might undo a lot of the problems that we’ve been facing. The world might be so different that the things that look like huge problems today turn out not to be big problems in the future.

Kevin Cool: So, you don’t get to a point where you question the whole system and tear it down and try something new or —

Andy Hall: No. Yeah, no. And that’s what I worry about. I worry that people are heading there and I’m sympathetic to why, but I think it would be a huge, huge mistake. I think if you look very broadly at an aggregate set of measures of how the U.S. doing, it would be great if we were doing a lot better. But we’re doing a lot better than most people in the media think, on a wide range of measures. And I think we take that a little bit for granted, and we like to talk a lot — on both sides of the aisle we like to talk a lot about blowing it all up. And I think we would be really disappointed by what we found if we did so. And in particular I’ll just mention, it’s sort of in vogue to be skeptical of democracy with that in mind.

So, some people are like, “Let’s stick to democracy, but twiddle this or that. Let’s get rid of primaries.” I think that’s a reasonable — But some people — again, on both sides of the aisle — are like, “Democracy itself just doesn’t work.” And this sort of peaked during COVID in the brief period of time where people thought China was doing very well on COVID. And I think that view is just wrong. We just have a crazy amount of evidence at this point that democracies are just better at responding to the fundamental needs of citizens.

So, there’s this famous finding from Amartya Sen that democracies basically never have famines. And it’s like they might not be particularly good or efficient in lots of other policy things, but they’re really good at preventing these absolute worst case scenarios because people just get too upset and they have a mechanism for correcting it. And that mechanism, it’s super imperfect, but we haven’t come up with anything even close in any other system. And so, I think, yeah, to fundamentally reshape that I think would be a big mistake.

Kevin Cool: That’s a wonderful answer. Thank you.

Democracy can be messy, but it is also resilient. Andy’s insights give us three broad ideas applicable well beyond the halls of government. First, the importance of incentivizing engagement. When teams feel recognized and rewarded, participation and ownership increase. Second is the need to adapt new technologies thoughtfully. And finally, understanding and articulating what’s at stake. Much like homeowners voting on local issues, when people are invested in the outcome, they are more likely to take part. Fixing the dysfunction in politics isn’t beyond our control. Armed with the right tools and mindset, tackling it head on is not just possible, it’s within reach.

If/Then is produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Nuzum of Magnificent Noise for Stanford Graduate School of Business. Our show is produced by Jim Colgan and Julia Natt. Mixing and sound design by Kristin Mueller. From Stanford GSB, Jenny Luna, Sorel Husbands Denholtz and Elizabeth Wyleczuk-Stern. If you enjoyed this conversation, we’d appreciate you sharing this with others who might be interested and hope you’ll try some of the other episodes in this series. For more on our professors and their research, or to discover more podcasts coming out of Stanford GSB, visit our website at gsb.stanford.edu. Find more on our YouTube channel. You can follow us on social media at StanfordGSB. I’m Kevin Cool.