The Function of Government (Accessible)

The Problem Isn’t That Government Is Broken — It’s That It’s Doing Exactly What It Was Built to Do

Most people feel something is wrong with government.
It feels slow, unresponsive, and increasingly disconnected from everyday life.

The usual explanations blame corruption, bad leaders, or ideological extremism.
Those factors matter, but they miss the deeper issue.

The truth is more uncomfortable and more important: Our political system is not failing. It is working exactly as designed, just not for most people.

Modern governments are complex systems. Like any system, they evolve toward stability. Over time, they optimize for survival: maintaining order, enforcing rules, and keeping the people who hold real power invested in the system.

When public outcomes consistently diverge from public preferences, that’s not necessarily dysfunction. More often, it’s a sign that the system’s incentives are misaligned with the public’s goals.

Why Representation Feels Broken

Our electoral system forces people to make defensive choices.

Voters are pressured to choose “the lesser of two evils,” not the candidate they actually prefer. Over time, this compresses a wide range of beliefs into two opposing camps. Once politics becomes a binary fight, compromise becomes risky, cooperation breaks down, and gridlock becomes normal.

This isn’t a cultural failure. It’s a structural one.

When meaningful cooperation becomes hard, only groups with concentrated resources — money, organization, and access — can reliably influence outcomes. Ordinary citizens, acting individually, simply can’t overcome those barriers.

The result is a system that preserves order and legitimacy, but increasingly serves a narrow set of interests.

The Goal Isn’t Chaos or Revolution, It’s Realignment

This doesn’t mean government needs to be torn down.

It means it needs to be realigned.

If we want a government that works for a broad public, the system must make it easier — not harder — for people to express what they actually believe, and for representatives to reflect that diversity without being punished for it.

That requires structural change, not just better personalities.

Two reforms matter most:

1. How we vote
   Voting systems that allow people to express support for more than one candidate — or to rate candidates — reduce strategic voting and encourage broader representation. They lower the pressure to “pick a side” and reward candidates who appeal across differences.

2. How much representation we have
   When fewer people are represented by each official, communities gain more meaningful voice. Political inclusion becomes practical instead of symbolic.

These changes don’t guarantee perfect outcomes. No system can.
But they reduce the incentives that drive polarization, gridlock, and elite capture.

Why This Also Requires Us

Structural reform alone isn’t enough.

Large-scale change only happens when people can cooperate across differences long enough to implement it. That requires something unfashionable in modern politics: patience.

Empathy isn’t a virtue signal here, it’s a strategy.

Real change depends on people being willing to listen, to separate policy disagreements from identity, and to work with those they don’t fully agree with. Protests have a role. So do institutions. But lasting reform is built through everyday conversations, trust, and persistence.

That’s how broad coalitions form. And without broad coalitions, reform fails.

What This Text Stands For

This text is not about left versus right.

It’s about building a political system that:

• represents people as they actually are,

• reduces the pressure toward constant conflict,

• and allows cooperation to be rewarded instead of punished.

We don’t need perfect government.

We need a system that gives ordinary people a fair chance to shape the rules they live under — and the ability to work together to improve them over time.

That is not radical.

It’s practical. And it’s overdue.

The Function of Government

A first principles analysis of government functions and inferences on how to improve misaligned systems.

Gregory Cho

Original Text

First Principles

To effectively engage in discourse regarding the state of government, whether it be in its best or worst forms, it is necessary to first assess what core roles such a system is meant to serve. It is, after all, imprudent to determine if something works without first determining what function it is meant to accomplish. Such thinking is generally referred to in engineering as the analysis of first principles. It is a term that shall be applied loosely throughout this text to refer to the axiomatic core of the topic of government. Such principles in engineering are often explicitly predetermined in the design phase. For the complex human driven systems typical in governments these axioms are instead emergent, necessary to some degree for system survival.

Government has historically been a rather nebulous term. Generally it references systems of control to organize and regulate large groups of people. They are diverse in their implementation and apparently in their functionality. Absolute monarchies, as an example, often operate under the presumption of divine right while democracies and their philosophical cousins, republics, operate under the general idea of popular sovereignty. Despite the initial differences, across historical regimes, durable governments tend to fulfill three recurring functions. First, they preserve the rights, ideals, and interests of the ruling coalition. Second, they promote economic stability and allocate rewards sufficient to maintain ruling coalition support. Third, they internalize externalities in ways that protect ruling coalition welfare and enforcement legitimacy. Collectively, these functions determine what is in effect the government’s implicit objective function, a term used as shorthand for survivability constraints, not as a claim of conscious optimization. The ruling coalition is defined as the subset of the population whose influence (agenda setting, veto, enforcement, resource allocation, etc.) reliably survives the coordination, aggregation, and enforcement constraints imposed by a given political system. Coalition membership is not fixed, moral, or procedural, but an emergent property of institutional survival. In smaller communes this subset might be a chief or an influential denizen, but in larger polities this subset may include merchants, elected officials, the entire population (in the limiting case of an ideal democracy), or simply the king/queen and his/her courtiers. This concept overlaps with the Selectorate Theory idea of the “winning coalition” described by Bueno de Mesquita in The Logic of Political Survival, but differs in a critical respect: under this framework the ruling coalition is defined by effective and durable control over enforcement and coordination, not by electoral victory, party membership, or proximity to a ruler. As such, the ruling coalition, unlike the “winning coalition”, may operate orthogonally to the stated goals of the transient political leadership.

The first function is often, in the case of particularly jurisprudent institutions, embodied in a constitution or some other founding document. Such rights and ideals are naturally flexible (the concept of rights is a relatively modern innovation) but, as stipulated by social contract theorist, John Locke, they must include those rights present in the state of nature, “life, liberty, and property.”

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions… (and) when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another.

John Locke (The Two Treatises of Civil Government)

Such rights and principles are one of the primary reasons governments exist. Even within the most oppressive regimes these core rights are to some extent preserved for the ruling coalition, though, they are often heavily conditioned on subservience and adherence to the governing structure. At their core all governments are coercive mechanisms to ensure the cooperation of participants toward a stable equilibrium of objectives, without this core function, the government collapses. Typically such a collapse happens when the ruling coalition expands or contracts either by fiat or via natural economic or social power accumulation (the latter is often unbeknownst to the incumbent rulers). Regardless of the cause for such acquisition or concentration of power, the issues that drive regime change are often a combination of private reward dilution, or incentive misalignment with the new ruling demographic. 

While the first function focuses on preservation, the second is primarily oriented towards private reward generation. The stick and the carrot are appropriate metaphors here. In governments where the ruling coalition is relatively large, such as in democracies or republics, these measures often come in the form of public infrastructure such as roads, sewage systems, and airports as such resources are generally beneficial for all parties that use them. In smaller coalition governments these rewards are typically more centralized as fewer meaningful keys to power need to be placated. The rewards for small coalitions are nonetheless diverse and can include things such as custom legislation enforcing mandated monopolies, cheap labor, or simple wealth extraction in the form of favorable tax schemes or basic plundering. Such regimes, whether extractive or inclusive, are generally stable as insufficient reward allocation to the ruling coalition, to the point where the opportunity cost of regime shift outweighs the coercive authority of the state (e.g. via selectorate style loyalty pricing), will disincentivize cooperation and thus will typically collapse to a more stable regime structure. Interestingly, whether such a collapse leads to more inclusive or exclusive economic and political structures is dependent on existing economic power dynamics, a topic discussed in great detail by Daron Acemoglu and British-American economist James A. Robinson in Why Nations Fail. Observed governmental outcomes are therefore best understood not as deviations from design, but as indicators of the system’s effective objective function.

The third and final function, to ensure the internalization of externalities to the benefit of the ruling coalition, is focused on corrective action and restitution. This is a crucial, and arguably the most important, function of government as it highlights the benefits of individual actors engaging in an enforced coercive structure as opposed to a purely adversarial one where negotiated settlements must be self enforcing. Within an enforced coercive system, the allocation of resources can be driven to a global coalition level optimum, whereas in purely adversarial systems, outcomes are often trapped in suboptimal Nash Equilibria or limited to voluntary settlements. This is true so long as the coercive authority of the state and the accompanying penalties outweigh the benefits of defection for the marginal actor. Note this holds even in the case of repeated games as while adversarial actors in repeated settings will naturally bargain towards Pareto efficient outcomes (as described by the Coase theorem), they are limited by transaction costs and the scope of enforcement. This mechanism of forced cooperation allows for greater economic opportunity and reduces the potential for blatant exploitation at the expense of other members of the ruling coalition. A simple example would be environmental regulations in large coalition systems. Should a corporation produce a product at the expense of environmental sustainability or general living standards, other economic and political actors must internalize this cost in the form of adverse health outcomes or decreased economic output in other sectors. Should the collective costs be great enough to warrant restitution, the coercive system of government can now enforce a settlement outside of what is typically viable based on individual actor power dynamics alone. The government in question can impose fines, require reparations, and regulate future actions and, assuming the benefits of remaining within the coercive system outweigh the costs, the corporation in question must oblige. Put another way, the government forces the system to recognize hidden variables by assigning them a distinct energetic or monetary cost.

Thus, with such first principles established, the thesis of this text becomes clear. A recurring assumption in political discourse is that undesirable outcomes such as inequality, exclusion, and instability are primarily the result of governmental failure or incompetence. This analysis argues instead that governments, like other complex systems, are shaped by selection pressures imposed by coordination, aggregation, and enforcement constraints, and that durable political systems persist because they satisfy the survival requirements of their ruling coalition by providing core governmental functions. When outcomes diverge from stated ideals, the divergence is more often a reflection of the system’s effective objective function (defined by institutional survivability) than of dysfunction or error. Put formally: in the absence of overwhelming external constraints or catastrophic information failure, durable governments will not persistently implement policies that undermine the long run material, political, legitimacy related, or moral utility required for the survival of their ruling coalition. This framework does not deny the presence of myopia, inefficiency, ineptitude, or internal conflict in governance; rather, it asserts that over long time horizons, political systems that fail to meet coalition survival constraints tend to be reconfigured or replaced. Misalignment, in this context, refers not to systemic failure, but to a mismatch between stated normative objectives and the structurally stable outcomes produced by existing institutional incentives. Realignment to societal ideals is therefore best understood not as a moral correction, but as a systems design problem.

Historical Evidence and System Collapse

Before exploring solutions to misalignment it may be prudent to substantiate the claims already made and explore system collapse modalities. There are several historical examples that give this first principles analysis empirical weight by illustrating how shifts in power distributions alter effective objective functions and shape societal and governmental behaviors, often without any corresponding change in stated ideals. Indeed this is an exercise applicable to all significant or even insignificant regime shifts and governments throughout history. The most prominent examples are the fall of the Roman Republic (and the establishment of the Empire), the first French Revolution, and the ongoing socioeconomic and political struggles faced by the United States in the 21st century. These cases do not prove inevitability, but demonstrate that when incentive structures persist over time, institutional outcomes reliably converge toward coalition optimal equilibria regardless of stated ideology.

The Fall of the Roman Republic

The fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire was a classic example of coalition collapse. During the time preceding Caesar the republic was undergoing substantial expansion. Thanks to the efforts of its generals the Roman Republic had unified Italy, held territories in Spain, Greece, and Africa, and had extensive trade relationships with nearly all major Mediterranean powers. A natural consequence of this conquest and wealth was the influx of cheap labor in the form of slaves. Large landowners consolidated their economic advantage, often with the tacit tolerance or institutional inertia of the Senate, by acquiring smaller farms and exploiting slave labor as a means of increasing the margins for their crop yields, effectively forming oligarchies to control land and crop production in the region. This system was already showing signs of instability due to rising political unrest and violence as a result of the Plebeian's coordination costs decreasing due to rapid urbanization and rising unemployment which increased their share of social and economic power. The Patrician class, optimizing for short term economic advantage and insulated from Plebeian coordination costs, systematically underweighted the long run destabilizing effects of coalition expansion resulting in insufficient reward distribution to placate the rising unrest. Critically, this inaction detrimentally affected the professional legionaries who were often compensated for their service via a parcel of land and a farm to operate, both of which were now effectively worthless. These conditions greatly reduced the Senate’s coercive capacity. By the time Caesar, acting as a focal point for veteran, Plebeian, and provincial interests, had consolidated his power and implemented sweeping land reforms, public works, and legislative change to dilute Patrician power, the regime had collapsed into a more stable state where private reward allocations and externality internalization mechanisms were sufficient for the new ruling coalition even as power was consolidated in a smaller population. In a rare irony, the autocratic regime that followed proved more inclusive to the Roman public; not by virtue of its form, but because its survival depended on distributing rewards across a broader coalition than the late Republic had been willing to accommodate. This pattern continued throughout the Empire’s history with emperors being conscious of the public’s rewards and the necessary payments to keep all keys to power satisfied. The system collapsed yet again, one and a half millennia later, not as a single political event, but as a gradual loss of centralized enforcement capacity. This was due to myriad exogenous factors ranging from climate change to coalition drift attributable to economic turmoil, perverse incentive structures, innovation, and religious instability. This case illustrates a recurring pattern: when coalition size expands faster than the mechanisms designed to distribute rewards and internalize externalities, institutional collapse becomes the system’s most efficient path to realignment.

The French Revolution

The first French Revolution is an example of system collapse primarily due to incentive misalignment and de facto coalition disenfranchisement. During the build up to the revolution, the nobility, as was the norm for most monarchies at the time, operated a primarily extractive regime. Historically this was a stable system as the ruling coalition, the two estates of the Nobility and the Clergy, primarily owned the land and commanded the military. Insulated from the economic costs of war and debt, the incumbent ruling coalition implemented taxes on the third estate unilaterally. They were able to do so despite the third estate (simply, everyone else) representing 98% of the population as all estates were provided one vote. This provided disproportionately greater voting power to a privileged minority. Also occurring in the preceding years to the revolution, the Bourgeoisie had formed with many wealthy professionals forming a de facto economic elite outside of the ruling two estates. These individuals held a majority of the nation’s debt, were strong economic drivers, and yet were forced to bear the cost of supporting the system. This created a clear and critical incentive misalignment: the people paying for the system (Bourgeoisie/Peasants) received none of the rewards, while the people receiving the rewards (Nobles/the King) paid none of the costs. As the state faced fiscal insolvency, an external stressor on the system, the rational survival strategy would have been to internalize the costs by taxing the wealth holding nobility. However, the rigid incentives of the incumbent coalition prioritized short term wealth preservation over long term system survival. By refusing to grant political representation to the Bourgeoisie in exchange for fiscal relief, the ruling coalition made the cost of exclusion higher than the cost of revolution. The resulting collapse was a violent realignment of the political structure to match the new economic reality. However, once again, due to the similarly rigid incentive structures of the new ruling coalition, the Bourgeoisie, France faced little relief for its fiscal and social problems resulting in a system defined by its scapegoating, demagogic rhetoric, and turmoil. Such circumstances raised the coordination costs sufficiently such that concentrated, organized groups, with sufficient implicit coercion power were now the only viable option for system survival. Thus the result was a relatively rapid progression through the social cycle from autocratic monarch, to dysfunctional republic, to autocratic dictator in the form of Napoleon.

These historical examples make clear a recurring theme: Under a first principles framework, when institutional collapse occurs under conditions where de facto economic or social power is not matched by consolidated enforcement capacity, the system will tend toward extractive equilibrium, because concentrated coercion minimizes coordination costs in the reestablishment of order. A critical inference from such an observation is that inclusive realignments require that enforcement capacity either remains centralized and legitimate, or can be rapidly coordinated by the expanding coalition.

The United States of America

Unlike the previous examples, the United States in the 21st century provides an opportunity not only to analyze a more contemporary phenomenon using this system's framework but also to provide a more rigorous examination of underlying social choice structures that shape implicit system objective functions in a steady state equilibrium. The United States in the 21st century is experiencing a number of social, economic, and political issues ranging from growing socioeconomic disparity, declining middle class purchasing power (Zandi et al.), an increasingly ideologically extreme political landscape (Bąkowski), and legislative gridlock and overarching dysfunction. There are likely many contributing elements to these qualities but one of the larger contributors arguably lies with the governmental system design itself. The current electoral architecture, specifically the “first past the post” (FPTP) system used to determine the winners of elections, creates the mathematical inevitability of exclusion that can be explained through a Social Choice Theoretic lens. Such systems exhibit well known aggregation pathologies that shape political behavior independently of culture, ideology, or civic norms. This, in turn, creates an implicit incentive structure which can be used in large part to explain the myriad compounding phenomena observed within the United States today.

Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem states that no ranking based social choice mechanism can consistently aggregate individual preferences across three or more alternatives while simultaneously satisfying a small set of fairness criteria. While not critical to understand for the scope of this text, for completeness, these fairness criteria are: non-dictatorship, Pareto efficiency, independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA), and transitivity. In plurality voting systems, this instability manifests most significantly through violations of IIA, demonstrating that such a voting system cannot maintain all fairness criteria with three or more voting options, rendering such a configuration inherently unstable. As the introduction of alternatives reduces the voting share of the closest ideological candidate (the IIA failure modality for FPTP) this instability is resolved by the suppression of alternatives. This is clearly seen in the equilibrium strategy for voting in FPTP systems which is to preemptively defect from third party candidates to maximize the chance of winning. This phenomenon is labeled the spoiler effect: the introduction of a third option increases outcome variance for its closest ideological neighbor without increasing expected utility for its supporters. Under such conditions rational voters defect preemptively, donors withdraw support, and institutional viability collapses before third party alternatives can mature.

The result, formalized through Duverger’s Law, is a stable two party equilibrium. This equilibrium is not a cultural artifact but a strategic response to aggregation instability. This response results in the breakdown of conditions necessary for ideological moderation via The Median Voter Theorem. This theorem stipulates that across a single peak distribution of ideologies a healthy democratic government will converge in the center thus capturing the largest ideological base. These conditions clearly do not hold in FPTP systems operating under Arrow style constraints. Voting becomes strategic rather than expressive, and political competition shifts away from preference aggregation toward coalition mobilization. The result is a natural tendency within FPTP systems to gravitate towards bimodal ideological distributions, a phenomenon with substantial consequences for the political system at large.

In such conditions, ideological polarization becomes a locally dominant strategy. Parties maximize turnout, donor enthusiasm, and negative partisanship rather than convergence toward a notional median. Compromise becomes electorally punishable, as it weakens coalition identity without reliably expanding support. The breakdown of median voter convergence is therefore not a failure of political actors, but a predictable outcome of institutional design operating under known Arrow style constraints.

This structural political polarization carries strong secondary effects. Mainly, political polarization raises the coordination cost for any form of legislative action. As political extremes become the norm in an environment defined by a bimodal ideological distribution, consensus is rare, and gridlock becomes the system’s steady state equilibrium point for broad based, distributive legislation. This does not imply inaction across the board; rather, it implies that broad, openly negotiated distributive legislation becomes comparatively rare, while policy increasingly routes through narrow procedural channels (must-pass bills, reconciliation), administrative rulemaking, and the courts. Functionally, gridlock serves as an energy filter, it doesn’t just prevent action; it selects for actors able to pay the fixed costs of influence. As described in Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective Action, large, unorganized groups (the electorate) lack the concentrated resources to overcome this friction. However, small, well capitalized groups (the ruling coalition of economic elites) possess the necessary energy to bypass the gridlock. This is often done through regulatory capture, omnibus spending, or direct lobbying. When the baseline transaction cost of broad based legislation becomes high, only actors with concentrated capital can reliably convert preferences into policy, so de facto control over coordination and enforcement drifts toward them. This matches the system framework’s definition of a ruling coalition precisely. In the case of the United States, as is the case in all governmental systems, the ruling coalition is emergent, not prescribed.

It should be emphasized that this power asymmetry is not incidental. Legislators operating within a polarized system face strong incentives to prioritize stable sources of funding, agenda control, and institutional protection over diffuse and weakly enforceable voter preferences. The resulting policy environment is therefore not maximally representative, but maximally governable given the constraints imposed by aggregation instability.

Moving beyond the theoretical, empirical evidence supports this interpretation. A well known Princeton University study titled Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens (Gilens and Page) found that when the preferences of average citizens diverge from those of economic elites and organized interest groups, policy outcomes align almost exclusively with the latter, while the former exerts statistically negligible influence. Within the framework presented here, this result does not imply corruption or democratic failure. Rather, it reflects differential bargaining capacity in a system where large scale preference aggregation is unstable and costly. Despite the stated goals diverging from observed outcomes, the system behaves consistently with its effective objective function.

Both theoretically and empirically, the system of government in the United States is shown to be not unstable or dysfunctional, but highly optimized to accomplish governmental functions for its emergent ruling coalition given existing system constraints. In aggregate, the effective objective function of the contemporary American political system is to preserve elite coalition stability and enforcement legitimacy while maintaining procedural democratic legitimacy, rather than to reliably implement median preference policy outcomes. Unlike the previous examples, the United States does not show immediate signs of systemic collapse, and even when the composition of the ruling coalition shifts, the nominally democratic structure of the system allows for comparatively smooth regime adaptation to accommodate new reward structures necessary for survival. The political system itself gives rise to this coalition and, through institutional mechanisms rather than explicit coordination, preserves its interests via military, policing, and legal enforcement capacity, supplies selective private rewards through tax policy, government contracts, and regulatory advantages, and internalizes harmful externalities through judicial mediation. Within this framework, growing socioeconomic disparity and declining purchasing power among non-coalition members are not anomalies, but predictable byproducts of a system optimized for coalition stability under aggregation constraints.

Realignment

Viewed from a system design lens it becomes clear that no durable government system that accomplishes all three core functions for its ruling coalition (i.e. optimizes on its implicit objective function) can be considered broken or dysfunctional. Instead, they are locally optimized, durable systems of coercion. They do not need to be fixed, but realigned. It is thus necessary, for the purposes of realigning system emergent objectives with societal ideals, to analyze structural incentives. To start at the end objective function and work backwards through reductive reasoning to determine the system necessary to achieve it.

As the space of desired objectives for government is relatively large, it is necessary to generalize them into taxonomic categories. Borrowing from Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s framework, these broad objectives can be labeled as inclusive and extractive governments. The labels themselves describe feasible objective functions under different aggregation and coordination regimes, not moral classifications of governance. These objectives are, of course, emergent from the designed political system and are shaped by coordination and aggregation constraints. It follows naturally that changing the aggregation mechanism is one of the few direct levers that can systematically realign outcomes.

Inclusive Governmental Objectives

Inclusive governmental objective functions are those in which preservation, reward allocation, and externality internalization are optimized for a large share of the population. Under this framework, such outcomes primarily require a large and stable ruling coalition, one that can coordinate and maintain enforcement legitimacy without collapsing into restrictive factionalism and gridlock. In practice, this is only feasible when aggregation constraints and coordination costs are sufficiently low that broad coalitions can form without pervasive strategic defection. To see how high cost equilibria arise, and how they can be reduced, it is therefore necessary to analyze the social choice mechanisms that shape coalition formation and legislative feasibility.

Ideal voting systems are often evaluated against a set of widely discussed fairness conditions, including non-dictatorship, Pareto efficiency, independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA), and transitivity, as formalized in Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. Arrow demonstrated that no rank order social welfare function can satisfy all such criteria simultaneously when aggregating three or more alternatives. As shown in the preceding analysis of the United States, violations of IIA (of which the spoiler effect is one manifestation) play a central role in generating strategic voting incentives, bimodal ideological equilibria, and high coordination costs in large capital diffuse coalitions. Because Arrow’s impossibility applies to all rank order aggregation schemes, ranked voting systems that preserve the remaining criteria necessarily inherit IIA failure related pathologies, even when they mitigate specific failure modes relative to plurality systems. As a result, ranked systems alone are insufficient to eliminate the structural incentives that drive polarization and gridlock in large coalition governments. Even in ranked systems designed to favor median voter preferences, such as Condorcet methods, instability remains around the edge cases due to IIA constraint failures which require tie breaking or agenda setting mechanisms, reintroducing strategic incentives analogous to those present in plurality systems. To relax these constraints, aggregation mechanisms must operate outside the domain of ordinal ranking altogether. Cardinal (rated) voting systems, such as majority judgement, range, or approval voting, achieve this by allowing richer preference expression and reducing the strategic compression of voter choice, thereby avoiding convergence toward FPTP-like equilibria under standard Myerson-Weber strategic voting assumptions. These systems are not without limitations: in equilibrium, both range and approval methods permit threshold strategies in which voters approve or assign maximal scores above a utility cutoff and minimal scores below it. Majority judgement, meanwhile, as a methodology promotes compressed sincerity as its equilibrium strategy. This is ideal for preserving preferences and expressiveness in single winner scenarios (true sincerity, as proven by Arrow, cannot exist under fairness constraints) but breaks down for proportional or multiwinner elections thus requiring the use of STV, PAV, or other proportional voting methods in such circumstances to compensate for this weakness. While such behaviors remain less expressive than fully sincere preferences, it preserves more informational content than ordinal systems, particularly plurality voting, and thereby reduces coordination costs by weakening incentives toward bimodal ideological distribution formation.

The critical objective of selecting an aggregation mechanism is to ensure that the social choice dynamics do not incentivize the collapse of a rich voter preference distribution to a bimodal one. This critical feature will reduce gridlock and extremism and thus limit the growth of coordination costs in the worst case. Cardinal, and specifically Majority judgement voting is likely not the only viable option and perhaps more complex implementations of ranked voting structures may accomplish this task sufficiently, however, it is the most simple preference aggregation structure at this time that accomplishes this goal. Another variable that can be altered in line with the aggregation mechanism is the level of representation. It is clear that having a larger representative to voter ratio also greatly increases the expressiveness of the political system as it allows for granularity with regards to voter ideological representation. A larger representative to voter ratio may also mitigate coalition formation coordination cost growth for rated voting in the strategic case as it makes the marginal cost of inclusion for a runner up alternative candidate smaller, this especially holds in a multiwinner election. To accommodate the growth of representatives it is likely that proportional voting schemes be used as these work best for multiwinner elections where several individuals can represent a subset of the population. This, in effect, changes the utility threshold for inclusion and greatly increases ideological expressiveness within the de jour ruling body.

In conclusion, if the set of stable governmental objective functions is to be broadly inclusive, the political system must reduce the incentive for preference compression and factional collapse at the coalition formation stage. One direct lever is the aggregation mechanism itself. As Arrow’s impossibility applies to ordinal ranking social welfare functions, ranked choice systems remain vulnerable to IIA-driven strategic effects even when they mitigate specific plurality pathologies. It should be noted that, while ranked choice and parliamentary systems often produce multiple parties in the legislature, governance dynamics frequently compress into a small number of disciplined coalition blocs. Cabinet formation, agenda control, and confidence mechanisms impose effectively binary decision structures, rendering such systems multiparty in name but bimodal in function. As a result, ideological expressiveness survives at the electoral margin but is compressed at the level where enforcement and policy formation occur. These systems delay, but do not eliminate, the compression of ideological dimensionality. Cardinal (rated) systems (such as majority judgement, approval, or range voting) partly relax these constraints by allowing richer preference expression and reducing the payoff discontinuities that drive preemptive defection, thereby weakening incentives toward bimodal ideological convergence. A second lever is representational granularity. Increasing the representative to voter ratio lowers the marginal cost of inclusion for runner up candidates and reduces coalition formation coordination costs by making partial representation viable. Together, these design properties, reduced preference compression and increased representational granularity, expand the feasible space of stable, inclusive equilibria.

Extractive Governmental Objectives

Extractive governmental objective functions are those in which preservation, reward allocation, and externality internalization are optimized for a small share of the population. Within these systems government functions primarily serve a select privileged few while extracting rewards from non-coalition members of society. In contrast to inclusive systems, survival in this setting requires a small ruling coalition, one that is emergent from deliberately or structurally high coordination costs and aggregation constraints to prevent defection or rebellion.

Extractive political systems can range from explicit dictatorships to performative democratic institutions that preserve formal electoral processes while maintaining high coordination costs, restricted information flows, or selective enforcement. Within societies where access to information is widely available, capital is already widely dispersed, or the population has preestablished methods of collective bargaining it is necessary to at least provide some beneficial governmental functions to the wider population as they typically have sufficient resources to survive primitive high coalition formation cost institutions, that being dictatorships or absolute monarchies. Thus in such circumstances, performative democratic institutions and/or beneficial rewards must typically be maintained even if de jour power is concentrated to a ruling class. Examples of this are modern dictatorships in moderately developed nations which often employ a sophisticated surveillance apparatus to raise coordination costs to restrictively high levels and historical feudal societies which primarily emerged from limited coercion capacity due technological and bureaucratic restrictions and the diffuse ownership of land and military power across the nobility.

Should the notional objective of a society be to construct a government with a stable extractive objective function, it is, in summary, necessary for such an institution to limit aggregation and increase coordination costs to the maximum possible given population dynamics. Critically, aggregation limitation must happen with some level of legitimacy to maintain coercive capacity. This can be done via the dismantling of the current legislature and governmental norms on the grounds of inefficacy (as was done to Weimar Germany), restricting voting capacity of certain demographics (a common tactic in modern democracies), or for the nominal sake of stability and economic prosperity (a process which exchanges broad coalition power for economic or social benefits). Raising coordination costs can, through modern technology, now be accomplished through a coercive police state and advanced surveillance techniques. Where once such an outcome, to effectively gather information on all citizens of a country, was prohibitively costly, in the modern era it is easily implemented and relatively inexpensive. Where inclusive systems reduce coordination costs to expand coalition size, extractive systems invert this logic: they preserve stability by raising coordination costs and restricting aggregation, thereby minimizing the size of the ruling coalition.

Implementation: Empathy as a Strategy, not a Virtue

As implementation of exclusive systems is relatively straightforward with many examples of successful autocratic takeovers and democratic backsliding throughout history, the focus of this section will instead be on implementing inclusive governmental objectives. As stated in previous sections this requires reduced coordination costs and aggregation constraints. The primary barriers to successful implementation of such system level changes are numerous and most notably include system ruling coalition resistance, overcoming high coordination costs to ensure sufficient collective bargaining power for the electorate, and limiting defections and infighting long enough to implement the necessary institutional changes. To overcome these barriers requires large scale coordination across the ideological spectrum. Such large scale coordination requires mechanisms that reduce perceived identity threat and allow actors to decouple policy preferences from partisan identity. In practice, this necessitates norms and behaviors commonly labeled as empathy, patience, and compassion, not as moral imperatives, but as functional prerequisites for coalition expansion. In repeated coordination games with identity based payoff asymmetries, trust building and preference revealing interactions expand the cooperative basin of attraction without requiring centralized enforcement. This framing does not deny the intrinsic moral value of empathy; it simply argues that moral framing alone is insufficient for large scale coordination.

Such a framing is necessary as it should not be assumed that incumbent ruling coalitions will voluntarily tolerate aggregation reforms that materially reduce their leverage. Under the framework presented in this paper, such reforms are, in expectation, survival negative for incumbent elites unless the alternative is system collapse or loss of enforcement legitimacy. As a result, durable realignment toward inclusive equilibria does not occur through elite concession, but through the formation of sufficiently large, persistent, and legitimacy preserving coalitions capable of imposing new aggregation structures while maintaining centralized enforcement capacity. This condition is rare, difficult to achieve, and historically exceptional.

As it is most often the case that bimodal ideological distributions are a result of system representational limitations and not a reflection of the population’s true preferences, identifying common ground beliefs and policy preferences within the population is costly, not infeasible. Engaging with the broad spectrum of ideologies and attempting to unite them through consistent framing of the problem as a matter of unifying axiomatic principles, through collective action and other means of information dispersion, creates necessary momentum to overcome most barriers to implementation. Ironically this approach has limited historical precedence in the form of the temperance movement, a movement that implemented the notoriously flawed policy of prohibition, as proponents of this movement included broad coalitions that crossed party lines due, in large part, to strong ideological and demagogic reframing to appeal to a vast majority of belief systems. The relevance of such a movement lies not in the policy outcome but in the demonstrated capacity for large scale coalition formation across ideological, religious, and class boundaries under conditions of high representational compression. Note that, similarly to the temperance movement, protests cannot be the only mechanism to achieve coalition expansion as such methods are typically restricted in their efficacy to members who are ideologically adjacent. This is not to diminish the protest’s role as a means to inform policy makers of emergent coalition preferences, only to identify its limitation as a tool to engage non-ideologically aligned voters. Such endeavors must, instead, be made in the hearth and heart of the home. In system terms: this refers to decentralized, low-salience coordination mechanisms that can operate within or, if necessary, below mass media equilibria, where identity signaling costs are lower and trust formation is more tractable. These methods are more individually costly as they require interactions with ideologies that may be uncomfortable or, on the surface, significantly divergent from each other. They require members of different beliefs to not argue, but instead to listen, understand core beliefs, reframe the problem, and then engage in collective problem solving. The payoff is extraordinarily high because such interactions reduce identity based defection incentives, expand the feasible coalition space, and make previously unstable institutional reforms reachable under existing enforcement constraints. Furthermore, distinguishing this approach from demagoguery and indoctrination, such a low-salience coordination methodology yields ideological alignment in terms of implementation which is divorced from radical or emotional noise, increasing the probability that such a movement yields long lasting coherent change (as opposed to change that is radical or unstable as was the case for prohibition). Instead of interacting with ideologically similar yet siloed individuals, limiting outreach, such methods of discourse fundamentally accomplish what is necessary to successfully implement structural change. Through empathy, patience, compassion, and most critically, persistence, ideological gaps can be bridged in a manner that supports durable institutional reform.

Conclusion

Electoral reform is not a panacea to solve all societal problems. There are likely myriad issues that fall outside of this framework. However, as demonstrated by this text’s analysis, the decision making entity of the government and its derived behavior is strongly influenced by system level design. While many problems in society are not directly caused by government behavior they are almost certainly linked to or impacted by it. By implementing change to governmental and political systems to align with societal, normative objectives, it makes the institutions in question better able to address issues and make decisions that align with social goals. This task is not an easy one, there are many barriers to its implementation and the cost of coordination simply to promote such change is exceedingly high. The payoff, though, is a government that may yet represent the stated interests of the governed. Such an analysis, as detailed in this paper, is not meant to moralize or justify action, but to guide decisions towards the desired outcomes.

Notes

1. Catastrophic information failure refers specifically to cases where the ruling coalition lacks access to reliable feedback regarding second order and long run consequences due to technological novelty, narrative distortion, or institutional suppression.

2. Majority judgement is where voters score candidates on a predetermined scale and the median score is taken to determine the winner. In the case of a tie the ordered list of voters has votes removed either from the ends of the distribution simultaneously or via random selection till the median between the tied candidates changes.

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