Democracy for Realists, Part 17 of 19
Elections that “throw the bums out” typically do not produce genuine policy mandates, not even when they are landslides. They simply put a different elite coalition in charge.
From the book:
Democracy for Realists, 2016
Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government
By Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels
Page 312
The result is that, from the viewpoint of governmental representativeness and accountability, election outcomes are essentially random choices among the available parties – musical chairs. Elections that “throw the bums out” typically do not produce genuine policy mandates, not even when they are landslides. They simply put a different elite coalition in charge. This bloodless change of government is a great deal better than bloody revolution, but it is not deliberate policy change. The parties have policy views and they carry them out when in office, but most voters are not listening, or are simply thinking what their party tells them they should be thinking. This is what an honest view of electoral democracy looks like. It is a blunder to expect elections to deliver more.
This is the essence of the problem with the current system. Democracy will continue to disappoint people for as long as we stay with systems that produce random outcomes. And when democracy disappoints people, they will turn to authoritarian politics instead.
But we can borrow ideas from Machine Learning and build a system that produces results that are better than random. We simply have to make this our goal.
This is the 17th essay in this current series. So far we have learned:
even the best educated voter is too ignorant to fulfill the obligations assigned to them in traditional theories of democracy
there are many advantages to democracy
the advantages of democracy do not come from the voters, and therefore must come from structural factors
we can design a better system where those structural factors deliver more benefits
See the essay from yesterday to see one specific proposal for making the system better.
But before we can build a better system, we need to admit that traditional theories of democracy are broken. They are myths that do not conform to reality. If we are going to build something better, we have to start by acknowledging the problems of our previous ideas about democracy.