The Governance Alignment Problem

Why the job of "politician" is structurally broken

I. The AI Parallel

In AI safety, the alignment problem is simple to state: How do you ensure that a powerful optimization process pursues the goals you actually want, rather than the goals it was trained to pursue?

Train an AI to maximize clicks, it learns to show outrage content. Train it to minimize user reports, it learns to hide harmful content from moderators. This is reward hacking: the system optimizes for the metric, not the intent behind the metric. The metric becomes the target, and when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

We have a governance alignment problem. The job of "politician" is structurally misaligned because it selects for election-winning, not outcome-producing. Politicians reward-hack the electoral system: optimize for votes, not welfare. Like AI alignment, the solution is architectural, not moral.

II. The Job Description Problem

"Politician" as currently constituted has these features:

The job attracts those seeking power without accountability, selects those best at winning elections (orthogonal to governing skill), rewards behaviors misaligned with outcomes, and punishes truth-telling.

This is the job description. These aren't bugs—they're features of how the role is currently designed.

III. Selection Pressure, Not Moral Failure

This is a claim about selection pressure, not character.

Imagine two candidates:

Candidate A: "The evidence shows spending increases don't improve educational outcomes. We need structural reform that will upset unions and take years to show results."

Candidate B: "Our children deserve better! I will fight for education funding because I care about the future!"

B wins. A is tagged as "anti-education," "doesn't care about children," "extreme."

Over electoral cycles, the system selects out honest truth-tellers. The surviving politicians converge on three types:

• Cynics who know but don't say
• Self-deceived who genuinely believe the popular thing
• Ignorant who never learned otherwise

The pool converges on misalignment regardless of individual intentions. Replace every politician today, and in two electoral cycles you'll have the same distribution. The architecture produces the outcome.

IV. The Dual Principal-Agent Catastrophe

The standard framing: politicians are agents of voters, but optimize for re-election instead of voter welfare. This understates the problem. There's no real principal-agent relationship at all—just self-interest at every level:

Public Good (terminal principal) — unrepresented; no agent
    ↓ voters optimize for selves, not society
Voters (supposed intermediate principal) — but actually self-interested actors
    ↓ politicians optimize for selves; votes are a resource
Politicians (supposed agent) — but actually self-interested actors

Even if politicians perfectly served voters, voters themselves are misaligned with the terminal principal—societal flourishing in deep time. In aggregate, voters optimize for short-term personal benefit, tribal satisfaction, and visible signals. Most can't model second-order effects. Many value belonging over truth. Hyperbolic discounting is the human default. Caplan calls this "democracy as a commons": each voter externalizes the cost of their irrational beliefs onto society. Individual voters vary, but the distribution is what matters for aggregate outcomes.

The terminal principal—public good, including future generations—has no mechanism to express itself. Nobody measures whether laws actually produce flourishing. "Voters" isn't even a fixed entity—it's whatever coalition wins tomorrow. The system has no actual principal. Just self-interested actors competing for resources, with the public good as rhetorical cover.

The voter-politician link diverges systematically:

A politician who optimizes for the terminal principal loses to one who optimizes for the intermediate principal. The system selects them out. Only misaligned agents survive.

Selection Pressure and the Laundering Horizon

The political cycle (~4 years) is shorter than most policy feedback loops (fiscal: decades; demographic: generations; institutional: variable). This gap is the Laundering Horizon: any policy with feedback loop longer than the political cycle cannot be managed through electoral accountability. Costs that arrive after the accountability window closes can't generate accountability—the politician is already re-elected or retired.

Selection pressure guarantees exploitation. A politician who says "this feels good now but will hurt us in 15 years" loses to one who says "this helps us now." The honest one is selected out. It's not that politicians are short-sighted—it's that short-sighted politicians outcompete long-sighted ones.

Temporal laundering is the clearest case, but not the only one. Spatial laundering: concentrate benefits on voting coalition, diffuse costs to non-voters (other jurisdictions, future generations, diffuse taxpayers). Politicians who serve their voters at expense of non-voters outcompete those who consider all affected. Causal laundering: complex policy → many intermediaries → "the economy is struggling because of demographics / globalization / COVID"—pick your excuse. Politicians who create plausible deniability outcompete those who take clear responsibility.

All three reinforce each other. Pension promises have temporal (costs in 30 years) + spatial (costs fall on future workers who can't vote yet) + causal (complex actuarial reality no one can evaluate) laundering simultaneously. The dimensions multiply. See Complexity Laundering for the full analysis.

Campaign promises compound this: voters evaluate input (promise) rather than output (result). This is the operationalization gap—the inevitable distance between a value ("good governance") and its measurable surrogate ("campaign promises"). Did the politician deliver? "Circumstances changed," "opposition blocked it," "partial progress." Complexity launders non-delivery. A feasible promise loses to an appealing infeasible one because voters can't evaluate feasibility at promise-time. Evaluation happens at the wrong point in the causal chain.

Since nobody represents the terminal principal (public good in deep time), nobody is optimizing for long-term outcomes. The selection pressure toward laundering is the inevitable consequence of a system with no actual principal—self-interested actors optimizing for the visible window, with no one holding the long-term position.

V. The Democratic Ratchet

The Democratic Ratchet (obligations growing faster than capacity to fund them) is downstream of politician misalignment:

1. Politicians need votes
2. Votes are bought with promises
3. Promises create obligations
4. Obligations compound (no electoral reward for reducing them)
5. Obligations eventually exceed capacity
6. System collapses or inflates away the debt

The ratchet turns because politicians are rewarded for promising, not for fiscal prudence. A politician who says "no" loses to one who says "yes." Every election, the ratchet clicks forward. It rarely clicks back—and when it does (Clinton's welfare reform, Sweden's pension reform), it requires crisis or grand bargain, not normal politics.

This isn't a prediction—it's observed in nearly every democracy without hard constraints. Entitlement spending as percentage of GDP ratchets upward. Normal electoral mechanisms don't reverse it.

VI. Borrowed Coherence

If the architecture is so broken, why did things seem to work before?

The politician misalignment was ALWAYS present. What changed is the external conditions that masked it.

During the Cold War (1945-1991): External threat (USSR) provided a forcing function. Survival pressure demanded unified elite response. The threat did the ALIGNMENT WORK that correct architecture should have done—politicians could be misaligned, but external pressure produced coherent outcomes anyway.

During growth phases (1945-1973, 1991-2008): Economic growth masked fiscal dysfunction. Surplus fed the ratchet without immediate pain. Dysfunction accumulated but wasn't visible.

Post-2008: External forcing function removed (no existential threat). Growth that masked extraction ended. Accumulated dysfunction became visible. Borrowed coherence expired.

VII. Why Arguments Don't Fix It

The naive theory of change: Better analysis → people learn → demand change → politicians respond → reform happens.

Why this fails at every step:

Power structures don't reform themselves against their own interest. Reforms that threaten power get blocked. Reforms that pass are precisely those that don't matter.

This is why activism feels like change but produces none. The system allows simulation of reform while blocking actual reform. The feeling of agency is the mechanism by which agency is prevented.

VIII. What Doesn't Work

You cannot fix structural misalignment by:

• Electing better people — Selection pressure produces the same type
• Providing better information — Mode 1 communication doesn't transmit
• Moral appeals — Tribal signaling dominates
• Expert committees — Advice without power is ignored
• Reforming politician incentives — Who implements the reform? The agents whose power it would constrain.

This is the meta-problem: asking politicians to fix politician misalignment is asking an AI to modify its own reward function. The misaligned agents control the reform process.

IX. What Might Work

The only paths that historically produce structural reform bypass the misaligned agents entirely:

• Hard constraints via direct democracy: Switzerland's debt brake is constitutional, validated by 85% referendum. Politicians can't evade it because it's not under their control. Go directly to voters for fiscal rules, bypassing captured representatives.
• External imposition: EU fiscal rules, IMF conditionality. Supranational bodies mandate what domestic politics cannot. Crude but real.
• Crisis: When things get bad enough, reform becomes possible. Dangerous—by then, capacity for reform may be depleted.
• Competitive pressure: Jurisdictions that fix the problem outperform those that don't. Exit forces adaptation.
• Parallel institutions: Build the Fourth Branch outside existing structure. Let it acquire authority through demonstrated accuracy, not through reform of the existing system.

The common thread: don't reform politicians. Constrain them, bypass them, or build around them.

All paths require the existing system to fail visibly enough that alternatives become thinkable. See When Does Reform Actually Happen? for the historical pattern.

This essay draws from the diagnostic framework developed in Aliveness, applying selection pressure analysis to the question of why democratic governance systematically fails.

Related reading:

• Complexity Laundering — How complexity protects the misalignment from visibility
• When Does Reform Actually Happen? — Five vectors that historically break structural capture
• Simulated Metamorphosis — Why activism feels like change but produces none
• The Fourth Branch — The institutional architecture that could fix it
• The Axiological Malthusian Trap — The civilizational pattern this instantiates
• Ethics Is an Engineering Problem — The architecture-over-disposition principle