Tuesday, October 08, 2013

Shutdown: A Condorcet Winner?

     This article in the Washington Post and its accompanying article on Yahoo.com show that 21 Republicans would vote for a clean continuing resolution which would re-open the government and fund ObamaCare. Attached is a chart I made in excel highlighting each winning coalition that kept the government running, eventually brought about its shutdown, and would hypothetically bring about its reopening.  Since we are only looking at whether the government will open or close we only need to look at the second letter.  However, looking at both letters tells an interesting story.
       First, lets look at the pre-shutdown vote tally.  Here, all 432 voting members of the House (there are currently 3 vacant seats) would vote to keep the government running independent of a vote on ObamaCare.  That makes sense, the government indeed was running.  It also tells us that 232 members would vote to defund ObamaCare independently of a vote on whether to keep the government open.  That too makes sense.  We know that numerous times the House has voted to defund ObamaCare.  Here, we see that the clear Condorcet winners - independent of each other - are to keep the government open and defund ObamaCare.  Between the last CR fight and October first, this was the state of the House.
      The second tally tells us a more interesting story.  The vote to shutdown brought these two issues together and Congressmen now had to vote on them together on whether to pass a CR that funds ObamaCare and keeps the government open or defunds ObamaCare and effectively closes the government.  This resulted in a forced, manufactured majority in regards to shutting down the government.  There were 21 Congressmen that were split on this vote and given the opportunity to vote on them separately we would see a continuation of the first chart and a natural majority for open government (Blue Highlight).  Instead, they had to vote on them together.  Given that at this point they valued defunding ObamaCare more than they valued an open government, (remember at this point you can only compare NN>YY) this manufactured an illegitimate majority of votes to shut down the government, and resulted in a non-condorcet winner in regards to shutting down the government. This was not their first preference, but given the preference table they were given, NN or YY, they chose to shut down the government.
     Democrats are currently working on a measure to bring a clean CR (YY) to the floor.  Given that 21 moderate Republicans now favor YY>NN,  this would again result in a manufactured majority, this time leading to the illegitimate funding of ObamaCare.  Here we see how rules of the game effect the outcome and lead to non-condorcet winners an inefficient allocation of public goods.  Here is a relatively clean example of how combining bills together can force Congressman to vote in ways they normally would not.  One can only think of how many inefficiently allocated public goods are dolled out in omnibus transportation bills through logrolling.

1 comment:

Ben Colalillo said...

The heading for the last chart "Vote to Reopen without Rules," should just be "Vote to ReOpen Gov't." The without rules thing was a holdover from another angle I was going to take