Will the project "Better Party Politics" receive any funding from the Clearer Thinking Regranting program run by ClearerThinking.org?

Remember, betting in this market is not the only way you can have a shot at winning part of the $13,000 in cash prizes! As explained here, you can also win money by sharing information or arguments that change our mind about which projects to fund or how much to fund them. If you have an argument or public information for or against this project, share it as a comment below. If you have private information or information that has the potential to harm anyone, please send it to clearerthinkingregrants@gmail.com instead.

Below, you can find some selected quotes from the public copy of the application. The text beneath each heading was written by the applicant. Alternatively, you can click here to see the entire public portion of their application.

Why the applicant thinks we should fund this project

Funding work that aims to improve the space of Party Politics presents an outsized opportunity to do good and to protect humanity’s long-term flourishing, given the high leverage that powerful individuals and institutions have. Even small changes have the power to redirect hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars of federal funding. Further, politicians have an important role to play in Agenda setting, and the media’s focus on Politics creates a huge amount of exposure for longtermist ideas, potentially inspiring a societal shift in values and priorities. At the same time, Politics nowadays is an existential risk factor rather than an existential security factor. Improving some of the dynamics that create existential risk through the political process can be seen as an impactful way to reduce existential risk overall. Better Party Politics will improve our resilience against threats to humanity’s potential. Finally, as a Cause Area, few people are working on it (compared to the important and great work people have been doing on Policy), and (Party) Politics in particular are neglected.

Here's the mechanism by which the applicant expects their project will achieve positive outcomes.

The most crucial step in the outlined Theory of Change is that between the “theoretical outcomes” (my research results) and the actual changes in political practice. There are a variety of mechanisms by which this can be achieved, and identifying the most promising ones would be an integral part of the “Explore” Phase of this project. However, previous evidence suggests that these may include, but not be limited to:

• Creating a Think Tank/a foundation/a lobbying group that advises politicians on the long-term effects of their decisions or has a narrower focus on single issues such as the rights of future generations (similar foundations exist in Germany and Belgium)

• Launching a media campaign that raises awareness of the importance of longtermist Governance, creating pressure for Politicians 

• Launching a citizen’s initiative (bottom-up approach to social change) that calls for Better Party Politics 

• Working together with Political Parties to help candidates run on a platform of evidence-based Politics 

• Working within parties to reduce their bias towards political opponents (a huge problem resulting in polarization, which in turn leads to more neartermist, opportunistic behaviour)

• Launching an organization that helps the coordination between countries and the adaptation of tried and tested measures

How much funding are they requesting?

Estimated Optimum (includes cost for running a program after 6 months):

250,000 USD.

What would they do with the amount just specified?

A funding commitment of 250,000 USD from the Clearer Thinking Regrant Program would allow the Grantee to work on the proposed project for a duration of around 1 year. This would be enough time to do most of the relevant research (Review and Interviews),build (sustainable, reliable) relationships with stakeholders and related EA organizations, set up the necessary organizational structures and hire staff for the next steps. Aside from the research output (academic paper, a forum post and a Research Agenda), there would be a concrete project that can be tried, tested and evaluated. It could serve as a template for future programs or similar initiatives, e.g. in other countries. 

More specifically, this means I will (copied from above, plus additional activities)

• Conduct a systematic review of the literature on political presentism 

• Interview experts on their estimates of the biggest problems and their respective tractability 

• Establish a framework that can be used to evaluate potential programs 

• Select a country for the MVP to be tested in 

• Select a specific program for this country 

• Conduct a pre-mortem on the program 

• Hire staff (most likely ops/research) to run and evaluate the program 

• (set up an organisation/initiative that can host the program, hire people etc.)

• Run the program/initiative (which is the most significant/costly/time-intensive step)

• Evaluate the program/initiative, its outcome and its cost-effectiveness 

• Deduce possible next steps 

I expect a project like this to be significantly more impactful, sustainable and both quantitatively and qualitatively superior, although an upfront investment of this kind should come with a clear commitment of the Grantee to shut down the project and return the grant if the initial stages do not show promise. I also believe this project holds an enormous amount of Information Value, some of which would likely only be extracted after months of work. Being able to hire additional staff would allow the Grantee to focus on Macrostrategy questions by freeing up time that might otherwise be spent on operational tasks. It would also allow the organization to scale and explore more than one country for the implementation of a program/initiative. 

Here you can review the entire public portion of the application (which contains a lot more information about the applicant and their project):

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1h2lhx06kEU_fZPsm4N_-CCuD8ERVpNL_DKj4wJLXD-U

Sep 20, 3:45pm:

Close date updated to 2022-10-01 2:59 am