Are standard politicians trustworthy?

Great Debates
1

I’ve seen the idea that US politicians are generally reliable about keeping their campaign promises floated around on this board a lot. It is based on things like this study from 538.com. The contention of the article and people expressing this sentiment is that people are wrong to distrust politicians, and they are specifically critical of people who felt that Clinton could not be trusted because she’s part of the ‘swamp’ of regular politicians in the recent election.

The article itself says the below, and I do not dispute the numbers in the article (and would prefer to treat them as established fact for this thread):

I was honestly shocked by this, because when I saw the article’s title and how it was being presented I expected to see something more like ‘politicians make a good faith effort to fulfill almost all of their campaign promises, but run into opposition, and even then manage to get a majority through’. But what it actually says that politicians do not make even a ‘good faith’ effort to keep a full third of their campaign promises! For me, these numbers confirm that you should not believe campaign promises from a politician, because there is documented evidence that they do not even attempt to fulfill a third of them. Not ‘they run into opposition from the other side so can’t do everything they wanted to’, or ‘an unexpected disaster happened so they had to deal with that instead of their promise’, but rather that they did not make a good faith effort.

Would you base your evening plans around someone who you knew would arbitrarily just stand you up one time in three, or lend money to someone who had a one in three chance of deciding to not pay you back every time they borrowed money? I know that I, personally, would classify a person who only tried to keep two thirds of the promises they made to me as ‘very untrustworthy, do not rely on them for anything’. And it’s even worse when you consider that the politician will put all of the easy or non-controversial promises into the 2/3 and the hard, controversial stuff into the 1/3. By 538’s standards, someone who pays back a ‘hey, can you spot me lunch today’ loan every week, but only half the time pays back ‘oh man, I need $250 to fix the car or I can’t get to work’ loan would be 90% reliable since he makes 9/10 of his promises, and thus extremely trustworthy. But would anyone here really trust this ‘reliable’ guy enough to lend him $250 for a car repair and expect it see it again?

So, I’d like to hear others thoughts on whether ‘we’ should consider people who do not make a good faith effort to keep a third of their promises as worthy of trust, or whether it’s right to distrust them and consider their promises unreliable.

2

I don’t know that this is true, the ACA was neither easy nor non-controversial, and yet it was passed. The same is true of the Mexican border wall and accelerated deportations, and yet Trump has immediately set to enacting them.

I don’t think lending money is analogous. Politics is far more complex, and not under any one person’s control. For example, Politifact dings Obama for a “promise broken” for not closing the Guantanamo Bay gulag. But what actually happened is that Obama issued an executive order closing the facility the day after he took office, and then Congress passed a law barring the prisoners there from being moved to another prison, or to the US. That means that if another country can’t be persuaded to accept a prisoner, there is nowhere for them to go. They can’t well be dumped into international waters.

And so it goes. The American system splits power between three branches of government, and many people. Unlike parliamentary systems, the legislature and the executive are different people. It’s frankly amazing that Obama was able to deliver on 70% of his pledges, considering.

3

I think the 538 article was a good example of being pleasantly surprised because the bar is so low. Two thirds of their campaign promises! That is better than anyone would expect.

However, how significant are the promises kept, vs. the ones not kept? Seems to me that if you take the top 5 promises of any President’s campaign, I’d be surprised if he kept 3 of them, or even 2. My criticism of those measurements is the same my criticism for politifact’s numbers. “SAT scores cratered in 1980” does not have the same significance as “I was cleared of wrongdoing”, and “I promise to spend $400 million upgrading mental health facilities” isn’t in the same neighborhood as “I just don’t think we should be forcing people to buy health insurance.”

I think the lesson here is that if a promise is in line with a candidate’s record and ideology, it’s likely to be kept. If it’s not, it’s just political positioning.

4

Let’s do make up our minds: Do we hate politicians because they break their promises? Or because they keep the stupid promises they make to ignorant voters? :rolleyes:

OP , your own source writes:

I wish the article went into more detail on broken promises. (It links to a book chapter on the topic, online but pay-to-view.) But politicians do have obvious incentives to say what they mean and mean what they say!

5
6

Yeah, but some promises are definitely just broken because they were never meant in the first place. Obama broke two big ones, the individual mandate, and NAFTA renegotiation.

7

Part of the problem is that most politicians consider 50.1% to be a “mandate”, and totally ignore the other 49.9%.

8

Fundamentally, most people think about politics wrong.

The goal of our system is to elect people that we trust to represent us when it comes time to investigate and debate policy. And part of that trust, is the trust that they’re representing all of us - not just the majority - working to preserve basic freedoms and human rights, and taking into account the realities and practicalities of the situations they are called to legislate on. It’s their job to perform a balancing act between looking out for their electorate and making rational and fair decisions.

And none of that is what most of us are electing our politicians to do, nor is that what most of us want from them.

But there is the end result that there are realities and practicalities of the situations that they will be called in to legislate on. Even if the politician is dimwitted enough to not be able to envision, or psychopathic enough not care about basic human rights and freedoms, they still have to contend with the Bill of Rights and other restrictions on what they can legally do (and realistically, if you can get elected to the Federal government, you’re probably not dimwitted and should be able to think philosophically enough to recognize that minorities shouldn’t have to live according to the rules of the majority.) Unless the electorate has the same intellect and knowledge of the issues as their representative, they will be fundamentally unable to expect legislation to come out of government that matches what they think it should be.

But who is going to elect the guy who gets up and says, “Sorry, but you all have no idea what you’re talking about, and I’m probably not going to want to do nor be able to do most of the things you want me to, and to do otherwise would be amoral and disastrous”? The guy who gets up and says what the majority wants to hear is the guy who is going to get elected. And by that sheer fact, it’s impossible for us to elect the person who is trustworthy. The system is an evolutionary process that selects against honesty. You just can’t make it in to the system if you’re not able to tell the people what they want to hear, and that requires that either you have insufficient knowledge to realize that you are doing so, or that you are a lying liar. For anyone running a second time for office, the former will have stopped being possible.

On the negative side, this means that we’re not hiring people who are trustworthy and who are fully honest about doing their job. They are people who are dishonest enough to do what it takes to get into the office, and thus dishonest enough to enact bad policy based on party politics, popular demand, etc. if it means keeping their job.

But on the positive side, they’re still only lying 1/3rd of the time. That whole “realities of the situation” and “legal options” thing does still force them to do the job that the founders expected of them the majority of the time.

Still, the point would remain that the metric is rather misleading. We don’t want politicians who do what we say. That’s just democracy, and democracy is dumb.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/timeline/newnatn/usconst/debates.html

9

Great post. One thing I’ll add, we really do need to stop tolerating politicians making promises they know they can’t keep or have no intention of keeping. If for no other reason than to make it impossible for another Donald Trump to get in the White House. When a candidate says they want to renegotiate NAFTA, they’d better damn well try to do it once in office, not send an advisor to Canada to reassure them that it’s all just campaign talk.

10

We live in a post-mandate society.

11

You would do better to make a national effort to remind the population that democratic system is one of compromise and to make the effort to abandon the totalizing rhetoric that seems to become more and prevalent.

12

.
.
This.

13

Most politicians in Canada get elected with 38% of the vote, and the low voter turnouts that exist in many Western countries. They still consider they have a mandate to do whatever they please, even if they had 20% of the eligible vote.

I expect politicians to lie by omission and slippery wordplay, and I do not respect this “skill” when practiced by a politician or any other professional. Obviously, some politicians are now compulsively mendacious.

14

Abandoning a campaign promise because of compromise is fine, although it’s true that many voters do consider it a betrayal and shouldn’t. But many promises are things they could do but just don’t want to. It’s just strategy.

15

Perception equals reality, but in hindsight I would have to say no … all have lied and come short of perfection.

16

What rock have you been under? Politicians promising the moon during election campaigns and producing a gray marble, or nothing at all when in office is pretty much the standard. Hell, in the case of Presidential or gubernatorial campaigns politicians often promise things that the office they’re running for has no power to actually enact or enforce on their own. And sometimes they may promise things in that category knowing full well that the other side won’t allow it to ever come to pass.

So it’s to be expected that some percentage of campaign promises are entirely bullshit, some are attempted knowing full well that they won’t succeed (I’d call that bad faith), some percentage will be scrapped as a result of compromise, some percentage will be attempted in good faith but fail to be carried out, and some percentage will actually be carried out.

Honestly, I was surprised to see that on average, 66% fall into the categories of good faith attempts and successes. I’d have thought that it wouldn’t be higher than 50%, with the other 3 categories (bullshit, no expectation, compromise scrap) taking up more than 50% of promises.

17

Not quite the right analogy. When I make performance plans for my employees, I aim (by coincidence here) to have about 1/3 more than expected to accomplish in an average year, with an expectation that completing 2/3 of the work is “satisfactory” and above that is “stretch goals”. Sometimes I have to specify priorities and mus-dos, but for more open-ended assignments, “I got 2/3 of these done, but this last one took a huge amount of unexpected effort” is decent performance. It’s good to manage upwards by setting the stretch goals, but difficulties should not be outright punished.

18

pantastic:

Whoo boy. I take it you’ve never dated anyone, or had a brother or sister or parent. Or at least, that you are always blinded to reality about pretty much everyone on the planet.

What most politicians specialize in, isn’t so much LYING, as it is selling intentions and dreams. Just like people do who are trying to find a mate or a date for the evening.

Something else to keep in mind, is the other side of the standard politician picture: while the politician is busy saying what they think voters want to hear, the voters are just as busy imagining that what the politicians actually say, is what they wanted them to mean (as opposed to what the words actually spell out). This is also exactly the same as people on the make in the dating/mating world.

And just as it’s popular for the average voter to pretend that he/she was “fooled” by the wily lying politicians, the people who wake up in bed next to a visually hot, but otherwise vile person after a wild night of sex, ALSO pretend that the other person “led them on.”

19

Want to know when a politician is lying ?
Their lips are moving.

The world still shocks me. I thought everyone knew this.

20

Some people are so into their “team” that they actually think their people are pure as the driven snow. If they were football fans their QB would never throw an interception. And when they did it would be because the other team cheated, those dastardly fellows.