Democracy for Realists, Part 19 of 19, final part
Many people on the Left reject electoral politics because it seems too stagnant, but we should consider that the formal political process can be re-invented as something that enables real change.
From the book:
Democracy for Realists, 2016
Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government
By Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels
Page 342-344
Populist candidates of all ideologies are often impatient with democratic procedures and constitutional norms, which they see as tools of the corrupt establishment. For their part, most ordinary citizens have never been all that strongly devoted to democratic norms and civil liberties. Political scientists have long recognized that most people have only a tenuous grasp of “the presuppositions and complex obligations of democracy, the rights it grants and the self-restraints it imposes,” as Herbert McClosky put it.
The evidence on this point goes back to the 1950s and ‘60s, when social scientists shaken by the rise of fascism in Europe began studying American public opinions. They discovered that a well-informed commitment to democratic values was largely limited to the most active and best-informed sliver of the population, though it was by no means universal among them. Below that stratum, large majorities expressed strong support at the level of broad generalities but quickly abandoned their principles or simply became confused when it came to (even slightly difficult) concrete cases.
Not much seems to have changed on this score over the past half-century. When the Latin American Public Opinion Project’s 2014 Americas Barometer surveys asked people in 23 countries whether “it would be justified for the military of this country to take power by a coup d’etat (military coup)” in response to high unemployment, crime, or corruption, one-third of U.S. respondents said that a military coup would be justified “when there is a lot of corruption” - a higher proportion than in Panama, Bolivia, and Haiti, among other places. The investigators, surprised by the finding, tried rewriting the question to explain what a military coup meant, but the result persisted.
Thus, political elites – politicians, civil servants, judges, and journalists – “serve as the major repositories of the public conscience,” if any does. But Americans have little faith in political elites. The same Americas Barometer survey found the U.S. respondents were also much less likely than Latin Americans (and Canadians) to agree that “Those who govern this country are interested in what people like you think.” Add in an attachment to an unrealistic “folk theory” of democracy, and the influence of political elites quickly becomes untenable, increasing the risks of demagogic candidates, constitutional crises, or worse.
In the current political environment, as we noted in chapter 10, most politically engaged citizens are firmly committed to one party or the other, and they are willing to overlook a lot in order to feel good about “their” politicians and opinion leaders. Moreover, given the enormous prominence of the presidency, any leader or faction controlling the White House can exert substantial pressure on co-partisans in Congress and elsewhere. So they, too, often fall into line in spite of knowing better.
As the depressing history of the 20th century demonstrates, preserving constitutional democracy requires sound institutional structures and unfailing vigilance. At the moment, carelessness abounds, fueled in part by the folk theory of democracy. Foolish referendums and a slipshod procedure for choosing presidential candidates have had real consequences.
The public wants things. They want security, they want good schools and also clean water that won’t poison their children. They want healthcare. Does our government give us what the public wants?
Our current structure of government dates back to the 1700s. In 1748 Montesquieu published his book “The Spirit Of The Laws.” This is the book that gave us the concept of “checks and balances.” Montesquieu suggested the government must have 3 branches: the executive, the legislative and the judiciary. In the USA, the book had a profound influence in shaping the Constitution. Since that time, we’ve patched the basic design many times, and we’ve expanded the franchise to more and more of the population, but there has been no change to the fundamental architecture.
We need innovative thinking. I’ve many friends who complain about the inertia of the system. Election after election they vote for certain candidates, but nothing seems to change. Why can’t we get action on the environment, or reform the police?
There are several aspects of our democracy that makes it unusually unresponsive to the public’s desires, but let’s focus on two:
1. First past the post voting. That means whoever gets the most votes win, even if there were a dozen candidates who split the vote and the winner only got 28% of the vote.
2. Geographic districts, so that land is represented rather than ideas (by contrast, look at Israel, where the whole nation votes for Parliament, so ideas are represented, but no geographic sub-districts get representation).
The architecture of the voting determines the outcome of the voting.
Imagine 5 candidates in the primaries, getting votes at these percentages:
28%
20%
20%
16%
16%
Chances are good the person with 28% is going to be a candidate who represents the status quo, since all the forces of the status quo can ensure their candidate gets the most votes, even if that is no where near the majority. Meanwhile, candidates who want real change are splitting the votes 16% and 16%. The vote for real change would be 32% if it was combined, so one of these candidates might win if we switch to Ranked Choice Voting. But under First Past The Post, the candidate with 28% wins.
It's been pointed out that Elizabeth Warren was the second choice of most Democrats during the 2020 primaries, so if the Democrats had used Ranked Choice Voting she would have been the candidate.
Geographic sub-districts: you can have a legislature that represents ideas, or it can represent land.
Voting for ideas: All of the people can engage in voting in for the whole legislature, in which case the parties will tend to represent specific ideas, like the Green for the environment, Labor for the working class, Liberals which in most countries is the name of the business party, Nationalists for the far-right.
Voting for land: in the USA we divide up territories into sub-districts, and then we elect one representative for each district. This means that the land is represented, but ideas are not. This style of democracy might have made sense during the agricultural era, centuries ago, but does it make sense now?
Whatever changes we make, we should remember that voters often don’t know what they are voting for. And this should recommend representative government to us. Representatives can devote themselves to politics full time, so they can learn something about the issues.
We should be honest about what works and what doesn’t work. And what clearly has not worked is the populist path that the USA has followed over the last century, or perhaps century and a half. Every progressive needs to look at the evidence, calmly and rationally, and ask themselves if the various experiments with direct democracy have created the progressive utopia they hoped for. Have referendums defeated the influence of corporate power in the USA, or have the referendums become a tool with which corporate power can outmaneuver the legislative process? Have direct primaries defeated the old guard in the party leadership and thus ended the status quo, or have they allowed television to play a larger and larger role in our politics, to the detriment of any leader who was serious about their civic duties?
Right now, among my friends on the Left, there are 2 main groups:
1. the ones who want to engage in highly populist electoral politics
2. the ones who want to turn away from the electoral process altogether, to focus on direct action
I’ll suggest there is a 3rd possibility, constructing a political system that is anti-populist in ways that reward those leaders who are serious about their civic duties, thus allowing those in the formal electoral process to do their jobs.
It is this 3rd possibility that this weblog is devoted to. I’ve previously sketched out what some of this system might look like, and we will explore a good deal more over the next year.
Of course, a system that is technically brilliant may not sell itself as easily as a system that fails but offers a deeply romantic aesthetic. So we will also consider by what process the benefits of a new system can be demonstrated, and thus win the public over.