(The following is adapted from a talk given at the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy, 2024.)
To begin this proposal, I want to share some words from Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman that have stuck with me ever since I first read them almost thirty years ago.
But I decided then never to decide again. Nothing — absolutely nothing — would ever change my mind again. […]
I did that once when I was a student at MIT. I got sick and tired of having to decide what kind of dessert I was going to have at the restaurant, so I decided it would always be chocolate ice cream, and never worried about it again — I had the solution to that problem.
Richard Feynman, Surely you’re joking, mr. feynman
They’re not great words, but they did stick with me, and not because of the point that Feynman is trying to make about satisficing. These words stuck with me because: I think he’s wrong. I think he actually was still deciding, each time, to have that chocolate ice cream.
Our decisions are something we engage with and re-engage with. Acting on our convictions may become habit, but it’s never fully disjoint from the knowledge and experiences we accrue. If the restaurant stopped serving chocolate ice cream, had Feynman doomed himself to never eat dessert there again? No, of course not. Humans don’t really work that way.
But our democracy kind of does.
Elections often feel like deciding never to decide again, or at least deciding to constrain ourselves from getting to decide again. For the next year we’ll only order chocolate ice cream. If we get sick of chocolate ice cream, that’s just too bad. We decided we were done deciding, and it’s chocolate. That’s what it sounds like whenever I hear something like “Brexit means Brexit,” or whatever arbitrary, one-shot, usually narrow result is today’s sacrosanct will of the people.
It would be better if our collective decision-making worked more like our individual decision-making, and allowed us to revisit and adjust our decisions with changing circumstances the way we do in day-to-day life. Since revisiting a democratic decision means voting on it again, this would require increased election frequency. Democracy, as we currently practice it in the United States, is like a feedback control system with an extremely low sample rate. I’d like us to consider cranking that up.
To be clear, though, when I suggest more frequent elections I am not suggesting we increase the rate at which we decide not to decide things. Rather, I’m suggesting having iterated votes on the same matters for as long as those matters remain relevant. That’s what I meant by the “That Barely Matter” part of the this talk’s title — and, admittedly, I was being maximally glib with that phrasing. I don’t necessarily want elections to be inconsequential, but it would be nice if how consequential they are was more closely related to how long those consequences were broadly desired. When I say I want to have lots of elections that barely matter, what I mean is that I want each individual election to matter a lot less, and the pattern of all elections to matter a lot more.
Potential Virtues of Very Frequent Elections
Clearer connection between electoral outcomes and people’s lived experience. If you only vote once every few years, it’s hard to draw a direct link between that behavior and the state of your life. “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” US voters ask themselves every presidential election, but so much happens in that much time that the question is difficult to answer, and the connection between the answer and one’s prior vote is nonobvious. “Are you better off now than you were a month ago?” is a much easier question to answer, and the answer is much more likely to be relevant.
Built-in voter education. I’ve heard many bemoan the problem of the uneducated or low-information voters; perhaps we can make engagement with elections themselves provide an education. It is already the case that when people are feeling dissatisfied they’ll vote for “change,” for whatever isn’t incumbent. With frequent opportunities to revisit those votes, that could be a good strategy. Try something new, see what happens, iterate; that’s an effective way to learn.
Greater collective willingness to try new things. You’re more likely to try something new if ending the trial is easy.
Lower return on investment for election interference. If elections were more frequent, they might be more resistant to certain kinds of manipulation. It’s rational to drop a few hundred million dollars skewing the results of an election if you think that you’ll have years afterwards to make it all back. It’s less rational if you’ll only have weeks.
Addressing Potential Objections to Having Very Frequent Elections
- It would be wildly inefficient
I’d argue that this is a good thing. Among evolutionary biologists it is a truism that there is an inverse relationship between efficiency and robustness. When it comes to something as crucial to our values and way of life as democracy, our priority should be optimizing for robustness.
(Also, I’d observe that the equivalence of “efficient” with “good” and “inefficient” with “bad” is an economic value of capitalism, not a democratic value.)
- Voting on the same things over and over is a recipe for instability
Maybe, maybe not. It’s true that very frequent elections admit the possibility of very frequent reversals, but having stability in one’s life is a fairly nonpartisan desire. Lasting instability is exactly the kind of outcome that, with repeated trials, we might expect people to adjust their voting behavior away from.
- It would be expensive
Compared to what? If a process is more expensive but produces better outcomes, it can be a net savings over a cheaper process. It’s not obvious to me how the net costs of dramatically increasing the democratic sampling rate would shake out. I think we’d have to actually do the experiment to know.
- There’s more to politics than just showing up to vote
Okay, but the vast majority of people don’t do more than show up to vote, assuming they even do that much. If you think people should be more politically involved, a good first step would be providing more opportunity for the kind of involvement that they’ve already shown at least some willingness to pursue.
- There is an opportunity cost to voting, so this would decrease voter participation
Maybe, but probably not consistently. If an election is swung by a small group to the detriment of everyone else, then soon there will likely be more people for whom the cost of participation is one they are willing to pay. Frequent elections would let people develop a better sense of how practically important voting is to them.
- “The idea of weekly elections is preposterous”
This one’s a direct quote from an emeritus poli-sci professor, responding to the the voting practices of the fictional democracy of Ionia (which I described at IWORD 2023), where they have an election every Tuesday.
I’m not about to claim that the distinguished but elderly scientist who says that this can’t happen is wrong. But I will say: we really do some equally preposterous things. I’m sure you can think of weekly rituals pursued by large groups of people, ones that connect to deeply held values and sense of community. It is demonstrably the case that people will come together and do things with great regularity if they think those things matter.
Many people in the United States don’t think that voting matters. But if they had more empirical reason to believe in the efficacy of democratic processes, they might change their minds about that.
To conclude, here are some words from Ursula Le Guin, which sum up the argument more succinctly than I ever could.
Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.
Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
It’s true of love, and it’s also true of democracy.