Democracy for Realists, Part 3 of 19
Too much research focuses on the failures of democracy, while not enough research focuses on what changes can fix the problems so as to create a stronger system
From the book:
Democracy for Realists, 2016
Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government
By Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels
Page 23-25
The “Spatial Model” of Voting and Elections
The most systematic and sophisticated instantiation of the populist ideal is the “spatial model” of voting and elections. Although the model has been a mainstay of political science for the past half century, it was originally formulated primarily by economists – perhaps because the intellectual framework of economics meshed naturally with “the liberal view” that “the aim of democracy is to aggregate individual preferences into a collective choice in as fair and efficient a way as possible,” as David Miller (1992, 55) put it. Miller acknowledged in a footnote that some readers might object to the limited focus on “one strand of liberalism – the importance it attaches to individual preferences and their expression”; however, he argued that that strand “prevails in contemporary liberal societies, where democracy is predominantly understood as involving the aggregation of independently formed preferences.” Thus, in effect the goal of the spatial model was to give mathematical form to the folk theory of democracy.
Achen & Bartels spend most of 400 pages proving that the “folk theory” of democracy does not work, but they don’t spend any time explaining what parts of the theory do work. While it is clear that there has never been 51% of the public that is able to understand political issues, the stories that Achen & Bartels tell, and the statistics they quote, seem to suggest that something like 5% to 10% of the population does engage in most of the behaviors suggested by the folk theory, which is to say, some portion of the public follows the news, knows the issues, and remembers what each politician does over the course of many years.
This suggests an easy fix for all of the problems that Achen & Bartels lay out. We simply need another level of representation, some group in-between the public and the legislature. I’m going to call these people the Notables.
Let’s assume we want to elect about 5% of the population to serve as Notables. Sticking with the large districts that currently exist in the USA for the House Of Representatives, with 800,000 people, and 600,000 adults, we’d want to elect 30,000 people to serve as the Notables for that district.
Let’s assume a system where:
1. elections occur every month
2. 1,000 people can be nominated each month
3. every voter gets 50 votes
4. the top 100 vote getting candidates are elected
5. they serve a single term of 25 years
6. they elect the legislature
So that gives 30,000 Notables. These are, presumably, the most politically motivated of citizens, the one’s who tend to engage in the kind of behavior that Achen & Bartels associate with “the folk theory of democracy.”
For all of the hassle of introducing a new layer of representation, there would be some advantages. Right now, political activism is informal and without recognition. In theory, anyone can become a political activist, in reality, only a small handful of citizens ever become politically active. Electing Notables would offer formal recognition for political activism. So far, we’ve never had a moment when as much as 5% of adults participated in political activism, so electing 5% of adults should mean that every adult who is interested in politics could become a Notable. The reality, that a somewhat limited group of adults takes an interest in political affairs, would then become officially recognized. Also, activists would gain a certain official support for being active citizens. This applies to left-wing and right-wing activists, there is no bias here.
Electing 5% of the adult population means that 1 out of every 20 adults will be Notables. That ratio is low enough that every citizen will know multiple Notables, personally. More so, every citizen will have at least one or two close friends serving as Notables. It is possible that such fine-grained representation will increase the legitimacy of the system.
Of course, the Notables themselves are relatively powerless. In the USA, with a population of 330,000,000 people, and an adult population of 240,000,000 the Notables would consist of 12 million people. That’s a large, diffuse group, too large to engage in anything like legislative action. All that we can say is, this is the group that shows interest in public affairs, so people in Congress have to take them much more seriously than they might take some random citizen. More so, this would be the group that elects Congress, so Congresspeople would suddenly be facing an informed electorate, rather than the apolitical and largely ignorant public that makes up the typical 51%.
There are some crucial issues to be addressed about electing such a group of Notables, and whether such a system would be truly representative, or would there be ugly interactions with existing advantages held by the wealthy, or held by those of particular racial groups. Such a large subject deserves its own essay, so I’m going to postpone that discussion till later in this series.
At times, Achen & Bartels suggest that political opinions move from the party to the public, never the other way around. But who is the party? There must be some limited group that makes up the in-group, and it is not clear if this might be 5% of the population or 0.5% of the population. This needs further research, but I suspect the 5% of Notables would not be nearly as passive as the 51% that currently wins elections. A system of Notables means the 51% of adults no longer elects Congresspeople, but rather, it’s 2.51% (half the Notables) that elects Congresspeople. And this smaller, better informed, better motivated group is likely to do a much better job of holding Congresspeople to account.
This bit does suggest further modifications to the electoral system:
Miller acknowledged in a footnote that some readers might object to the limited focus on “one strand of liberalism – the importance it attaches to individual preferences and their expression”
In this metaphor citizens are consuming a political reality, or rather, they are consumers and they buy a political system by spending their vote. It’s not clear that metaphor works at all, but just for a moment, as a thought experiment, let’s go further with it.
What can we do with money? We can buy things with it, or save it and then use it to buy things later. To the limited extent that we might want to apply a “buy a political system with your vote” metaphor to the political system, then we should take it seriously, and we should allow more flexible options for votes. In particular, rather than granting each citizen 50 votes a month, we might say they have 600 votes for the year, which they can spend in any particular month, as they see fit. So an impulsive citizen might spend all 600 votes in January, a lazy voter might forget to vote all year and then spend them in December, a somewhat thoughtful voter might save for the months when they have personal friends who are running for office.
It is interesting that saving votes allows for strategy and therefore rewards voters who are strategic. Some elections will be more important than others — this has been true throughout history and will continue to be true in the future. A strategic voter might save their votes for use in the most important elections, perhaps when certain evil people must be defeated or when certain very good people need extra support.
It’s possible that empowering strategic citizens would cause strategic mindsets to also gain power act the higher levels of government, thus allowing the kinds of strategic leadership who rarely win elections in democracies. Put differently, allowing the most strategic voters to be clever is a fundamentally anti-populist idea, and therefore brings with it the advantages of anti-populism that I’ve discussed elsewhere and will discuss more in the future.
Personally, I think this idea might introduce too much confusion into the voting process, and thereby undermine the legitimacy of the elections. But I do think this kind of brainstorming is what we need to do as we try to imagine the democracy of the future. We need to engage in bold thought experiments, not because every experiment deserves to be tried in real life, but rather because bold thought experiments expand the range of ideas under consideration and might eventually allow us to generate ideas that are both powerful and also pragmatic.
Continuing with the thought experiment:
What else can we do with money? We can spend more money on an item when we really, really want it. If we are at an auction, and we fall in love with a particular sofa, we can bid the high bid on the sofa, at least to the limit of our budget. In other words, no one is forced to pay flat rates for items at an auction. If we take this idea into politics, we can let people cast multiple votes for one candidate. If you know your best friend is going to be a candidate at some point over the next year, you might save your 600 votes and then put them all on your best friend. If you think your best friend is going to make society much better once they are a Notable, you’ll probably want to put some energy into the effort to get them elected.
Again, it would take some research to know how these changes to the voting system would play out, but what seems disappointing is that Achen & Bartels summarize 120 years of economists and philosophers explaining the failures of democracy, and in all that time, very little research has been done regarding how we might fix these problems.
But what is clear is that many of the problems that Achen & Bartels describe exist because voters only get one vote, and are only allowed to vote for one candidate. It’s clear that changing these two facts of our voting systems would fix at least some of the problems that Achen & Bartels describe.
(Someone will likely say that run-off elections, or rank-choice voting, would fix some of those problems. First of all, to be clear, rank-choice voting is simply a way of saving money in regards to having multiple run-off elections. The results of rank-choice voting is exactly the same as having multiple run-off elections, but having multiple run-off elections is expensive, so asking people to list all of their preferences the first time they vote can save tax payers a lot of money. Second of all, even with multiple run-off elections, they end result is still the selection of a single candidate. Later in this series, we will explore the difference between systems that pick one person, versus systems that pick multiple people.)