What is a Decision Matrix?

A decision matrix is simply a means of putting together different pieces of information to help make a decision. A basic example of this would be trying to find a phone or VOIP service. How do you decide which company / service is best? To decide you can make a list of the criteria that are important to you and then grade each company / product on how well it does on each criteria. Suppose there are four different company products you’re evaluating, and you are particularly interested in 4 different criteria: price, reliability, amount of features, and product support. If you put all this information together in a grid you wind up with a simple decision matrix that looks like this:

From here we just need to assign a scale and then rate the different companies. So, using a scale from 1 to 5, we would wind up with something that looks like this:

• Company 1 is the cheap option that works surprisingly well—but if you have a problem you’re on your own.
• Company 2 is the company that’s fairly expensive but still manages to be mediocre.
• Company 3 is the cheaper option that throws in all the features—but doesn’t actually work very well.
• Company 4 is the expensive option, hence the 1 for price, but you get a lot for the price.

After all is said and done, it looks like Company 4 is the winner. It has the highest total score and so it seems that we should go with Company 4.

Now as I said, this is a very simple decision matrix. And its simplicity leaves out something that is pretty common in decision making, namely, each criteria is not equally important. Maybe you’re a techy sort of person and so Tech Support is less important to you than the others. Or suppose that your company has hit a hard spot and so it doesn’t really want to spend a lot of money on a new telephone system. In this case we weight Price, the first column, more heavily than the others. There are a number of different ways to do this, perhaps the simplest is to just multiply everything in the Price column by, say, 1.3. This would mean we weigh Price to be 30% more important than the other criteria. What happens when we do this?

As you can see, all the numbers in the first column get 30% bigger. More importantly, we now have a new winner, the price difference was just enough to give Company 1 the edge.

Ok, so we’ve seen how a simple decision matrix works, and we’ve looked at one way to do a weighted matrix. How does this work in the political arena?

A political voting matrix 

A political decision matrix works on a similar principle but is a little more complex (figures politics would be complicated right?). To walk through how this works we are going to use a concrete example from our current political context (April 2024 in the good ole USA). We are going compare and contrast the way two people who agree on the basic issues but have different political leanings might come to different conclusions.

We’re discussing people who are in basic agreement about issues because it’s a lot more interesting and useful an exercise. Obviously if people disagree on all the fundament issues like Abortion, Economy and Immigration, and there are two parties that take opposite sides on the issues, the people are going to vote for opposite parties. More difficult, and something I’ve seen people really struggle with personally, is when there are people who basically agree on everything who still wind-up voting opposite ways. This can be both puzzling and even hurtful. That’s what we’re looking at here.

These two people are both somewhere on the conservative / libertarianish side of the map. They agree that their four top issues are restricting abortion, stopping corruption, improving the economy, and limiting illegal immigration. Further, they agree that these positions should be evaluated by how important the policy is to fundamental justice, how effective they think the politician / policy will be, and the risk involved in the decision (we use these 3 criteria for ease of example, there are other and probably better ways of doing this). Each of these will need a little more explanation.

Intrinsic justice

Different issues are more or less important on the justice scale. Basically everyone agrees that taking away someone’s wallet is unjust (theft), but that it is less unjust that taking away their life (murder). So in our example, the higher the number the more fundamental a justice issue it is.[1]

Policy effect

This category includes both how effective you think the proposed policy will be, and also how effective the candidate will be at making it happen. So, if you don’t trust the politician to make the policy happen (even if they say they will), this category gets a low score. Similarly, if you think the candidate will make their policy happen, but that the policy won’t make any difference it gets a low score.

Safety vs Risk

Similar to the last, this category includes both the risk of the policy itself, and the risk of the person you’re voting to implement the policy. Perhaps you are anti-illegal immigration and you trust a candidate to stop illegal immigration (high policy effect score) but you are worried that the way that person will do it will result in concentration-like camps and the breaking up of families. This would result in a low safety (high risk) score.

When we put this all together we get a chart something like this:

Note how this is a bit different than the telephone decision matrix. In that case each row was a different company we were choosing between. The row with highest total wins. Not so here. We are not really trying to decide who wins between Restrict Abortions or Stop Corruption. Instead, we are comparing the total for the entire chart. So the little box at the bottom of the Total column is the final total we are looking to find (And no weighing of criteria! That’s too complicated for today). Alrighty, on to our comparisons!

Donald Trump vs Robert F. Kennedy Jr

The plan is to create one chart for Donald Trump and one for RFK Jr. and see who has the higher number. The twist is this, we are going to evaluate Trump vs RFK from the perspective of a traditional conservative, and then from a more populist libertarian perspective. So ultimately, we will wind up with four charts—if that doesn’t make sense yet don’t worry. Keep reading and it will become obvious. First up is the conservative evaluation of Donald Trump.

Now I should note, I think this chart is actually fair to the general position. These are most of the top categories at play, and, while each person is different, I think it is a fair accounting of how many conservatives think of Trump—I’ll call the hypothetical guy filling out the chart Bob. Things to note is that Bob thinks restricting abortion is of the highest importance for Justice—fitting since he thinks its murder. He’s a little concerned about Trump’s dedication to the cause, but ultimately thinks it’s a safe bet. He thinks corruption is a major problem which Trump will really help with—but he thinks there’ll be room for improvement. Trump’s first term was largely ineffective on this point anyway. Rather, than going on, I’ll bring in Bob’s evaluation of RFK now:

Note Bob’s concern with RFK’s policy on abortion. RFK is pro-abortion and so he scores at the bottom of the chart. However, he believes that RFK is not really trying to push abortion and so he isn’t such a risk as, say, Joe Biden. He thinks RFK will be good on corruption, but he’s not convinced RFK will be much good at the economy. He also knows that RFK is against illegal immigration, but he’s not sure how much effort RKF is going to put into stopping it, so he’s a much less safe bet than Donald Trump. All things told, Trump comfortably wins out over Kennedy.

Now’s the time to bring in the more populist libertarian, Jamie. I’ll put all four charts up at once so you can see at a glance how they compare.

Unsurprisingly, this libertarian grades things a bit differently that the conservative. While he agrees that abortion is an important issue, let’s be honest, he has no patience for late term abortion, but he’s not really convinced that full personhood goes all the way back to conception. How a single celled organism can be the same as a child just stretches his imagination too much. Consequently, he doesn’t see early term abortion as too much an issue of intrinsic justice. He also notes that Trump is for abortion being a state rather than national issue, so while Trump will have some effect, it’s not likely to be tremendous. However, when we get to risk, we find a rather large difference of opinion. Our libertarian is not confident that the effect Trump has will actually be good—he might inspire a lot of bad policies that try to limit very early abortions, policies that have the net effect of making procedures that are intended to save the woman in-case of a dangerous pregnancy harder to get. Even if there are exceptions written in a law, the net result could still have a dangerous effect.

In fact, risk is the biggest problem this populist libertarian has with Trump. While he thinks Trump is better on a couple of issues (namely abortion and economy), he always rates Trump as riskier than Kennedy. In his eyes, Kennedy is the safer choice. He’s more likely to actually fight corruption effectively, to not make hurtful abortion policies, to not start a risky trade war, and he won’t put immigrants in concentration camps trying to clean up the border. While it might be a tough decision between Kennedy and Trump just on the issues, the unpredictability of Trump ultimately makes this decision pretty straightforward.

Conclusion 

So what are we to conclude from all this? The point here is not to try and persuade someone towards one camp or another. Instead, the goal is to try and provide a means to deliberately work through the issues oneself, and a way of thinking about competing positions and dialoging about them. Ultimately, everybody has some sort of decision matrix or algorithm they use to decide who to vote for. The only question is whether that decision making paradigm is something that we’ve consciously considered, or whether it remains a fuzzy, murky feeling lurking at back of our minds.

Of course, we’ve not tried to find the right side of the big vs small government issue, free market healthcare vs single payer, war support vs isolationism, etc…. We’re not even going to try and work through those policies to try and find the ‘right’ answer, those answers are too involved and too far afield. There’s something closer to hand that we’ve ignored so far. Something a bit more foundational.

Even if we have Christian convictions about what a just world should look like—when should we try and impose those on the world? Everyone agrees the church is not the same as the state, but there’s lots of disagreements about what exactly the relationship should be. Basically everyone agrees both that it is a settled Christian conviction that theft is bad, and also that it should be politically enforced (i.e. outlawed). But what about lying? adultery? abortion?

To put it differently, as Christians, what sorts of Christian things should make it into our political decision matrix as well as our church decision matrix, and how should they be ranked? In the next, and penultimate, discussion we’ll (start to) tackle this extremely difficult topic.

[1] It would probably be better to use this category as a weight for the policy effect and safety, but I’m trying to make this as simple as possible.