A Vote for Change
The United States of America has continually been touted as a great experiment in democracy. With this empirical data, perhaps we can conclude that the experiment hasn’t been terribly successful. Odds seem strong that a closer look at other election races may support the general trends noted here. Of course, on more local levels, this is likely to be less and less the case, at least in areas where the population is more uniform in political preference and can maintain longer lasting wins for a particular party.
And this is the crux of the matter. The higher up we go away from the most local level, the more people are covered by any given political office or agency. And the more people are covered by a given office or agency, the more diverse their political preferences are likely to be. And the more diverse their political preference are likely to be, the less likely a given office or agency will be able to make its constituents happy. This fairly obvious bit of common sense is borne out by the figures we’ve looked at — figures which paint the picture of a population that is, even over long periods of time, evenly divided between the passionate and the apathetic, and between the two major political poles, a population that is stuck inside a cycle that cannot produce anything fundamentally new.
How can such population possibly be made happy when all must give into a common set of policies? It can’t.
Does this mean that nobody should vote? No. This assessment doesn’t tell anybody what to do, it merely explains what goes on. As long as an individual feels that some good can come from supporting a particular candidate, it will continue to make sense for that individual to vote. But none of this suggests that we can do nothing but accept the current cycle.
In science, when an experiment proves unsuccessful, scientists try a new approach. Perhaps the same is required for the great experiment of democracy.
For a fascinating look at how these ideas reveal the red/blue state notion to be totally misleading, see One State, Two State, Red State, Blue State by Giulianna Lamanna.
[...] …read the site’s inaugural essay, “The Truth (Damned Truth) of Election Statistics” (http://www.potluck.com/2004/05/the-truth-damned-truth-of-election-statistics/), hopefully a provocative piece for this U.S. Presidential election year, [...]
“Anatole has been explaining to me the native system of government. He says the business of throwing pebbles into bowls with the most pebbles winning an election — that was Belgium’s idea of fair play, but to people here it was peculiar. To Congolese (including Anatole himself, he confessed) it seems odd that if one man gets fifty votes and the other gets forty-nine, the first one wins altogether and the second one plumb loses. That means almost half the people will be unhappy, and according to Anatole, in a village that’s left halfway unhappy you haven’t heard the end of it. There is sure to be trouble somewhere down the line.
“The way it seems to work here is that you need one hundred percent. It takes a good while to get there. They talk and make deals and argue until they are pretty much all in agreement on what ought to be done, and then Tata Ndu makes sure it happens that way. If he does a good job, one of his sons will be chief after he dies.”
—Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible