Hugin & Munin Journal

Electoral systems do not simply count votes. They decide what votes can become. Editorial image generated by the author. There is a comforting fiction at the heart of democratic politics: voters choose, votes are counted, and power follows. Elections appear to be civic arithmetic, as though adding up preferences reveals the will of a country. In reality, a vote does not travel directly from citizen to government. It passes through districts, ballot rules, allocation formulas, thresholds and party systems before it becomes a seat—or fails to become one. Electoral systems are therefore better understood as translation machinery. They preserve some information, amplify some constituencies and discard others. The relevant question is not whether a system produces distortion; every method must compress millions of conflicting preferences into a legislature and, eventually, a government. The question is which distortions it creates, who benefits from them and what pol...

In my review of Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter , the book’s most unsettling claim was that democracies often fail not because voters are ignored, but because they are obeyed. Bad policy is not always imposed upon the public by cynical elites. Sometimes voters ask for it, reward it and prefer the story it tells about the world. That leaves a harder question for anyone interested in democratic reform. If individual voters bear almost none of the cost of holding politically satisfying beliefs, what kinds of institutions could make collective error less cheap without treating citizens as defective material to be managed by their betters? One answer is to reduce popular power. Voters do not understand economics, incentives, institutions or trade-offs, so more authority should pass to economists, judges, civil servants, central banks, markets or some other body less exposed to mass opinion. The temptation begins from a real weakness and then mistakes dispossession for corr...