The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

Along with wiping out coalition-reducing gerrymanders, the time may well have come to amend the US Constitution to get rid of the electoral college. Here we have an institution whose founders’ original intent is pretty clear. They wanted to ensure that the slave states would join the United States and that meant erecting constitutional provisions that would protect slavery.4 The electoral college was one of those institutions. Here is a great example where original intent most assuredly should not guide modern-day politics. Slavery has been outlawed for about 150 years and yet the electoral college persists, and the primary reason, even if rarely spoken out loud, for its survival is that it allows politicians to construct a coalition of essential supporters that is substantially smaller than would be the case under direct election.