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.