“Can America remain model of democracy around the world?”
It’s not my question. It’s the title of Renee Earle’s opinion piece in ‘The Hill’ (15th Jan, 2021). The grammar’s bad… you can’t get good sub-editors these days. She could be asking whether America can remain a model of democracy around the world after the Capitol Hill riots or whether America can remain the model of democracy around the world after the riots.
Only an American would ask that question. The better question is whether America is a model of democracy at all. Of course, the answer depends on who you ask.
The Capitol Hill riots of January 6th would look like democracy in action to Aristotle.
Like many other Ancient Greeks, he thought ‘rule by the people’ (the demos) meant mob rule and it frightened him.
A mob attacking a political institution would be exactly what he’d expect in a democracy. So, he’d argue that January 6, 2021 was a high point in American democracy.
The Athenians believed in participatory or direct democracy, however, in which all citizens vote on all major policy decisions. They’d look at the American system and see oligarchy, not democracy. If every citizen isn’t involved in significant collective decisions then there is no democracy for them. But nobody talks about every citizen being involved in every major collective decision these days.
We agree that democracy isn’t all citizens making all major decisions for their community. We accept that ‘democracy’ can be done just using representatives of the people.
Democracy becomes representative democracy.
It’s so much easier this way. Getting representatives together to make major collective decisions is far less of a problem than organising a vote by the people.
The crucial thing is that the representatives of the people actually represent the people when they make their decisions… that they act as though the people were making the decision.
The problem is that we’re not sure what representatives are supposed to do to make sure that their decisions are being made as if everybody was there making the decision. We need to know that they are representing the people. We’re just not sure what that means.
The easy answer is that representatives do what the people who voted for them want them to do. The problem with easy answers is that they are often poor answers.
Apart from a few very specific policy initiatives, most voters don’t have a clear sense of what they want from their representatives. They might name a couple of issues that are important to them. They might know what the major parties’ policies on these issues are. At best, their instructions to their representatives with respect to everything a government has to do are minimal.
But if the people don’t know what they want in anything but vague and general terms, then doing what the people want is difficult for political representatives.
Forgive me for taking you down a rabbit hole, but there are even more questions to ask here.
We can want things that are bad for us. So, is representatives ‘doing what the people want’ them implementing bad policy?
The people don’t want to pay personal tax? As many people don’t. Let’s not have personal tax! Taxing businesses means that they can’t afford more workers? As many people also believe. Let’s not tax business! That’s fine if, like some people, you want a government that can’t do very much.
Most people, and almost all political representatives, want a government that can do things.
Mainly, because we want protecting from many of the people who use economic power to exploit people.
Everyone knows that monopolies will form in free markets and when they don’t powerful corporations will control prices and use whatever means they can to prevent other companies from taking any of their markets — they’ll even work together to do this. Anti-trust and anti-price fixing legislation have always been necessary… but the less money the government has the less it can do to stop these practices.
So, when it comes to taxation, representatives might decide that, even if they all agreed, the people don’t want the consequences that will result from removing personal and company tax and preventing governments from stopping the control and manipulation of markets by major corporations and the wealthy.
But this means that not doing what the people want is … doing what the people want…
There are a couple of ways to think about what a political representative has to do to be a true representative of the people. (Political) ‘agents’ do what they are told to do even when they think it is the wrong thing to do. (Political) ‘trustees’ do what they think is in the people’s interest, even if that is not what the people want them to do.
Most political representatives talk like agents and act like trustees. They say they are doing what the people want while doing what they think the people should want.
This makes sense. It’s much less demanding to be a trustee than it is to be an agent. Agents have to get instructions and do what they are told. But that’s hard if voters support a party for different reasons and because of different policies (they might even disagree with some of the policies of the party for which they voted).
And voters often cast their vote because they don’t want the other party to win the election. Politicians often claim elections provide clear instructions (a mandate to introduce certain policies), but nobody believes them.
Sometimes politicians do what they have promised to do during an election. Sometimes they don’t. Both could be democracy in action.
And what happens when the election was three or four years ago? What happens when some new challenge emerges that wasn’t part of the election? Representatives can try to go back to the people who voted for them to seek more instructions. But that will just favour the active and the noisy
Agency is a simple idea. But it falls short when it comes to understanding the role of a political representative. Political representatives are not receiving clear and regular instructions from the people.
Trusteeship allows representatives to ignore what the people want, which hardly seems democratic (even if it explains a lot of what goes on in actual representative democracies).
A third way to think about what it means for political representatives to ‘represent the people’ is that they simply ‘mirror’ them. This view underpins arguments for the direct representation of minorities because it will mean that political representatives are more like (better mirrors of) those they represent.
Mostly it comes down to sex, gender, age, race, ethnicity and religion. This gives a crude representation of the people. But, from this perspective, it’s a lot better than your representatives all being of one or two types.
Old, white, straight men fill democracies in the English-speaking world, for example, leaving young people, women, people of colour and those with non-straight sexualities feeling unrepresented (and thinking that this Is not democratic).
It’s the weakest of the three ideas of representation, which I am taking from Hanna Pitkin’s ‘The Concept of Representation,’ because it doesn’t tell representative what to do. They just need to be themselves when it comes to making important decisions for the people of their nation.
While it doesn’t offer any guidance as to what representatives are to do, thinking of democratic representation as representatives mirroring the people undermines the claims of political representatives that they can represent the people as their ‘trustees,’ which is how most representatives are behaving in America (and Australia and most, if not all, other representative democracies).
The mirror approach forces us ask whether someone deeply unlike others can be their trustees. It’s relatively simple if trustees are acting for people who can’t know or promote their own interests because of who they are (e.g., children who inherit wealth or someone suffering from dementia). It’s crucial that trustees are not like the people for whom they are acting as trustees.
It is not so simple when It comes to political representatives acting as trustees of the people. Because it’s not clear how we can know what someone very different from us can know what we want.
Given that the trustee idea is about what political representatives do and the mirror idea is about who they are, we might combine them into a test for democracies that is closest to the original meaning of democracy (‘rule by the people’).
The basic principle that derives from this combination is: The more representatives are like (mirror) the people for whom they are (political) trustees the closer we get to democracy. This would mean political representatives can claim to act in the interests of those they represent because they’re like them and more likely to know what they want. Any claim to be working in someone else’s interests has to rely on evidence that the trustee can know the interests of those they serve (represent).
The alternative is that we have a group of political representatives who claim to be acting as trustees but have little understanding of the people for whom they are acting as trustee. These pseudo-trustees can’t know what they people for whom they act as trustee want. They can’t put themselves in the position of people they don’t understand.
They can guess. But their guesses are likely to involving substituting their own views for the views of those for whom they are trustees. And a representative democracy in which there is no relationship between representatives and the people they claim to represent can’t be a democracy.
At its best, it’s an oligarchy. Oligarchy has a bad name these days. According to Merriam Webster, is ‘a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes’ https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/oligarchy.
Oligarchy used to just mean rule by the few (‘a small group’) over the many. The ‘especially for corrupt and selfish purposes’ was not part of its original meaning. If the few were decent, moral, caring people who want to do the right thing by those they ruled, then it’s not a bad thing. Not quite democratic. But good.
If oligarchs are doing what the people want, even if they’re not elected, then we might call this system a democracy. We shouldn’t, I think. But the point is that an oligarchy could be aristocratic (good) or tyrannical (bad).
So, where are we?
America is not a direct/participatory democracy. But that doesn’t matter. Representative democracy is accepted as a form of democracy.
America is an oligarchy in which there is voting. That gets us part of the way. If America is an oligarchy in which there is voting and the oligarchs (political representatives) work to deliver what the people want, then it might be a representative democracy.
American representatives don’t act as agents, however. There’s no direct and ongoing relationship between represented and representatives, which is essential to representatives being agents.
Any claim to being political trustees also fails because representatives are too unlike the people they are supposed to represent. Representatives in the houses of Congress at the state and federal level are mostly white, middle-class men who belong to social and economic elites. They cannot act as trustees for the people.
All leaders claim to serve the people. In oligarchies, a small number of people very unlike those they rule decide what is in everyone’s interests.
We don’t believe them. We describe these systems as authoritarian or dictatorships. The only difference between these systems and American democracy is that people get to vote for unrepresentative representatives who do what people like them want and convince themselves that this is what everybody wants.
When challenged, they will claim that this is what the people want because it is what they should want. And that doesn’t sound very different from authoritarian governments and dictators.
America is not the model of democracy around the world. It’s not even a model of democracy around the world.
Unless, that is, like Aristotle you believe that democracy is another name for mob rule. Then January 6, 2021 was a triumph of American Democracy and provides a model for the rest of the world.
