Economist Writing Every Day

Interpreting policy talking points from people running for office is difficult for a variety reasons, but it essentially boils down to the fact that voters often do not want the outcomes that would be produced by the policies they will in fact vote for. Candidates, in turn, must find a way to promise policies they will either do their best not to deliver or, if they do deliver them, said policies will be bundled with other policies that will mitigate their effect.

Interpreting the true intended policy bundle being signaled by a candidate is fraught with traps, not least of which our personal biases. If I want to like a candidate, for social or identity reasons, I will have a tendency to interpret their policy proposals as part of a broader, unspoken, bundle that I like. If I don’t want to like a candidate, perhaps because they are a petty, boorish lout whose principle aptitude appears to be grifting at the margins of legality and leveraging the high transaction costs of our legal system, then I will subconsciously interpret each policy proposed as part of a more insidious unspoken bundle.

How should voters and pundits navigate an environment where information is limited and bias is largely unavoidable? I don’t know, but here’s how I try anyway.

1. Assume every candidate has basic competency in appealing to their base.
2. Assume every candidate wants to appeal to the median voter.
3. Do not assume anyone knows who the median voter is.
4. Assume both candidates and their advisors have the same capacity to assess how their respective bases will react to a proposal and how it will actually impact them, but do not assume they know how the median voter will react and be affected.

In essence, candidates will always have a deeper familiarity, with greater repeated interactions, with their voter and donor bases. They know how they will react and how they will actually be impacted. Platforms will be designed around navigating contexts where popularity and expected impact are in conflict. What this means is that, in the aggregate,

1. A candidate stands to do the most damage when advocating for policies that will aid their base at the expense of the median
2. A candidate will create the most uncertainty when the desires of their base are at odds with the consequences for their base.

For example, assume both major parties are advocating for trade restrictions. Let’s call them the Plurality party and the Majority parties. Trade restrictions will hurt the median voter, full stop. The Plurality party, whose indentity constitutes a minority of the total population but the largest share of the population of any subgroup, stands to gain the most through policies that extract from others in a negative sum game. It will be easier to take their candidate’s policies at face value because of uncertainty around the median voters preferences, in part due to voter uncertainty about how policies will affect them.

The Majority party, on the other hand, is more fractured in the subgroups that constitute its more numerous whole. They can be thought of an encompassing group coping with the high costs of intragroup bargaining. Their greater numerical advantage in elections is partly, if not wholly, nullified by difficulty solving collective action problems and their need to solve positive sum games whose benefits are spread too thinly to excite their base. Further, the Majority party is inclusive of the median voter, about which there is greater uncertainty. The Majority party, as such, has greater incentive to rely on a form of subtextual deception. To win elections, they will need to propose the policies that the various elements their base wants while also bundling them with other policy elements that will mitigate their consequences in the aggregate and leave options open downstream as consquences for the median are made manifest. Interpreting proposals of the Majority party demands more Straussian reading, which also means that greater care is needed in monitoring your own bias. Because all complex political economy aside, sometimes parties do in fact just have bad ideas.

Good luck.