From the book:
Democracy for Realists, 2016
Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government
By Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels
page 11
The pioneering survey research of Paul Lazarsfeld and his colleagues at Columbia University (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1948; Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954), of Angus Campbell and his colleagues at the University of Michigan (Campbell et al. 1960), and of other early analysts of electoral choice produced a rather bleak portrait of habitual, socially determined political behavior, once again calling into question whether citizens could perform the role that the folk theory of democracy seemed to require of them.
Page 12
Thus, scholars, too, persist uneasily in their schizophrenia, recognizing the power of the critical arguments but hoping against hope that those arguments can somehow be discredited or evaded, allowing the lackluster reality of democratic practice to be squared with conventional idealistic democratic thinking. Often, their attempts to bolster the tattered theoretical status quo bring them back to Winston Churchill’s claim that “democracy is the worst form of government except all those others that have been tried from time to time.” But that is a distinctly un-idealistic defense of democracy - and no defense at all of the folk theory of democracy.
We can do better than Churchill. Aristotle suggested that the different forms of government consisted of monarchy, aristocracy or democracy and he suggested mixed systems of government seemed to have the happiest results. The phrase “checks and balances” didn’t exist till 1748, but many commentators have noted that mixed systems do allow certain guardrails to be in place. That suggests another way to analyze government systems: how much to they allow for guard rails? By definition, a dictatorship does not have guard rails. An aristocracy has only limited guard rails (the Magna Carta) and mostly only for the benefit of the wealthy. While it is often noted that democracy can amount to a “tyranny of the majority” is allows for more extensive guardrails than any other system. It’s possible we should have a different word for democracies with guard rails:
Demofraktis, “people” and “fence.”
If voters are stupid then the benefits of democracy do not come from the voters. But the benefits of democracy are well known and well documented. Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for pointing out that democracies do not suffer famines. If the voters are not responsible for the benefits of democracy, then we need to look elsewhere to find where those benefits come from. It is possible that the benefits come from how amenable democracy is to checks and balances.
Why believe that the voters understand the issues when all the evidence shows that they do not?
The idealists are an odd group. Some hopeful dream persists that there exists some group that is “the people” whose will should be the true guide for policy. In that view, the political process is distorted by business interests, racial groups, ethnic groups, religious groups, military and nationalist groups, but if you could set all of that aside you would get at the true will of the people.
No doubt there are some true needs of the people – we can see this over the long-term. When people brag about the best aspects of their society, what are they bragging about? Many of these happy features of society are unpopular at first, and only later become something that people brag about. For instance, large scale infrastructure: people don’t like paying for it, but then they enjoy the increased prosperity for the next 50 years. No one is willing to fight to death to build a library, but then, once it’s built, families with children will brag to other families “Our neighborhood has a really great library, the kids love it.”
The idealists are an odd group. They make a mistake that in some ways reminds me of people who are addicted to porn: the odd obsession with nakedness as the way to get the thing that is wanted. The idealists who seem most invested in the folk theory of democracy seem to feel that if only one could strip away all the annoying procedures and parties, the apparatus of government and paraphernalia of campaigns, all the raiment of a political system, then you would get the naked truth of the people’s will. If representative democracy disappoints, then surely direct referendum's will work better. When referendum's disappoint, then perhaps we should give up on large-scale complex civilization and go back to living in small, decentralized collectives, because then it will be possible to get the naked truth of the people’s will
But life in small, decentralized collectives also has some difficulties, please see my comments about Diane Leafe Christian’s very good book “Creating A Life Together: Practical Tools To Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities.”
Is it possible to get the naked truth of the people’s will?
Is it possible to get the naked truth of the people’s will? As we might say of most porn, we should consider the opposite strategy: maybe raiment is sexy. Maybe certain structures are enabling, rather than limiting. Maybe a commitment to a complex process is like therapy, it is slow and takes work because discovering the hidden truths is sometimes painful and so needs to be done with care.
If you say you want responsive government, Achen and Bartels might ask, “Responsive to what? The voters themselves don’t know what they want.”
The evidence is simply overwhelming that voters don’t know much about most political issues. And yet, again, over the course of 20 or 30 years, there will be outcomes that the public is proud of, and other outcomes that the public is angry about. It does not matter if the public is able to form an intellectual connection between a policy 20 years ago and a result that exists now, what does matter is that the public will be happy about some things, and unhappy about other things, and these things will have evolved over several decades, because of specific policies that specific political factions were able to push through.
This does suggest a strategy for responsive government that is exactly the opposite of what the idealist of the democraticfolk theory seem to believe: a trust in the long-term.
We might reasonably say that the current majority is always stupid and angry and irrational, but we can design a system such that the long-term majority is often wise and clever and logical. The emergence of wisdom from ignorant voters is not such a challenge, it’s the kind of thing that data scientists do every day, trying to find a useful signal amid a great deal of noise.
Build a structure, don’t advocate for a policy.
That’s the implication. If you’d like to see the triumph of progressive politics, don’t waste time advocating for progressive policies. Rather, spend your time advocating for a structure from which progressive policies would occur naturally, and without effort.
Some of my ideas here are shaped by my experience with WPQuestions.com. I created the web site in 2009 and ran it till 2016. It was a site where people could offer a cash prize to ask questions about WordPress, then experts would compete to provide an answer. I thought perhaps this kind of “micro-consulting” site might be a major movement, and perhaps I would eventually open hundreds of such sites, each focused on some narrow topic. But quickly it became clear that the site would be popular, in a small way, with the people who built WordPress websites, but it would never become a big business. In fact, the site never made a profit, at best it simply broke even. I ran it for 7 years because it became an important part of the WordPress community and owning such a site was useful to me. But it quickly became clear that I could not waste time actually deciding issues that came up on the site, such as when a question was unanswered and the asker wanted a refund. I had to turn over the management of the site to the people on the site. And I did that by enabling increasingly complex forms of voting. For instance, when I first created the site, the person asking the question was allowed to award the prize to whoever offered the best answer. But this didn’t work well. Sometimes the asker never bothered to award the prize, and sometimes they did so unthinkingly, giving the money to someone who had said something stupid and incorrect. So I had to let the experts themselves vote on how the money was distributed. The experts were surprisingly responsible about this. They were not allowed to vote money to themselves, so they had to vote money to the other experts, and then they expected the other experts to vote them money, when they deserved it. This was a classic variation of Prisoner’s Dilemma, where the prisoners learn to treat each other with respect because otherwise the other prisoners can retaliate. An especially difficult issue was figuring out how to create a system of voting around refunds, since the experts never wanted to see money leave the site.
Every problem can be solved by some new system of voting.
That was the lesson that I learned. Over 7 years, the systems of voting got more and more complex, and we tackled more and more problems on the site. But every issue could be resolved with some system of voting.
Crucially, people who signed up for the site could not initially vote. It was nothing like a pure democracy. It was a system of voting that empowered those who had proven a certain loyalty to the community through their work. It was very “demodexio” – a site that empowered those who had proven their commitment and skill. This was the key that enabled everything else.
My current optimism about democracy was shaped by the years I ran that website. Whatever problems democracy faces, those problems can be fixed by adding more structure to the system of voting that our country uses. But the issue is always one of structure, not policy. Structure produces policy. The USA is typically a center-right nation because it has a structure of voting that produces center-right policy. If a popular policy is defeated year after year, decade after decade, it is time to go back to the place where policy is manufactured: one has to focus on changes to the structure. Some structures will simply never allow the enactment of certain policies, so if you favor those policies, it is pointless to advocate for those policies till after you have changed the structure. In the USA, people sometimes understand this point when they complain that the Senate is structurally designed to be a reactionary body that over-represents the rural states. But the issue of structure goes far beyond the Senate.