The Proof is in the Polling

Back when the atrocities of January 6 were fresh in our minds, I wrote a piece called "Who Cares About Democracy?" in which I opined that the answer is "Almost nobody."

I have lately seen a study coming out of Yale by Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik that provides hard data to support that claim. Here are five conclusions that they draw from their excellent study, "Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization and the Robustness of Democracy in the United States" (American Political Science Review, 2020):

1. Americans value democracy, but not much: A candidate who considers adopting an undemocratic position can expect to be punished by losing only about 11.7% of
his overall vote share. When we restrict attention to candidate-choice scenarios with combinations of partisanship and policies that we typically see in real-world elections, this punishment drops to 3.5%.

2. Support for democracy is highly elastic: When the price of voting for a more democratic candidate is that candidate’s greater distance from the voter in terms of her preferred policies, even the most centrist voters are willing to tolerate at most a 10–15% increase in such a distance.

3. Centrists are a pro-democratic force: “Centrist” voters who see small policy differences between candidates punish undemocratic behavior at four times the rate of “extremist” voters who strongly favor one of the candidates.

4. Most voters are partisans first and democrats only second: Only about 13.1% of our respondents are willing to defect from a co-partisan candidate for violating
democratic principles when the price of doing so is voting against their own party. Only independents and partisan “leaners” support more democratic candidates
enough to defeat undemocratic ones regardless of their partisan affiliation.

5. Supporters of both parties employ a partisan “double standard”: Respondents who identify as Republican are more willing to punish undemocratic behavior by Democratic Party than Republican Party candidates and vice versa. These effects are about equal among both Democrat and Republican respondents.

****

The moral is, either exalt democracy or get used to living without much more than a shred of it.

Even a Powerful Majoritarianism Cannot be Tyrannous If It is Truly Democratic

In my humble opinion, there is WAY too much talk about "the tyranny of the majority." What the majority has long been, in the U.S. anyhow, is not tyrannous but feeble. Nevertheless, there is a deep-set fear of violent hordes here, and our Constitution is befouled with a bunch of unnecessary separations of power, a bicameral legislature, an Electoral College, and assorted other enfeebling provisions. The reasons that stuff is in there, of course, and the arguments for retaining all it, center around fear: fear of a "mobocracy," fear of armed brown shirts, fear of sans-culottes, fear of Bolshevism. 

Of course, all of those items are quite sensibly feared. (Think of January 6th for example!) But what is missed by the fearful defenders of our cowering Constitution is that none of those groups, events, or "isms" had very much to do with democracy, even with democracy of the most radical kind. That's what my new paper, "Why Radical Democracy is Inconsistent with 'Mob Rule'" is about. 

It has just come out in the new issue of The Romanian Journal of Society and Politics and is available for free download here.

Abizadeh on Majoritarianism

Majoritarianism seems pretty intuitive: when there is a disagreement, the faction with the most members should win. Why? Because every person’s view should be treated equally. It can’t be denied that there are objections to this very simple intuition. One popular one comes from a position of epistocracy. Epistocrats argue that if some people’s views are “more intelligent,” perhaps resulting from superior evidence, or are considered more likely to be true for any other reason, their votes should be worth more. Another criticism may result from a concern for “persistent minorities.” Here, the problem is that some “sticky group,” say Basque or Canadienne separatists, may be faced with the problem that their advocacy always fails--election after election. They’re in a minority--and not just any sort of minority, but one that almost seems to define them--and may always be so. This seems to some observers to be terribly unfair. These critiques may conclude with the theory that the relevant minority--the “smart people” or the members of the non-dominant culture--ought not to have to obey the majority. After all, the majority is either likely to be wrong (because stupid)* or certain to be oppressive (because dismissive of repeated dissents).

One traditional manner of attempting to maintain some level of majoritarianism in the face of such criticisms is the use of federalism. The supporter of fairly autonomous subdivisions can try to assuage the epistocrat by pointing out that the locals are much more likely to know precisely what is going on than (even the arguably smarter) folks who form their opinions from a considerable distance. And the defenders of separatism may be satisfied if they are given their own political subdivisions where, if not all, at least a considerable portion of their public policy may be developed without outside interference from groups with persistently different outlooks.

The extent to which federalization is anti-democratic is controversial, partly because both the boundary lines of the subdivisions and the areas of policy that are to be free from “outside interference” may be, to a great extent, arbitrary and thus, subject to intense disagreement. Furthermore, it may be doubted whether the locals really do know more about what they’re doing than outside experts, and the creation of, e.g., a French Canadienne region in Ontario would quite likely create a new “minority”: the English-speaking folk within the new district.

These are long-standing, probably intractable issues, and I certainly will not try to make any headway with them here. My interest today is rather in a recently published paper according to which democracy doesn’t require majority rule in the first place, and which concludes that federalism, rather than producing any deficit in democracy, is a democracy enhancer not in spite of its anti-majoritarian aspects, but because of them. For Arash Abizadeh, democratic procedures must be untethered from majoritarianism because it was a mistake to ever closely associate the two concepts in the first place.

Abizadeh begins his discussion by noting what he and others have taken to be the characteristics of majoritarianism that make it uniquely appropriate--even definatory--of democracy. First, there is the (a priori, not “real world”) equiprobability of each voter’s decision being the action that changes the election result. It also makes voter determinations (again a priori) independent of the determinations of all other voters. In addition, majoritarianism provides anonymity. which is the property that ensures that swapping the same number of yea votes or nay votes between any groups of voters cannot change the outcome. Finally, majority rule supplies neutrality, a property that requires that the decision rule itself is perfectly indifferent to what is being voted on.

Abizadeh does not deny that majority rule has any of these essential-to-democracy characteristics, but he suggests that they cannot be sufficient, since other decision rules, like choosing winners through various sorts of lotteries seem to have them too. Certainly, a selection rule having all the properties of neutrality, independence, anonymity and equiprobability may not provide democracy. That’s because democratic decision-making is essentially a method that allows some group to get what they want. That is, no selection rule that is not essentially a voting rule can provide democracy. For in random selection procedures, only one person--or even nobody at all!--may get to indicate her preferences. Abizadeh recognizes this additional constraint on democracy-providing properties when he points to the importance of political agency. He notes that while both dictatorships and lotteries may give each voter an equal amount of agency (or power), majority rule provides the maximum possible a priori voting power to each potential voter.

But in Abizadeh’s view there’s a problem in thinking that equal, maximal (a priori) democratic agency is sufficient for democracy. This can be seen, he thinks, when one considers that representative government itself seems to be inconsistent with the fair distribution of voter power. He writes, “those who defend a majoritarian conception of democracy by appeal to political equality have no leg to stand on once they move from direct to representative democracy.” On his view, with the introduction of representative government (a “two-tier procedure”) majority rule is fatally compromised, because when voters are not involved in the final selection of appointees or policies, “maximizing overall a priori voting power will often sharply clash with equalizing a priori voting power.” That is the sum and substance of what Abizadeh calls his “internal critique,” which, he believes, “reveals the majoritarian conception of democracy to be incoherent.”

This is a very serious charge, so let's look at this argument that majoritarianism is self-contradictory more closely. I believe it’s quite correct that the use of representative government is not inherent to democracy, which may be either direct or representative. There are oft-discussed merits and problems associated with both types, but each can be democratic so long as equally-treated group members are given the opportunity to indicate what they want, and their voices are accurately aggregated and acted upon. Whatever the problems of representative government, however, most of the well-known difficulties associated with representation and delegation are entirely separate from the problems that “two-tier” elections have been shown to create for majority rule. The latter specifically involve such atrocities as the U.S. Electoral College, in which the existence of widely different state populations do clearly de-democratize Presidential elections (just as, of course, the institution of the EC was intended to do). The point is that these specific voting-for-elector problems, which also come up in university appointments, are not solved by federalization: they are actually caused by the devolution of the electorate into separate voting blocs--something that is, of course, required by federalism. That is, as considerable literature on this matter has demonstrated, there is no majority deficit problem with two-tier voting so long as there are no subsidiary units of voters doing the selecting of the ultimate electors. Thus, majority rule is not undone by representation in this context, but by federalism—or at least by the creation of political subdivisions. While  separation of some sub-group into a new country might cure this defect--so long as the new country has no voting subdivisions--so could an absolutely unitary government without the creation of the new polity.

I make here no argument against federalism or other forms of devolution, and I don’t mean to suggest that there are no difficult puzzles produced as soon as a group begins to include appointments or policymaking by delegates who are supposed to be representative of the general electorate in some manner or other. Examples of such problems were recently brought to light by two cases in the U.S. Supreme Court involving so-called “faithless electors”--and have come up in many other contexts involving corruption, dereliction of duty, incompetence, etc. since the days of Plato. But the particular problem of interest here--that of an increase in majority deficit connected with two-tier voting--is actually created by the partitioning of voters into subsidiary units, and (if there were no other relevant considerations, which, of course, there are) could be undone by dissolution of the units and reabsorption of voters into a unitary electorate. In a word, no sub-units, no majority deficits. And there is nothing about the concepts either of majoritarianism or representation from which the devolution of voting segments may be inferred.

So much for Abizadeh’s “internal incoherence” critique. The author moves on from there to what he takes to be the obvious, real-world deficiencies of majoritarianism. These involve, first and foremost, the above-mentioned difficulties associated with persistent minorities. On these matters he is much more convincing...but also much less original. In a (to my mind unnecessarily complicated manner), he argues that certain persistent minorities--those which are likely to have significantly less economic power than the dominant majority--have been dealt hands, indeed hands after hands after hands, that seem on their face to be coming from stacked decks. Abizadeh points out that the political views of the members of such minorities should be expected to be closely correlated: this generally results in a regular struggle by group members to get a single one of their programs implemented. Abizadeh suggests that the solution to such problems involves a recognition of the power in numbers, i.e., facing up to the fact that democracy is largely a matter of group dynamics in which individual choices ought not to be aggregated in any manner that entirely abstracts votes from their relevant surroundings and their implications for a posteriori voting power. Where there is no such recognition, or it is not appropriately dealt with by federalization, Abizadeh believes that members of these groups may be justified in ignoring majority edicts. He may well be right, but it should be clear that such actions/resistance need not be considered to reflect a greater appreciation for democracy. I believe, on the contrary, that what they would indicate is that members of such sub-groups have concluded that democracy does not offer solutions to many of their intractable troubles.

What I think Abizadeh misses here is that democratic procedures should never have been thought to have made those sorts of promises in the first place. Democracy cannot not prevent indifference to minorities, and is even consistent with certain types of cruelty to them. This can (and, in a sense, should) happen wherever a majority is indifferent or cruel. Abizadeh seems determined to make democracy consistent with his views of fairness and decency—or at least with some sort of equality of a posteriori calculation of voting power. But the goal of democracy is neither fairness nor decency of that kind, but simply self-government. It is neither more nor less than the way in which the people in some group (i.e., the majority) can get what they want. It must indeed prevent certain types of discrimination, provide equal protection to each person, and must even lend helping hands to ensure that each group member is provided with a broad array of enforceable political rights. This understanding of authentic democracy thus has those features that Abizadeh associates with what he calls “thick majoritarianism,” But, no matter how thick, democracy should not be thought to ensure a kind or gentle polity by guaranteeing the a posteriori equality of individual voter agency—even if it could.

Of course, everyone is free to exalt lovely goals other than democracy, just as Abizadeh does in this article. Certainly, there is no disgrace in making generosity or fair distribution of wealth or appreciation for indigenous cultures one’s summum bonum: it may even display great virtue. What no one should do, however, is try to bend the concept of democracy in an attempt to show that we can be good small “d” democrats even when we are actually looking hither and yon for ways to prevent the people from getting what they want.

*I spend a good deal of space on refuting epistocratic notions of democracy in my book.

My Hornbook Review of Mary Anne Franks' Constitutional Critique

 

The new review of mine that has popped up at 3:16 AM is of Mary Anne Franks' ferocious attack on white male supremacy, and its alleged support by not only gun groups like the NRA but free speech advocates like the ACLU. It's a fun-to-read polemic.

Franks is right about the cult and the disgustingness of the current GOP, but I think she misses constitutional flaws that can't be found in the First and Second Amendments. She also puts too much faith in the Declaration of Independence and the Fourteenth Amendment. (That's a bit cultish too, IMO.) 

Take a look! 

The Third Chapter of My Hornbook of Democracy Book Reviews

 

My review of Adam Jentleson's new book on the evils of the U.S. Senate, its leaders, and, in particular, its Filibuster is now up at 3:16 AM. It can be found here

The Second Chapter of My Hornbook of Democracy Book Reviews is on Constitutional Idolatry

 

My review of Brian Christopher Jones' 2020 book on constitutional idolatry https://www.3-16am.co.uk/.../2-brian-christopher-jones... has just been published as the second chapter of my Hornbook of Democracy Book Reviews at 3:16 AM: Chapter 2.

A Hornbook of Democracy Book Reviews

 

Richard Marshall has generously offered me a place to review books on democratic theory at his 3:16 AM site. My first review, of Lee Drutman's Two-Party Doom Loop is now up. 

https://www.3-16am.co.uk/articles/1-review-of-lee-drutman-s-breaking-the-two-party-doom-loop-the-case-for-multiparty-democracy-in-america?c=a-hornbook-of-democracy-book-reviews

I expect the next three (in some order or other) will be Brian Christopher Jones' Constitutional Idolatry and Democracy, Yascha Mounk's The People vs. Democracy, and the forthcoming  Huemer/Layman "debate book" on whether government authority is an illusion. And, while it's not strictly a book on democracy, I'm thinking I might not be able to resist writing something on Peter Graham's Subjective vs. Objective Moral Wrongness.

Keep an eye out!

Can Non-partisan Electoral Systems Produce Coherent Policies that are Responsive to the Electorate?

In my book I take the position that a bipartite voting system is necessary to get a good sense of what the people in any group want. And I offer up something like the Mixed-Member Proportional Representation system used in New Zealand and elsewhere. It is a bit different from MMP, however, since I specifically call for single-member elections using Approval Voting and proportional representation using the Single Non-Transferable VOTE (SNTV). I don’t discuss to what extent (if any) elections utilizing my proposals should be partisan or non-partisan, however, and to the extent that strong parties are making exclusive lists of candidates in the PR elections, SNTV voting--where everyone votes for one favorite candidate--becomes equivalent to an open party list system in which the parties set forth the only candidates that anyone may vote for. I am agnostic on this matter, but have been thinking about it quite a bit lately. I therefore put these musings—which are a bit out of my wheelhouse-- on this blog with the hope that those with more knowledge in this area may comment and enlighten me.

 Why should anybody think that parties are important in the first place? What value can they add? In his Why Parties: A Second Look (2012) John H. Aldrich writes,

 

“Parties are intermediaries that connect the public and the government. Parties also aggregate these diverse interests into a relatively cohesive, if typically compromise, platform, and they articulate these varied interests by representing them in government. The result, in this view, is that partis parlay those compromise positions into policy outcomes, and so they—a ruling if nonhomogeneous and shifting government majority—can be held accountable to the public in subsequent elections. The diversity of actors in the party lead to an equally diverse set of party arrangements….These diverse structures make possible the key concepts of the party in this view: interest articulation and aggregation and electoral accountability. 

 

This idea is fleshed out a bit in the paper “A Theory of Political Parties: Groups, Policy Demands and Nominations in American Politics” (2012), by Kathleen Bawn, et al. The authors there consider a society in which there are various interests such as those who want to protect local wool production, those who want to spend money on school buildings and teachers, those who want to enforce blue laws, and several other groups—including some that coalesce (like of low-taxers, consumer groups or bar owners) specifically to defeat the other groups. Then the authors try to make the case that without deal-making between these interest groups, nothing like a coherent public policy is likely to result. Obviously, their little society greatly simplifies the real world. I believe, however, that it is still too complex to fathom. In this entry, I will try to provide an even simpler scenario and attach a level of quantitative support to each interest in order to see whether it’s really the case that every sort of voting scheme requires a fairly robust party system in order for a coherent policy that is responsive to the desires of the voting public to be produced.

 

Assumptions:

The jurisdiction has a population of 1,000,000 and has three seats for representatives.

500,000 are generally uninterested in matters of public policy or “politics.” The remaining 500,000 do have first priorities they want their representatives to focus on and may also have second priorities, but no one has any public matters they care about, beyond a second priority.

105,000 are Pro-Choice (These care most about a woman's right to have an abortion without interference)

100,000 are Protectionists (These care most about putting tariffs on goods coming from outside this jurisdiction)

100,000 are Laborites (These care most about union rights and raising minimum wages)

75,000 are Anti-Protectionists (These care most about preventing tariffs)

75,000 are Anti-Laborites (These care most about stopping unions and preventing minimum wage hikes)

45,000 are Anti-choice (These care most about the right to life of unborn prenates)

Of the 105,000 Pro-choice Advocates:

21,000 are secondarily pro-protection

21,000 are secondarily anti-protection 

21,000 are secondarily pro-labor

21,000 are secondarily anti-labor

21,000 have no secondary public interest

Of the 100,000 Protectionists:

20,000 are secondarily pro-labor 

20,000 are secondarily anti-labor 

20,000 are secondarily pro-choice 

20,000 are secondarily anti-choice 

20,000 have no secondary public interest

Of the 100,000 Laborites:

20,000 are secondarily pro-protection 

20,000 are secondarily anti-protection 

20,000 are secondarily pro-choice 

20,000 are secondarily anti-choice 

20,000 have no secondary public interest

Of the 75,000 Anti-Protectionists:

25,000 are secondarily anti-labor 

25,000 are secondarily pro-labor 

10,000 are secondarily pro-choice 

10,000 are secondarily anti-choice 

5,000 have no secondary public interest

Of the 75,000 Anti-Laborites

25,000 are secondarily anti-protection 

25,000 are secondarily pro-protection 

10,000 are secondarily pro-choice 

10,000 are secondarily anti-choice 

5,000 have no secondary public interest

Of the 45,000 Anti-Choice Advocates:

10,000 are secondarily pro-protection 

10,000 are secondarily anti-protection 

10,000 are secondarily pro-labor 

10,000 are secondarily anti-labor 

5,000 have no secondary public interest

 

************************************************************************************

 

Let us start by assuming that the electorate will vote for all and only those candidates who back what is most important to them (this assumption will be changed below). If the three candidates for the three seats in this imaginary district are to be elected via a system that both (i) allows voters to vote for as many candidates as they like, and (ii) gives seats to the three candidates receiving the most votes, then Pro-choicers (with their 105,000 backers will win all the seats. If electors may vote for no more than three candidates, the Pro-choicers will be certain to win all three seats only if they put up no more than three candidates. Obviously, one way of assuring that result in an election of this type is for the pro-choice advocates to organize a party with the power to determine which candidates with its priorities may pull papers. If those with other first priorities understand the situation, they may try to arrange a merger with any pro-choice party that forms, in order to pick up one seat by a member with a different first priority who favors choice as a second priority, or to at least make sure that at least two of the seats are taken by candidates who share their views as a second priority.

 

In a system where voters may pick only one favorite (with the top three vote-getters winning seats), it will again be difficult without the intervention of strong parties to ensure either the victory of more than one representative with any particular first priority, or even the victory of more than one representative having either a first or second priority of any one (or two) particular interests. Securing such results would seem to require the intervention of entities making possibly quite complicated deals involving both what members may and may not publicly support and who will be allowed to run for office.

 

What happens if we vary our assumption requiring that each member of the electorate will vote for all and only those candidates who back what is most important to her by assuming instead that each elector will vote for all the candidates of whom she minimally approves. Now, everyone will vote for all candidates espousing EITHER their first or second priority. Would we still need parties? Given this changed assumption, if electors may vote for as many candidates as they want, and everyone who is interested in politics goes to the polls, we can expect the following results: 1 Pro-choice winner, 1 Laborite winner, and 1 Protectionist winner. So long as each interest group has at least one candidate in the race sharing its first priority, it won’t matter how many additional candidates having that first priority also run. For simplicity then, let us just assume that each of the groups listed above has only one candidate with that first priority on the ballot.

 

Approval Election Results

The Pro-choice candidate will receive 105K + 20K + 20K +10K + 10K + 165,000 votes

The Protectionist candidate will receive 100K + 21K + 20K +25K + 10K = 176,000 votes

The Laborite candidate will receive 100K + 21K + 20K + 25K + 10K = 176,000 votes

The Anti-Protectionist candidate will receive 75K + 21K + 20K + 25K + 10K = 151,000 votes

The Anti-Laborite candidate will receive 75K + 21K + 20K +25K + 10K = 151,000 votes

The Anti-Choice candidate will receive 45K + 20K + 20K + 10K + 10K = 105,000 votes

 

Will we therefore have a government that enacts Pro-choice, Protectionist, Laborite policies? Not necessarily. In spite of the first priorities of these three candidates, we cannot assume that the policies created by the three representatives will end up being Pro-choice, Protectionist, and Laborite. Why not? Without party intervention, the second priorities of the winners will be randomly distributed, so we cannot simply assume that, e.g., the Pro-choice winner will be amenable to labor or protection proposals. Similarly, we cannot simply assume that the Protectionist representative will be pro-choice or pro-labor. Thus, if the three-member legislative/executive representatives require a majority to do anything, they may be unable to go forward on any front. Alternatively, one (or two) of the voter-supported positions may move forward…but there may be no way to tell which one(s) ex ante. Perhaps detailed polling and interviews with all the candidates would be helpful here, but it seems they'd be so only if these candidates are completely forthcoming—and it’s not clear what their interest would be in getting into secondary matters if they don’t have to, since such disclosures may hurt their electoral chances.

 

This quite simple scenario seems to me to suggest that with no pre-election coordination, it may well occur that there will be no movement on any issue post-election. But I do not know how or whether the coordination required for program enactments can occur absent the construction of parties and the subsequent presentation of party candidates. Deal-making of the required sort would seem quite difficult to obtain in any setting in which interest groups--parties--are not important players. It thus seems to me that if one believes (as I do) that democratic governments must be authentically responsive to the sort of electorate imagined in this example, a relatively strong party system may be required.

 

I'm not sure about this, though. And, again, I hope those with more experience in this field will comment and correct me where they believe I need it!

How a Procedural Democrat Can Respond to Critics of "Responsiveness"

 

In my book, I argue that, as it is intrinsically good for an individual to get what she or he wants, so it is also good for a group. And, as I take democracy to be, at root, a political system that is designed to fairly, accurately, and frequently determine what the people within it want and then attempts to deliver it to them, I hold that obtaining a democracy is also intrinsically good. 

There is no shortage of investigators,* however, who do not accept one or both of the following claims:

1. Democracies are best evaluated by their responsiveness to (how closely they reflect) the "will of the people."
2. Responsiveness is measurable in some universally approved, satisfactory way. 

That is, while it may be thought even by someone who agrees that  weighing responsiveness to the desires of the electorate is a sensible way to determine how democratic a system is, there's no good way to do it. Not only are there deep divisions about what sort of voting methods would accomplish this mirroring, it is also insisted that it would be impossible for elections to do anything like that, even if they could be made perfect. 

So, other measures have been considered instead. Perhaps the key to being a good democracy is thought to be how many people vote, or how well the poorest cohort is doing, or how generally peaceful and prosperous the place is, or how high the level of "workers' rights" is. Whatever evaluative measures are chosen, those are pushed instead of responsiveness, either as a way to determine how democratic a place is or as a substitute, because they are thought to matter more than any supposed "level of democracy" ever could. In addition, the critics may demand that more focus be placed on the "getting" and less on the "wanting." For they may point out that people may not only disagree on whether some implementation is really what they have asked for, but can also change their minds at any point subsequent to an election. 

These issues are discussed at some length in my book, but it may be well to take a minute to summarize some reasonable responses to the responsiveness critic here. To simplify, let's not quibble about what should be meant when one uses the term "democracy," but rather simply agree that at the very least it has to require something like the majority "getting what it wants." Of course, if I make that simplifying move, I will have to allow that democracy might not "really" be such a good thing for the people said to be "enjoying" it. There's a trade-off that one must be willing to make here--where no analysis of well-being is provided. In my book, while I accept a definition of "democracy" that involves responsiveness, I also try to show through an analysis of what it means for persons or groups to be well-off, how improvements in group well-being are essentially connected with increases in democracy. 

To answer objection 2 above, it is necessary to have a theory of what votes are and what can make elections the best way to determine what groups want. So, I also attempt that in the book, and I will not try to replicate those arguments here. There is more. To move forward here we will also have to suppose that we've reached some sort of basic agreement on how to make appropriate assessments of what an electorate wants at any given time: that is, we must be all set with the voting rules, the frequency of elections, ease of ballot entry, campaign finance--all the procedural items. (I well understand that all of those matters are controversial!) 

One other thing we'll have to do to make any progress is settle on the fact that in any modern state we'll have to be talking about a representative system, not any sort of direct free-for-all. Only the smallest "city-states" can actually be governed directly, although levels of citizen participation can certainly vary a great deal in representative systems. Finally, if what we've stipulated to so far is to make any sense at all, it must be understood that some sort of rule of law is required. There's no point in saying that voting must be like this or that or that representation must have certain characteristics unless there are at least some rules that simply must be followed. And that in turn requires some area where final, unappealable judicial or other review cannot be undone--even by large majorities. 

So, that is the list of stipulation items that I am forced to request here, and in this blog entry I'll give no additional defense of any of them. I'm afraid, however, that none of this will have been to any avail. For this is the point at which I'd expect the critic of responsiveness to reply, "All these stipulations will do you no good whatever. You won't be able to gauge whether a polity is producing what is wanted because of the huge number of unclarities and ambiguities surrounding your attempt--even given the items you've asked for here. To give just one problem, you insist both that in a democratic regime the electorate may not be against majoritarianism and that, on the contrary they may not oppose a principle that majorities should be able to get whatever they want. How can that not be contradictory? Again, maybe the people want secure-from-majorities protection of various basic rights that the radical democrat does not allow for, or maybe they lean in the other direction and just want a dictator! Either you support radical majoritarianism or you don't--but you want it both ways! Well, so be it--it's your game to make what rules you want. Even then, it will remain the case that you don't tell us what we should infer when voters change their mind after an election. And you don't say what you take to be an acceptable lag time between an election and a requested result--or even how we can tell whether what some government has provided really does satisfy the electoral demands. Are satisfaction polls supposed to be taken? What is worst of all, of course, is that, on your view an extremely poor, unhappy--indeed miserable!--populace can be said to be getting precisely what they want, even when they all insist that they aren't!"

These sorts of objections are also discussed at some length in my book, but some short answers are that if we disallow initiative petitions and focus on the choosing of representatives, questions about whether election results have really produced what is wanted disappear the moment those victors are sworn in. And the concern that the newly minted officials may not actually do what is wanted of them can be handled by the proceduralist by requiring the easy availability of recall of officials, of referendums for repealing enacted laws, and (in limited areas) a way in which the electorate can reverse judicial decisions. Short, renewable terms for officials and campaign finance reforms will, of course, also be necessary. In this way, if the electorate really doesn't like something that its government is doing or has done, they will be provided easy opportunities to undo it. (Not any impeachment nonsense like we've seen twice with respect to Donald Trump, for example). The authentic democrat will say, in a word, that no other sorts of measurements of success are needed.

To continue, exaltation of (responsive) democracy does not allow for the undoing of democratic principles like majoritarianism or free and fair elections even by the people. That is an ineliminable constraint or there will be no democracy. So, contrary to one of the above complaints, authentic democracy does require certain "rights"--the political ones, like speech, assembly, association, and press. Wanting an anti-democratic regime simply doesn't count here. Furthermore, democracy also requires equal protection of all the people and explicit prohibitions against unfair discrimination. All of these simply follow from our democratic axioms: we can't really know what the people want without these guarantees firmly in place. It should not be suggested that the authentic democrat is entirely opposed to "rights" protections, just because it endorses a smaller list of them than a traditional liberal may. If a group wants additional constraints against "majority tyranny" they can vote for representatives who they believe will enact them, but later majorities must be given the power to effectively disagree and repeal any of them not required by any democratic system: such a power of repeal can be allowed to apply to the additional, non-essential "rights" only. 

It exalted as I think the authentic democrat must exalt it, has never been claimed to be a panacea. All it can be correctly be said to do is get the people what they want (at least in the way of representation)--and for exactly so long as they want it. Getting such procedures in place is the most important first step to authentic democracy. And, in my view, pressing for additional requirements--or for the diminution or elimination of those the democrat advocates--do not involve democracy at all, but other things those theorists happen to endorse--like wealth equality or prosperity. I don't deny that such ends may be lovely--I may want them myself--but they are often not democratic ends. They may, in fact, be extremely anti-democratic. At any rate, I have more modest interests myself when I theorize in this area. I say only that if you provide real democracy, though I may personally want other things too, I will promise to declare: Ich habe genug! 

* For an excellent discussion of these matters, see Andrew Sabl, "The Two Cultures of Democratic Theory: Responsiveness, Democratic Quality and the Empirical Normative Divide," Perspectives on Politics, 2015. A summary of earlier literature on these matters can be found in Andrew Roberts, "The Quality of Democracy," Comparative Politics, 2005.

Interview by Richard Marshall for 3:16 AM

 

I was just honored to be interviewed by "philosopher whisperer" Richard Marshall, late of 3 AM Magazine and now publisher of the independent 3:16 AM. You can read it here: 

Democracy Naturalized from end-times-series

Who cares about democracy?

 

Just mused about the DC riots in this essay for Erraticus: 

Who Cares About Democracy?