Go for it Ernie! If they adopt it in the Vatican, maybe it will be viewed
elsewhere. First I was going to say “maybe it will be viewed more favorably
elsewhere”, but then I realized that maximum majority voting is pretty far
off of the political radar screen. I may be its only bona fide fan.
Chris
------------------------------------------
Christopher P. Hahn, Ph.D.
Constructive Agreement, LLC
<mailto:[email protected]> [email protected]
P.O. Box 39, Bozeman, MT 59771
(406) 522-4143 (406) 556-7116 fax
------------------------------------------
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Dr. Ernest Prabhakar
Sent: Monday, February 11, 2013 12:47 PM
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [RC] Vatican version of Political Science
Wow, it is impressive to see Arrow's theorem (and Arrow himself) actually
important in an ancient a process as this one.
I'd always considered voting cycles more of a mathematical concern than a
practical one. Maybe I need to suggest they implement Maximum Majority
Voting….
-- Ernie P.
On Feb 11, 2013, at 10:55 AM, [email protected] wrote:
W Post
The political science of papal elections
Posted by Dylan Matthews
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/dylan-matthews/2012/07/16/gJQAH7AyoW_page.htm
l> 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.html?hpi
d=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_campaign=Feed%3A+themonkeycagefeed+%28The+Mon
key+Cage%29> and PM
<http://www.whiteoliphaunt.com/duckofminerva/2013/02/what-political-science-
says-about-the-popes-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_pr
oportion.png> Source: Maltzman, Schwartzberg, and Sigelman.
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.
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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