Congress may be getting exactly the behavior its election system rewards

Terry Gerton We are coming up on the midterms and the focus on congressional elections. You’ve got a new paper out with some theories about why Congress isn’t more productive. Tell me what you’re thinking as opposed to maybe what the rest of America is thinking.

Kevin Kosar Well, hating on Congress is an age-old American pastime. And when you look at the way that the public tends to view Congress, they don’t like Congress collectively. And they tend to attribute Congress’s shortcomings to either bad people being there, people of ill motives, the parties being way more extreme in their views than the general public. Or they say, you know, look, Congress is polarized and it’s red shirts versus blue shirts and therefore nothing is getting done. And there’s truth to all of these perceptions, but what we get at in the paper that we recently wrote, that is Scott Warren and I, is that members of Congress face very strong incentives to not do their job, which leads to this underperformance.

Terry Gerton You would apply then the economics rational actor theory here.

Kevin Kosar Yeah, we really pick up where Yale professor David Mayhew started back, oh gosh, I think his book came out in 1974 wherein he said, imagine the average member of Congress is a rational actor seeking one thing first and foremost, to get reelected. Begin with that supposition and you can explain a lot of Congress’s behavior. And what we find is that’s true.

Terry Gerton So what does that theory help explain then that just leaning on polarization doesn’t?

Kevin Kosar So, we all know that the nation faces a lot of big challenges. We have inflation that’s been going on for years, high interest rates, a war in the Middle East, tensions with our age-old rival Russia, etc., etc. And that’s to say nothing of the affordability crisis, AI data centers. There’s so many big things that we as a nation need to collectively grapple with. You would think that members of Congress would see a great opportunity to leap in on those issues and introduce some bills and hold some debates on the floor and try to get something done for the good of the country or even just for the sake of getting themselves re-elected. But instead, Congress is out of session for about seven weeks. Which Seems kind of crazy and seems kind of derelict, but what’s happening is that these folks in Congress are pursuing reelection and they think they can best pursue reelection by being out in their home states, campaigning, raising money, and trashing their opponents.

Terry Gerton So are you saying we’ve got the incentives wrong in this structure?

Kevin Kosar We collectively face an incentive challenge, absolutely. And each of us, as Americans, kind of have to own it. Because they’re chasing our votes. And we need to be a little more thoughtful about how we vote. What are we taking as our motivations when we show up to the ballot box, are we doing as so many Americans now do, which is to show up at the ballot box for the sake of voting against somebody as opposed to voting for the person that they think has done a good job, has come up with good policies, etc.

Terry Gerton Kevin Kozar is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Kevin, how much of this is really a bug? I mean, Congress was designed to make elected officials responsible to voters. So isn’t what you’re describing just Congress being responsive to voters?

Kevin Kosar They are being responsive to voters, but it’s not clear that they’re being responsive to all voters. And this gets at the primary problem, as it’s been called. Over the last, oh gosh, 80 years or so, the United States adopted the primary system to help it pick candidates for the November general elections. Once upon a time, other methods were used. Parties would get together in caucuses and various kind of private gatherings, and they would select candidates amongst themselves to trot out, or they would hold conventions or the smoke-filled rooms where the party bosses would pick somebody that they thought could get elected by the general public. That’s the old selection method. We moved to primaries as a kind of progressive reform. And what we’re learning is that primaries themselves are not perfect. They are, in fact, highly problematic because the voters who turn out in primaries are only about one fifth of the eligible voters. And those voters tend not to be normies. They tend to be people who are single issue voters, particularly passionate about the party, et cetera. And you take that and you combine it with gerrymandering and self-sortation of the U.S. Population and what you get is elections in November which frequently feature candidates who are either further left than voters want or further right than voters want. And then we get stuck playing the game of pick the lesser of two evils.

Terry Gerton It sounds like you’re really describing good economic model here where we’ve got rational actors doing things that maximize utility, but at the end of the day really aren’t optimized for the individual voter. So what would you do differently?

Kevin Kosar Yeah, yeah. You mentioned earlier, the members of the public and what they think of politicians, they tend to think of the politicians as greedy and stupid and all that. What I would argue is that instead, Moneyball has come to politics. Everybody is following data. Everybody is parsing incentives and following them to the maximum degree. And so the question is how do you change the structure of the rules so that you get a better game? You know, we’ve done this in Major League Baseball. We’ve done in football. We’ve in basketball. All the major sports have changed the rules when they found out that players and teams were gaming the system and producing a worse competition. So one thing I have argued very strongly for is that we have to look at the primary system. I mean, if you’re only getting one-fifth of eligible voters to show up, you’ve got to raise that number. You’re just not getting a healthy sample size. Why not move those elections from spring and summer right up into November? Why not structure them in such a way that you have candidates from all parties on there so that all voters have to go together and choose amongst these varied options? Why not then say the top four vote getters move on to a second election? Or you can have a rule that says if any of the primary candidates in this kind of all-party primary get 50% of the votes, that person wins the overall election. Turn it into a bigger, more exciting competition as opposed to these kind of separate GOP, Democratic party, small events.

Terry Gerton That’s similar to how California runs its primaries, right?

Kevin Kosar It is similar, although they do a top two system and unfortunately that’s not enough slots open. And with Democrats having a large majority, you tend to get a Democrat running against a Democrat.

Terry Gerton What would it take to change the rules to be something like what you suggest?

Kevin Kosar Well, the constitution affords states the authority to run their congressional elections just about any way that they please. And so we need states to step up and engage in more electoral experimentation. And we’ve seen some of that. There was a ballot initiative in Alaska some years ago that brought the Final Four voting system to it. And hopefully voters will stick with that, although I understand there’s an effort to repeal it, not surprisingly, because the parties find it threatening. And there have been experiments other places in the country. I think experimentation, however, has to be a lot broader. We’ve got to figure out a better way to make a better mousetrap than the partisan primaries.

Terry Gerton Well, the problem might be that the people who have to change the incentives are the same people who operate within them.

Kevin Kosar Absolutely, people who benefit from the way the game is currently being played don’t want to change the rules and that’s why we have typically to rely upon ballot initiatives to kind of force them to change.

Terry Gerton So what would have to happen before these ballot initiatives or other sorts of reform efforts could become more politically possible?

Kevin Kosar Citizens simply have to get engaged. And there are all over the country, various groups pushing one reform or another. So, you know, those of you who are interested in say, ranked choice voting as a way to change the incentive structure, you now, there’s an organization called Fair Vote and they have a whole bunch of ranked choice voting groups scattered throughout the nation who are advocating for change at the local and state level. There’s a group that’s promoting approval voting. You just Google approval voting, you can see and connect with them. It’s gonna require a citizen engagement because as you pointed out, quite sharply, the players in the game who are happy with the way elections are working, they’re certainly not going to step up.

Terry Gerton Are you seeing, Kevin, a groundswell in places across America that really want to change this system?

Kevin Kosar Yeah, most certainly. I mean, the open primaries as a reform vehicle has had a lot of success. OpenPrimaries.org, you go to that website, you can see that there is a ton of activity and there’s been a ton of victories. And there are many more battles where they’re trying to get out of this GOP versus Democratic primary model and force, you know, allow voters to flow between the elections. So it’s happening out there.

Terry Gerton What are you hoping as a result of the upcoming elections that more people will be motivated to change or that there will be some testing of these various pilots that are out there?

Kevin Kosar Yeah, I think, this may sound cynical, I think that after the dust settles in November, voters are going to look and say, oh, this did not turn out as well as I would have hoped. And maybe instead of just continuing to do the same thing we’ve been doing again and again and expecting different results, maybe we should do something different.