Politicians and Competence

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 13.5

Members of US Congress

It is universally recognized that good government requires competence. In the US Founders’ vision, elections would help create an elite meritocracy in which the wise, virtuous, and competent would govern. Members of Congress are indeed elite – but not in the positive sense Madison and other Federalists had hoped. Those who observe the regular occurrence of corruption and occasional scandal emerging from national and state capitols have reason to doubt the efficacy of the Federalists’ approach. As I noted in chapter 7, most people disagree with the notion that the members of Congress are the “best and the brightest” our nation has to offer. While some individual members of Congress may be brilliant, it is debatable whether they, as a group, have above average intelligence or competence. What’s more, the character traits in which they rank higher than the average, are predominantly ones that are not beneficial for society.

Competence is made up of many distinct attributes. While some individuals may have high intelligence and a broad range of competencies, nobody is omni-competent. A person or group that is competent with regards to A and B, may be totally incompetent in dealing with C and D. The more homogeneous a group is, the more likely it will exhibit gross incompetence with regards to some important tasks. As presented in this book, the issue of group competence is far more complicated than many people imagine – it is not simply the sum of individual competencies. But to aid in examining the whole issue of competence, for the moment let’s gloss over this reality and pretend for the sake of argument that there is some fundamental human characteristic called “general competence,” which different people have to different degrees.

Politicians are widely mocked as incompetent, egotistical, manipulative or spineless. Politicians are stereotyped not only in America, but around the world to varying degrees. Stereotypes are often false, of course, and this could be simple jealousy – inferiors who enjoy bad-mouthing their betters. However, even if this stereotype is valid, pointing out the flaws of elected officials is fruitless if there isn’t a better alternative. Was the aphorism that Winston Churchill referenced in his 1947 speech to parliament fundamentally correct – that electoral democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time?

What can we say about how well elections perform at selecting for competence and other attributes that might be desirable in our rulers? My twenty years experience as a lawmaker convinced me that elected legislators don’t stand out as more competent than average citizens. The selection process applies a powerful filtering process, but it is not one that selects for policy or deliberative competence. 

The filtering process of partisan elections clearly selects legislators who are unlike the general population they are supposed to represent. First, elected politicians must be the sort of people who are willing to consider serving in such an office. Many people would not want to do this, whether because of shyness, time commitment, or countless other reasons. Second, they must be people who are willing to put themselves through the stressful process of running for office, which requires both a large amount of public exposure, as well as thick enough skin to suffer through attacks. Candidates can be subjected to smears and false accusations.¹ Third, to become an elected official, one must have a financial, employment and family situation that allows one to devote the necessary time to running for office (let alone serving if elected). Fourth, people must have personal networks and/or party connections that make a campaign feasible. Fifth, in jurisdictions without public campaign financing, candidates must also have financial backers. Sixth, successful candidates tend to be people who are able and willing to do the sorts of things (sometimes unsavory) that are needed in order to win an election. These filters can apply to local, state and national offices. They are simply more powerful for higher offices. Relatively few people are willing or able to pass through all these layers of filtration, and those who do are not like most of the rest of the members of the community.

The election process imposes a strong bias favoring economically and culturally advantaged individuals with a magnified sense of self-importance. This sense of self-importance often crosses the line to narcissism. Research by Chin Wei Ong of Bangor University and others has found that

“followers were initially attracted to narcissistic leaders' charisma and vision, and these factors were responsible for narcissists' initial rise as leaders. In other words, groups of people initially preferred the narcissist over others as their leader.”

However, they also found that narcissists did not perform well over time and were ineffective as leaders.

The common sense view that narcissism is not conducive to constructive public policy deliberation, feeds the notion that an eagerness to run for office should be a disqualification from serving. There are good reasons this quip resonates with many people. Putting people through the filter of elections before they are empowered to make decisions clearly distorts the nature of the legislative body, but not only by favoring egotists. The people I know, who I would most want to have making important decisions for society, are people who would never consider running for office, while many of the successful politicians I know are exactly the kind of people whom I wish were not in control. I don’t want to paint every politician with this brush and overstate this point; some elected officials are, of course, humble, brilliant individuals with only the best of intentions. But as a general rule, tolerant, open-minded people, who are well suited to the task of deliberation, are also the type of people unlikely to seek or win political office. Electoral politics tends to attract and reward “true believers,” who are often intolerant and closed to others’ new perspectives. 

There is no compelling evidence that elections are effective at selecting individuals with competence at governing. The skills and personality required for winning elections are not the same, and are in fact often in conflict with, those needed for competent governing. James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds points out that we shouldn’t believe people are more expert, simply because they confidently assert their competence. There is no evidence of a positive correlation between level of confidence exhibited by elected officials and actual level of competence. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect (mentioned at the end of chapter 9) in action.² A feeling of certainty that one is right (a lack of humility and recognition that one might be wrong) is associated with “getting into politics” and deciding to run for office. This certainty and false confidence probably also helps with mobilizing supporters, money and winning elections.

Surowiecki relays the story of a series of experiments with groups of military-fliers who were given some logic problems to solve. Higher status pilots spoke more, and more convincingly than navigators, even when the pilots were wrong and the navigators were right. But there is no correlation between confidence and competence.

“In fact, as the military-flier studies suggest, people who imagine themselves as leaders will often overestimate their knowledge and project an air of confidence and expertise that is unjustified.”

What’s more, others (in this case navigators) tend to accept and defer to the self-defined experts.

There is also the fundamental matter of alignment of interests that may supersede the question of competence. The interests and policy preferences of those who win elections do not necessarily align with those of the population they are supposedly representing. We have already established that there is a huge class divergence between the elected elite and the average citizen. Of course, some individuals rise above their class interests, and work for the common good. However, most people conveniently rationalize that policies that are in their interests are probably also good for the nation as a whole. It’s just human nature. I don’t see any convincing evidence that Congress as a whole acts constructively towards the interests of the average citizen (and polls show most other citizens don’t either). Some readers may disagree, but the burden is on them to find evidence of this, rather than to simply assert that Congress acts for the general good, merely because that’s how representative democracy is supposed to work. If there is a divergence, competence in office may mean competence to effectively work against the interests of the people purportedly being represented. Frequently, candidates stress their effectiveness, or ability to “get things done,” while neglecting to detail exactly what things they want to do. Is it better to have a representative who is competent at defeating the interests of a community, or a representative with uncertain competence who shares the interests of the community? Fortunately, with sortition we don’t need to answer this conundrum, because the evidence indicates that lottery selection, combined with good process, can select competent bodies that genuinely represent the interests of the population.

1. Defaming the reputation of a private individual can cost the perpetrator through a lawsuit. But being a candidate makes one a “public figure” and thus easily subject to slander and libel. Public figures must prove not only that the smear is a lie, but also that the attacker acted with actual “malice.” Intention is an extremely difficult thing to prove in court.

2. In 1999 Justin Kruger and David Dunning of Cornell University analyzed four studies of University undergraduates and found that those who separately scored in the bottom quarter on tests of grammar, humor or logical reasoning tended to hugely over-estimate their performance and believe they were well above average in that particular sphere. On the other hand, those who performed best on the tests tended to under-estimate their performance. The researchers concluded that incompetence can also cause incompetent individuals to be unable to recognize their own incompetence. This has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. In the electoral context, such people may be more likely to consider themselves to be good candidates, and indeed may project an air of confidence that actually does enhance their ability to win elections, though not necessarily to govern well. As the researchers observe in their paper, Charles Darwin sagely noted over a century ago, “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” [Kruger and Dunning. 1999.