I am encouraged by Ben Berger's reaction to my book, and hopeful that other readers will be as open-minded. Of course, the drawback of Berger's Cassandra comparison is that if it is apt, that will not be the case. Similarly, the drawback of any attempt at a paradigm shift in Kuhn's terms is that nearly every attempt fails, and it is difficult for the author himself to distinguish a negative reaction motivated by philosophical conservatism from a negative reaction motivated by intrinsic weakness in the unconventional argument itself.

Berger's primary critique of my argument is appropriate and, if anything, it should be made more forcefully. As he observed, the fact that an election is a hiring mechanism rather than a market does not mean that it is identical to all other hiring mechanisms. Thus, attempting to extrapolate from other employment mechanisms to an election runs similar risks as the market analogy. I must agree. In Chapter 3, I attempted to describe the most significant differences between elections and other types of hiring and firing mechanisms to address the issue. For Berger, the most important feature of an election that distinguishes it from other types of hiring mechanisms is the fact that voters have less information and fewer incentives to gather information than other types of employers. If our primary concern is with designing an electoral system, then the collective-action problem that voters face with respect to gathering and acting rationally on information is the greatest obstacle to having the electoral system work optimally. However, I do not think that this distinction undercuts my arguments about the counterproductive effects of what we conventionally call “competitive elections.” The fact that voters face a collective-action problem not faced by other employers does not mean that they should flip a coin to decide whether or not to renew an incumbent's employment contract.

Instead, I consider the most important weakness of my argument to be another distinction between elections and conventional hiring mechanisms that apparently was less troubling to Berger—there are no political parties, nor any analogs to parties, in other types of employment relationships. From a normative perspective, I do not think that the presence of parties makes flipping a coin a uniquely beneficial way of deciding whether or not to renew an incumbent's employment contract, but from an analytic perspective, the fact that my model leaves political parties out in the cold suggests that there is a critical feature of our electoral system that my model simply cannot describe, or at least cannot describe well.

Because of the features that make an election different from other hiring mechanisms, Berger notes that my argument may be subject to the same critiques that I pose to the market analogy. He is right that ignoring these differences may be just as problematic as relying too literally and exclusively on the market analogy. Complex issues require broad and, well, “competing” models.