10 Not Quite Right, but Still Good: The Democratic Ideal in Modern Politics

1. 10Not Quite Right, but Still Good: The Democratic Ideal in Modern Politics

2. Arrow’s Theorem • All democracies are fraught with problems. • Economist Kenneth Arrow demonstrated that the use of elections does not ensure that the majority’s preference will be selected. • Whenever there are more than two choices in an election, the method used to add up all the votes has a tremendous impact on who is the winner. • Arrow found that different methods of counting votes lead to very different election outcomes. • He also demonstrated that one can never be certain that any one method of counting votes will lead to the majority’s single preferred option. • Even elections that most would consider perfectly fair are imperfect because it is not certain the outcome is truly the one voters desire.

3. Arrow’s Theorem • Imagine we are all going to elect the king of the ice cream social. We have five candidates, cleverly named A, B, C, D, and Bruce, the singing Wallaby. • The most conservative candidate is on the right, advocating the imposition of vanilla for all and the extreme liberal is on the left demanding that we all must sample all flavors. • The moderates are in the middle.

4. Arrow’s Theorem • With a typical method—the candidate with the most votes wins—Bruce wins with 27 percent of the vote. • It turns out that the vast majority—73 percent — would rather have anyone other than Bruce.

5. Arrow’s Theorem • Using a method such that if there are more than two candidates and nobody wins a majority (more than half), and the two with the highest pluralities (the most votes) must face each other in a winner-take-all run-off election changes the result.

6. Arrow’s Theorem • Bruce and candidate A would get the most votes in the first round, with 27 percent of the votes for Bruce and 23 percent for A. • The two of them would have to face each other in a second round. • Most who voted for the three eliminated candidates are closer to A on the ideological spectrum than to Bruce. • The vast majority of them would probably prefer candidate A over Bruce. • Thus, in the second round of this different, but still fair, method of holding an election, candidate A would beat Bruce.

7. Arrow’s Theorem • Does the run-off method insure that the election selects the majority’s preference? • Both methods are considered fair. • There are other fair ways of adding up votes that can produce still different outcomes. • What would happen if instead of voting for the candidate you prefer the most, you vote against the candidate you hate the most?

8. Arrow’s Theorem • This method would eliminate Bruce first and A would likely be the second voted off! • All of A’s, B’s, and C’s supporters, and roughly half of people who should be D’s supporters will vote against Bruce. • Assuming that voters will then turn against the remaining candidate who is most distant from them, you can see the mid-point between the most extreme candidates A and D. • A is now the least liked candidate and will be eliminated, and the ultimate winner is likely to be C.

9. Arrow’s Theorem • What happens if using the round-by-round voting system, there is voting FOR the candidate you like most and the candidate with the least votes in each round gets eliminated? • The first one eliminated is now C. • If C’s supporters split evenly between B and D, B moves up to 23.5 percent and D gets 25.5 percent, and A gets eliminated. • In the third round all of A’s supporters go to their next closest candidate, giving B 46.5 percent and leaving D’s 25.5 percent to lose to Bruce’s 27 percent. • In the final round at least half of D’s supporters jump to B rather than Bruce!, • There have been four different winners in four different ways of counting the vote!

10. Arrow’s Theorem • There are many other types of elections that are possible, e.g., ranked votes, the use of open primaries, or an electoral college. • These methods also could provide different results. • The example also assumes that the process of conducting the election was perfect. • However, in the real world problems come up, e.g., hanging chads, misprinted ballots, voting machine failures, etc. • Arrow’s Theorem shows us that elections cannot be the perfect means of making decisions because part of the process, the way you tally the votes, can significantly alter the outcome, even when it is done perfectly and fairly. • There is no way to guarantee that the outcome reflects the true will of the majority. • The imperfect reality of using an election to achieve the ideal of democracy serves as a reminder of the distinction between the ideal and the real and how that distinction affects politics.

11. Democracy and the Liberal Ideal • These examples really do not relate to democracy. • They are examples of elections, which is what most people probably think of first when they hear the word democracy. • In the modern world, pure democracy, as conceived by the ancient Greeks, is not actually a viable form of government. • Pure democracy is probably unattainable in practice. • The various forms of modern democratic governments try to approximate that ideal.

12. Democracy and the Liberal Ideal • Democracy means rule by the people. • Athens was small enough so that all citizens could gather together to share perspectives, debate, and actually vote on policies. • We call this type of participation direct democracy. • In reality, Athenian democracy was not perfect; Athenians had slaves and only true Athenians could be citizens. • The Athenian democracy condemned Socrates to death for challenging the Athenian democracy’s accepted truths and for purportedly corrupting the youth. • Socrates’ jury was comprised of the citizens of Athens seated as one group, and it was they who voted to put him to death. • While direct democracy allows for participation for those recognized as citizens, there can also be no tolerance for difference and dissent. • This can lead to the tyranny of the majority, where an unrestrained majority bands together to victimize the minority.

13. Democracy and the Liberal Ideal • Plato was not a fan of democracy, and Aristotle listed it among the bad forms of government. • Plato believed that simply because a majority of people had an opinion, it did not make them correct. • Aristotle believed that democracies occurred when the mass bulk of people ruled in their own selfish interests without concern for the public good. • The framers of the U.S. constitution shared this Aristotelian negative view of democracy. • They would not have used the term democracy to describe the government they created. • They preferred the term republic, a government in which decisions are made by representatives of the citizens rather than the citizens themselves. • Think of the many undemocratic features of the Constitution, e.g.,: • the Supreme Court • the Senate • the Electoral College • Despite its flaws, democracy remains a powerful ideal.

14. Direct Democracy • Elements of direct democracy can be a valuable part of a modern democracy. • The closest we probably get to direct democracy is the referendum or initiative process employed by many U.S. state governments. • Referenda are questions that legislatures put on the ballot for the people to decide. • Initiativesare questions citizens put on the ballot, usually after some kind of qualification process like collecting a significant number of signatures on a petition. • These processes provide mechanisms to go around legislatures and other representative governing bodies to allow the public to vote directly upon policies, laws, or other actions that would normally be taken up by legislatures.

15. Direct Democracy • Some argue that there are serious problems with direct democracy. • They believe that the public has limited knowledge of the intricacies of politics and that the fleeting involvement of the public leads to bad decisions. • People, the critics argue, are more interested in the daily challenges of dating, home, career, etc. • Direct democracy can seem appealing to those frustrated with government. • However, the reality is that direct democracy usually does not work in the sense that it might have for the ancient Greeks.

16. Direct democracy • There are several reasons why direct democracy runs into problems, but there are two simple and obvious explanations. • First, most people have neither expertise nor the time to evaluate and consider all of the details of running a town, county, state, or country. • Given the massive complexity of governing, it would be impossible for everyone to participate in every decision. • Second, most of the population does not want to participate. • Politicians, philosophers, and political scientists often forget that many people want to ignore politics if they can; most people believe they have better things to do. • Consider whether you would want to institute an electronic democracy that could closely approximate a direct democracy. • Assuming we could deal with computer security issues, we could give everyone a password and ID that will allow them to vote on the Internet. • Should allow everyone to vote on every issue of concern? Do you want all the people you know to be involved this way? Do you want to do it? • The simple solution is to pay someone else to do it. • Still, it would be dangerous to completely surrender the role of governing to others.

17. Representative Democracy • Many of the structures and processes that the framers of the U.S. constitution created to approximate government by the people have served as a model to an increasingly democratic world. • Interestingly, the framers consciously and rationally designed the Constitution from nearly a blank slate. • Without too many historical constraints or ongoing commitments, the framers were able to invent and adapt structures, processes and methods to create a functional government that could approximate the ideal of government by the people.

18. Representative Democracy • Four factors are critical to the effectiveness and the remarkable endurance of the U.S. system. • First, the Constitution uses representatives to create a democratic government of specialists. • Second, it institutionalizes revolt through frequent elections of representatives. • Third, the Constitution recognizes the potential downside of democracy by specifically limiting the power of government. • Fourth, it recognizes democracy’s limits by adding a few undemocratic features. • By creating a mixed government, the U.S. constitution encapsulates the battle of the real versus the ideal when it comes to democracy. • Basically, direct democracy in the U.S. system is limited to choosing representatives and personal involvement in politics is limited to deciding for whom you want to vote. • Not an ideal solution, but this imperfect compromise does attempt to address the most significant difficulty with direct democracy—at least much of the time.

19. An Economic Theory of Democracy • The earlier figure demonstrating the different methods of counting votes had the conservative candidates on the right, the liberals on the left. • The point was repeatedly made that people would vote for the candidate that was closest to them on the figure or that they would vote against the candidate that was farthest away. • This is the spatial distribution of voter preferences and this is essentially what Anthony Downs did in An Economic Theory of Democracy.[i] • A half-century later, Downs’s theory remains the best way to discuss much of the why behind what we see in modern representative democracies. [i] Downs, Anthony. An Economic Theory of Democracy. 1957. New York: Harper & Brothers.

20. An Economic Theory of Democracy • The one difference between this figure and the earlier ones is that this one adds an indicator of the concentration of voters along the line stretching from the liberals on the left to the conservatives on the right. • The height of the curve indicates the number of voters holding a particular ideological preference. • The curve is lowest at the ends and highest in the center. • This represents the fact that most voters are concentrated near the middle of the political spectrum; they are moderate. • While it often seems the opposite, public opinion polls suggest that most people are in the middle.

21. An Economic Theory of Democracy • The figure assumes two things that may seem obvious: • People will vote for the candidate that is as ideologically similar to themselves as possible, and • Candidates wish to get enough votes to win the election. • Given these assumptions, the spatial approach can be used to make some interesting arguments regarding: • the likely ideological position of successful candidates • the most effective ideological position of political parties, and • the number of parties a democratic structure is likely to host depending on how its rules are structured.

22. Winner-Take-All • Downs used his calculations to explain why the United States has, and will probably always have, a two-party system. • He was also able to argue that those two parties would always remain close to the nation’s ideological center. • The United States uses a winner-take-all(no proportional representation), first-past-the-post (no run-off elections), single-member district system. • In other words, each election has one winner, that winner is the sole representative of a given location, and winning is a simple matter of receiving the plurality (most) of the votes cast in the election. • Including the spatial depiction of voters in the discussion explains some of the results in the ice cream social example.

23. Winner-Take-All • One can now see how an extremist can manage to win an election when there are a large number of candidates. • Although most of the voters are in the middle, there are three candidates competing over this area of the graph. • By dividing the votes in the middle, it was possible for a representative of a more extreme position to win. • Fewer voters overall were near Bruce, but he did not have to share those votes with any other candidate.

24. Winner-Take-All • To identify the percentage of voters casting a ballot for each candidate draw a vertical line halfway between the candidate and the closest opponent. • The line between any two candidates represents the point where voters go from being closer to one candidate to another. • Those on the left side of the line between A and B are closer to A, and they will vote for A; those on the right of the line are closer to B, and they will vote for B. • The number of people voting for each candidate equals all of voters who are closer to that candidate than to any other. • Thus, the number of votes for B includes everyone between the first voter to the right of the line between A and B, all the way to the last voter to the left of the line between B and C. • The height of the curve represents the concentration of voters; therefore, the area under the curve, bounded by the two lines, is the total number of candidate votes. • The candidates in the middle get a narrower slice, but the slice is taller. • The candidates at the extreme get a wider, but shorter slice.

25. Winner-Take-All • In most elections, candidates want to be in the middle. • Under any scenario where one or more of the middle candidates is removed, the extremists lose. • If one picks any two of the five candidates and runs them against each other, and the one closest to the center will always win. • In a two-candidate election, the midpoint of the curve is critical. • Because the area under either half of the curve is the same, the candidate who can push the dividing line between themselves and their opponent just one voter onto the other side of the center will have a majority. • The one vote in the exact center is called the median voter; his name is Karl. • Downs argued that this fight over the median voter (Karl) explains why the United States will always have two political parties that are very close to the political center (moderate).

26. Winner-Take-All • To win the general election in a two-party system, a party must run a candidate who can capture the median voter of the overall population. • The candidate closest to the ideological middle (position 5) will win. • Because the parties represent different sides of the political spectrum, the parties cannot move all of the way to the center. • In a two party system, the candidate exactly in the center of the overall population is on the edge of their party’s political spectrum. • This is why people can complain, with some justification, that presidential candidates tend to sound alike. • The competition for the center yields fairly similar candidates. • However, there must be some difference between the candidates because within the candidates’ parties those who are at the middle of the overall population are extremists within their parties. • They are not at the center of their party’s ideological spectrums.

27. Winner-Take-All • The need to win the overall election drives parties’ to the overall center, while the need to win the primary drives candidates toward the party’s median vote. • The likely result is that there will be parties that claim ideological ground just to the right and left of center (locations 4 and 6). • Once these two parties are established, it almost impossible to add a third party. • New parties usually form to represent a dissatisfied portion of the population. • Most dissatisfied voters will be out at the extremes. • Their candidates are further from the center than the candidates of the existing two parties. • Rather than help dissatisfied voters get a representative that is ideological closer to their views, the new party does the opposite. • Starting with candidates at 4 and 6, a new candidate representing a more extreme ideological position, e.g., at 8, guarantees the election of the moderate candidate farthest from the new candidate’s ideology. • The new candidate at 8 steals most conservative voters from the candidate at position 6, which hands a victory to the candidate at position 4.

28. Winner-Take-All • This scenario has happened several times during U.S. presidential elections. • Whenever an independent or third candidate captured a significant share of the vote, the candidate from the established party that was ideologically closest to the added candidate lost the election. • Some argue that Ross Perot cost George H.W. Bush a second term as president. • While there are reasons to question this conclusion, it is a fact that if you were to add the votes for Perot to those of George H.W. Bush, Bush would have won a second term in a landslide,. • This is always the case in winner-take-all single-member district systems like the United States. • Think how frustrating this for political parties that challenge the status quo. • A political party that wins 15 percent of the vote across the country could win none of the 435 seats in the United States House of Representatives. • To win an election in a winner-take-all single-member district system like the United States, the winning candidate must be able to achieve a plurality to win any election district. • Because running candidates for political office is a costly, time-consuming, and exhausting task, renegade parties quickly tire of trying. • Further, to the degree that a new party has ideas that may appeal to the center, the centrist parties will quickly absorb those ideas.

29. Winners Take Their Share • Given Downs’ work, how can there be so many countries with more than two political parties? • Not all democratic systems have rules like the United States. • Modern democracies come in two basic flavors: • the single-member district systems used in the United States where one winner represents one location • the proportional representation systems that are common in many parliamentary democracies around the world.

30. Winners Take Their Share • The most common alternative to a winner-take-all system is a proportional representation system (PR). • Proportional systems focus on political parties instead of candidates. • At election time, voters across the entire country cast their ballots not for political parties. • There are candidates—the parties offer long lists of candidates—but the transition from candidate to governing representative does not come from achieving a plurality of the vote. • The seats in the parliament are divided among the parties based upon the votes they receive. • All parties that pass the qualifying threshold and that get more than a certain minimum percentage of the vote (e.g., get at least 5 percent) win seats. • The number of candidates taken from each party’s list is based on the proportion of the vote the party receives, i.e., it is a proportional system.

31. Winners Take Their Share • If there are only two parties (A & B), both try to move toward the ideological center because people vote for the party closest to them on the ideological spectrum. • Being closest to the center, party A will get the votes from the vertical line of political division separating it from Party B along with all the votes out to extreme left hand edge of the spectrum, and it will win the most seats in parliament. • The strategy of capturing the middle moves Party A away from the people out on the extreme left. • Those people may want representatives that better reflect their preferences, and they will form a new party (HGCP). • It captures all the votes from the midpoint between it and Party A; it gets all the votes from the extreme left. • The HGCP will win seats and win the right to vote in the legislature. • If the HGCP wins enough seats to prevent either Party A or Party B from holding more than 50% of the legislature, it will have power far beyond its numbers as it can affect the race for prime minister.

32. Winners Take Their Share • Noticing the dramatic gain in the HGPC’s influence will likely lead to a new party on the right (BGBB). • Any dissatisfied group can offer its own party. • The only limiting factors are: • the percent needed to pass the qualifying threshold for at least one seat and • the strategic need to capture enough seats to either dominate or be a relevant party. • This typically results in one or two large moderate parties and a large number of smaller parties that vie for relevance. • The lower the qualifying threshold, the easier it is to get a seat and the greater the number of smaller parties.

33. The Real versus the Ideal Again • In reality, the type of election used to create a modern democracy is not an either-or proposition; i.e., mixed forms are abundant. • No method of electing representatives is inherently superior nor has any mixture created a perfect representational democracy. • Democracy in its ideal form holds great promise, but in the real world it is fraught with problems. • The common definition of the term democracy has changed frommajoritarianism, i.e., rule by the majority, to something else. • Democracy is now commonly infused with undemocratic elements, e.g., freedom of speech, protection of minorities, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion. • The modern definition of democracy has been stripped down to its bare essentials. • Joseph Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, stripped the term of all values and saw it only as a method to reach decisions, “the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote."[i] • [i] Schumpeter, Joseph A., Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. 1976. New York: Harper and Row, p. 250.