Philippine Elections: Why I Will Vote For President "None Of The Above"

On Monday May 10th, we will be holding our national elections. And I cast my vote in favour of "None Of The Above" as President. 

Here is why: My vote will not affect the outcome of the election, not even if I am able to convince my family or as a metaphor the barangay where I reside. (about 1% of voting population equals 500,000 votes). 

 Besides, the personal cost of going to vote (transportation, filling up forms, effort, time, risks to security etc.) seems greater than the impact of my vote. My vote will not affect the prospective policies of the future leaders.

For example, US President Obama was popularly elected but enacted a very unpopular law-the Obamacare. President Obama’s approval ratings now are at the lowest level since he assumed the post, not only because of Obamacare but on the issues prior to this. 

 Also what is popular is mostly wrong, whether it is Philippine elections 1998 which led to People Power 2, Juan Peron, Adolf Hitler, or etc..., what you vote for, most of the time, may not be what you expect to get. My vote won’t be reflective of symbolism or popular expectations of peoples' interpretation of their morality vicariously reflected on their desired candidates. 

Instead, my vote will anchor on political-economic reality. The way I see in today’s political theatre, the current crop of contestants for the highest field in the land can be classified into two categories-the status quo-cians and socialist dreamers. The status quo-cians are the leading candidates whose political successes have emanated from the current political conditions. They are what Professor Arnold Kling calls as the "Insiders" in the Philippine context. Hence they are unlikely to roil the present conditions in spite of the rhetorical demagoguery about “changes”. 

Have you heard any politician who doesn’t utter the spiel about "changes"? 

Commons sense tells me that immense elections expenses will need to be recovered and that the political baggage from assorted horse trading and backroom dealing with different and ideologically opposed political groups will suggest more of the same policies, but with a subtle difference-the distribution of power will be based according to the degree of political debts as perceived by the new leaders. 

In other words, the only “changes” I expect to see post elections are personalities involved in dispensing public funds and controlling power (and not in the system dominated by cronyism and client-patron relations). The rule of the entrenched political class means 'the more things change the more they remain the same'. 

On the other hand, the socialist dreamers are those in the tailgroups of the survey and are unlikely to win, but whose idea of change appear mostly predicated on their socialist messianic visions. While they come with less political albatross, the lack of machinery, popularity and finance poses as big handicaps to their ambitions. 

In realization of these therefore my vote will not be an imaginary display of democratic virtue. 

Finally, my vote will reflect on my understanding that governance is a very complex issue and not some grand simplistic mythology about leadership virtuosity and omniscience. There are many factors involved such as behavioral, stimulus-response or feedback mechanisms from existing laws and welfare system, the effectiveness of social institutions, diversity of public's demand for social services, bureaucratic hurdles, opportunity costs and etc... 

 In addition, governance is even more than just an issue of knowledge problem. It is more about the issue of the stakeholders problem-where the incentives to secure knowledge are driven by the degree of stakeholdings. For example a businessman would try to secure all required knowledge in his field to assure the survivalship of his enterprise. That’s because if one fails, the cost of failure will be significant, i.e. loss of capital aside from the attendant psychological effects. 

Meanwhile for voters, since the costs of voting for a losing candidate are personally inconsequential and because of the lack of stakeholdings, people tend to vote based on prejudices, popularity, and potential connections (or even from bribery). 

 That’s why people see election like sports game, to fittingly quote the Economist, ``POLITICS, our Bagehot columnist reckons, is like sport: the way people see incidents is determined by which team or party they want to win, even if they do not realise this is the case.” 

 While some people try to portray elections as a battle between “good” over “evil”, the fact is that all candidates are human beings and are subject to human frailties [as noted above subject to political debts, subjective interpretation of events, limited knowledge, influenced by networks, etc...]. 

Hence good over evil, or black propaganda seems equivalent to the proverbial "pot calling the kettle black" and reveals only of the irrationality of voters. Little has been said about the candidates’ biases on the economic impacts from a bloated bureaucracy, complexity and enforceability of laws, costs of redistribution, costs of compliance, politicization of social institutions, taxation and etc... things that truly matters most. Well even if they did, they were buried in media, since they haven’t been in the fancy of the public, since these issues are complex or hardly understood (or maybe even plain refusal to be understood). 

As for leaders, the issue of stakeholdings depends largely on their career interests. That’s why politicians and bureaucrats are typically “reactive” agents-their policy responses are predominantly reactions to the events that capture the attention of the populace for the moment (example, whatever happened to the proposed law surrounding the Halili-Ong sex video scandal?) 

Thereby, considering the vast coverage of the interconnectedness and complexity of any society, securing knowledge are merely delegated to the bureaucracy and attended to only at the “need” of the moment. 

In short, the knowledge problem exists not only due to human frailty but likewise due to the low incentives or stakeholdings by the leadership to attain them (yes to repeat, because society is too broad to be comprehended by any single person or by the state). 

 What does the stakeholding problem suggest of the prospective candidates? Well as said above very little, except to get elected. To close, I think domestic political trends will increasingly be shaped by external factors as argued here and that's why some political aspirants have been directing their platitudinous political themes to OFWs. 

And perhaps like many followers of President Obama, a year after next week's elections, many voters would turn out frustrated enough to regret their choice this coming Monday.