Vote - Defeating the Defeatist Tendency

My ‘Why Malaysia Needs More Governance and Less Corruption?’ and the subsequent ‘Vote for Change?’ posts attracted many comments (for Arrested Development’s standard that is…) which are interesting, persuasive and worthy of lengthier discussions.

Unfortunately, I can only respond to some of them briefly here.

Evolution Analogy:

Cantab used evolution as a parallel to election and the danger of transitioning into a bad equilibrium through voting just for the sake of political competition. He ended by saying:

Bottom line: if we want change, WE have got to make it. Not cross ballot papers while hoping real hard someone else does the dirty work.

I fully agree that if we want change, we have got to make it work ourselves. But voting IS part of the set of actions that we could be pursuing in catalysing a change.

At this point, I think it is important for me to explain myself. I am not advocating voting for the opposition just for the sake of creating political competition as a long term strategy for a democracy. It is plea borne out of what I think is a crisis of norms and institutions in the current state of our nation which is partly due to the political monopoly of the current ruling coalition. Ideally, we should be voting for people, policies and principles (visit Haris Ibrahim’s blog: The People’s Parliament for an inspiring and earnest effort), and this would be my longer term strategy too. Unfortunately, given the current state of affairs, I do not think that this is a luxury all of us have for the coming general election. With the current political hegemony, voting for the oppositions will almost certainly not replace the incumbent coalition, but it will be sending a signal that the people do not condone corruption, inefficiency and the squandering of our future and wealth.

When I said democracy is a process, I meant it in a more holistic sense and not just the election-selection process. The road to democracy requires the co-evolution of informal norms and formal institutions that would ultimately allow for a governance of a state that is of, by and for the people. One of the most crucial elements for this is to have a society that has a strong desire for leaders to be made accountable to the public.

Having read economics in the undersized rooms of the under-funded portion of the Sidgwick site, I am more inclined to view the situation to be more of a parallel to competition between firms rather than an evolutionary process.

Firms derive their power from the support of the consumers while political parties derive their power from the support of the people. At the risk of oversimplification, monopolies, having complete market dominance, have very little incentive to improve, be efficient and tend to exploit the consumers by charging higher price for their product. On the other hand, competition tends to result in pressure to improve and ultimately better serve the interest of the consumers. For local examples, imagine a poorly-run state-backed monopoly (Proton, perhaps), and an industry with intense competition. A good example for the latter is the pre-paid mobile-phone industry in Malaysia. Notwithstanding the wastage from over-advertising, it is very difficult not to see how competition has resulted in improved services for consumers (try imagining 1 cent per sms 3 years ago…).

Marginal Vote:

A single vote is like a broken pencil – it is pointless. As cliché as it might sound, this is not true – every vote counts. Especially when you look at it from the collective perspective. The fear is, however, this pointless reason is used as justification for apathy and inaction on a collective level, hence resulting in the worst case scenario coming true.

I initially intended to use the non-cooperative outcome story of a prisoner’s dilemma to illustrate this, but decided against it now since it has alluded to in my previous post on rude driving, and it can get a bit geeky.

Instead, I refer to an example given in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point on what is called the ‘bystander problem’:

“One of the most infamous incidents in New York City history, for example, was the 1964 stabbing death of a young Queens woman by the name of Kitty Genovese. Genovese was chased by her assailant and attacked three times on the street, over the course of half an hour, as thirty-eight of her neighbors watched from their windows. During that time, however, none of the thirty-eight witnesses called the police. The case…became symbolic of the cold and dehumanizing effects of urban life… Nobody can say why the thirty-eight did not lift the phone while… [but] it can be assumed… that their apathy was indeed one of the big-city variety…

The truth about Genovese, however, turns out to be a little more complicated — and more interesting. Two New York City psychologists — Bibb Latane… and John Darley… — subsequently conducted a series of studies to try to understand what they dubbed the "bystander problem." They staged emergencies of one kind or another in different situations in order to see who would come and help. What they found, surprisingly, was that the one factor above all else that predicted helping behavior was how many witnesses there were to the event.

In one experiment, for example, Latane and Darley had a student alone in a room stage an epileptic fit. When there was just one person next door, listening, that person rushed to the student's aid 85 percent of the time. But when subjects thought that there were four others also overhearing the seizure, they came to the student's aid only 31 percent of the time… When people are in a group, in other words, responsibility for acting is diffused. They assume that someone else will make the call, or they assume that because no one else is acting, the apparent problem — the seizure-like sounds from the other room… — isn't really a problem. In the case of Kitty Genovese, then, social psychologists like Latane and Darley argue, the lesson is not that no one called despite the fact that thirty-eight people heard her scream; it's that no one called because thirty-eight people heard her scream…”

Similarly, that our single vote does not matter in the bigger scheme of things might be true on an individual level, but on a collective level, it could be disastrous. If everyone who wants change thinks that his/her vote is powerless to affect change, than the status quo will remain.

As for Elegant Lily’s comment, he articulated a very real and relevant concern on communal politics being key in determining election outcome. It is a sad truth that division by ethnicity exists across almost all aspects of the Malaysian society, with politics being chiefly so. That said, I do believe a growing number of Malaysians are increasingly realising the importance and urgency of looking beyond racial identity for the future of our nation.

Similar to the argument on marginal vote, it is very important for this group to realise that they are not powerless to affect change. I sincerely believe that we should not allow the dominance of the status quo to feed our defeatist tendency.

Quoting Cantab out of context, “if we want change, WE have got to make it.”

Elanor