This creates what we might call “the declining talent pool of soccer,” or more simply, the “benchwarmer” dilemma: You want your best 11 players on the field, but in order to motivate your players, you’ve got to threaten to replace them with an inferior player from the bench. Thus, one of these situations may result: Your 11 best players might give less than a full effort (knowing that their imperfect effort is still better than a benchwarmer’s full effort), or your inferior benchwarming players might be the ones you put on the field.

The same problem arises when choosing government officials. The result is inferior governance.

The “Benchwarmer” Dilemma in the British Cabinet

In recently published research, Torun Dewan and David Myatt argue that the same dynamic limits the performance of governments. They’ve got the British cabinet in mind. With salaries and benefits defined by statute, the British Prime Minister’s only “stick” to motivate junior ministers is the threat of removal. But since ministers generally come from a small pool (the House of Commons), the PM can’t actually remove a minister unless the PM is willing to substitute in a less desirable alternate.

Thus, the longer a party controls the British cabinet, the less talented it will be at governing. Either the ministers remain in their positions for so long that the threat of removal loses its credibility, or else talented ministers are replaced with inferior ministers so often that the overall talent level crumbles. Eventually, the cabinet becomes so ineffective that that majority loses control of parliament, allowing the other party to start the same process all over again with its (initially) fresh talent pool.

Is There a “Benchwarmer” Dilemma in U.S. Elections?

I like Dewan and Myatt’s argument. It makes a lot of sense. It helps explain why there is often a “honeymoon” period after elections when the new government seems so effective.¹ In large measure, their argument works so well because it focuses on the British cabinet, where roughly 90 cabinet members (ministers and junior ministers) need to be drawn from a pool of 350 or so majority-party members of parliament. After all, the soccer analogy that I use above might not work so well if there were 1000 players on the roster and only 11 on the field.

Or would it? I think that the “benchwarmer” problem from the soccer analogy can apply just as well to American elections. Consider a member of the U.S. House running for reelection in his district. The only punishment that his “boss” (his voters) can threaten him with is removal from office, whether in the primary or in the general election. They have observed the incumbent over the past two years–longer if he has served several terms–and they understand his strengths and weaknesses. By contrast, they may be mostly unfamiliar with the challenger, who may be a political newcomer.

Thus, voters are faced with a dilemma: Should they keep the star player (the incumbent) on the field despite imperfect performance, or should they substitute in a less experienced, less tested benchwarmer? Elections aren’t merely a referendum on the incumbent’s performance.² Instead, it’s an evaluation of the incumbent that takes account of uncertainty about the challenger’s ability to fill the incumbent’s shoes.

The effect of all this might be that incumbents know they can safely underperform without having to worry much about losing their seats. Maybe that’s why over 90% of U.S. House members get reelected every two years.³ Despite all the recent hubbub about 2010 being an anti-incumbent election year, I’ll be stunned (like Sides and Yglesias) if that pattern changes much this year. Voters find it better to stick with the devil you know than with the benchwarmer you don’t.

Given that this dispute revolves mostly around methodological (not theoretical) differences, one wonders why this article did not appear as a reply to Gerber et al, followed by a response from the original authors. As my critique at the end of this review will make clear, there are many holes that Gerber et al could poke in Denny and Doyle’s approach.

Details

Those familiar with Gerber et al’s 2003 article may be surprised to see methodological arguments leveled against it. After all, Gerber et al used sound experimental methods to neutralize methdological concerns. They selected a sample of voters who had not turned out in recent elections; they randomly assigned some of those non-voters to receive a mobilization treatment in 1998; of those who actually turned out in 1998 as a result of this mobilization effort, they then looked to see how many turned out again in 1999. At each stage, turnout information for each voter was gathered from public records–not from self-reported polling data.

The problem, Denny and Doyle claim, is not so much with the research design as with the statistical analysis. Gerber et al use instrumental variables in a lagged binary choice model, a procedure that does not yield consistent estimators. As a result, Denny and Doyle write, it appears that Gerber et al severely overestimated the effect that voting in previous elections has on voting in subsequent elections–that is, Gerber et al overestimated the extent to which voting is habit forming.

Denny and Doyle seek to estimate the strength of “habit” more accurately by using Britain’s National Child Development Study (NCDS), a six-stage panel that tracked children born in March of 1958 into the late 1990s. They use a large number of time-variant and time-invariant variables from this study to predict turnout in 1979, this cohort’s first opportunity to vote. For later elections, they use the same background variables, but insert a lag for whether the respondent had voted in previous elections. This procedure produces the estimate that voting in previous elections raises the probability of voting in subsequent elections by 13%.

Punchline: Yes, voting is habit-forming, but not as much as Gerber et al thought.

Critique

I’m surprised that AJPS did not provide Gerber et al the opportunity to reply to this article. I hope to see a reply from them in a future issue. Even if they accept Denny and Doyle’s econometric criticisms as valid (which they appear to be), I suspect that Gerber et al would find plenty of flaws in Denny and Doyle’s approach.

Randomization vs Control Variables

For example, I find it surprising that Denny and Doyle think their statistical control variables can remove individual-level background conditions (fixed effects) as well as Gerber et al’s randomization can. As Denny and Doyle acknowledge near the beginning of their article, the greatest empirical obstacle to identifying an effect of habit is that you must first control for anything that might influence an individual voter’s propensity to vote. If you omit a single variable that influences propensity to vote, then that variable’s effects will be swallowed up in the lagged turnout measure–inflating the estimated effect of habit.

Gerber et al use randomized experimentation to completely remove concerns about omitted variables; Denny and Doyle by contrast, use a (large) vector of control variables taken from the NCDS. They make a valiant effort to argue that these variables (and their sophisticated methods) can account for this problem, but let’s face it–no matter how many control variables you use, control variables can never improve on randomized experimentation.

Is Britain comparable to America?

More broadly, I wonder whether this study is even comparable to Gerber et al’s. Gerber et al studied American elections, and argued that habit raised your probability of turning out by 47%; Denny and Doyle study British elections and find that habit raises your probability of turning out by 13%. But do we really expect habit to have the same effect in such different contexts? Elections are far more frequent in the United States than in Britain–so much so that some worry about “voter fatigue” hurting American turnout. This difference alone implies two things relevant to habit formation. First: Since American elections are more frequent, voters have more opportunity to develop a strong habit. Second: Since American elections happen in more rapid succession, there is less time for the habit to “wear off” before the next election occurs. (Recall that Gerber et all compared turnout in 1998 to 1999–only one year apart; is it any surprise that this would have a stronger effect than comparing British turnout in 1979, 1987, and 1997?)

In sum: An interesting article, but I’d like to see more. I guess that’s how I end most of my reviews, though.