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.