Democracy for Realists, Part 16 of 19

The political parties seem to play a key role in the stability of any democratic system.

Once again, let me repeat, the benefits of democracy have been well-documented. Amartya Sen (whose work we will review in 2022) won a Nobel Prize for showing that people in democracies do not suffer from famine. People in democracies are better protected against disease, are more likely to be vaccinated against common childhood illnesses, and tend to have better educations provided by their governments. Democracies tend to experience more economic growth than non-democracies, though at any given time there might be a non-democracy that is growing very fast. One study has shown that men are taller in democracies. In the long-run, democracies offer a stability that seems to produce better outcomes for people, when compared to the long-run experiences in autocracies. Democracies are the happiest form of government, and they can be made stronger still.

However, the research suggests that the benefits of democracy do not come from the voters, at least not directly. The evidence on this point is very strong. Even the best educated citizen is far too ignorant to fulfill their obligations under most standard theories of democracy. The omnicompetent citizen does not exist. So the benefits of democracy clearly arise from structural factors, not the voters.

We need to keep this in mind as we design stronger and better versions of democracy. Because incorrect ideas have lead to attacks on the structures of the political process, structures which might have been the source of some of the benefits of democracy. In the USA, experiments with direct democracy, such as direct primaries and referendums, have made politics more populist and increased the influence of television and the techniques of mass marketing. The increased space in which the techniques of mass marketing can operate has allowed for a dangerous, populist style of politics into which a few dangerous demagogues have stepped. As an example, it is well known that the Republican establishment hated Donald Trump and never would have allowed him to become their official candidate, if they’d had the power to stop him. But since the 1960s, when direct party primaries became universal, the parties have been weaker and less able to control who their own candidates are (as compared to when the parties would meet at a convention in some city, and the delegates to the convention would pick who the candidate would be — parties had strong control at that time).

And yet, most of us have the intuition that some kind of participatory democracy would lead to better results than the system we currently have. But we can say with confidence that what we’ve previously seen is a clumsy attempt to graft elements of direct democracy onto the structures we inherited from the 1700s, and that effort has failed.

Democracy for Realists, 2016

Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

By Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels

Page 301-303

Academic theorists of democracy (with the notable exception of Rosenblum 2008) have shown little enthusiasm for political parties and partisanship. Indeed, they have often seemed unimpressed by mere electoral democracy, and thus uninterested in the pressing question of institutional design and legitimacy raised by analyses like ours. Instead, much (and much of the best) contemporary political theory has focused on highly idealistic models of participatory or deliberative democracy (Pateman 1970; Barber 1984; Habermas 1994; Fishkin 1995; Benhabib 1996; Gutmann and Thompson 1996; Macedo 1999; Cohen 2003). These models of democracy emphasize – indeed, they often simply assume – rationality, mutual consideration, and the patient exchange of publicly justified reasons for supporting specific policies. Thus, they rest on essentially the same unrealistic expectations about human nature embodied in the folk theory. And like the folk theory, they are significantly undermined by what has been learned since the Enlightenment about human cognition and social life (Sanders 1997; Mendelberg and Oleske 2000).

Whatever else deliberation in its more refined and philosophically approved forms may have going for it, it is very likely to be distinctly undemocratic in practice, since “many people do not have much desire to engage in political debate to begin with” (Mutz 2006, 10) and are intensely averse to political disagreement (Eliasoph 1998; Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 2002). Hence, they often fall silent in deliberative settings, letting better-educated and more prominent citizens dominate, as Mansbridge (1980, chaps. 9-11) found in New England town meetings. This is a telling indication that theorists of deliberative democracy are “try[ing] to whip the public into doing things it does not want to do, is unable to do, and has too much sense to do” (Schattschneider 1960, 131). Most ordinary citizens do not want politics to be more like a philosophy seminar.

Perhaps for that reason, the practical impact of deliberative theory has been quite modest. The most cited and studied attempts to “scale up” these idealized models of democratic decision-making were large-scale, government-sponsored “citizens’ assemblies” intended to consider changes in the election laws of the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Ontario (Warren and Pearse 2008; Fournier et al. 2011). In each case, a body of ordinary citizens engaged in an elaborately funded year-long process of education, consultation, and deliberation aimed at recommending a new voting rule to be employed in provincial elections. And in each case, their nearly unanimous recommendation was decisively rejected by their fellow citizens in a subsequent referendum.* We do not know what combination of deliberative shortcomings, public inattention, and partisan conflict may have been to blame; but if the point of the assemblies was to shape the judgement of the broader electorate, this seemingly worthwhile Canadian initiative was an expensive, dramatic failure.

While political theories grounded in misguided assumptions about human nature are usually of little practical import, the dispute over the folk theory and its alternatives is not just an academic squabble, a tempest in a classroom teapot. The folk theory has also structured how everyday citizens and important political figures have understood American government and American ideals. In consequence, foolish reform movements have relied on its teachings, giving us flat-earth pronouncements about how government should work.

As we saw in chapter 3, the results in American politics – excessive reliance on referendums at the state level and the dilution of the influence of knowledgeable party officials in the choice of presidential candidates – have strengthened the hand of narrow interest groups and often resulted in self-defeating choices by the electorate. We argued, for example, that voters' choices made a mess of car insurance, damaged their children’s dental health, and even let homes be burned down. In the same way, every presidential primary season exposes the dangers of voter fatigue with familiar, experienced politicians and their enthusiasm for hopelessly unqualified but clever demagogues known only from a few television appearances.

As we have seen, effective democracy requires an appropriate balance between popular preferences and elite expertise. The point of reforms should not simply be to maximize popular influence. We need to learn to let political parties and political leaders do their jobs, too. Simple-minded attempts to thwart or control political elites through initiatives, direct primaries, and term limits will often be counterproductive. Far from empowering the citizenry, the plebiscitary implications of the folk theory have often damaged people’s real interests.

Page 310-311

The role of political “sophistication” in analyses of this sort underlines the fact that the task of being a good citizen by the standards of conventional democratic theory is too hard for everyone. Attentive readers will already have surmised our view of intellectuals in politics, but for clarity, we spell it out here. The historical record leaves little doubt that the educated, including the highly educated, have gone astray in their moral and political judgments as often as anyone else. In the antebellum era, prominent southern professors and university administrators often defended slavery (Faust 1981). Brilliant 19th-century German professors helped give shape to German nationalism and the racial identity theorists that led to Nazism, and German university students in the 1930s were often enthusiastic supporters of Hitler (Meinecke 1925; esp. 377-433; Kershaw 1998, 76, 80). Protestant and secular professors backed Otto von Bismarck’s campaign to suppress the civil liberties of Catholics in 19th-century Germany (Gross 2004). Crude prejudice against Catholics, Jews, and others was common among American intellectuals until recent decades, too (Billington 1938; McGreevy 2003).

More recently, 20th-century communism attracted many highly educated people around the world. Numerous French intellectuals supported Russian communism well after its crimes had been exposed (Aron 1957; Caute 1964). Radical Chinese intellectuals backed Mao Zedong’s campaign to establish his regime and keep it in power – a regime that eventually became, not just a relentless oppressor of intellectuals, but the most murderous government in the history of the world (Goldman 1981; Townsend and Womack 1986, 58-62). In the United States, prominent political science professors became advisors to the American government during the disastrous Vietnam War, while others naively favored Ho Chi Minh in his ultimately successful effort to establish a repressive communist state in that country (Halberstam 1972).

Of course, a great many other people in each of these countries made the same or other equally appalling judgments. The point is simply that, as Gustave Le Bon (1895, 122) put it more than a century ago, “It does not follow because an individual knows Greek or mathematics, is an architect, a veterinary surgeon, a doctor, or a barrister, that he is endowed with a special intelligence on social questions….Were the electorate solely composed of persons stuffed with sciences their votes would be no better than those emitted at present.” Gifted in their own spheres, artists and intellectuals have no special expertise in politics. In our political judgments and actions, we all make mistakes, sometimes even morally indefensible errors. Thus, when we say that voters routinely err, we mean all voters. This is not a book about the political misjudgments of people with modest educations. It is a book about the conceptual limitations of human beings – including the authors of this book and its readers. As Walter Lippmann (1925, 10-11) remarked, “I have not happened to meet anybody, from a President of the United States to a professor of political science, who came anywhere near to embodying the accepted ideal of the sovereign and omnicompetent citizen.”

My one criticism of this book is that so much energy is spent demolishing old theories of democracy, without any effort to explain the benefits that come from democracy, or where those benefits might come from.

Perhaps I’m biased because I spent 20 years writing software, but I think of this issue mostly in terms of data science. Democratic elections can still, in theory, produce intelligent outcomes if we think of this as a situation where we are trying to get the signal from a great deal of noise, at which point most of the tools of Machine Learning can be applied. Clearly, we will want some filters that reduce noise and allow a signal to come through.

Achen & Bartels would agree that political parties can be useful as a filter, at least in those systems where the parties are allowed to be autonomous, coherent, and powerful. Therefore, in building a stronger version of democracy, we need to be sure that any system we design allows the parties to do their job in the system. If individual voters can never know enough to understand the details of all of the issues, then we need to rely on the political parties to help educate voters about the issues.