Democracy for Realists, Part 1 of 19
If we think of democracy as a machine that can produce a product that we like, then can we put guard rails on this machine, so that we can get more of what we want, with less risk of self-injury?
Over the next month I will be discussing “Democracy For Realists.” Achen and Bartels do an excellent job of making clear that standard theories of democracy have no relation to reality. And yet, some structural benefits of democracy are well known (Amartya Sen won a Nobel Prize for pointing out that no democracy has ever had a famine). I’m going to quote some excerpts and try to explore the paradox that democracies clearly work, even though they clearly don’t work the way most people assume.
Democracy for Realists, 2016
Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government
By Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels
Page 9-10
The Critical Tradition
The folk theory of democracy celebrates the wisdom of popular judgments by informed and engaged citizens. The reality is quite different. Human beings are busy with their lives. Most have school or a job consuming many hours of the day. They also have meals to prepare, homes to clean, and bills to pay. They may have children to raise or elderly parents to care for. They may also be coping with unemployment, business reverses, illness, addictions, divorce, or other personal and family troubles. For most, leisure time is at a premium. Sorting out which presidential candidate has the right foreign policy toward Asia is not a high priority for them. Without shirking more immediate and more important obligations, people cannot engage in much well-informed, thoughtful political deliberation, nor should they.
Recognizing that actual people are far from the unrealistic ideal citizens of folk theory, disappointed observers have often adopted a judgmental tone, implicitly assuming that the folk theory provides the appropriate moral standard for citizens, which few meet. At the end of the 19th century, for example, James Bryce (1894, 250) observed “how little solidity and substance there is in the political or social beliefs of nineteen persons out of every twenty. These beliefs, when examined, mostly resolve themselves into two or three prejudices and aversions, two or three prepossessions for a particular leader or party or section of a party, two or three phrases or catchwords suggesting or embodying arguments which the man who repeats them has not analyzed.” He might have added that the remaining one in twenty exhibit the limits of rationality, too.
However unaware of his own human limitations Bryce may have been, in our view he was not wrong about the fact of widespread citizen inattention. Indeed, the past century of political science has done remarkably little to alter the basic outlines of his portrait of public opinion. Even in the midst of the Progressive Era, the fundamental veracity of that portrait and its troubling implications for folk democratic theory were clear enough to those willing to see them. The great political scientist and Harvard University president A. Lawrence Lowell (1913, 233), for example, noted with respect to democracy that “there has probably never existed a political system of which men have not tried to demonstrate the perfection,” but he dismissed as “fallacious” all theories “based on the assumption that the multitude is omniscient” and “all reforms that presuppose a radical change in human nature.”
The multitude is not omniscient, but as I previously wrote:
Can a government produce good laws if it is run by an ignorant, angry, hysterical mob that suffers from amnesia? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. Saidmyno had the happy rule that all laws had to be voted on twice, with the two votes separated by ten years.
My point there was that voting could be used as a filter against outliers. The idea owes more to data science than to political science.
We know from history that democracy brings real benefits, yet we know from observation that the majority of voters are completely ignorant and irrational, so the question arises, where do the benefits of democracy come from, if they don’t come from the voters?
Mere structure can save lives. What happens if you try to herd a large number of cattle through a long, straight chute? There is a danger of a panic, causing a stampede, causing many animals to be injured. How is this problem solved? Easily: instead of a straight chute, have the chute go in and out a bit. The in-parts choke the pressure, the out-parts are therefore spaces of less pressure, therefore the stampede cannot build up pressure. This is how farmers protect their cattle. Architects use the same ideas to protect humans, at stadiums and festivals. What if the crowd is thick and someone yells “fire!” Good architecture will have frequent, regularly recurring obstacles in the hallways, perhaps the pillars that hold up the building, that can act as choke points, and therefore limit the risk of a stampede. So long as the starting point of all human traffic is in some wide open space, where crowding is less dangerous, then the backpressure in the hallways should go all the way back to that wide open space. The point is that the narrow parts limit how much pressure can build up on the next part, and thus limit the amplitude of any developing wave of panic.
The economist Amartya Sen proved that democracies don’t have famines (see Democracy Is Practical). Voting has real benefits for society, but we need to be clear, it is something about the voting itself that creates the benefits, the benefits do not come from the voters.
How can democracies have benefits if the voters themselves are stupid and irrational, and most elections have completely random outcomes?
Here we need to speculate, but there are several models that make sense. One possibility is that the benefits of democracy are indirect, for example, a democratic milieu allows for the professions to interact with each other in a cooperative rather than competitive ways.
Some mechanics probably are more direct than that, but here the evidence is thin. Speculating a bit, here is one of my favorites:
Suppose there are 2 or more factions full of greedy, selfish, unethical leaders who want to gain power to corruptly enrich themselves and their supporters, while also throwing the other factions in jail for having been greedy and unethical when those other factions were in power. The various factions have 2 main options:
a.) fight a long, bloody civil war to gain power, then jail or kill one’s opponents, then attempt to enrich themselves from the shattered ruins of the nation.
b.) agree to democratic elections, avoiding war and death and destruction, but facing the risk of limited opportunities for enrichment.
Suppose that, either out of wisdom, or because they’ve already exhausted themselves with civil war, all of the factions agree to abide by democratic elections. Now when they are in power they want to corruptly enrich themselves as much as possible, but they also know the next election is completely random and they can’t be sure they will still hold power. If another party wins, any corrupt behavior might be punished with jail time. So they feel they have to be either less corrupt, or they have to use formal, legal processes to enrich themselves and their supporters, which is another way of saying they have to limit their corruption in some ways.
Voting allows for changes in who holds power, and this can have a cleansing effect. It is possible that we could get almost the same effect if, instead of having elections, the major parties agreed to roll some dice once every 4 or 5 years, with whoever wins the dice roll getting to govern for the next 4 or 5 years.
I’m joking about rolling dice to pick leaders, though randomizing some parts of government oversight might reduce corruption. Consider, if an agency is considered corrupt, a reform minded leader might set up a regular accounting, and hire one of the big, well-known accounting firms to audit the agency. But if the leader of the agency can establish a long-term relationship with the leader of the accounting firm, then they leader of that agency could bribe the leader of the accounting firm. So some rotation of accounting firms would be useful. In fact, having a list of 30 good accounting firms, and rolling dice to determine which one would do the audit each year, would go a long way to defeat most systems of corruption.
Around 700 BC, when ancient Athens was first experimenting with democratic forms of government, many of the government roles were chosen by straw or lot, which is to say, the process was random (a sortition). The idea that randomness can reduce corruption has been around for a long time. (In biology, there is a theory that sexual reproduction was invented mostly to defeat pathogens: the random mixing of genes made it more difficult for pathogens to optimize their attacks against a particular, known, static genome.)
All over the world, there are so-called democracies where a single party governed for 30 years or more: Mexico, Italy, Japan, India. All of these democracies were note-worthy for their high levels of corruption. By contrast, democracies that have experienced regular shifts in which party holds power are less corrupt. The corruption we see in Canada or Germany or Sweden or Israel is minor compared to the corruption seen in less dynamic democracies. (Someone will respond to this and say “Netanyahu in Israel was very corrupt.” Okay, but favorable coverage in a newspaper and maybe $300,000 in gifts, for just one political leader, seems minor compared to a place like Mexico or Nigeria, where gifts have to be handed out to hundreds of politicians.)
The lesson from this is that merely calling a government democratic doesn’t mean anything, the real issue is how competitive the elections actually are. Countries like Mexico or Nigeria, where the whole process was tightly managed, should not be considered democratic merely because they have elections. (Mexico has gotten better, Nigeria has gotten worse. See The Brutality Of The Nigerian Government.)
There are, of course, ambiguous cases, and nations in transition. Over the last 40 years, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea have all become more democratic. Sadly, the USA seems to be backsliding, with many individual states taking steps to ensure that future elections will be less competitive.
Then there are countries like Poland and Hungary, which emerged from dictatorship, became functioning democracies, and have now moved towards rigged elections that make a mockery of the word “democracy.” Orban, in Hungary, has said he aims to establish an “illiberal democracy.” That would be funny if it wasn’t so dangerous.
Achen and Bartels gave their book the subtitle: “Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government.” And yet, as soon as we realize that the benefits of democracy come from the structure of elections, not from the voters, then we see that we can build complex structures that will produce more responsive government.
Achen and Bartels might respond “Responsive to what? The voters themselves don’t know what they want.” Which is true, but voters have needs, such as good schools for their children, a military that can defend the nation, and an ability to make a living. And also, voters need clean, healthy teeth (the book offers a case study on the battle over putting Fluoride in municipal water). Achen and Bartels offer many examples of voters sabotaging their own interests, but each of those examples suggests an opposite world in which voters are less likely to hurt themselves.
If we think of democracy as a machine that can produce a product that we like, then the question becomes, can we put guard rails on this machine, so that we can get more of the product we want, with less risk of injury?
Over the next month we will explore what this might look like.