Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton Studies in Political Behavior Book 1)

by Christopher H. Achen

Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them.

Perhaps for this reason, nearly all contemporary political regimes, no matter how repressive, claim to be democracies of some sort.

Even the Chinese respondents were virtually indistinguishable from Americans, not only in their enthusiasm for democracy as an ideal but also in their assessment of how democratically their own country is currently being governed.

“Yet as I hope to show, the criteria provide highly serviceable standards for measuring the achievements and possibilities of democratic government…. They do provide standards against which to measure the performance of actual associations that claim to be democratic. They can serve as guides for shaping and reshaping concrete arrangements, constitutions, practices, and political institutions. For all those who aspire to democracy, they can also generate relevant questions and help in the search for answers.

More than a century ago, Graham Wallas (1908, 127) skewered the logic of unrealizable ideals:6 “No doctor would now begin a medical treatise by saying, ‘the ideal man requires no food, and is impervious to the action of bacteria, but this ideal is far removed from the actualities of any known population.

As Walter Lippmann (1925, 39) put it, the unattainable ideal of “the omnicompetent, sovereign citizen” is bad in just the same sense that “it is bad for a fat man to try to be a ballet dancer.

For example, a substantial majority of Americans say that democratic government is a very important factor in the nation’s success;8 but most also believe that “the government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves.”9 On one hand, we are a free people controlling our own special form of government, the envy of the world. At the same time, we are badly governed by incompetent and untrustworthy politicians beholden to special interests. We are simultaneously dreamily idealistic and grimly pessimistic.

is this a coping mechanism, because the alternative is too scary to function with as a reality?

“For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.” Lippmann remains the deepest and most thoughtful of the modern critics of the psychological foundations of the folk theory of democracy.

and what about the people we elect? don't they have the same limitations and biasez?

For example, the most careful study we know of the impact of direct democracy on public services found that voters in Illinois seized the opportunity to curtail fire district budgets, dangerously degrading the quality of their fire protection—and possibly costing themselves more in insurance rate increases than they saved in taxes by doing so (Tessin 2009).

We conclude that group and partisan loyalties, not policy preferences or ideologies, are fundamental in democratic politics. Thus, a realistic theory of democracy must be built, not on the French Enlightenment, on British liberalism, or on American Progressivism, with their devotion to human rationality and monadic individualism, but instead on the insights of the critics of these traditions, who recognized that human life is group life.

To be ruled is both necessary and inherently discomfiting (as well as dangerous). For our rulers to be accountable to us softens its intrinsic humiliations, probably sets some hazy limits to the harms that they will voluntarily choose to do to us collectively, and thus diminishes some of the dangers to which their rule may expose us. To suggest that we can ever hope to have the power to make them act just as we would wish them to suggests that it is really we, not they, who are ruling. This is an illusion, and probably a somewhat malign illusion: either a self-deception, or an instance of being deceived by others, or very probably both.

not only “how voters choose” but also “how parties and leaders shape the alternatives from which the choice is made.

For example, Miller (1992) suggested that democratic deliberation might mitigate incoherence by generating widespread consensus about how to locate the various alternatives along a single dimension, or about how to separate the issue into independent unidimensional components.

The other is Downs’s analysis of political information costs, which led him to conclude that, because of “the infinitesimal role which each citizen’s vote plays in deciding the election,” the returns to acquiring political information “are so low that many rational voters [will] refrain from purchasing any political information per se” (Downs 1957, 258). Thus, “A large percentage of citizens—including voters—do not become informed to any significant degree on the issues involved in elections, even if they believe the outcomes

to be important” (Downs 1957, 298).

In this respect, modern cognitive psychology has sharpened and reinforced concerns about the quality of public opinion raised by critics of democracy from Plato to the pioneering survey researchers of the 1940s and 1950s.

Shifts in election outcomes, they concluded, were largely attributable to defections from long-standing partisan loyalties by relatively unsophisticated voters with little grasp of issues or ideology.

Successive responses to the same questions turned out to be remarkably inconsistent. The correlation coefficients measuring the temporal stability of responses for any given issue from one interview to the next ranged from a bit less than .50 down to a bit less than .30, suggesting that issue views are “extremely labile for individuals over time” (Converse 1964, 240–241).11 In marked contrast, expressions of party identification were much more stable, with correlations from one survey to the next exceeding .70. Converse (1964, 241) inferred that parties “are more central within the political belief systems of the mass public than are the policy ends that the parties are designed to pursue.

50% of those who identified with the right-wing Monarchist party took left-wing policy positions (Barnes 1971, 170).

not sure i understand the methodology here did voters tell them the candidates they voted for and then voted on certain policies with the researchers who then drew conclusions on the correlation between the two?

individual voters’ “errors” will not cancel out in the overall election outcome, especially when they are based on constricted flows of information (Page and Shapiro 1992, chaps. 5, 9).

or focus on the private server in Secretary Clinton's home

On issue after issue—ranging from support for public works in 1976 and defense spending in 1980 to European integration in Britain to nuclear power in the Netherlands in the wake of the Chernobyl reactor meltdown—Lenz’s analyses provided substantial evidence of vote-driven changes in issue positions but little or no evidence of issue-driven changes in candidate or party preferences. As John Zaller (2012, 617) put it, “Partisan voters take the positions they are expected as partisans to take, but do not seem to care about them.” Lenz (2012, 235) characterized these findings as “disappointing” for “scholars who see democracy as fundamentally about voters expressing their views on policy,” noting that the “inverted” relationship between issue positions and votes seemed to leave politicians with “considerable freedom in the policies they choose.

what?

However, the Founders also believed that direct popular control of government would be dangerous and undesirable. Thus, James Madison famously argued in Federalist Number 10 that the system of representation they proposed would “refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose.

will this ever change? it's doubtful.

Political theory put a glossy sheen on the customary human reluctance to pay taxes.

Colonial elites eager to resist British rule exploited popular discontent to bolster their own political standing. Resistance turned to violence.

the

The understanding of democracy reflected in the U.S. Constitution was shaped by the Founders’ intellectual heritage and political experiences. They wanted a stable government with a constitution that would protect prosperous landowners like themselves, as Charles Beard (1913) famously argued. Even Thomas Jefferson, often remembered as a dedicated democrat in a republican age, was anxious to limit the influence of the urban masses (Hofstadter 1973, chap. 1).

According to Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick (1993, 5), “It can probably be said that the principal components for a structure of norms and social values most appropriate to the working of a capitalist, democratic, equalitarian culture were fully in place by about 1830, though not very much before then.

The periodic economic contractions that punctuated the development of the industrial United States in the second half of the 19th century enhanced the appeal of third parties. Farmers, facing the most volatile conditions and some of the worst monopoly exploitation by the railroads, were a particular source of political agitation and third-party movements (Hofstadter 1955; Goodwyn 1976).

The democratic theory animating the Populists and Progressives was the folk theory of democracy. Those ideas directed their reform efforts along a particular path, providing a script for American reform movements that was to have fateful consequences for them and their successors down to the present era.

Democracy is not to be found in the parties but between the parties.

Comparing fiscal policies in states with and without the initiative process over a period of three decades, Matsusaka identified three significant differences: • First, “the initiative reduces total government spending” by about 4%. • Second, “the initiative shifts spending from state to local governments.” • And third, “the initiative shifts the sources of revenue from taxes to user fees and charges for services,” allowing “fewer possibilities for redistribution of wealth” (Matsusaka 2004, 52).

The result, according to a study by Will Bullock and Joshua Clinton (2011, 916), was that elected officials “move[d] away from the ideological extremists in their own party after the adoption of the blanket primary,” but only in “the most moderate districts—of which there are increasingly fewer.

As a result, although voters tended to be moderate and a sizeable portion were willing to break party ranks, the average voter was ill-equipped to do so in a way that led them to select more centrist candidates in contests for House and state Senate.

In most domains, making choices on that basis would be considered a very low standard of competence. One would not want to engage a surgeon or fly with a pilot who proposed to “make choices purposefully, using available information.” Indeed, Donovan and Bowler’s evidence is by no means uniformly optimistic in its implications for the quality of policies adopted via direct democracy. For example, Broder (2000, 219) cited Donovan and Bowler in support of the view that “the tax limitation measures (like Prop. 13) that pass so readily when presented to the voters often have the perverse effect of reducing expenditures on popular public services—like parks and libraries—below what the public wants.

Throughout most of the tax revolt period the electorate wanted “smaller government” but also the same or increased spending on specific services.

But in fire districts with referendum requirements, average response times were almost one minute (about 7%) higher than in comparable districts without referendum requirements. He noted (2009, 94–95) that this difference is “substantively large based on widely-accepted

“the tax savings that voters enjoyed may have been smaller than what they would have saved on their homeowners insurance policies with better fire protection.

The proposition eliminated a number of firefighting companies and reduced the staffing of those that remained. Funds for removal of dead trees were also cut drastically. When the fire began, the result was an uncontrollable conflagration for many hours. Although detailed voting data for the fire-stricken area itself seem to be unavailable, the sad irony is that the victims had probably voted heavily for Proposition 13: the Piedmont area of Oakland, at the edge of the fire, had voted 73% in favor (Simon and Dooling 2013, 1420). Direct democracy had overruled the judgment of fire professionals, with horrific results.

The republican principles of the Founders are now conveniently dismissed as the elitist and aristocratic trappings of a bygone era. Hence, coping with the deep differences between their sophisticated ideas and our simplicities, which would not be easy, becomes happily unnecessary. This conceptual laziness has consequences. Faced with the inevitable occasional failures of our political institutions, we cast about for curative measures. But we have only one cure we trust. Throughout American history, calls for “political reform” have nearly always entailed calls for greater “

the point being: the founders also believed in elites.

In America, as elsewhere, the movement toward greater power for ordinary citizens began as an overdue corrective against centuries of domination by military, economic, religious, and cultural elites. For centuries, “more democracy” was a good idea as well as an appealing ideal. But nothing that simple is a defensible all-purpose theory of government. In time, democratization cured many of the evils that had initially animated the demand for popular control. Despotic governments, corrupt aristocracies, and restrictions on suffrage were swept away. But because popular understandings of democracy provided no clear recipe for reconciling popular control with competent leadership, the cure of “more democracy” went on being applied in every crisis. The adoption and expansion of direct primaries, initiatives, and referendums demonstrate the influence of this view on American political thought and practice in the Progressive Era and since.

We see little reason to think that letting lawmakers’ “most engaged” constituents “participate in the process of legislating” every time their phones chime would improve either the process of legislating or the product. Edmund Burke and James Madison, among many others, favored a very different model of representation, the trustee model. On this view, elected officials ought to use their own judgment to look out for the best interests of their district and their country, regardless of what their constituents believe. But this perspective flies in the face of the simplistic enthusiasm for “more democracy” in modern American political culture. As the majority of respondents in one recent survey had it, “The will of the people on most issues is pretty clear, and politicians should just follow it.”26 In the wake of Warren Miller and Donald Stokes’s (1963) landmark study of “Constituency Influence in Congress,” political scientists, too, have largely taken to studying political representation by measuring the fidelity with which elected representatives “just follow” the preferences of their constituents, whether on broad issue dimensions of the sort analyzed by Miller and Stokes or specific roll call votes or overall liberal-conservative ideology (e.g., Miller 1964; Converse and Pierce 1986; Bartels 1991; Esaiasson and Holmberg 1996; Clinton 2006; Bafumi and Herron 2010). Even when subsequent scholars have not explicitly endorsed the instructed delegate model of representation,...

Alas, as we saw in chapter 2, empirical studies of representation grounded in the instructed delegate model have produced very mixed results. The positions of elected officials are usually no more than mildly correlated with those of their constituents.

The key insight of this alternative theory of democracy was that voters could exert substantial control over their leaders, despite knowing little about the details of public policy, simply by assessing the performance of incumbent officials, rewarding success and punishing failure. In one of the first and most influential formulations of this perspective, V. O. Key (1966, 61) portrayed “the electorate in its great, and perhaps principal, role as an appraiser of past events, past performance, and past actions. It judges retrospectively; it commands prospectively only insofar as it expresses either approval or disapproval of that which has happened before.

The efficacy of self-government thus depends on party and governmental leadership with the initiative and imagination necessary to meet the public problems that develop and with the courage to assume the political risks involved.

in addition to how voters choose candidates, it would be interesting to know how elected officials decide how to vote and which legislation to craft. what are their motivations? re-election, principles, money, power, combination of some or all of these?