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.