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.