T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan: The rules of the empty game

LINE & LENGTH

Like academics and pickpockets, politicians too have rules which they can break only at great risk

Operation Duryodhana, in which some clever journalists secretly filmed as many as 11 MPs receiving money in return for asking questions in Parliament, has surprised only the naïve. This is because if you define honesty in the conventional, unqualified and non-contextual way, an honest politician is an oxymoron.

Clearly, there is something about the profession that induces even otherwise decent fellows to behave caddishly. It is the way the game is played. It is important to understand this because all callings have their own implicit rules which are very different from the formal explicit ones. If you want to get anywhere in your chosen profession, you simply have to observe these implicit rules.

Since this is as true of academics as it is of pickpockets, it is more useful to examine the rules, rather than the persons who play the game.

Rule No 1 is that only winning matters because the winner takes all. This zero-sum game characteristic of politics has two consequences.

First, the squeamish stay away. Second, the rules are made by those who regard honesty like people usually regard exercise or prayer""something to be admired in others but never emulated.

Rule No 2 is that your political worth is directly proportional to how much money you can bring to the table. The higher the degree to which you can finance yourself in an election, the more you are likely to get a ticket. That is the necessary condition; but it is not sufficient.

Rule No 3 is that no one but you will be responsible for your day-to-day expenses. These can be huge. MPs' homes are full of constituents, mostly indigent who, at the very least, have to be fed thrice a day. There are other expenses too. Who will pay for all that?

Rule 3 exists because there are no positive externalities for the MPs if they pay into a common party pool from which some stipend can be paid for meeting these constituents-related expenses. This is because, first, no one is sure that an MP will win the next time, and, second, even if he is sure of winning, spending on people from other constituencies holds no benefits for the rest.

So political parties leave their MPs to fend for themselves although the Communists may be an exception because the trades unions pay for them. Other parties don't have this pool to dip into. If they tried to create one, there would be an uproar.

Rule No 4 is that you must recoup your election expenses in the first two years and devote the next three years to generating the margin money for the next election. This margin money, for most sitting MPs, is 50 per cent. But if you can increase it beyond that, your chances of getting a ticket increase.

Since it costs a crore plus to fight credibly in a parliamentary constituency, an MP needs to generate at least a crore in the five years available to him. Most don't manage to. But that is not for want of trying.

Rule No 5 comes out of Rule No 2: the political parties need you to bring in more than money if they are to bank on you. This includes the capacity to generate future contacts amongst potential funders of election campaigns and that requirement creates its own pressures on MPs, leading them away from standard definitions of honesty. The pejorative word nexus springs to mind.

Rule No 6 is "No squealing". If you rat on someone, you may be ratted on next. And since you need the money, it is not in your interest to rat. So there is no internal pressure to remain honest.

Rule No 7 is that in the current framework each MP must spend more than the other. This comes out of a Prisoners' Dilemma sort of situation where, although each MP is best off spending as little as possible, in reality none of them can.

This is because whenever one MP realises that the other is not spending, he can achieve a higher individual payoff by spending more, and thereby hoping to extend his reach amongst potential voters. Given that each MP stands to gain by spending more if the other does not spend, what ends up happening is that they all spend as much as they can.

In the current framework, where there is no effective enforcement mechanism to achieve""and stay at""the outcome in which nobody spends excessively, there is no way of restricting spending. In other words, nobody unilaterally chooses not to spend, and there is no multilateral mechanism to ensure it, either.

What are the possible solutions? Neither a radical change in voters' sentiments, in the sense that corruption once discovered will be punished by defeat, nor a reduction in the costs of elections, is likely. Studies in the US have shown that a reduction (or increase) in spending by 50 per cent affects the vote distribution by a little over 1 per cent. The incentives to spend are therefore simply too high.

Possibly the only solution is a change in the structure of payoffs. I'll revisit the issue in a future article.