W Post
The political science of papal elections
Posted by _Dylan Matthews_
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/dylan-matthews/2012/07/16/gJQAH7AyoW_page.html)
on February 11, 2013
Pope Benedict XVI — né Joseph Ratzinger — has_ announced that he will
step down_
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/pope-benedict-to-resign-citing-age-and-waning-energy/2013/02/11/f9e90aa6-743b-11e2-8f84-3e4b513b1a13_story.h
tml?hpid=z1) at the end of this month. In doing so, he becomes the first
pope to resign in 598 years. The last resignation, in 1415, occurred when
Gregory XII stepped down to end the Western Schism in the Catholic Church,
in which rival popes and antipopes, each recognized by a different set of
secular governments in Europe, claimed sovereignty over the church.
Which is to say that this is a pretty strange occurrence. But, as with
normal papal successions, it will prompt the vote of the College of Cardinals,
a group of up to 120 church leaders (current estimates put the number
around 118) below the age limit of 80 who convene to elect new popes. Exactly
how that process works, however, changes frequently, and indeed has changed
since the election that elevated Benedict in 2005.
NYU political scientist _Joshua Tucker_
(http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2013/02/11/the-pope-has-resigned/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_camp
aign=Feed:+themonkeycagefeed+(The+Monkey+Cage)) and _PM_
(http://www.whiteoliphaunt.com/duckofminerva/2013/02/what-political-science-says-about-the-pop
es-successor.html) at Duck of Minerva have compiled a good set of
political science research into papal elections. It’s a sensitive subject
because,
as GWU professors Forrest Maltzman, Melissa Schwartzberg and the late Lee
Sigelman put it in their _paper_
(http://home.gwu.edu/~forrest/Maltzman(Pope.PS).pdf) on Benedict’s election,
“Officially, Ratzinger’s selection was
attributed to the will of God, a force not amenable to any empirical test
that is in our power to conduct.”
But unofficially, Benedict was selected in accordance with the wishes of
his predecessor, John Paul II. For most of John Paul’s tenure, papal
elections were subject to a supermajority requirement, with a two-thirds
majority
required to finalize a selection. As Maltzman et al show, by the middle of
1990 John Paul had already appointed two-thirds of voting cardinals.
Assuming his appointees all agreed on a candidate, they could have outvoted
any
previous appointees from 1990 until John Paul’s death in 2005 and installed a
candidate along John Paul’s preferred lines:
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2013/02/jpII_cardinal_proportion.png)
Source: Maltzman, Schwartzberg, and Sigelman.
But as the above chart shows, a funny thing happened in 1996. John Paul II
issued Universi Dominici Gregis, a document revising the two-thirds
requirement. In filibuster parlance, he went nuclear. As the authors note, the
timing here is funny. He already had a supermajority of appointees in the
college. This seems to refute the notion that the change was intended to help
secure a future pope who would continue John Paul-like policies.
Instead, they argue, what drove revision was a desire to prevent gridlock.
There were three likely candidates for pope in 2005 (according to these
authors; _others disagree_
(http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-Benedict-XVI-Catholic/dp/0385513208) ). There
was Benedict (then Ratzinger), a Vatican insider
with a reputation as a doctrinaire conservative. There was Carlo Maria
Martini, a quite liberal Italian cardinal and former archbishop of Milan who
died last year and supported same-sex civil unions, a right of the dying to
refuse medical treatment and the distribution of condoms as a “lesser evil”
to AIDS transmission. And there was Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop
of Buenos Aires, who earned support from cardinals in the developing world
and holds fairly mainline Catholic views. Not only did no block have a
clear majority, but a “voting paradox” was at work:
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2013/02/Screen-Shot-2013-02-11-at-10.23.53-AM.png)
Source: Maltzman, Schwartzberg, and Sigelman.
To see what’s going wrong here, suppose you’re in the Martini bloc.
Getting either the Ratzinger bloc or the Bergoglio bloc on your side would put
you over a two-thirds majority. You prefer Bergoglio to Ratzinger, so you go
to Bergoglio first. But he prefers Ratzinger to you, so he turns you down.
You could go to Ratzinger, but you really don’t want to make concessions to
that faction. And Ratzinger and Bergoglio can’t put together a two-thirds
majority between them, and even if they could, Ratzinger doesn’t like
Bergoglio as much as he likes Martini. Everything’s deadlocked. A majority
election wouldn’t eliminate the possibility of deadlock, but it would make it
much less likely.
Maltzman et al hypothesized that even if John Paul II hadn’t noticed this
potential problem, he likely was talking to someone who had. In 1994, they
note, John Paul appointed the Pontifical Academy of Social Science, meant to
provide the church with advice from political scientists, sociologists and
economists of note. One of the original appointees was Kenneth Arrow, the
Nobel-winning economist whose most famous work concerns voting paradoxes.
His Arrow impossibility theorem proved that it is impossible to take the
ranked preferences of a group of voters and turn them into a societal ranking
that conforms with certain basic rational and fairness requirements (for
example, one requirement is that one person ranking an option higher shouldn’
t hurt its societal ranking). The relevance of that work to the Pope’s
dilemma should be clear enough.
Regardless of whether the political scientists’ history is right and Arrow’
s views really did push the cardinal election process in this direction,
their point is important for this next papal election because Benedict has
_reversed_ (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6242466.stm) John Paul II’s
repeal of the two-thirds requirement, the very repeal that enabled Benedict
to be elected in the first place. In the past, this has led to compromise
selections like, well, John Paul II, but if a voting paradox arises, the
church could be in for considerable gridlock.
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