Playing with politics

I recently convinced over 100 people to join a political party they will not vote for. I did this because I study games.

The Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) will elect a new leader at the end of the month. There are 13 candidates vying for votes. The process is complicated, but not to a citizen who understands games. In this case, the winning candidate will get more than 16,900 points, which is equivalent to half the points in each of Canada’s 338 ridings. The winning voters will get their preferred candidate elected.

There are many rules, but here is a particularly interesting one: each riding in Canada contributes 100 points, allocated proportionately. So if constituents in my riding, Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie, allocate 30 percent of the vote to Maxime Bernier and 20 percent to Michael Chong, then they will get 30 and 20 points respectively. The thing is, CPC members are not evenly distributed across Canada because some regions are more centrist or leftist.

The Implications:

Certain members grant more points with their votes. Some ridings might have 500 registered members, while others may have 50. Those 500 contribute 0.2 points each, whereas the 50 get two points each. This in turn means candidates are incentivized to campaign in regions that are to the left of the party’s general membership. This rule structure meets the party’s mandate to remain a “big tent” in order to have a legitimate mandate larger than 50 percent of the federal vote.

A Deeper Look

Political scientists and economists have the tools to make the same assessment I just did. I do not claim to have special knowledge or techniques, only an openness to use these means in a variety of ways. As a humanities scholar, I have an ingrained desire to see how rules privilege certain ideologies. As a voter, I want to exercise my political will and do my civic duty. It is on this last count that game studies contribute to a liberal arts education.

In this case, I noticed that this rule makes it possible for a particular candidate, like Michael Chong, to win. His platform lies somewhere between sober and boring. Many CPC members characterize him as a red Tory. In reality, he is a holdover from the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, which merged with the Canadian Alliance in 2003. Most importantly, he is the only candidate who thinks addressing climate change is a priority. This alone can get him many points in urban, left-leaning areas.

While I care about many political issues, the threat of climate change is a tier above the rest. I want the Canadian government to actively reduce our carbon footprint. For that to happen, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition cannot waste time debating whether climate change is real. They must instead debate how best to tackle it.

Voting against climate change deniers in the federal election is important, but that represents one voice in 15 million. Voting in the CPC leadership race in a leftist riding meant my voice was 1,000 times more powerful than it would be in a federal election!

Challenging Legitimacy

Of course, I wasn’t the only person to have discovered this. Pretty soon fears of a leftist hijacking echoed in the CPC. I want to dispel that idea outright. Everyone who has paid $15 for a legitimate vote in the CPC leadership race has done their civic duty. The voting structure is not some vulnerable mistake exploited by morally bankrupt citizens. The voting structure was built in a specific way to encourage exactly this kind of behaviour.

Since its inception the CPC has never gotten more than 40 percent of the popular vote. If ultra-conservatives continue to insist that their merger with the Progressive Conservatives was a meaningless exercise and their vision of the party is the only legitimate one, then the party will not only fail to attain a mandate, it will fail to act as a reasonable opposition to other parties that come to power. As a citizen, I benefitted from game studies because it allowed me to think strategically, politically, and morally about the implications of a rule structure.

I wanted to share these thoughts. With the help of friends, we created a website called Choose Chong. At the time we were terrified that the then leading Kevin O’Leary would not only bring Trump-like politics to Canada, but that he would also fail to challenge Trudeau’s policies in any useful way. We weren’t the only ones because the site got thousands of hits. When O’Leary recently left the race, he cited Quebec’s resistance to him as his reason for quitting. I’d like to think that I had some small impact on that.

Now, O’Leary has endorsed a French-Canadian candidate, Maxime Bernier, on the premise that he could attract the French-Canadian vote. Hopefully Quebec does not fall for it. Bernier’s platform involves eliminating equalization payments essential to Quebec’s healthcare. As it stands, Chong is in fourth place for people’s first choice candidate. Luckily, the election uses a preferential ballot, so here’s hoping he is enough people’s second pick. If you are confused about preferential ballots and their impacts on strategic voting, stay tuned for a future blog post.

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