Lessig's proposals

Lawrence Lessig proposes having the government take the first $50 of a person’s income tax payment, and return it to each individual taxpayer as a voucher to be used to fund political campaigns. The taxpayer would be able to spend this voucher on any candidate he wants, or to spend it on general campaign expenses of the party he identifies with. Each individual would be able to contribute no more than $100 more to any campaign. Your estimate is that this process could potentially generate as much as 6 billion dollars to be distributed to candidates.

This proposal is ingenious, and may even have the effect he and I want, but I have some reservations about it. The first has to do with the issue brought up by the Citizen’s United decision. Is a corporation an individual, a person? If so, as the Citizen’s United decision seems to imply, would the first $50 of a corporation’s tax payment also be returned to the corporation to be used for campaign contributions? Would a corporation also be limited to $100 in additional contributions? This would be an interesting development. If not, how would corporations be treated? Is a constitutional amendment necessary to make sure that a corporation is not a person? There is a separate movement to this effect (see Jeffrey Clements, Corporations are not People).

The second reservation has to do with paying for it. It would involve reducing revenue to the government of potentially 6 billion dollars. That reduction would have to be compensated for by either reducing spending in other areas, or raising taxes to make up for the reduction. Republicans, as they are now, would be attracted to reducing spending, but the Democrats would resist and would want to raise taxes. The measure would thus become just another point of contention between the Republicans and Democrats in their paralyzing war between taxing and spending. The likelihood of getting anything so game changing through the present congress seems vanishingly small. Corporations and the wealthy would fight it strongly. This is not to say that it might not be a good idea, just that it would take a strong external push to get it past the logjam that our government is.

The third reservation is perhaps more philosophical. It has to do with appealing to the government to fix the problems we have with the government. Governments, of course, set the rules for just about everything, including financing campaigns, but to ask them to in addition create an agency to administer a program to provide that financing is a step beyond what seems to be appropriate for a government. Such an agency could lead to a moral hazard problem such as what we have in dealing with large banks, or with the corporate capture of regulatory agencies. Politically also, it is more difficult to create such an agency than it is to merely change the rules for financing campaigns.

Campaign Finance Reform

A friend of mine last week quite adamantly claimed that campaign finance reform is the one overriding issue that we should all focus on, to the exclusion of other issues. For him the goal has to be to take money out of politics. Without that nothing else can be accomplished.

To this I present a syllogism:

Politics, most generally, is the competition for power in government…or business…or love.

Money is power.

Taking money out of politics is an absurdity; it amounts to telling politicians to compete for power without power (money).

Unfortunately it is not just my friend who advocates trying to take money out of politics. Lawrence Lessig has recently written an entire book (Republic, Lost) developing this position. He builds his case on the basis of the notion of dependence corruption. As he defines it, “an institution can be corrupted … when individuals within that institution become dependent upon an influence that distracts them from the intended purpose of the institution. The distracting dependency corrupts the institution.  Lessig, Lawrence (2011-10-05). Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It (p. 15). Hachette Book Group. Kindle Edition.’ Given this definition, it is not hard to demonstrate that congressmen are corrupt. I have reservations about his use of corruption as the basis for his argument that campaign finance reform is necessary, but his actual proposals are what are important. As it turns out, he is not so much arguing that we should remove money from politics as he is arguing that the money for political campaigns should be derived from individuals as part of their payment of taxes, in a program administered by the government.

The problem I have with his proposal is that he treats political parties as no more than labels individuals use to check off where they want their money to go. The candidates become central, thus continuing the push to eliminate parties from any role in the political process. To me this is a complete misunderstanding of the political process.

Party continuity

If as Ware claims, there has been more continuity than discontinuity in the parties since 1820, then perhaps parties should be seen as more of an expression of the basic weakness of our government than as a cause of it. The supposed strength of the parties from about 1820 to about 1900 could be seen as more of an aberration resulting from the use of patronage than as a genuine strength of the parties themselves. If we define parties as institutions that aggregate and rationalize the interests and values of their members and adherents, that provide ideologies by which their members can promote programs and policies, then patronage has to be seen a means to the end of developing and promoting this ideology. On the other hand, if patronage is able to overpower the ideology, as I believe it did with the Jacksonian spoils system, then the function of parties in the operation of government is irretrievably distorted.

Granted that technology has added another dimension to the current dysfunctions, but the basic weakness of parties and of government is not something new. It only strengthens my contention that stronger parties would produce a stronger and more effective and efficient government. Perhaps this is just wishful thinking, but many of the recent changes in the parties can be seen as tentative movements toward becoming stronger, and in this sense are positive. The transition from what we have had for the last two hundred years, and a genuinely national, ideological, programmatic party will be difficult and wrenching, but the result will be a more efficient government.

California primaries

According to Ware, the development of the direct primary as a method for nominating candidates for office was not a revolutionary change, but rather an evolution of a system that relied on patronage to motivate and organize party members to support party candidates. The parties were almost completely decentralized, with the power at the state or even the county level. There was no national party organization through which the local parties were organized and disciplined.

Today there are national party organizations, but they do not operate as institutions that organize and rationalize the local parties. They are not in the position of telling the local parties what the positions of the local candidates should be on national issues. They are rather in the position of supporting whatever positions the local candidates take.

Primary elections took the power of nomination away from the party leaders and gave it to the “people”, supposedly the members of the party, but actually and rather amorphously, to anyone who claimed to be a party member. Ultimately the party was forced into being only an organization that supported whoever was able to get nominated in the primary, irrespective of his/her position relative to the issues of the day.

The ultimate expression of this orientation is the California primary system, where effectively the primary functions as a somewhat redundant preliminary to the general election. Party still are able to nominate candidates for the primary, and how this is done is not specified, but the primary election is a competition among all the candidates from all the parties, with the top two going on to the general election. The primary election is no longer a way of choosing who the nominees of the party are: it is essentially only a preliminary to a runoff election of the two top vote getters. How the parties nominate their candidates for the primary becomes an unspecified process internal to the party. It appears that this has just defeated the purpose of having primary elections.

How this works itself out will be interesting. Meanwhile, there continues to be little national discipline in the parties.

Direct Primaries

I have now read both of Ware’s books, one on political conflict, and the other more specifically on the development of the direct primary as a way to nominate candidates for office. I must say that the depth and breadth of his knowledge is impressive.

In his discussion of the development of the primary system, Ware argues that it did not result from a struggle between the parties and those anti-party Progressives who wanted to weaken the influence of parties in government. His analysis of the history of the period between 1890 and 1910 indicates that in contrast there was little opposition within the parties to the direct primary as a method. It presented itself as a method for rationalizing the process of nomination in the face of increasing pressures from population increases. It was perhaps not the best solution, but it was the easiest to sell to party members and the general population. The role of the anti-party reformers was only secondary to the demands within the parties.

Ware’s analysis is detailed and complex. One would think that if the parties were actually supportive of the use of primaries then perhaps primaries did not weaken the parties, as the anti-party reformers wanted. Ware’s argument is that initially primaries did not weaken the parties: the parties adjusted to the new rules, and went on with their dominance of the political process. Over the long term, however, the effect of primaries, along with the development of TV and other technologies, did weaken the parties, and made elections candidate centered rather than party centered.

Given this history, Ware is not very optimistic about returning to party centered elections. He sees the history of the changes in the election process as more or less inevitable, given the character of the American polity, and short of a revolution, no prospect of development away from the candidate centered elections of the present.

My impression is that Ware is not happy with the current status quo, but as a historian it is not his place to suggest changes going forward. In contrast, I have no such restraints, and am free to suggest ways in which the current weakness of the parties could be remedied. Again, my general recommendation is to give to the parties the exclusive control of the disbursement of campaign funds to the candidates. This would have to be done as a matter of law, since the election process has been made so fully into a legal procedure of the state, and this would be the sticking point, but it is not insurmountable.

More on parties

I have now read Alan Ware’s book on political conflict in America. Ware has spent his life studying political parties, and knows a tremendous amount about them. I am not sure about some of his distinctions by which he frames his discussion, such as between liturgicals vs pietisticals, or between libertarians vs republicans, but he does get down to some of the structural, organizational issues about political parties toward the end, and these are important. As he describes it, the Democratic party created by Van Buren in the 1820s was the first real mass party, and it succeeded because of its organization and its use of patronage. Thus it is incorrect to say that the parties at that time were weak. They were not weak as organizations, but they were weak in the European sense of not having coherent national programs and platforms.

Criticism of the parties will have to be more complete and precise. I am now reading Ware’s book on the development of the direct primary between 1890 and 1915.

Mean while, I have learned that there is a movement advocating a constitutional amendment to the effect that corporations are not, and cannot be treated as persons under the law. This is in reaction to the Citizens United decision by the Supreme  Court that allows corporations, as people, the free speech right to express their opinions and feelings in the form of giving money to PACs supporting candidates. Whether or not this will ever happen, or should happen, it is appropriate to correct the previous tendency of the Supreme Court to treat corporations as people, especially with respect to the 14^th Amendment. This would go a long way toward reducing the freedom of corporations and enhancing the power of governments to regulate corporate behavior.

Citizen's United

I have started reading a recent book by Alan Ware, “Political Conflict in America”. Hopefully it will expand my knowledge of parties, but it will be a difficult read. Meanwhile I just read a book by Thomas Edsall, “The Age of Austerity”. It poses the question of whether we are going to have to get used to the loss of abundance, and the consequent growing ugliness of politics. The Republicans have taken advantage of the politics of scarcity to promote fear and an “us versus them” attitude in politics. They have been successful with this tactic, and the Democrats have not been able to counteract it, but the question is whether this is a contrived position, given the Republicans opposition to raising taxes, or is it a harbinger of a more serious worldwide collapse of credit foreshadowing the end of oil, global warming, and general chaos. If the latter, there is not much anyone can do.

In any case, perhaps the world has been too stable for too long. We seem to be reverting to the world before the great depression and the new deal, where racial discrimination was ignored, and the federal and state governments were not allowed to interfere with business. The Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court, if nothing else, is a sign of the efforts of the Supreme Court to reestablish its role as ultimate arbiter of government actions. The Supreme Court has always taken an activist role in government: the difference is that in the 50s and 60s it ruled about what the government had to do, in a positive way, such as with regard to segregation, reproductive rights, and police procedures, whereas previously it had only been concerned with what the government could not do: enforce individual civil rights, discriminate against businesses, regulate labor relations.

It is time for the government, for congress to stand up to the court, and declare that it, not the court, reflects the will of the people. But if disaster is on the way, as the Republicans claim, perhaps it is too much to ask that we try to improve the way we operate.

Why Parties

I have just finished reading Aldrich’s book, Why Parties?, in which he presents his version of what passes for theorizing about parties in political science. He starts from the assumption that individuals are atoms of self-interested wants and needs. From this position, he reasons, it is necessary to justify why these individuals would get together into a party. He uses the theorizing about collective action, social choice, and utility maximization to justify why basically selfish individuals would go against their own self-interest to form parties. For me all of this theorizing is unnecessary, since I take the urge to associate with others in groups as basic, not needing explanation. Thus much of what Aldrich says in this book misses the goal of explaining how parties operate and function in the larger picture of governing.

Nevertheless, Aldrich does have some things to say about the history and structure of political parties that come through in spite of his superstructure. He divides the history of political parties in the US into three phases: 1. The early non-acknowledged parties of 1790 to 1828, 2. The “mass” parties created by Van Buren, lasting until 1960, and 3. The candidate centered parties since then. I am not sure I agree with this division of the historical record, but it is something to think about. His description of the Jacksonian Democrats and the Whigs is interesting, especially after reading about the 1850 Compromise that effectively destroyed the basis of the alliances of both parties that tried to ignore the issue of slavery.

Aldrich does not follow up on his discussion of the Democrats and the Whigs with a similar discussion of the Democrats and the Republicans after the Civil War, and their implicit agreement to again ignore the continuation of slavery in the south. Aldrich also does not really discuss the role of the professionalization of the federal executive, and the consequent loss of patronage as a tool for the parties to discipline their members. Such loss of patronage places for me the transition from the “mass” party Aldrich describes in the 1910-1930 period, rather than the 1960s. Jacksonian parties were not just “mass” parties, but parties organized in terms of patronage primarily at the state and local levels.

Further, Aldrich does not discuss the role of two world wars and the depression on the structure and organization of the parties, as if these events had no effect on the parties. Another problem I have with Aldrich is that he seems to focus much of his attention of the presidential elections, and when he does discuss parties in congress, he does so almost exclusively in terms of the house, where majority rule is more clearly a major factor. This allows him, though, to largely ignore the interaction between the house and the senate, and between the congress and the executive. These to me are crucial to a real understanding of how the parties function-or do not function-in our government.

In sum, Aldrich provides some useful details of the history of parties, but his orientation prevents him from going beyond the conventional history. His claim that parties are in fact not weak but are actually stronger than they have ever been, seems to me to misunderstand the way in which they may seem to be stronger. To say that parties function in service to the candidates is to admit that they are now subordinate, in a position of weakness, relative to the candidates. This is especially true given the Citizens United decision, which he could not have known about.

I am still in search of a good account of the role and function and history or parties in the US.

The 1850 Compromise

I have been reading, as a slight deviation from reading on democracy and parties, a book on the Compromise of 1850, where supposedly the Civil War was delayed for ten years. The book is The Great American Debate by Fergus Bordewych. I had read about this period in our history before, but this book provides a more detailed look at the events of that time. The book makes it clear that far from delaying the Civil War for another ten years, what the debate did was to galvanize the North into a much more explicit antagonism against the institution of slavery. From the founding to 1850 the effort was to avoid the issue, given the dominance of the South in the federal government, in the presidency and in congress, and it may have been that the moral and economic dimensions of slavery were just not as well recognized. The Compromise of 1850 ended this willful ignorance. It was the end of an era, with the deaths of John Calhoun, the apostle of the virtues of slavery, of Henry Clay, the great compromiser, and of Daniel Webster, the great orator and traitor to his principles. It was the beginning of the career of Jefferson Davis and Stephen Douglas. The only heroes were William Seward, who spoke early of the moral evil of slavery, and Abraham Lincoln, who came only ten years after to make the same argument.

All of the elements I discuss in my book, the dominance of the senate, the ability of the south to use the lack of discipline in the senate to delay proceedings, the changes in demography, the blatant effort of the south to enshrine minority privileges for its institution of slavery, the inability of the north to take a principled stand on the issue, in part because of the south’s control of the senate—all of these things were present then and did not get discussed. These issues continue to plague us today. There is still little discipline in congress, and the minority is able to prevent action. I learned that the first mistake was to give to the south the ability to count every slave as 3/5 of a person, giving them an advantage in the House in terms of representation. This prolonged the dominance of the south, and allowed them to develop the delusion that they were somehow privileged even though they were a minority. Another aspect of the basically undemocratic constitution.

Separating finance from campaigning

I have been talking about doing a study of the role of political parties in America, and I mentioned this to my brother recently. He told me about his experiences working at the local level with politics. He was involved in recruiting candidates for the local city council. At the local level at least for him money did not seem to be much of an issue. The real problem was finding people willing to serve on the council. This got me to thinking about at what level in the process does money become a real problem, and how is the candidate involved. In the case of primary elections, where the candidates are chosen through preliminary elections of candidates, money raised by the candidates is clearly an issue. In this case the potential candidates are actively seeking the position, rather than being recruited by the party. Some of them may in fact be unwelcome to the leaders of the party. Under these circumstances, the money the potential candidate can raise independently of the party may be important in determining whether he becomes a candidate.

If the potential candidates were by law limited to spending only money provided by the political party, and the party were required to allocate money to the potential candidates equally as long as each qualified, through some petitioning process, to be a candidate, then the issue of raising money for candidates in a primary battle would go away. The onus for raising money and allocating it to the candidates would be on the party, not on the individual candidates. This would deprive the candidates of their freedom to act independently of the party through their ability to raise money, but it would relieve them of the burden of raising money. Competition between candidates would shift to their positions on issues and abilities to communicate with voters and manage the campaign.

At the national level, preventing candidates from soliciting funds would make fund raising dinners where the candidate himself appeared illegal. The party as an entity would be able to hold fund raising dinners, but the candidate would not be able to appear. This would perhaps reduce the attraction of the dinner for donors, but it would make it clear that the donations are to the party, not to the candidate, removing the ability of the donor to specifically (and improperly) influence the candidate. PACs would be forced to coordinate with the parties, not the candidates. They could still spend as much as they want, but only on the parties, not the candidates—unless of course, they spend so much money that they in effect take over the party, making it an appendage of the PAC rather than the other way around, as may occur with the Republican party.

Parties and budgeting

With this posting I launch into an area with which I have no first hand experience or expertise. It is the area of budgeting, or more generally the process by which a government raises revenue and allocates it to the programs the government provides to the people. In Britain, as I understand it, the budget is prepared by the executive departments in consultation with the ruling party. There is a special period during which the budget is presented to parliament, but it almost invariably approved, since the ruling party has the majority, and the budget is a high priority item. On approval, the budget, the appropriations, and the associated taxes to pay for the expenditures is set. These are all taken care of in one period. The rest of the time in parliament is taken up with legislating on new programs and policies that I suppose will be paid for in the next budget if they have not already been incorporated into the current budget.

In the US, on the other hand, the process of budgeting, authorizing, and appropriating are separated and chaotic. The House, especially lately, has come up with a budget, and then complains that the president and the senate have not produced a budget. One would think that it is especially the House’s responsibility to produce the budget, since it is responsible in the constitution for raising and appropriating funds, but this has become more and more blurred over our history. It used to be, before we began to have deficits, and needed to raise taxes to pay for them, that the allocation and appropriation of money for the executive departments was carried out by the individual House and Senate committees responsible for the departments, without much coordination between them, since, with a surplus, it was not necessary.

Once coordination became necessary, the question of who would do the coordinating became an issue, and since there were no strong ruling parties, the tendency was for the executive departments to do the coordinating. Congress resisted this, and tried to establish its own independent coordination process, but the result was only that the process became a contest between the executive and the legislative. This contest goes on today, and the process is chaotic. Often there is no budget, appropriations are delayed until the last minute, and then bundled into continuing resolutions that only continue the chaos. The House goes through a process of developing a budget, but it is only a sham, since it does not require that authorizations and appropriations conform to the budget, and usually they don’t.

Clearly the US government is dysfunctional with respect to the budgetary process at least. My contention is that it is so because the parties are not strong enough to force a rationalization of the process. The ruling party in the House has come a long way toward imposing order on the process in the House. If it were only up to the House, we would have a rational, organized, effective process. Unfortunately the House is only one of the parties currently involved, and it is overshadowed by the president and the senate. If the ruling party were stronger it would be able to diminish the power of the president and senate, and establish the proper dominance of the House.

Committees and Parties

Getting away from the discussion of democracy, I have two observations about the US government. The first is that as I understand the British government, their use of committees is quite different from what is done in the US congress. The difference is that they do not use committees to formulate legislation—at least not committees in parliament. Their legislation is formulated within the party, with input from the executive departments. There are of course disagreements and compromises within the party, but these are worked out within an overall agreed on context, and the leader of the party has the final say. By the time the legislation reaches parliament, it is subject only to minor changes in detail, under strict rules of relevance to the issue involved. The opposition party is not able to make any significant changes in the legislation, and thus the majority party’s program is enacted or defeated as is.

Committees in the US congress, in contrast, function to formulate from the beginning the legislation, and input from both parties is allowed in the process of formulation. Although the majority party may have initially written a bill that reflects the party program, in the committee process changes and compromises are made that corrupt and distort the original intent of the bill, and the result of this process is a bill that often does not reflect the majority party program. All of this is done in the name of compromise and cooperation, but the result is to subvert the intent of the majority party, and thereby deprive the majority of its ability to respond clearly to the will of the majority. The recent ACA bill is a good example of this corruption.

I have said all of this before. The point is that the way committees operate in congress is completely up to each house of congress. There is no constitutional mandate that says the committees have to operate in this way. They could operate more like the British committees. Legislation could be more of a party controlled process.

This leads me to the second issue: Political parties in the US are weak and ineffective. Much of this has to do with the presumption that parties are bad, and their influence should be curtailed. The mantra is that we should get money out of politics, and politics out of government. Such a view is ludicrous, but it is promoted by “serious” people, such as Lessig and Ackerman. I do not understand the reasoning behind their arguments. They say that money serves as a way to influence candidates, and such influence is bad. Somehow candidates are supposed to be immune to influence and make decisions only on the basis of objective debate over the issues. There are no such candidates. Every candidate, just as every person, is inevitably influenced by others, and we would not want it to be otherwise.

If there is a problem with money, as opposed to influence, it is that it is allowed to be given to individual candidates. In any other area, such as the stock market or business, such use of money would be clearly illegal, a form of bribery or blackmail. It is clear to me that the problem is one of giving money to individual candidates. This is what should be made illegal. Money is of course necessary for campaigns and party activities, and it has to come from somewhere. This is where the bias against parties has warped the thinking of so many people. They are unable to get their minds around the idea that the parties, as independent organizations, might just be able to eliminate the improper use of money to bribe individuals. If the parties were strong enough to control the allocation of money, and if only the parties were able to give money to candidates, they would serve as a buffer between the sources of money and the candidates who need the money. But no one seems to want to hear this point.

recapitulation

To recapitulate this review of the meaning of democracy: First, democracy must be understood in the context set out by Winters, as a form of government existing in the space provided by oligarchs, who are the ultimate beneficiaries of government organization. Democracy in ancient Athens was a very primitive form of democracy surviving in a space provided by the ruling oligarchs of the day, and in spite of appearances, largely controlled by them. Athenian democracy lasted only for a relatively short period. The model of good government became the Roman Republic, but it was never a democracy, in spite of Machiavelli’s attempt to describe it as such.

It was not until the 1700s that democracy in the form of representative government appeared, although the English government had a tradition of democratic albeit non-representative government long before then. Representative government appeared perhaps first in America, then in France, and then in Britain, although British parliamentary government is the purest example of truly democratic government. Przeworski confirms that the elements of democratic government are that it is made up of representatives of the people, and that decision making is ideally by majority rule. Neither representation nor majority rule are universal. Representation is often constrained and restricted in various ways, and there are often restraints on the simple operation of majority rule, but these are the essential ingredients, and deviations from these ideals are only indications of how much a given government fails to be truly democratic.

Przeworski does not emphasize that the process of representation is important not just in giving the voter a choice of who is to govern, but more importantly it forces the representative to pay attention to the will of the voters, and to shape his policies and programs to conform as much as possible to the will of the people. This more than anything else is what makes representative government responsive to the demos. Przeworski pays unnecessary lip service to the dogma of the separation of powers and the virtue of checks and balances, and he therefore ignores another necessary characteristic of democratic government, namely the effective control of the executive by the legislature.

Absorbing Przeworski

I was gone last week, so this posting is a double.

Incidentally, it is interesting to see that the current Republican nominating process does not seem to have been adversely affected by the elimination of limits on campaign contributions from the rich through superpacs. If anything it seems that Gingrich and Santorum have been able to continue their efforts long beyond what would have been normal without such limits. Whether this is good or bad is a matter of opinion, but it is difficult to argue that debate has been curtailed or distorted. It may have become more negative, but I am not sure that this is because of the superpacs. But this is just my view. For me the issue is not the amount of money, but of how it is distributed—it should be under party control, not the control of individual campaign finance managers.

I am still rereading Przeworski. So far he has discussed democracy, where he seems to be saying that democracy is government decision making by majority rule. This is consistent with my view of the nature of democracy, and admittedly my view may have biased my interpretation of what he is saying. He next covers representation, where he does no more than do an in depth survey of the history and variety of representative governments around the world. He reviews parliamentary and presidential governments without clearly judging which is more democratic. Then he goes on to elections, and it is here that he seems to me to get off track. He discusses elections in terms of median voter theory, and bemoans the fact that political parties may give little choice to the voter because of the constraints of appealing to the median voter. To me this is a narrow and distorting way of looking at elections, even though it is the dominant approach taken in political science. To me he conflates voters voting in an election for representatives with legislators voting on a bill in a legislature. They are two different processes, and it is not clear to me that one can talk about them in the same terms. Median voter theory is just to simplistic to be useful in describing elections. Elections are much more a matter of assembling groups of voters into a majority coalition. Competition between parties is a matter of attracting more and larger groups into the party. The median voter would seem to be irrelevant to this process.

Nevertheless, Przeworski does assert that party government in most developed countries, even when party control changes from one party to another, has been remarkably conservative, in the sense that a change in party control has not resulted in any drastic change in policies. One might dispute how drastic the changes have been between Labor and Conservatives in Britain under Thatcher, and more recently under Cameron, or between Bush and Obama in the US, but perhaps this is only a matter of degree. In any case, Przeworski’s observations are an argument against the idea that democratic governments will be capricious. More later.

Part of the reason I had to reread Przeworski is that he does not organize his material in the way I would have. To me there are three parts to his argument, one on the structure of a democratic government, one on the nature of representative government, and one on the goals or ideals of government. His discussion, however, is divided into separate, non-consecutive chapters. His discussion of the structure of democratic government is in chapters two and six, his discussion of representation is in chapters three and five, and his discussion of the goals of government is in chapters four, on equality, and seven, on liberty. It was thus difficult for me to integrate his discussions into the frame I have developed.

Przeworski does a truly masterful job of reviewing the issues in each of these areas. He has a much more comprehensive grasp of the varieties of governments around the world and through history. I have learned a lot from him, and am humbled by the relative paucity of my knowledge. Perhaps he has no interest or inclination to make judgments about any particular government, such as the US government, in the face of the large variety he surveys, or at least he is very mild and indirect in his judgments, as befits an academic.

Nevertheless, he is dubious about the value of the almost universal efforts to restrain the expression of the will of the majority, in particular the notions of the separation of powers and checks and balances. He favors the dominance of majority rule and the role of political parties. He is dubious also about the value of representation by itself to ensure that the government is responsive to the people. I find little to disagree with in what he says.

My only regret about Przeworski is that he does not focus his knowledge on a critical judgment of the American system, and this is my problem, not his. He does not judge the US system perhaps because he knows of so many other systems that are no better, but my focus is on the US system in particular. My goal is to suggest changes to the US government, not just to describe it.

Democracy as representative government

In my continuing search for what I am missing in my version of democracy, I am rereading Przeworski’s book on representative government, an in depth and sensitive discussion of the issues involved in discussions of democracy. He points out that except for the brief use of the term democracy in ancient Athens, the term was not used until the 1500s and did not become popular until the 1800s. In his view democracy is equivalent to representative government and did not appear until the American and French revolutions. More precisely, representation was not applied to governments of large nation states until that time. It may have existed sporadically in small city states such as in Florence or Venice, but not on a large scale.

For Przeworski the issues involved in having a democratic government—indeed, in having any government—are those of dealing with economic inequality, ensuring political equality, ensuring the maximum freedom possible, and establishing a balance between liberty and order and stability.

Winters provides the perspective from which the issue of economic inequality needs to be discussed. It is not just a problem of controlling such inequality, as if the government could manipulate the oligarchs. It is rather the other way around, one of continued efforts of the government to placate the oligarchs so that they will allow the government to attend to the will of the people. The oligarchs set the limits within which the government operates.

In this context the issues of freedom and equality are ensured to the people through the democratic process--majority rule—and the rule of law and the sanctity of property, which are double-edged swords. The rule of law provides predictability to the people, but it also protects the wealth of the oligarchs. Oligarchs are afraid of majority rule because it provides the potential to upset their control of the people, and so they support restrictions on the application of majority rule. Without such restrictions they would have to rely on their ability to manipulate the people’s representatives to ensure continued protection of their wealth. The British example suggests that they need not fear.

But these issues of freedom vs equality are issues of any government, not just democratic governments, and are thus not intrinsic parts of the definition of democracy.

Majority Rule

I have said in previous posts that elections and representative government is a necessary condition for democracy, but they are not sufficient. It is time to say what I believe to be the sufficient part of the definition of democracy. For my money, for a government to be democratic it has to be representative with free and fair elections, and it has to make legislative decisions using majority rule as the determinative criterion. In small organizations it may be possible to operate on the basis of consensus, where the majority defers to the greater influence of the leader or leaders, although I am not so sure of even that, but in a larger organization, such as a national government, there has to be an agreed upon rule for decision making, and majority rule is the most fair.

It is in this respect that the US government in particular is most egregiously non-democratic. From its beginning, in designing the constitution an during the ratification process, the supposed virtue of having supermajority rules for decision making was common, and so such rules were built into the design of the US government. It is this part of our constitution that most needs to change.

I wish I had some feedback on this point from those who believe that supermajorities are good, and more generally from those who reject even representative government, so that I could more deeply discuss this point. To me this is just a very simple and straightforward requirement for government, or any large organization, one that is implicit in most discussions, except when it comes to discussing the American government. There must be complications I in my naivete do not understand, or maybe there are some hidden virtues of not being fully democratic that do not get mentioned for fear of upsetting the masses.

Elections essential

Winters admits that democracy exists only within the space provided for it by the oligarchs. Fortunately that space is much greater in the modern world than it was for the Greeks and Romans, or in the Italian city-states. The fact remains, though, that democracy exists only insofar as the oligarchs allow it, and provided that the democracy protect the oligarchs’ wealth from threats, both external and internal. If democratic decision making itself threatens the oligarchs, it gives preference to the oligarchs, in the name of the rule of law and the sanctity of property rights. Politics is the continual struggle of the oligarchs to protect their wealth from threats from other oligarchs primarily, and only secondarily from the people.

If we quite cynically stipulate that all government decision makers have been put into their positions by the oligarchs, the problem for the people is one of how nevertheless to ensure that the decision makers are at least minimally responsive to the will of the people. The use of some form of selection of decision makers by lot does not suffice because it leaves those selected open to the manipulation by the oligarchs that already is endemic. Remember, the decision makers in the democracy are there only at the sufferance of the oligarchs to begin with, and the influence of the oligarchs is not going to disappear just because the decision makers have been chosen in some random way.

The only really effective way to force the decision makers, even though they have been chosen by the oligarchs, to be responsive to the people, is to force them to go through an election process, where they need to persuade the people that they are going to take the will of the people into account in their decision making. This is not a perfect requirement, and it is not sufficient, but it is necessary to the goal of the democracy, of making government responsive to the will of the people.

Democracy within Oligarchy

Maybe it is just too easy to discredit the notion of inclusivity as a criterion for democracy. There must be some other criteria that capture the essence of what people think of as democracy. If we are to exclude representation as a component of a democratic government, then it is difficult to imagine what a viable criterion would be. Those who think it is undemocratic to be represented, as opposed to being directly involved in government, are going to have a difficult time constructing a viable government.

To take a different tack, it may be helpful to consider the point of view put forth by Winters in his book Oligarchy. He suggests that all societies are basically organized in terms of relative wealth, with the most wealthy, the oligarchs, controlling whatever governmental structure there is. He describes the Athenian and Roman governments as ruling oligarchies, ones where rival oligarch provisionally agree to cooperate, or at least rotate control of running the government. This means that the oligarchs at least partially disarm—while engaging in making decisions for the larger society—and that they adhere to certain rules and practices.

Such ruling oligarchies are democratic only in the sense that the oligarchs allow the “people” to have some limited control over the decision making. Such power to the people serves to moderate the conflicts between individual oligarchs. Even oligarchs need followers. Giving their followers some power to influence decision making requires the oligarchs to orient their activities to pleasing their followers, and increasing the number of their followers. The rivalry between oligarchs becomes one of who can enlist the largest number of followers, and thereby overcome the influence of other oligarchs. Debate in the assembly is over which of the oligarchs, or his appointed orator, can best manipulate the members of the assembly to support his position. The oligarchs, especially in Rome, were very careful to make sure that the debate did not go beyond these bounds.

This was “democracy” in Athens and Rome. It did reduce the ever present potential for conflict between oligarchs, and promote peace and security within the strict constraints imposed by the oligarchs, but there was no sense in which government was of or for the people, and it was inherently unstable.

Modern governments are relatively more stable and secure, and oligarchs have relatively less direct influence on decisions made by the governments, but the oligarchs are still effectively in charge, and the people, the rest of the population, have influence only to the extent allowed by the oligarchs. Today the rule of law and the sanctity of property serve to protect the oligarchs from threats to their wealth. In Winters’ view the protection of wealth has always and always will be the overriding goal of the oligarchs.

Inclusiveness as a criteria

Inclusivity is a major characteristic of democracy for the modern advocates of more democracy in the world. The more inclusive a government is, the more it includes all of the members of its population, the more democratic it is. It is appropriate, then, to examine how inclusive the Athenian government, the ideal for many advocates of democracy, was. In fact the Athenian government was not inclusive at all.

To begin with, the median member of the Athenian city-state was a slave, who had no rights at all in the government. As much as 80% of the population was enslaved. In these terms, the government was not inclusive at all, and there was no “popular” control. See Winters’ Oligarchy for more details.

If we consider only the citizens of the city-state, as most do, even there the involvement of the citizens in the government was not great. If we assume that 6000 citizens showed up for the assemblies, and that there were another 600-1000 citizens involved in the Council of 500, the juries, and the various magistrate positions, this would be no more than 20% or less of the entire population of citizens. Further, discussion in the assemblies was clearly strongly manipulated by the ruling oligarchs and their chosen orators. This would be no better than the percent of those involved in New England town meetings as indicated by Graham Smith. Is this all that is meant by inclusiveness and popular control?

Of course an equal proportion of those participating in the government of a country with a population of 300 million would mean that 60 million would be participating in the government. Does anyone really want a government of 60 million people?

I conclude that the Athenian government was not a democratic government simply by virtue of how inclusive of its citizens it was. Inclusiveness cannot be considered a viable criterion for how democratic a government is.

If participation in the government is at most at the level of 20% of the population, as it was in ancient Athens and in modern New England town meetings, then that 20% is by definition an elite group. They become elite just by being the ones who participate. The problem is not that they are elite, and therefore, by that simple fact, not representative of the entire population—they are by definition not representative of the rest of the population. The problem is rather one of how to make sure that this elite group is responsible to the rest of the population.

In a small town or city-state, where this elite is likely to know personally most if not all of the rest of the population, it is not hard to imagine how it could be responsive to the rest. Responsibility would be almost automatic, although the elite would likely be more responsive to the powerful and wealthy than to the poor and powerless. This is a fact of human intercourse that will never be changed.

The problem becomes more acute when the population increases to the extent that personal contacts with most of the population is no longer possible. Then the problem becomes one of how to ensure that the (self) chosen elite continues to be responsive to the rest of the population. Two solutions are possible. One could institute a system of choosing the elite proportionately from all of the relevant demographic subgroups in the population—age, gender, ethnicity, etc. The choice within each group would be effectively by lot. Or one could have elections. Selections by lot was used in ancient Athens, at a time when the relevant demographic groups was quite narrow—adult, male citizens, but it has not been used since, outside of a few very special circumstances.

Historically, where power was not acquired through force of arms, the preferred non-violent method has been election. Elections become especially necessary when the relevant population is large and the elite constitute a very small percentage of the total population. Elections are the means by which the responsiveness of the elite is ensured.

Characteristics of Democracy

Those who advocate direct or participatory democracy appeal to the government of ancient Athens as their model of the way government should be. Athens supposedly had the first real democracy, and as far as they are concerned, there has never really been real democracy since. Dahl has been a major proponent of this way of looking at democracy, and in fact it has been suggested that Dahl was the founder of what might be called the Yale School of Democratic Theory, those who believe in promoting direct democracy as much as possible. More recent writers in this vein have been Graham Smith, Fischkin, and O’Leary.

Smith suggests four criteria for judging how democratic a government is: inclusivity, popular control, deliberative decision making, and transparency. A government is more democratic if it is more inclusive, includes more of the total population, if it allow popular control of government processes, if it makes decision through clear deliberation, and if its processes are transparent to the people.

We can use these criteria to judge the nature of the ancient Athenian government. The results are not promising for using Athens as a model of democratic government.

Defining democracy

In my book I defined democracy in terms of three criteria: representation, majority rule, and effective legislative control of the executive. I proposed these criteria as part of an argument that the US government is not democratic: it fails my definition in that it does not operate by majority rule, and the legislature does not have effective control of the executive. The latter criterion is not really a characteristic exclusive to a democracy: in theory effective legislative control of the executive is necessary for any viable organization, whether a democracy or not.

In any case, subsequent reading has made me aware that many other theorists of democracy do not include the above criteria in their definitions. Specifically, many theorists do not insist on majority rule as the basic mod of decision making. They are willing to admit decision making by consensus, in other words by supermajorities. They do not seem to realize that requiring supermajorities leads only to paralysis—the case of the California government is perhaps the best example. More significantly, there is another group of writers on democratic theory that maintain that representation is by definition anti-democratic. Representatives are or become an elite, oligarchical group that by definition contradict the principles of democracy. Their position is that true democracy is government by the people, as a whole, or at least as much of the people as can be enlisted in the operation of the government. They advocate such things as selection of government officials by lot, or the creation of mini-assemblies as a way of involving more of the people.

If I am going to maintain my definition of democracy, I will have to deal with these objections.

I'm back

I am hereby resuming my blog associated with the book I have written about changing our government. The book is being printed as I write, and an updated version of it will be uploaded to Amazon shortly.

In the hiatus since my last blog, I have been reading further in areas that I have felt I needed to deepen my understanding of since writing the book. I have chosen two areas in particular, the concept of democracy, and a detailed comparison of the American with the British system of government. My focus lately has been on the concept of democracy. It is the less difficult of the two areas, although it has many complications, most of them having to do with the distinction between direct or participatory democracy, and representative democracy. There has been a lot written about this, and I will be expressing my interpretations of the issues involved in future blogs, and eventually perhaps in another book.

The other area is much more involved in that it requires an extensive experience with both the American and the British governments, a background that I will probably never have. Nevertheless, I will be trying to do as well as I can, and that may result in another book.

I realize that what I will be writing will be at a fairly high level, but that is where I am. I will try to blog about once a week with comments on these two subjects.