There’s been a huge move over the past…twenty years or so? to cut down on that sort of behavior. Things like eliminating earmarked spending in legislation so you can’t buy legislator approval of a bill by committing to buying a bunch of shit in their district, that sort of thing. Increasing transparency in government, more committee meetings in front of cameras, that sort of thing.
And this sounds good from a “transparency of government, the people know what their representatives are doing” perspective. The argument that Balioc and Rauch are advancing, and I’m endorsing, is that this is a bad thing.
It makes politicians. respond to stupid symbolic political pressures and basically incapable of engaging in compromise. Everything becomes an ideological matter, everything becomes polarized, you can’t buy support for a bill that needs to pass (see e.g. the debt ceiling fights), and it makes it harder for politicians to just ignore their constituents when their constituents are fundamentally misinformed.
This recalls my original objection then, I guess, that having representative government but making the representatives unaccountable and opaque is inherently absurd. If you’re intentionally removing the public’s ability to penalize politicians they think are doing a bad job, or even to tell how good a job politicians are doing, you should probably just be instituting an actual non-democratic system of government, rather than attempting to warp representative democracy into a pale imitation of it. If you really want to hack democracy so that government is mostly about pork, just ban political parties.
The bigger issue here though is that I don’t think this system would actually restore any of that. Under secret ballot you can’t tell how many votes you have for a contentious bill in the first place (since people have an incentive to lie), and you can’t tell who voted for it afterwards if the vote doesn’t go as planned, so leverage has to be applied either over the entire voting body collectively, or at least over a large enough majority of it to accommodate “noise”.
To be sure: none of my most-favored political systems, in the abstract, are democratic at all. I am 100% in agreement that, from a process perspective, the democracy isn’t contributing anything useful here. But whatever else you want to say about it, democracy does have the very real advantage that large numbers of people consider it super-legitimate. So maybe having pointless elections for unaccountable legislative agents is worth it if it convinces everyone that the government speaks with the will of the people. I dunno, man.
I think logrolling does work under this stupid system, though. In the voting chamber, there’s no incentive to do anything other than vote your actual preferences, since you’re unaccountable to anyone for your choices. If the $50K Pork-a-tarium matters to you, why wouldn’t you vote to support it, once it’s been included in the bill at your behest?
I suppose you might get a stupid dynamic where legislators lie about what it would take to buy them off, in hopes of torpedoing bills they oppose by screwing up the opposition’s vote count. I have trouble imagining this tactic surviving for very long, but maybe I’m not cynical enough.