Can game theory explain 2024's year of elections?
Political losers sneer at voters who seemingly ousted well-meaning, if hapless, incumbents to install villains who actively campaigned to lower their living standards.
"Face-eating leopards prepare for a record year."
However, people may not vote in their future interests, but to further a strategy that is equally rational.
Politics is often framed as a game of engagement, debate, persuasion, and, if not consensus, then collaboration.
However, competition may be the more accurate framing, in which the governnment and people are opponents.
Wars, austerity, leaving citizens at the mercy of corporations, hooligans, globalisation, and microbes. It is easy to cast governments as untrustworthy.
This adversarial setting with periodic elections resembles an 'iterative prisoner's dilemma' from the mathematics of game theory, in which tit-for-tat is the optimal strategy.
That is, punishing a faulty government with instability is better than voting in line with one's ideals or self-interest.
It doesn't matter that your rights will be curtailed as long as you send the message that you hated inflation.
Perhaps without voters consciously realising it, their self-defeat may be for a greater good.
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