The Decisive Vote is an Expensive Vote
When do votes matter? That's a vague enough question that it can mean anything, and so of course that makes it a good topic for social media discussion.
But in public choice we're against vague questions, so we'll distinguish between how votes matter for policy versus how votes matter for social perception. That's the heart of Shepsle's Congressional Pay Raise Dilemma in the textbook, and in a different way it's at the heart of Gordon Tullock's case against (most) voting (3 minute video) which we'll come across later in the semester.
In the Congressional Pay Raise Dilemma, no politician wants to be socially perceived as voting for the pay raise, but every politician wants the policy of the pay raise. So what will happen? The pay raise will pass with the absolute minimum number of votes, and probably with the votes of politicians in the safest seats.
Shepsle chose a particularly cynical example of the policy/perception tradeoff, but even more noble or more mundane legislation often has elements of a Congressional Pay Raise Dilemma. In 2003, Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachussetts and true Vietnam war hero, wanted to be socially perceived as disagreeing with President George W. Bush's tax cuts for higher earners, but he also wanted to be socially perceived as supporting funding for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I believe that for both personal and political reasons, Senator Kerry wouldn't allow American troops to go without food and water in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan. That's a formally untestable belief, but it's consistent with the way he's lived his life, both before and during his career in the Senate--so as a matter of policy he wanted the funding bill to pass in some form.
How did John Kerry address this Military Spending Dilemma? He voted for a military funding bill that was never going to pass in the Republican-controlled Senate--a bill that paid for the extra spending by repealing some of the Bush tax cuts. And then Kerry later voted against a military funding bill that was surely going to pass--a freestanding spending bill, supported by the GOP Senate majority, which just like almost every other Congressional spending bill didn't explain how it was going to be funded.
When asked on the 2004 Presidential campaign trail why he voted against the legislation that ultimately funded the troops then in the field, he gave the famous answer, which captures the social perception theory of voting:
"I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."
While the Bush campaign mocked Kerry mercilessly for this example of what they called "flip-flopping," Kerry was actually being honest about they way politicians often try to signal that they like part of a bill without liking all of it. This time it didn't sell well with much of the voting public, and Kerry lost both the popular vote and the electoral college in 2004's presidential contest, but Kerry's strategy of "voting for it before voting against it" is worth keeping in mind. It's one example of this important fact:
When a piece of legislation has enough votes to surely pass with a few extra votes more than needed, no single legislator's vote matters for policy.
But every single legislator's vote still matters for perception.
Kerry knew the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were going to be funded, so his vote was not the marginal vote, the decisive vote. He could feel free to socially signal. This is true on literally any piece of legislation that passes with one extra vote to spare: Any one legislator can feel free to vote for or against the bill to make what we usually loosely call a "political statement," because the vote will have zero effect on policy.
Think a bill to increase health care spending with 225 votes in the House, while good, isn't progressive enough? Feel free to vote against it and make a speech on "unmet needs."
Think a campus free speech bill with 64 votes in the Senate doesn't go far enough in protecting on-campus First Amendment rights? Again, vote against it, knowing that the bill will easily beat a filibuster, and call for following the "principles of the Founders."
Once enough other votes are secure that the policy is guaranteed, the marginal vote in a legislature is no longer a policy vote: it's a perception vote. Shepsle's Congressional Pay Raise Dilemma was a fun example of a bigger issue: policy-irrelevant votes are everywhere in legislative politics.
And that means that when the votes to pass aren't secure, when a bill needs just one more vote to pass, then your vote truly is both a policy vote and a perception vote.
That's one important reason why it's better (in many cases) for a bill to pass the House by 219 rather than 218. When a bill looks like it has 217 votes and you're deciding whether to vote for it, you are, to use microeconomics language, the marginal voter. But so is everyone else who isn't in the "Yes" camp! And when you're the marginal voter, you're the responsible voter, the decisive voter. And if there's one thing humans, inside and outside of politics, have an incentive to avoid, it's being responsible.
But sometimes politicians do take responsibility. Here's one historically important case, one that has already become part of the Congressional canon:
Elsewhere in the discussion board I told the story of Congresswoman Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, a Democrat who lost her seat in part because she was the 218th vote for President Clinton's 1993 deficit reduction package.
The House's biography of her is very good on this topic, and Margolies-Mezvinsky was clear about the distinction between a policy vote and a perception vote:
[S]he made a last–minute switch to support the 1993 Clinton budget after months of publicly voicing her opposition to the bill because it did not contain enough spending cuts...On the day of the vote, she appeared on television and told her constituents that she was against the budget. Minutes before the vote, however, on August 5, 1993, President Clinton called to ask Margolies–Mezvinsky to support the measure. She told him that only if it was the deciding vote—in this case, the 218th yea—would she support the measure. "I wasn't going to do it at 217. I wasn't going to do it at 219. Only at 218, or I was voting against it," she recalled.
If you're not what she called the "deciding vote," and what economists would call the "marginal vote," your vote doesn't matter for policy--so you might as well be perceived however you like. Her 218th vote, the marginal vote, created a difficult political perception back home, and was part of the reason she lost her seat after just one House term. I presume she took the hit to her perception because she wanted this policy more than the opportunity cost, the most likely alternative.
We can always compare actually existing legislation to our utopian dream of an ideal piece of legislation; but our utopian dreams are never going to make it to the floor of the House for a vote. The most likely alternative to Clinton's 1993 deficit reduction package was the status quo policy of bigger deficits, and that wasn't an appealing alternative to her. She knew her vote was going to be expensive. As Margolies-Mezvinsky told President Clinton at the time:
"I think I'm falling on a political sword on this one."
She was right. It was an expensive vote for a policy she preferred. If the bill had had either 220 or 215 votes lined up--sure passage or sure failure--she could have easily given a speech right afterwards, saying:
"This deficit reduction bill had good parts and bad, and I hope Congress can come together to create better legislation to reduce the long-run deficit."
A "Yes" vote is always concrete, since you're supporting an actual piece of legislation--but a "No" vote is a chance to weave dreams of an alternative that will probably never happen, something perhaps well to the left or the right of what actually became law. A "No" vote, by contrast, often has a flexible interpretation--like the meaning of a line in Shakespeare. "No" is usually politically safer--as long as you're better than Senator Kerry at talking about it.
As you probably know, they call votes like the one Margolies-Mezvinsky took a "tough vote." When you're a close to being the marginal vote, the decisive vote, it's often a "tough vote." So be on the lookout for "tough votes," because those are votes where, if the bill ultimately passes by one or two votes, there are probably quite a few politicians who voted against it but could, in a pinch, have been persuaded to vote for it.
In this essay, who took the more decisive vote, Kerry or Margolies-Mezvinsky? There's only one right answer here.
In this essay, who took the more expensive vote, Kerry or Margolies-Mezvinsky? What about the vote made it expensive? With the right argument, either could more expensive, but it really has to be the right argument.
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