Conservatives and Lotteries: Romantic Comity?

It fascinates me to examine the conservative (note the uncapitalised “c”) parties of developed Western countries. When I arrive in a country where I’m unfamiliar with the political landscape, one of the first questions I ask is “who is viewed as the most conservative candidate and why?” This is an interesting boundary line, as it often tells you where the political periphery lies. For instance, in Britain, it is fine to be an outspoken racist, but it is not okay to oppose a minimum wage or be in favour of the poor selling their organs to the highest bidder (in Hong Kong, the opposite).

If you study conservative political parties internationally, one thing strikes you: They are so poorly-aligned with one another. Some seem to be entrenched in Christian theology while others seem to be obsessed with subsidising agriculture while still others are fascinated by obscure features of their countries’ tax codes. With increasing acceptance of homosexual marriage and a variety of other progressive inevitabilities, the concept of a conservative uniting platform seems more fleeting than ever. Some conservative politicians are in favour of things like environmental initiatives (Denmark and Sweden), pander to those who want minimum wage laws (Britain and America), and even oppose the privatisation of prisons (Canada and France).

One common thread among conservatives is resent for wealth coming from anything other than “hard work,” meaning worn knuckles and Protestant stick-to-it-ive-ness. Odd, then, that such people support conservative parties that support lotteries (lotteries distribute substantial wealth to people who have done little work to earn this payout). Possibly because a faint memory of past generations' hard work is a more acceptable way to (misleadingly?) describe lineal, dynastic wealth held on crumbling estates where a butler dutifully irons the newspaper, preferably the FT or the Telegraph, each morning to set the ink (whereas wealth coming from new industries like high technology tends to be generated in geographies and demographies with liberal leanings where addresses have flat numbers). I once stayed at a substantial estate in the English countryside and the breakfast conversation was more conservative than the rated top speed on the family’s Bentley Arnage (purposely mispronounced by my friend’s Oxbridge-educated father, to rhyme with “carnage,” displaying his disdain for all things French, including, apparently, pronunciation), returning frequently to “the people on the dole” who were “breeding in unprecedented numbers” (empirically untrue; Britain’s birthrate is not particularly high, including among subpopulations with lower incomes).

But "those people" do something that conservatives love. They play the lottery. How much do conservatives love lotteries? I decided to do some empirical research on the matter. Out of the fifty states in America, nineteen have new major lotteries in the past ten years or joined a major interstate lottery association to which they did not belong in the ten years prior (1993-2002) to the ten years in the sample (2003-2012). Of these nineteen, seventeen had Republican governors at the time the decision was made. I then looked generally at laws that increase lottery presence (appropriating state funding to lottery advertising), the frequency of lottery drawings, or the size of lotteries. Of such laws that were vetoed (rejected on authority of the state’s governor), none was vetoed by a Republican governor.

The same is true across the Western world. In Europe, conservative parties overwhelmingly favour lotteries when compared to their more liberal counterparts – this is particularly true when one examines the southern European states, where conservative politicians often are conservative Catholics who (somewhat oddly) staunchly oppose casino gambling but favour lotteries. In South America, another place with a substantial Catholic political influence, the lotteries in Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Panama, Guatemala, and Costa Rica trace their roots to conservative parties or conservative politics. The most liberal states in Central America – Venezuela, Cuba, and Ecuador – have tiny lottery operations that are miniscule in budget, payout size, and marketing presence when compared to neighbouring nations.

The lottery is a special tax. It is a tax on the poor and on people who are not very good at mathematics.

There are cases where it is rational to participate in a lottery, but they are rare.

Let’s say the payout is one billion dollars and the cost of a ticket is one dollar (these numbers are not ludicrous, as the U.S. in the past month had a lottery jackpot of over half a billion dollars). Let’s say everyone in America is going to buy one ticket, and let’s say – for ease of calculation – that there are three hundred million people in America. Let’s say there are three hundred million possible combinations of lottery numbers and that everyone will receive a unique number. I buy my ticket. My chances of winning are one in three hundred million, but one three hundred millionth of one billion is still more than three dollars. So the expected value of my one-dollar ticket is more than three dollars – in expected value terms, I’m getting more than 300% return on my investment!

Most lotteries do not work this way for four primary reasons: 1) there is no guarantee anyone will win 2) the expected value of each ticket is smaller than the purchase price of that ticket 3) the number of people who will play is uncertain and 4) the incidence of splitting the prize is statistically-significant among winning outcomes. As a result, most people who consider the likelihood of winning choose not to play.

Let’s return, now, to conservative politics. Of all the issues for conservative parties in the Western world to internationally agree upon (I say Western world because Thai, Cambodian, Japanese, Korean, Malaysian, and Indonesian politics are all cases of systems with conservative parties that oppose lotteries for a variety of reasons), why lotteries?

One of the major conservative resentments, internationally, is the size of the state. More than this, it is the fiscal redistributory role of the state, which is seen as unfair. The successful are seen as unduly penalized with taxation while the lazy are seen as unduly rewarded. Cicero once lamented to his brother Quintus, “pauperes non sit tributarium,” but what he meant was not that the poor would not be taxed. What he meant is that the poor cannot be taxed in proportion to what they take. In other words, that a purpose of the State (with a capital “S”) is to manage the unavoidable and delicate scenario in which some people consume services for which their taxes cannot provide.

This is the fundamental quarrel of Western conservative parties with the state (small “s”): that it takes too much and gives it to the frivolous poor, who in turn squander this windfall on their frolics. It is politically unpopular and logistically problematic to tax the poor. The poor are more likely to have informal incomes or to engage in barter. The poor are likely to be employed in ways that are not well-reported (partly, paradoxically, due to immigration crackdowns by conservatives).

But lotteries are magical in the eyes of conservatives – they provide a way to tax the poor. And, best of all, unpopular enforcement is not needed; the poor line up at corner shops to pay this tax. In places like London and Chicago, lotteries are even directly linked to services poor people use (like publicly-funded schools), which is popular with everyone – the poor and liberals like this because it seems that the money is being used for a good cause that more-than-sufficiently cleanses any moral stains on its collection and the wealthy and conservatives love it because it creates a direct link showing the poor are finally paying the services they’re consuming. Everyone rejoices.

In my research on a broad variety of topics, I struggle to find an issue that as clearly unites the conservative movement internationally as lotteries. But, once one ponders what lotteries actually do – and the political narrative that can be built around them – their success is not only obvious, it’s ingenious. The losers of a lottery lose negligible amounts, not enough to increase their burden on the state. And the winners of a lottery win while only slightly injuring their fellow man – something any politician can easily relate to.