Maintaining intellectual honesty on the campaign trail
A jarring moment came one day early in the campaign when I was knocking doors. A voter asked me about some issue - maybe grocery prices - and I had a convoluted answer. I said that although the state doesn’t have any influence over that, we could deal with with housing and energy, which leaves more money for food, but that might take time to implement. You could feel the energy drain out of the conversation.
I left that house and was wrestling with a snappy response for the next time that happened, when it hit me.
I could have just told her that I’d fix it.
There was no fact-checker standing next to me. It wouldn’t have been a direct lie if I was vague or non-committal enough. And the rest of the conversation would have gone a lot better.
The only problem: it wouldn’t have been the right thing to do.
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Truth and fraud in campaign promises
Politics is a social contract.
My platform is an offering to voters. If you vote for me, I’ll try to build more housing, improve public transit, and add more clean energy to the grid.
Of course, there are limits on what I can guarantee and I think most voters understand that. If I say I’m going to work to increase funding for childcare, I hope they don’t expect me to do that on day one, but understand that the budget won’t be set for seven months. And if we go into a recession in that time, new money might have to wait.
But the overall direction should be clear. I’d running to do these things. If I’m elected, I’ll do my best to achieve them.
To promise something that I know I can’t deliver feels like a violation of that contract, as fraudulent as if I were selling a used car that I knew didn’t drive.
Yet, as I walked down the street going from one conversation to the next, it occurred to me that there was no person or organization who would enforce that contract. Rhetorical fraud would almost never be prosecuted.
Do politicians follow through?
At the national level, there is evidence that politicians do try to keep their promises, at least more than we might expect.
From Woodrow Wilson to Jimmy Carter, presidents completed about 75% of campaign promises and subsequent presidents were mainly stalled via congressional opposition.
However, this is at the national level, where media coverage and attention is plentiful. Two German researchers found that the critical element in promise-keeping is whether voters will know whether a promise has been kept or made.
Promises can be used as commitment based on the instrumental value from promise keeping (e.g., voters will not reelect politicians who broke past promises). This instrumental value, however, requires transparency and knowledge about promise keeping, which often cannot be guaranteed. For example, voters’ perceptions about promise keeping diverge substantially from actual promise keeping (Naurin, 2011, Thomson, 2011) and voters often lack trust in the media providing such information. The recent rise of populist politicians and illiberal democracies goes hand in hand with distrust in the media — emphasizing the need to understand what shapes promise competition when transparency or trust in information about promise keeping is lacking.
At the state representative level, this is highly worrying.
There are far fewer reporters working in local journalism today than 20 years ago. Journalists covering politicians are one of the public’s best sources of accountability, it being their job to keep track of promises and ask why they haven’t been fulfilled.
The nature of state government can lead to voters not knowing that a promise is inherently unrealistic. People often talk to me about issues that are under the control of the federal or city government and I have to explain where I can indirectly help (like with grocery prices).
With our uncompetitive elections in Massachusetts, it may not matter if a promise is broken, since a winning representative is unlikely to face a serious challenge anyway.
The current system we have therefore incentivizes making promises that can’t be kept.
The rewards for doing so are winning votes and elections.
The penalties are unlikely to be enforced.
How I stay honest
Before I go further, I want to stress that I’m not accusing anyone in particular of making unrealistic promises. I don’t want this newsletter to seem like I’m subtly attacking anyone. But the fact is that our system for holding politicians accountable is less rigorous than I’d like, and that means politicians have to hold themselves to account.
For me, it helps that I have spent most of my life in an environment where I assumed my work would be be judged with extreme scrutiny.
I did my Master’s and PhD at Oxford, which operates on the tutorial system. Students write an essay every week, meet with a professor for an hour, and having their argument dissected by someone who has seen hundreds of them before, probing at each weak point like a district attorney attacking an unreliable witness.
I did pretty well in college and went to grad school confident I could succeed. That confidence was rocked after my first tutorial, when everything I thought I knew about the origins of World War I was put through an intellectual wringer. Was Franz Ferdinand even shot in Sarajevo? I couldn’t be sure.
For the next week, and until my dissertation was completed, I treated every meeting with my supervisor like an event I had to prepare for. I read the material, wrote the my essay or chapter, looked for weaknesses, rewrote it, and then after it was torn apart in the meeting, rewrote it again.
The result was clearer thinking and sharper writing. But the habit was even more valuable. I wrote everything assuming that every sentence needed to be defendable.
That continued into my first job, when I managed coverage of North America, Australia, and New Zealand for a daily publication on geopolitics and macroeconomics. Every article would be read by one of my colleagues and my boss before it was published. It carried on into my work on the ranked choice voting campaign, where all claims had to be backed up or we could lose credibility on a new idea. And it even continued in my startup, where I needed to show that the product did what I say it did.
I’m sure that there are many other professions like this. My wife is a doctor and she similarly must make sure that every prescription and diagnosis is backed up with evidence and noted. Lot of people have something that keeps them honest in situations where an easier option is available.
For me, it’s that experience in grad school.
Being 22 years old. Walking into an office so crammed with books you’d think the walls would fall down. Having to defend my 1,500 words on the origins of the Cold War from a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society who has written books on the topic.
Every time I go up to a door and am asked about a particular policy, I treat my response like I’m going to have it met with a skeptical English accent saying “What exactly does that mean?”
Every sentence must be credible. Every promise must be realistic. Voters deserve nothing less.
And in case anyone does want to read that dissertation, it’s here.
