Monday, November 3, 2014

What's the point of elections if everything is already decided?

Election Day - November 4, 2014 - is upon us.  It is another of those special days in our nation’s public life when we get our chance to help decide who our elected leaders will be for the next term of office.

It is said that through elections, we citizens get to choose our future.  But in fact that saying involves a huge leap of faith.  By voting and electing our leaders, we do choose our future to a degree—but it may not be what we thought it would be, based on campaign promises by the candidates prior to election.
But even when elected officials keep their campaign promises, that may still not be the full story as to what we get after their election to office.  I say that in view of the following question:  Is it possible that candidates for office don’t tell us about every issue important to the constituents who elected them?

Put differently, isn’t it possible—and in fact quite likely—that candidates for office, including those who manage to get elected, keep secrets from their constituents they would never want to be made public?
I’m not talking about the sordid personal indiscretions of public figures, replete with embarrassing color photos, that fill the pages of supermarket tabloids.

I’m talking about issues of public interest that belong in the public eye because they involve the official duties of elected officials carried out daily while on the public payroll between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM.  
These issues go to the heart of our democratic republic and its governmental processes and yet, in my 40+ year career, with 20 of those years as a president of a “public” university in Pennsylvania, I have never heard these issues discussed publicly, or mentioned in a book, magazine or newspaper article.

To explain what I’m getting at, consider the following provocative quote:


                                                                      Dmitry Medvedev
The above quote may sound like a punch line from a stand-up comic’s routine, but it was actually made by Dmitry Medvedev, the third elected President of the Russian Federation!  His statement probably reflects a growing concern both inside and outside of Russia, whose adoption of “democracy” is both recent and fragile, in which many people fear that the Russian Federation will relapse into still another dictatorship similar to the communist dictatorships it escaped with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Based on recent Russian history and the meteoric rise of Vladimir Putin as Russia’s second the fourth president—with a term as Prime Minister in between—thanks to being appointed by President Dmitry Medvedev, his former colleague and campaign manager, Medvedev’s quote is quite believable and may accurately describe “democracy” in Russia today where, even allowing for a little hyperbole, “everything is already decided” before the votes are counted.
But what could Medvedev’s quote actually have to do with elections in America?

I believe that Medvedev’s provocative quote does have real relevance to elections in America.  It’s just that while not everything in America has already been decided prior to the elections, there are some things—of critical importance to the constituents—that have in fact already been secretly decided.  

Game Theory With Two Players
Game theory is a branch of research in economics and mathematics that studies the relative risks and rewards of one player either cooperating with, or competing against, the other player in the game.  A familiar example of game theory involving two players is known as the “Prisoner's Dilemma.”  When two suspected criminals are captured for a crime and interrogated in separate rooms, each prisoner knows that if they both refuse to cooperate, there’s a good probability that they could both go free.  But they also know that the first prisoner who cooperates with police to help convict the second prisoner can also get lenient treatment in the process of “giving up” their partner in crime.  Hence the prisoners’ dilemma.     

Game Theory with Three Players
Virtually everyone who remembers their teenage years will recall the potential treachery that often reared its ugly head when it came to “three-way friendships.”  Well as it happens, the political and electoral processes in America may be understood fairly well in terms of game theory with these three players: 1) the Electorate (E) ; 2) the Democratic Party (D); and 3) the Republican Party (R).  In this case, each player can choose to either cooperate with, or compete against, one or both of the other two.  

The Politicians’ Dilemma
We are all familiar with the scenario between those three players in which the two political parties  compete fiercely against each other in seeking the favor of a majority of the voters in the electorate.  The two parties constantly attack each other publicly while trying to outdo the other party in securing the support of a majority of the electorate by straining to meet the needs of the majority of the voters.  

Don’t Tell the Children!
But as we recall from our teenage years, in a game with three players, there are actually three different ways to play “Two against One!”  They are: E + D against R; E + R against D; but don’t forget D + R against E!                   

Like I often say, “Don’t tell the children,” but it is possible and in fact quite common, for the two political parties to cooperate with each other to the disadvantage of the voters who elected them. 
Details later.

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