The figures in this group fall into three sets. The paradoxes show democracy's formal machinery producing results nobody intended. The sayings about power and law carry centuries of cynicism in a few words. And the partisan quips, from both directions, show how political identity likes to explain itself, often under a borrowed name.
Paradoxes of voting and representation
The Condorcet Paradox, found in 1785, shows majority preferences cycling even when every voter is consistent: a majority prefers A to B, another B to C, and another C to A. The Ostrogorski Paradox shows a party losing on every issue yet winning the election. The Alabama Paradox, found in American apportionment, shows a state losing a seat when the total number of seats rises. The Paradox of Voting asks why anyone votes when one vote almost never decides anything, and Tullock's Paradox of Revolution asks the same of uprisings.
Popper's Paradox of Tolerance and Wollheim's Paradox are philosophical rather than arithmetical. The first holds that unlimited tolerance destroys itself; the second asks how a democrat can think one policy right and also accept that the majority's contrary choice ought to be enacted.
Sayings about power and law
The sayings are older and more cynical. Acton's Dictum is usually misquoted: he wrote that power tends to corrupt, a qualification most repetitions drop. The Italian proverb the law made, the loophole found records the arms race between rules and those who evade them, and Whack-a-Mole records its enforcement version. The Chinese idiom Sha Ji Jing Hou, kill the chicken to scare the monkey, describes punishment aimed at the audience rather than the offender. The Iron Law of Institutions holds that people care more about their power within an institution than about the institution's success.
Partisan quips
The third set is political self-description. Not a Liberal at Twenty-Five, attributed to Churchill without evidence, and Mugged by Reality, Kristol's definition of a neoconservative, are accounts of moving rightward. Buckley's Boston Telephone Directory prefers randomly chosen citizens to Harvard's faculty. The Triumph of Evil, the famous line about good men doing nothing, is attributed to Burke, who is not known to have written it.
Where it applies
The paradoxes have practical consequences for anyone designing a voting system, a committee procedure or an apportionment formula, since each identifies a failure some rule must accept. Ranked-choice and approval voting are, among other things, attempts to manage the Condorcet problem. The sayings about law apply to anyone who drafts rules: a regulation written without anticipating its loopholes, or enforcement that simply moves a problem elsewhere, follows a path the proverbs describe.
Where it is argued over
The paradoxes are settled as mathematics; the disputes are about how often they arise in practice. Studies of real elections find cycles less common than theory permits, though not absent. The partisan quips carry the group's contested flags, mostly for misattribution. The ledger files them with their true or uncertain origins, which corrects the record without further comment. Issawi's Law of Cynicism, that opposition to a course of action is inversely proportional to knowledge of the alternatives, is one of a set of satirical propositions and has not been tested.
Why it is worth knowing
The paradoxes show that some political frustrations are not anyone's fault; they are properties of aggregating preferences at all. The sayings supply the wry realism that long experience of power produces. The partisan quips are worth knowing for a different reason: they show how easily a political conviction acquires a famous author it never had, which is a small lesson in how political memory works.
The entries behind this essay: Figure in Law & Politics. Every subject has its essays on the essays page.