Democracy for Realists, Part 7 of 19
"It may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves."
From the book:
Democracy for Realists, 2016
Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government
By Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels
Page 52-53
The Founders of the American political system had a complex understanding of the role of the people in a republican government. As they proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, governments are instituted to secure the “unalienable Rights” of “all men,” and they derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” However, the Founders also believed that direct popular control of government would be dangerous and undesirable. Thus, James Madison famously argued in Federalist Number 10 that the system of representation they proposed would “refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose.”
The judgements and worries of the Founders regarding “the people themselves” seem rather distant in the 21st century. Living in a proudly “democratic” country that has come to unchallenged wealth and international power, most Americans today would be hard-pressed to define the difference between a democracy and a republic, much less to defend a preference for one over the other. For most contemporary Americans, democracy means rule by the people, democracy is unambiguously good, and the only possible cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. The set of ideas that we have referred to as “the folk theory of democracy” is triumphant.
This striking evolution in our popular understanding of democracy reflects – and has probably also contributed to – a long history of periodic frustration with governmental performance. Whenever existing political institutions have seemed to fail, Americans have cast about for “reforms.” But in a political culture dominated by a naive view of popular sovereignty, plausible “reforms” must be constructed and defended as “more democratic” than the existing institutions they are intended to supplant. As Bruce Cain (2015, 7) put it, “The general drift of American political reform has been to try to fix the problems of representative democracy by creating more opportunities for citizens to observe, participate in, and control their government’s actions. There is in American political culture a strong implicit faith in popular sovereignty as the remedy to government corruption, misrepresentation, and incompetence.”
It seems likely that Madison had this correct, that a body elected from the public does a better job of serving the public then the public could ever do for itself. Certainly, the last 245 years would have been pure chaos without a Congress to try to organize the expression of the many conflicting moods of the public. At a minimum, Congress has acted as a shock absorber for some of the more violent mood swings.
Given the success of this original idea, the public might have gone further down that road, dealing with the problems of the system by adding in another legislative layer, to further filter the public’s expression. We can imagine a great many experiments in that direction that might have worked well. As one such experiment, a few days ago I suggested electing 5% of all adults to serve as Notables, a half-way step between the public and Congress.
Electing officials who then elect or appoint higher level officials seems to have good results. This is how the upper chamber of the German government is appointed, and Germany since 1949 has had better than average government, compared to most other Western democracies.
As a software developer who has worked on some data science projects, I understand the idea of trying to draw a signal out of noise, by passing the noise through multiple filters. But I can not think of a situation where I’d want to have 2 filters nullify each other and give me contradictory results. So it feels like an architectural mistake that the USA has both the House of Representatives and also the Senate, and bills need to pass through both houses. But it would make a lot of sense to me if the noise of the public was being filtered through multiple filters consecutively, so it would make sense to me if the public elected the House of Representatives and then the House of Representatives elected the Senate. Again, that two step would have some echos with the German system, although there it is the provincial governments that appoint the upper chamber.
The German upper house is a bit like what the USA Senate was before the passage of the 17th Amendment:
Americans did not directly vote for senators for the first 125 years of the Federal Government. The Constitution, as it was adopted in 1788, stated that senators would be elected by state legislatures. The first proposal to amend the Constitution to elect senators by popular vote was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1826, but the idea did not gain considerable support until the late 19th century when several problems related to Senate elections had become evident. Several state legislatures deadlocked over the election of senators, which led to Senate vacancies lasting months and even years. In other cases, political machines gained control over state legislatures, and the Senators elected with their support were dismissed as puppets. In addition, the Senate was seen as a “millionaire's club” serving powerful private interests. The rise of the People's Party, commonly referred to as the Populist Party, added motivation for making the Senate more directly accountable to the people.
During the 1890s, the House of Representatives passed several resolutions proposing a constitutional amendment for the direct election of senators. Each time, however, the Senate refused to even take a vote. When it seemed unlikely that both houses of Congress would pass legislation proposing an amendment for direct election, many states changed strategies. Article V of the Constitution states that Congress must call a convention for proposing amendments when two-thirds of the state legislatures apply for one. Although the method had never previously been used, many states began sending Congress applications for conventions. As the number of applications neared the two-thirds bar, Congress finally acted.
In 1911, the House of Representatives passed House Joint Resolution 39 proposing a constitutional amendment for direct election of senators. However, it included a “race rider” meant to bar Federal intervention in cases of racial discrimination among voters. A substitute amendment by Senator Joseph L. Bristow (R-KS) removed the “race rider.” The amended Joint Resolution was adopted by the Senate on a close vote in May of 1911. Over a year later, the House accepted the change, and the amendment was sent to the states for ratification. On April 8, 1913, three-quarters of the states had ratified the proposed amendment, and it was officially included as the 17th Amendment.
Given high levels of bribery in the state houses, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, reformers were hoping that direct elections of Senators would lead to a less corrupt system. For some reason, the idea of a Federal anti-corruption agency was not considered (for the reformers of the 1890s, the creation of the FBI was still 50 years in the future).
But we should ask, did the 17th Amendment actually decrease corruption in the state houses, or in the Senate? Is the Senate now better run than it used to be? Did this reform work? It’s possible we would have gotten better results by setting up an anti-corruption bureau. Especially if one is going to go to the trouble of passing an amendment to the Constitution, why not pass an amendment to set up an agency with wide powers to fight corruption? That is, why not address the problem directly?
As Bruce Cain (2015, 7) put it, “The general drift of American political reform has been to try to fix the problems of representative democracy by creating more opportunities for citizens to observe, participate in, and control their government’s actions. There is in American political culture a strong implicit faith in popular sovereignty as the remedy to government corruption, misrepresentation, and incompetence.”
What the idealists and reformers seem to often miss is that going to the public for a vote means that the vote will be decided by whoever can get the most time on television. This should be obvious to a generation raised on marketing and consumerism, but somehow the idealists and reformers hope that this next reform will be different, always different, or they come up with ideas to neutralize the influence of television, for instance, they insist on public funding of candidates, so that every candidate can get some money to buy television advertising. But this doesn’t neutralize the influence of television, it actually cements the importance of television, and it means the issues that have the best chances of winning are highly emotional ones that can be pitched in a 60 second ad. Rile people up and make them angry and they will show up and vote in large numbers — but those are the only issues that work well over television, and an issue has to work well over television if you want the public to vote in large numbers.
Likewise, nowadays, I could repeat the above paragraph, word for word, for advertising on social media, which shares all of the evils of television, plus it adds the new evil of being far less transparent than television. It is easy to track spending on television. It is difficult to track who is spending what on what ads online.
For now, we seem doomed to continue down this road. Deep cultural forces are at work such that idealists and reformers in the USA can only imagine reform as involving the public more directly, to vote on more and more things. This has never worked out the way the idealists and reformers were hoping, and yet each new generation of idealists and reformers hope to continue down the same road, refusing to learn any lessons from the failures of the previous generation of idealists and reformers. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” as Fitzgerald said, in a different context, but it also applies here.