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> We need to create systems that make politics attractive to people who do it out of ideology. Is your implication that right now most politicians are not poli
by dwohnitmok 6y ago
> We need to create systems that make politics attractive to people who do it out of ideology.
Is your implication that right now most politicians are not politicians out of ideology first and foremost, but rather for their own financial gain?
I would take the contrarian view. I would guess the majority of politicians are politicians because of ideology. Although they may not believe everything (or perhaps even most of what) they say they do and what they do believe may change while in office, I would be surprised if they don't have some core ideology that powers them.
It's otherwise unclear to me why politicians seek re-election so frequently. In most Western democracies, a person with the opportunity to become a career politician has far more lucrative job opportunities outside of politics than within, especially once you've become a high-level politician. If people were doing it for money, I'd imagine they'd do a single term and then immediately try to parlay that into another job rather than trying to slug it out term after term.
The other mildly persuasive explanation to me is enjoying the power of the office, but the feeling of power is very hard to separate from fervent ideology.
- vkou 6y agoA simple answer may be Darwinism. The politicians that survive are politicians that seek re-election. The 'why' they originally go into politics (money or ideology) may be irrelevant as a fitness function for this sort of thing. (And eventually, as t -> ∞, the percentage of politicians that seek re-election will -> 100%.)
- dwohnitmok 6y agoDarwinism generally arises in a world of fitness where reproduction is the dominating force. That is if politicians reproduced while in office to form more politicians and reproduction among politicians was the main source of new politicians then yes we might have reason to believe that seeking re-election is an emergent behavior from basic survival. However, that's not the way politics works. There is a stable equilibrium where politicians are constantly replenished by the larger population as they leave office, which holds true as t approaches infinity. And indeed this is more or less what we observe in Western societies.
- dwaltrip 6y agoBehavior can “reproduce” when it is copied by (or taught to) others. There are a variety of selective factors that make it more likely for certain copied behaviors to “survive” and then be copied further. This is cultural evolution. Of course, much complexity is uncovered when you dig into the details. It isn’t a perfect analogy but it seems very useful.
- dwohnitmok 6y agoBy the time we're talking about things like cultural evolution and memetic propagation, we're getting pretty close to just talking about ideology again.