Nate Knows Nada

So let’s get back to some politics, for a little while at least.

Lots of ink has been spilled about what’s going on with the Democrats
right now, as they focus on selecting a candidate to run against Bush
in the general election, and much of the discussion has centered on the
focus on electability and what the Democrats “should” be doing. 
I’d like to talk about why the discussion of electability in the
Democratic candidate is reasonable and probably valuable to have.

In political science, we have a theory that applies very well to
two-party systems such as ours, called the median voter theorem. 
(It can also apply to multi-party systems, with simple
modifications.)  What it says, in brief, is that in a two-party
system, the “median voter” will win.  Imagine, if you will, a
line, representing the ideological spectrum from left-to-right. 
We can place every voter in our system along this spectrum.  The
voter who falls in the middle of the spectrum (not ideologically, but
the one with equal numbers of voters on either side of him or her) is
the “median voter,” and in a two-party system, the party that gets this
voter will win an election.

(Note to my professional colleagues: This is not intended to be a
formal demonstration of the MVT — I could do that, but many of you
could do it better.  I’m just trying to explain it stylistically
and show a general readership how it might apply to what we’re facing
in the elections right now.)

(Note to those interested: more formal definitions and discussion of this theorem can be found here, here, and here.)

Let’s consider a simple system of seven voters, as in this illustration.

There are seven voters here.  The way this works is that voters
will pick the candidate closest to them on the preference
spectrum.  Whoever captures four (or more) of the voters will win
the election issue here.  So place two candidates anywhere you
like in the spectrum.  One of them will be “closer” on the
spectrum to a majority of the voters, and that’s the candidate who will
win.  We like to call this “capturing the median voter,” for the
candidate who captures the exact middle person — or the 50 percent
plus one voter, as you may have learned in a civics class — will
win.  Another diagram will make this a bit clearer.

In this illustration, we’ve got a more complete system.  Same diagram
as above, but now I have added candidates (1 and 2), a vertical line to
represent the exact middle of the preference spectrum (the bright green
line — you could consider it the dividing line between left and right,
or you can call it the “center”), and a thing called the tipping point
(which we will ignore for now).

Who will win the election?  Remember, whichever candidate is
closer to the majority of voters, whoever can convince the median voter
to vote for him, he will be the winner.  Once a candidate is close
enough to the median voter to convince this voter to select the
candidate, the candidate will also be even closer to a bunch of other
voters.  Median voters are powerful, in a sense, because capturing
them produces an electoral majority.  So if you’re a candidate,
you want to get the median voter to vote for you, because everyone else
to your side of the median voter will also vote for you.

In this election, candidate 2 wins.  He is closer to the median
voter than candidate 1, so the median voter will choose to vote for 2
over 1, as 2’s preferences (which you might consider as “positions on
the issues”) are closer to the median voter’s than 1’s are.

Now take a look at this thing I have called the “tipping point.” 
This
represents a point equally as distant from the median voter as
candidate 2 is.  In other words, the distance from the median
voter to
the tipping point is the same as the distance from the median voter to
candidate 2.  In order for candidate 1 to win, he will have to
come to the right of the tipping point, to get closer to the median
voter than candidate 1 is.

Can you guess how we might explain the tendency for both major
political parties in the US to look fairly similar, even on the
abbreviated ideological system that exists in this country?  Yeah,
in pursuit of the median voter (who, in electoral opinion surveys of
the US, we have found is pretty much in the middle of the road
ideologically), the two parties have generally moved toward the middle
in pursuit of the MV.

Note some interesting features of this system:  First, the
system
is somewhat middle of the road, as four of the seven voters could be
chracterized as preferring outcomes in the middle 50 percent of the
spectrum.  Second, note that candidate 1 is closer to the (green)
center than candidate 2.  Also note that the median voter is
pretty close to the middle of the system.  Even so, the candidate
of the right will win, because his preferences are closer to those of
more of the people in the system.

O.K., so what does this mean for the current election?  Here’s
what I think the election looks like to your average Democratic voter
right now.

Cand Right is George W. Bush.  Candidates Left and Center-Left are
currently running in the Democratic primaries.  If you are a
Democratic primary voter, and you think the election in November will
be close, you want to find the candidate who will come closer to the
median voter (whom I have located in the middle of the scale only for
convenience) than George W. Bush will.  Candidate Left is just
about as far away from the MV as Candidate Right is.  If your
estimation of the location of the median voter is off, you could lose
the election, and since we’re talking about a possibly close election,
you don’t want to be off.  So you might choose to take someone who
doesn’t entirely match your own preferences (e.g., the cadidate is more
to the right than you are) in preference to having Candidate Right win.

So what the Democrats are doing right now, as they pursue the more
“electable” candidate, may be more “rational” than voting purely for
the guy whom they prefer to all others.  And they realize that
this is not a one-shot game — it’s got two stages.  Democrats who
are thinking of who’s more “electable” are perhaps remembering that
they have to win a presidency, not just a nomination.  Democrats
pursuing an “electability strategy” are acting out a very complex
analytical situation in a very intuitive way.  For just about any
Democratic primary voter, any Democratic candidate is preferable to
George W. Bush, and if the electorate is so tightly divided, it might
do to start with lots of people closer in their preferences to a
party’s candidate (as would be the case with Candidate
Center-Left).  Otherwise, in the case when Candidate Left runs as
the nominee, Democrats have a much harder job of positioning to do to
get the votes necessary to obtain their majority.

So the move toward Kerry is not surprising (to me, at least). It may
represent very rational action by large numbers of Democratic primary
voters.  But let’s see what happens in Tuesday’s caucuses and
elections….

Caveats: Yeah, this isn’t a perfect model of our system, as we have an
electoral college, possible shifts in preferences by candidates and
voters over the course of the run-up to the election, and so
forth.  But it’s a stylized and simplified version of a complex
story that, I think, helps us to understand a bit more what’s going on
out there.

Also, this doesn’t represent my preferences. =-)

But the ribs press transcript is pretty funny.  The man just wanted a meal in peace….

Back about a month ago, Ryan over at SanskritBoy responded to my Episcopal/RC post by talking about the religious pluralism aside, and one of his interlocutors said the following:

“You can call the old-fashioned approach to religious others
‘exclusivism’–others will be excluded from salvation. Its opposite
number is ‘inclusivism’, which comes in two kinds. ‘Closed exclusivim’
holds that adherents of other religions may obtain salvation, but only
in spite of the imperfections of their religion, which offers no
improvements to our own. (For example, Karl Rahner wrote famously of
the “anonymous Christian,” a person outside the Church nonetheless
lived the life of a de facto Christian. Such a person might receive
salvation, but not because the religion she professed had much to
recommend it.) On the other hand, an ‘open inclusivism’ holds that the
other may have something to teach us.”

What I’m holding to in my previous post is probably something more like the open inclusivism mentioned.

But my religious pluralism probably regards the belief in the existence
of something larger as a requisite for discussion (though not for
existence as a fellow religionist).  I realize that I am going to
have a very hard time talking with the people Ryan mentioned:

“There are some types of Buddhists whose views are so incompatible I
just couldn’t imagine them joining an interfaith discussion table where
the common underlying link is assumed to be God. God, after all, is
just another schmuck- subject to eventual fall from heaven once he’s
used up his store of good karma, destined to be reborn as a lowly king
or administrator or even a peasant or (gasp, the horror!) a woman one
day. God probably got to where he is today by doing ascetic practices
for a few aeons, and finally he attained rebirth in a really pimpin’
paradise. But God still doesn’t really get it- and as soon as he does
get it, he will have ceased to exist.”

At least in terms of “God” (expansively defined) as an underlying
concept, we’ll have a difficult time talking to one another.  It’s
a prior that I can’t really get away from.  And the Buddhists that
Ryan mentions probably can’t get away from their prior that
“understanding” leads to non-existence.

But here’s where we might come in together, an approach I learned when
my small faith community was trying to do some intra-faith dialogue a
few years back.  We didn’t start with questions of belief, as
would be a natural approach in Western Christianity and Western
society.  We started experientially, asking what religion and
faith meant in the day to day lived experience of life.  “How does
living your religion help your daily life?”  “How does your
religion hinder your daily life?”  “What about your life compels
you to practice your religion?”

I did this with a group of Episcopalians (ranging from conservative to
liberal) who figured out that we found it easier to talk about faith
with Jews and Buddhists than with other Christians, like Mormons,
evangelicals, and some of the Orthodox.  We spent more time
getting to know the non-Christians than we did the Christians, and our
own understanding of our own faith had some holes, as a result. 
But it’s always hard to get to know and get along with your family,
often harder than with strangers.

And I think process-oriented conversation will likely be more fruitful
in terms of finding common ground.  In talking to a Buddhist,
Muslim, or another Christian, it’s probably just a dead-end to discuss
“belief” (especially since “belief” may not be the most fundamental
requisite of the above in all cases).  But what we do probably provides a lot more range to the conversation.

I’ve heard that the above approach is one that many monks have found
useful when talking to one another.  According to some reports
I’ve heard from interreligious monastic conversations, the monastic
commitment to a life of prayer and contemplation, no matter what the
particular religion, provides an entree into interfaith understanding
that non-monastics have a much harder time accessing.  In other
words, if you spend your days praying and contemplating, you’re already
doing such a lot that’s similar that you’ve got a good place to start
talking, and the discussion of differences leads not to belief but to
how different groups pray and contemplate differently.

And in the end, that may bring us back to the “open inclusivism”
above.  When the discussion centers on action and practice and
process, the “other” may indeed have something to teach us, as the
process of another faith can find a situation in one’s own, becoming a
thing that’s really not the exclusive domain of one or the other but
something that’s a bit of both.