jueves, 23 de mayo de 2019

La familia y las elecciones



Parece que las familias de España estamos de enhorabuena, casi todos los partidos con posibilidad de escaños en Europa y concejales en los Ayuntamientos y Comunidades Autónomas llevan en sus programas electorales una “Ley de familia”.

Puede ser que de golpe todos han tomado conciencia de que si aprietas mucho a las familias acabas con la natalidad y esto acaba directamente con el futuro del país. Es posible que también haya influido la aparición de Vox en el panorama político con un discurso diferente sobre la familia, y que esto haya hecho reaccionar a los demás. No importa demasiado la causa, lo importante es que por fin se han dado cuenta algunos de que es necesario tomarse en serio a la familia y tratarla como un bien a proteger, ya que la familia sigue siendo la institución más valorada por los españoles y la más vilipendiada –hasta ahora- por los políticos.

En realidad de la familia no habría que protegerla, basta con que deje de ser atacada y se protege sola, porque es un ente natural, prepolítico que no necesita protección estatal para fructificar, en todo caso, ya que estamos en un tiempo en el que tendemos a legislarlo todo, la familia debe tener también su ley y aquí solo propongo algunos aspectos que –a mi juicio- deben ser tenidos en cuenta para que la ley sea exitosa:

1.      Que la familia es un ente prepolítico y que los políticos, las leyes, solo deben ayudar a mantener, no a redefinirla o a utilizarla para otras luchas. En este sentido debe volver a ser reconocida la familia natural (hombre y mujer con hijos) como familia, y llamar o proteger si se quiere a otras formas de convivencia como lo que son, es decir, formas de convivencia y no familia. En sus programas PP (“La familia es el eje de la sociedad, que cumple una función irremplazable de cohesión social y solidaridad intergeneracional”) y Vox (“proteger a la familia como institución básica”) tienen claro el concepto. No así Podemos, que propone en su programa “reconocer en el Código Civil a los animales como seres que sienten”, ni el PSOE dice en sus 110 compromisos con la España que quieres: “Aprobaremos una nueva Ley de familias, que contemple todo tipo de familias”; y tampoco Ciudadanos: “Propondremos una Ley de Apoyo a las Familias que promueva la natalidad y garantice la igualdad de derechos de todas las opciones de familia”.
2.      En esta línea de uso del lenguaje analógico, tanto el PSOE como Ciudadanos como Podemos llevan en sus programas llamar familias numerosas a las monoparetales (y “monomarentales”) con un hijo, incluso Ciudadanos propone dar la categoría de Familia numerosa a la de dos hijos. Podemos pensar que es una cuestión terminológica, pero si las ayudas a las familias numerosas se reparten en los que no son numerosos, puesto que dos hijos no es, digamos, un gran número, lo que estamos haciendo es dificultar las ayudas a las verdaderas familias numerosas y no incentivar su creación.
3.      Algo que no lleva nadie en sus programas, pero que debería tenerse en cuenta es la creación de vivienda asequible para las familias, en especial para las familias numerosas, obligando a construir casas de más de tres dormitorios en un porcentaje suficiente en las viviendas de precio tasado y dando prioridad a las familias, a las familias numerosas y familias con discapacitados a su cargo en la adquisición de estas viviendas.
4.      La familia es un bien en sí que ahorra al Estado millones de euros en atención a la dependencia, ayuda cuando se acaban todas las ayudas del Estado en tiempos de crisis, ahorra en psicología, socializa y es más ecológica. Por ello las familias, y en especial las familias numerosas o con discapacitados, deben pagar muy pocos impuestos, llegando incluso en algunos casos a la exención total. Hay que tener en cuenta que lo que hacen las familias es crear contribuyentes, la exención de hoy es la recaudación del futuro y el mantenimiento del sistema de pensiones. El Estado, si quiere preservar a la familia, tiene que reconocer el inmenso esfuerzo económico que hacen los padres de familia para sobrevivir. Esta exención de impuestos tampoco aparece en ninguno de los programas electorales de los partidos, y si queremos un repunte en la natalidad debemos hacerla posible.
5.      El otro campo que es también importante para el desarrollo de la familia es el tema de la educación. Hay que devolver a las familias las decisiones sobre sus hijos, los padres son responsables de la educación de sus hijos, de su salud, su desarrollo y su la seguridad. El Estado no debe meterse en las cuestiones que afectan al desarrollo de los niños. Las políticas intervencionistas que, bajo el pretexto de proteger a la infancia, asaltan la patria potestad y van contra el artículo 27 de nuestra Constitución. En los programas de los partidos tenemos dos, el PP y Vox, que defienden la libertad de enseñanza. Ciudadanos no se pronuncia y el PSOE y Podemos se decantan por primar la educación estatal y recortar la libertad de enseñanza, prohibiendo la clase de religión o condicionando los conciertos estatales a cuestiones ideológicas.
6.      Las familias viven en una sociedad tecnológica donde la información entra en los hogares a través de la televisión, el cine, Internet, etc. el Estado debe preservar a la infancia de imágenes, palabras, situaciones que pueda dañar la integridad moral de los niños y atentar contra las convicciones morales de los padres, por ello debe volver el control de lo emitido en horario infantil, y todo contenido audiovisual o publicitario debería tener una calificación moral que preserve a los niños de imágenes con contenido violento, sexual, cruel, sexista, etc. La televisión pública debe ser especialmente cuidadosa con este asunto. Creando comités de ética ejecutivos desligados de los partidos. Ningún partido plantea esto en sus programas.
7.      Por último, en ambientes laborales se debe respetar también la existencia de la familia, persiguiendo como delito grave el mobbing maternal, es decir el acoso moral a las mujeres embarazadas o con niños en el trabajo y debe controlarse los horarios para favorecer la conciliación entre la vida laboral y la familia. En esto sí que los partidos, todos, prometen en menor o mayor medida, la creación de estos mecanismos de defensa y la gratuidad de la educación preescolar.
  
Fuera de las medidas concretas el Partido Popular y Vox llevan en su programa el concepto, acertadísimo: la “perspectiva de familia”. Esto, sin duda es lo que hace falta, no solo una ley y algunas medidas extraordinarias, no solo una actuación concreta, sino un programa general que abarque transversalmente todas las leyes y todas las actuaciones públicas.

En definitiva, es bueno que se hable de familia, que se inicie el debate y que los políticos empiecen a vislumbrar que el bien de la familia es el bien de la nación, y mejor sería si pasando las elecciones algo de lo de sus programas es llevado a la práctica. En fin. Votemos y esperemos.



jueves, 2 de mayo de 2019

Is Democracy Possible? (John Burnheim)


Introduction

I A first approach to the issues

Democracy does not exist in practice. At best we have what the ancients would have called elective oligarchies with strong monarchical elements. Most contemporary discussions of democracy assume that the task of democratic theory is to provide either some justification for these regimes or some normative guidance for their improvement.1 It is assumed that the state is a necessity of social life. The question is whether it can be made more democratic. One of my aims is to disprove this assumption by showing how a polity might function without the centralization of government that constitutes the state.
There is no denying that social life is impossible without government. There must be decision-making bodies that exercise coercive power over groups and individuals. Moreover, the decisions of governing bodies must be coordinated, and where negotiation fails some co-ordinating decision must be imposed on them if peace and rationality are to prevail. But this neither necessitates nor justifies any body possessing a monopoly of power to decide and enforce decisions about matters of public and common concern.
For a variety of reasons I begin with practicalities, though of a very general and abstract sort, rather than with a theory of human nature or of society or of rights and authority. Discussions of these latter matters always involve assumptions about what can be done or is likely to happen. The values we emphasize reflect our hopes and fears and the experience from which these spring. The very concepts we use in political theory are bound up with the structuring of our social world by specific social practices. What human nature is is a matter of what human beings can do. And what they can do is a matter of what they have ways of doing, individually and collectively. What rights seem necessary for people to enjoy and what authority is desirable are a function of needs that take definite shape only in definite forms of social life. No doubt human nature is neither indefinitely plastic nor perfectible, but equally certainly what human beings can do remains a matter to be explored.
There is no well-founded theoretical basis on which arguments about human nature can resolve our present problems. It is, I hope to show, both more profitable and more honest to address ourselves explicitly to practical problems and their solution in the first instance. Here the constraints are quite specific. Nevertheless, the solution is unlikely to arise simply from the analysis of the problem. It will call for philosophical reflection about its desirability as well as for argument for its practicability. In the long run, however, proposals can be tested only in political practice, which will judge both their feasibility and desirability.
The main practical problem about democracy is easily stated: in any fullblooded sense “government of the people, by the people, for the people” seems impossible in any but the narrowest range of circumstances. For government by the people to occur the people must make the decisions that constitute the content of government. But there is no way in which they can make these decisions, much less make them on a sound basis, when the decisions involve so many people in so many different ways as do the decisions involved in legislating and administering in a modern state. This is not a matter of technical difficulties of communication. Today we can organize and address assemblies hundreds of times as big as the Greeks could. It would be possible to provide everybody with the means of listening to debates on any topic and recording a vote on every issue without their leaving their armchairs. But people would be reduced to accepting or rejecting proposals. There is no way in which any significant proportion could participate in framing them. Aristotle and other ancient critics of democracy argued that it inevitably degenerated into rule by the orators and ultimately into tyranny. The bigger and more passive the audience the more that is likely to happen.
Moreover, if the point of democracy is that good decisions, decisions that reflect the long-term interests of the people, should be made, it is questionable whether people can know enough to make rational decisions on the very large range of issues that have to be faced. This point has nothing to do with the “ignorance of the mob”. It applies equally well to professional politicians, social scientists or any other aristocracy. It is an argument against all centralization of decision-making power whether in an individual, a small group or a mass assembly. Clearly the force of the difficulty is a function both of the size and complexity of a society and of the degree to which its affairs are ordered by explicit administrative decisions, its degree of socialism. Advocates of the market mechanism have used it as an argument for small government and advocates of certain kinds of socialism have insisted on it as an argument for small autonomous communities. I shall argue that both of these solutions to the problem are unsatisfactory.
Again, there are inherent difficulties in the vague concept of “the people”. For all those who, from Plato and Aristotle onwards, have accepted the importance of class power in politics, rule by the people comes down in practice to rule of the poor over the rich. As long as the economic system functions to produce control of the means of production by a few, class differences will persist. The attempt of the “have-nots” to use the power of government to limit the power of those who control the means of production must always lead to a situation of self-defeating conflict. If a market or, more specifically, a capitalist system is to flourish it must be possible for owners of capital to make long-term investments with a reasonable probability of profit. Attempts to redistribute income by taxation must either fail to have any substantial effect or result in lack of investment and economic hardship for those in need of employment.
Instability produces war and repression. Ruling groups that are threatened by popular power have always been inclined to use military means, demagogy and treachery to protect their interests. Only in a classless society does the notion of the people acquire a genuinely inclusive extension. In a class society it oscillates between a more general and a more specific meaning in a way that reflects the contradictory interests of the different classes. But is a genuinely classless society possible? Is it possible to avert concentrations of economic power and of status only at the cost of an intolerably restrictive concentration of political power in the hands of those who claim to represent the people?
[See, however, my remarks about Marxist class analysis in the preface to the second edition.]
Moreover, the concept of the people covers up an enormous variety of differences of interest connected with specific forms of life and community property. Most significantly, each nation-state treats its own territory as a collective property subject to no external interference. The people are always the French or British or Guatemalan people. The “people of the world” has a hollow ring even in rhetorical contexts. It corresponds to no operative reality. But many of the problems that we face, ecological, economic and humane, are soluble only on a global basis and with an eye to the future needs of all humankind.
If government by the people for the people can be conceived coherently only as government by all existing human beings in the long-term interests of the human race and of the world that it dominates, is it not patently impossible? Would any nation be willing to submit itself to a world state that would dictate to it how its resources were to be used and disrupt its way of life to conform to the prescriptions of some remote majority? How could such a remote and all-powerful body admit of any meaningful participation by the thousands of millions whom it governed? Can there be world democracy without a world state?
There is, finally, a fundamental point of principle that is hardly ever addressed by democratic theorists. It is desirable that each person or group should have an opportunity for influencing decisions of any matter in direct proportion to their legitimate material interest in the outcome. It is not often noticed that this principle is ineffectual unless its converse is also satisfied. Nobody should have any input into decision making where they have no legitimate material interest. The notion of legitimate material interest calls for explication. Roughly, by “material” I mean to exclude interests that people have simply because of their intrusive desires about how others should fare, while by “legitimate” I mean to exclude material interests that are not based on entitlements that are morally sound.
The point of these exclusions is obvious enough. Individuals or groups do not acquire the sort of interest that entitles them to have a say in determining what I or some group to which I belong may do simply by their having strong feelings about the matter. Their interest must have a more material ground than their thinking about the matter. Equally, people may have good reason to covet things that I am entitled to, but that does not give them a legitimate interest in those things. In particular, in regard to public goods there is often a serious confusion between people’s legitimate material interest in the opportunity costs of providing some good for a particular group and their unwarranted claims to determine just what is good for the group in question. There may be a reasonable argument that the money should have been spent elsewhere. But if it is allocated to a certain educational programme, for example, the precise form that programme should take is a matter on which those who are directly affected by it should normally decide.
If these principles are not observed the result is tyranny, perhaps wellintentioned or unobtrusive tyranny, but tyranny in a strict sense. People are exercising authority over others, without warrant and without regard to their proper autonomy, by virtue of possessing political power. All present forms of democracy and all hitherto proposed forms of it not only permit but encourage such tyranny. The result is that they strain their claims to be called democracy and their claims to superiority over monarchies and oligarchies. Normally they become oligarchies that are defensible only on the grounds that no better alternative is available.
That this degeneration is a normal consequence of everybody having a say in everything is not difficult to understand. In a very small and amicable group people may abstain from using their votes on matters that do not concern them on the basis of a convention that it is the proper thing to do. The convention may be sustained by interpersonal relationships. In larger groups it tends to break down. Vote-trading becomes the key to success. Not to use every opportunity to extract the maximum return for one’s agreement to vote in a certain way is to invite defeat at the hands of those who do. The more uninterested one is in the specific issues the better. It makes it so much easier to trade favours uninhibitedly. Naturally, one may need to put some sort of face on it, but usually that of a soundly pragmatic man will do.
What happens in this process is utterly different from what happens in a genuine exchange of substantive interests. If each of us quite legitimately has some title to the same thing we shall have to bargain about what each is willing to trade for the other’s title, or perhaps submit to arbitration or the toss of a coin. Each of us has some power over the other, but unless one of us is so poor in entitlements as not to be able to secure any reasonable set of his or her interests, or is in particularly desperate need of just this thing, the exchange will normally be fair. The exchange ceases to be fair when what I get in exchange for my substantive good is merely release from an arbitrary threat on your part. The obvious case arises when you threaten to harm me physically unless I hand over what you want. But any threat to use arbitrarily power that you have to harm me without substantive cost to yourself is equally obnoxious, whether it is done out of malice or self-interest, or even paternalism.
Now in any present form of democracy it is quite usual for it to be necessary to buy the votes of many people who have no legitimate material interest in the matter in hand in order to meet the interests of those who do have a genuine interest in it. Electoral democracy carries this to the point where the “numbers-men”, the power brokers, operating through political parties and professionally organized lobbies, manipulate these disposable votes into concentrations of power for their own aggrandizement. The trick is to buy people’s votes over the whole range of matters that come up for decision on the basis of committing oneself to some limited set of promises about the few things that they feel strongly about. To make matters worse, those strong feelings are often not based on legitimate material interests. The system is corrupt and corrupting. We do not realize how badly it functions only because the existing alternatives are worse.

II Functional autonomy

Our task is to disentangle the knot of assumptions that go to make these difficulties; rejecting some, showing how others can be dealt with, accepting others. At the risk of being dismissed out of hand, I shall indicate what my strategy is. I shall argue that most of the decisions that are now taken by centrally controlled multi-function agencies ranging from nation-states down to municipalities could be taken by autonomous specialized agencies that are co-ordinated by negotiation among themselves or, if that fails, by quasi-judicial arbitration, rather than by direction from a controlling body. Participation in the decision-making process in each body should extend not to “the people” generally, but to those who are affected by the decisions in question to the degree in which they are affected. Obviously, this raises a crucial problem about what interests are to be accounted legitimate. Interpreted conservatively it could mean that all existing interests are to be protected. Interpreted radically, it might seem that everything is “up for grabs” and every individual or group has an interest in almost everything. I shall attempt to show how a course might be steered between these extremes.
The first element of my strategy, then, is not only anti-state but anticommunalist, directed against giving sovereignty or anything like it to any geographically or ethnically circumscribed group. In doing so it runs contrary both to the major tradition of political philosophy and the course of political history, as well as to most projections for the future, conservative or radical. Nevertheless, I shall argue that the problems we have to face in practice can be solved only by moving in the direction of functional decentralization of this kind. My argument will involve an examination of the inherent characteristic of the various decision-making procedures that already exist in social practice designed to demonstrate their limitations and the effects of using them beyond the scope of those limitations. In particular, I shall examine the limitations of the market, bureaucracy and voting as mechanisms for the control of productive resources and argue that other mechanisms could be introduced in appropriate contexts that would not have the same limitations.
If the division of communal and corporate agencies into specialized functional agencies were carried as far as possible, subject to considerations of technical efficiency, the number of decision-making bodies with considerable autonomy would be increased enormously. Even at a municipal level there is no reason why the various services that local councils provide, roads, parks, libraries, recreation facilities, building regulations, health services, garbage collection and so on, should not be run quite independently of each other, with different geographical circumscriptions and with closer relations to similar services in other areas than to many other services in their own area. People might come to see themselves as being part of many diverse social activities and functional communities rather than any simple inclusive community. Indeed, this is increasingly the case in modern urban societies. Nevertheless the very complexity of modern life raises a seemingly intractable practical difficulty. In most local communities there is little enough interest in local politics. If people are faced with the need to participate actively in the very large range of agencies of all shapes and sizes that affect their wellbeing, it seems most unrealistic to suppose that they can or will do so in an informed and constructive way. In practice they will vote en bloc for party tickets and hand over their active voice to political elites.

III Statistical representation

This brings me to the second and more outrageous element of my strategy. In order to have democracy we must abandon elections, and in most cases referendums, and revert to the ancient principle of choosing by lot those who are to hold various public offices.2 Decision-making bodies should be statistically representative of those affected by their decisions. The illusory control exercised by voting for representatives has to be replaced by the chance of nominating and being selected as an active participant in the formulation of decisions. Elections, I shall argue, inherently breed oligarchies. Democracy is possible only if the decision-makers are a representative sample of the people concerned. I shall call a polity based on this principle a demarchy,3 using “democracy” to cover both electoral democracy and demarchy. How and under what conditions this procedure might work I shall discuss in detail later. For the moment I shall say just a little about the philosophical consequences of adopting it.
Until about two hundred years ago it was widely assumed that the principle of rotation of offices by lot was the characteristic procedure of democracy.4 Since then democracy has come to be identified with competitive elections on an universal suffrage. In practice, this situation has arisen because democratization has usually been won by a series of steps, each of which has been mainly a matter of bringing existing political elites under the control of a wider group of the population by submitting them to the necessity of competing for office at regular intervals. It has rarely been a major tendency of such changes to widen the political elites themselves. When new groups have acquired the franchise they have often sought to generate their own political parties, but the elites that constitute the ruling stratum in these parties have usually come to be only superficially distinguishable from the more traditional elites. Elitism has not been challenged effectively.
In the theory of democracy two quite different strands of classical liberal theory have contributed to the identification of democracy with elections. Classical utilitarianism claims that actions are to be evaluated solely by their consequences. What matters is that governmental decisions should be good decisions. The responsibility of decision-makers is not to give people what they want, but what is in their interest. The role of elections is to give electors the chance of choosing those who are best equipped to make good decisions, those who possess all the knowledge and skill that the electors themselves inevitably lack. By contrast, a less clearly formulated tradition, often associated with Rousseau and more generally with contractual views of political authority, sees elections essentially as the expression of the collective will of the electors. The government derives its legitimacy not from its function or its deeds and their consequences but from a commission given to it by an agreed procedure of electoral choice. A governmental agency ought to do all and only those things that the majority of the electors want it to do.
The utilitarian position about elections depends primarily on factual considerations. Elections are supposed to be the best means we have of seeing that government is properly carried on. So my differences with them will be resolved by the discussion of the possibility and consequences of statistically representative democracy or demarchy. (I am not a utilitarian but the differences do not matter in this context.) The contractual tradition, however, raises more complex questions. One might argue, for example, that a voluntarist account of political authority is compatible with any form of government, since the people can will anything that they like. But the voluntarist view may be pressed so far that only those particular decisions that command informed, universal and explicit consent are deemed legitimate. In that case any substantial existing interest group is in a position to block any change that affects its interests adversely. Even if the requirement of consent is restricted to decision procedures rather than extended to specific decisions, no group would consent freely and rationally to decision procedures that would undermine its vital interests.5
Some contractarians, notably John Rawls, have held that it is possible to escape the problems of actual interests and to deduce a set of moral principles of legitimacy from a thought experiment. This envisages a group of people who are ignorant of what their interests will be convening to decide on a constitution that will be beneficial to the contractants no matter what their interests may turn out to be.6 These moral principles would then act as constraints on what could be deemed a legitimate will. I believe that such hopes of deriving definitive results from thought experiments are theoretically and practically illusory. Nevertheless, given some fairly weak assumptions, I believe that the Rawlsian move constitutes a reasonable test that any proposal calling itself democratic should pass. I believe that my proposal would pass.
At the other end of the scale from extreme individualist voluntarist views we come to views that attribute to the corporate will of the people a more or less mystical rightness. This will is not the product of compromises between conflicting interests or of accepted constitutional procedures but of historical necessity or of some Volksgeist. In so far as it attains concrete expression it is manifested in a charismatic leader or an organization that claims some unique authority to articulate it correctly. It is hardly necessary to emphasize either the enormous dangers of such movements or the ease with which they may in fact constitute a very effective social force in certain circumstances. One of the salient features of the sort of polity I am advocating is that it radically undercuts the possibility of such movements using the instruments of government to force their will on people. Indeed, I should hope that it would result in the dissolution of the social basis of charismatic authority and destroy its grip on people. Even if it is true that many of us have some profound psychological need for identification of a non-rational kind with some totality that transcends us, perhaps we can satisfy this need by identifying with football teams rather than governments, “historic missions” or the destinies of races.
Nevertheless, no profound social change can take place in a conscious and deliberately controlled way unless there is a very wide consensus that it is at least acceptable, and a substantial group that is both strongly motivated and organized to bring it about. I concede that the central requirement in our present historical situation is that the working class should become conscious of the need to abolish the sources of class division at every level of social life. This is especially the case in the matter of control of the means of production. To that extent I agree with the classical Marxist analysis. [In fact I now reject a class analysis, stressing instead conflicts of interest that we all have. In a market society we all have some interest in the profitability of capital investment and some interest in the prosperity of people who sell their labour power. It is no longer true in advanced capitalist societies that most people possess nothing but their labour power, though there is a significant minority of whom this is true.]
In any case what that analysis lacked in my view, was a sufficiently rigorous and constructive theory of democratic government.7 Rather, the classical Marxists tended to share the anarchist assumption that in the struggle for democracy the revolutionary movement would generate spontaneously the decision procedures and institutions that were needed to produce a democratic society. I shall argue that in this respect it was deeply mistaken and try to indicate the strategies that are appropriate for a revolutionary socio-political change in a democratic direction.

IV Assumptions

Demarchy, as I shall present it, is utopian, at least in the sense that no model for it exists, and it is not based on a projection of present trends or causes. It can be brought about, if at all, only by convincing enough people that it should be tried. Obviously the chances of doing that are small. So it is all the more important to emphasize that in other respects it is not utopian at all. In particular, I shall argue that it does not presuppose that people perform substantially better either morally or intellectually than they do at present. My hope is that it could create conditions that would lead to improvements in the level of moral and scientific self-awareness in the community through a self-reinforcing process, but there are good grounds for embracing it without putting any store by such hopes. It is offered primarily as a solution to present problems, a way of averting very great evils, starting with small practical steps.
Meanwhile, the lack of any clear and plausible view of how a democratic socialist society might work is, I believe, the main obstacle to significant radical activity. State socialism in all its forms has been discredited. It has become increasingly difficult to put all the failures down to exogenous causes. The kinds of changes that can be produced by the use of centralized power are not the changes most socialists had hoped for. Moreover, popular spontaneous action is clearly no remedy. At best it is haphazard, illcoordinated, often foolish and shortlived. At worst, it is terror manipulated by leaders engaged in power struggles. The fond hopes of the anarchists, which Marx himself and so many Marxists have shared, that the solutions to how future society is to be governed will emerge in the process of struggle have proved illusory. Organized struggle to control the state calls for military and political organization of a centralized and authoritarian kind. It reproduces state power transferring it into the hands of different people. Unorganized struggle merely forces the existing power structure to adapt. It cannot replace that structure.
Still it will appear absurd to many to offer a few changes in procedure as a solution to the great problems of our time. It smacks of panaceas and monomanias, like Berkeley’s faith in tar water. Blanket scepticism, however, is no more rational than credulity. Procedures are very important, especially where it is a question of producing decisions from a mass of disparate inputs that can be interrelated in a variety of ways. In order to produce reliably good quality output a sound procedure is needed both to select good quality input and to process it properly. In social decision-making the crucial questions are, What kinds of information about the situation can the decision process handle? What desires and aspirations does it respond to? How good is it at coming up with the most practical and appropriate decisions in the circumstances?
Decisions are made by people. Good people may arrive at good decisions in spite of poor institutionalized procedures, when they are not wholly constrained by those procedures. Conversely, the best procedures in the world can be misused by people who are determined to do so. But the more complex the society and the longer our time-span the less likely it is that these divergences from the norm will be significant. This is not just a matter of probabilities sorting themselves out in the long term. Procedures have a constraining effect on what is registered and what is made of it, and the constraints tend to grow tighter the more deeply entrenched the procedures become. If the success of a business enterprise is entirely a matter of its relative profitability, then it becomes increasingly difficult for a manager under the pressure of competition to take account of factors that produce no profit, even if there are other good reasons for doing so and the cost is not great. The manager becomes typecast in the role of profit producer. There may even be a suggestion of impropriety, at least in the eyes of accountants and shareholders, in stepping out of that role. It is not the manager’s money that is involved. Similarly, judges are increasingly held to the letter of the law, bureaucrats to regulations and politicians to what generates the most favourable balance of power, whatever their personal preferences.
The crucial problem is that our present procedures of public decisionmaking are incapable of registering reliably a number of aspects of the situation that are of great concern to those who understand them, and incapable of drawing reliably the appropriate conclusions even from the information they do register. Because they deal with vital questions they must be changed. The change will not be an improvement unless certain other conditions are present. Above all, there must be enough people who in their own interests are willing and able to make the changed procedures work. I shall argue that it is not unrealistic to suppose that there are enough such people, and that there are practical strategies of change available. A major point is that nobody is required to participate in the political process, but just to trust those who do.
Similarly, I shall have to argue that it would be rational for people to accept the decision procedures I am advocating. My argument will be that it is much less risky to hand over control of public goods to a variety of very limited agencies than to one omnicompetent agency. The risk of irresponsible action is dispersed. Total disaster is less likely. However, the problem of control becomes more complicated. It is, superficially at least, much easier to keep a watch over a single authority than over very many. But the watch one can keep over an omnicompetent authority cannot be very effective. In any case, on most things that affect me I have no particular view, certainly no wellfounded basis of assessment. I should be reasonably content to have those matters looked after by people who are competent, sensitive to my interests and are watched by others who share my needs. At the same time, I should like to have the opportunity of playing a substantive role in those few areas in which I have some stronger interest and knowledge, provided the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs.
By contrast with existing democratic practice, demarchy does not assume that most of the population is in a position to make soundly based assessments of all the major issues of government policy or even to assess the merits of rival elites competing for votes. What it assumes is that most people, if they are faced with limited concrete questions about matters that affect them directly, are capable of gaining enough understanding of the issues to make sensible choices about them. Moreover, it is not too difficult to arrange things so that they have sufficient inducements to act responsibly in these matters, to seek the best advice, open up discussion of the possibilities and attempt to find optimal solutions. Where more difficult, higher-level functions are involved, it is more likely that people with suitable competence and motivation can be found and chosen by and among those who have worked together on more limited problems than by any other selection process.
My pessimism about our present political structures is accompanied by a similar pessimism about our economic structures. I shall have to show how these too can be changed for the better. Again I shall argue that, granted reasonably realistic conditions, the crucial factor is the practices that constitute decision procedures in these matters. I make no pretensions to solve the problems of economic theory, nor do I draw very much on the many extensions of economic theory to matters of public choice. All of this work achieves a certain rigour at the cost of working with very limited and abstract models. These models can be applied to real situations only with a good deal of caution, which is often missing in their advocates.
By contrast, the considerations I shall offer are of a looser, but more practical kind, suggestive and exploratory rather than theoretical and explanatory. Ultimately, the only solid ground for asserting that something is possible is that it exists. Conceptual analysis can show that a state of affairs is conceivable, but it cannot pretend to show that the conception encompasses everything that is needed for it to be realized. So it cannot even assure us that a state of affairs is not impossible, much less that it is possible in some stronger sense, for example possible under certain given conditions. The strength of conceptual analysis lies in bringing out the contradictory characteristics of conceptions that at first sight appear quite reasonable. So I make no sweeping claims about the arguments offered in this book. They are designed to induce readers to give practical consideration to certain possibilities in the light of their own needs and experience. My justification for asking people to read this book is that if what I have to say is right it is very important, and it has not been said before. It is intended to provoke and challenge readers of every sort to say where it is wrong.

V The argument

Chapter 1 confronts the usual arguments for the necessity of the state in an attempt to undermine them, and underlines the dangers in the state system and the precariousness of attempts to control it. It is argued that the system of states generates rigidities and absurdities that are impossible to control democratically. In chapter 2 the problem of bureaucracy, control from the top through large permanent administrative organizations, is examined and the reasons for it criticized. The possibility of organizations being answerable Introduction 13 directly to those affected by their decisions is explored and the problems of such a system clarified.
Chapter 3 undertakes a sustained critique of voting, emphasizing the paucity of the information a vote can convey, the futility of the individual vote in mass assemblies and the impossibility of voters becoming well informed. The defects of party politics and the incapacity of reforms in systems of voting to remedy them are detailed. This critique is followed by an argument that statistically representative decision making bodies would provide a means of meeting all the major objections to electoral politics, as well as providing a means of breaking bureaucracies down into small units under the direct control of those they affect.
Chapter 4, having briefly surveyed the inadequacy of a pure market economy to provide public goods and reasonable access for all to the means of production, outlines a proposal for a market society in which various productive resources are vested in different trustee bodies. These trustees would be independent of each other and not subject to any central policymaking or executive body. They would lease productive resources to firms at prices that would cover the need for public goods, and safeguard other community requirements. The argument is that demarchy would constitute an adequate social control of production in a market economy and provide satisfactory security for all.
In chapter 5 various features of and objections to this system of public decision-making that I call “demarchy” are examined, and the hopes that might reasonably be placed in it are detailed.
A reader who is anxious to get to the heart of the matter might start at chapter 3, or even at the third section of that chapter, where the working principles of demarchy are outlined, and proceed to chapters 4 and 5.
I have many ideas about the practical details of implementing demarchic principles that are not mentioned in this book. To do so would have been misleading. What I am anxious to produce is a radical reappraisal of the whole problem of public decision-making. Once people accept the possibility of demarchy they rapidly find themselves coming up with an abundance of suggestions about how it might work in practice. It is one of its great strengths that it makes experimentation in thought and practice infinitely easier than in state-governed societies. It thrives on diversity.

Notes

1. For a good critical survey of contemporary theories of democracy see Jack Lively’s Democracy (Oxford, Basil Blackwell: 1975). My work is much indebted to the works of R. A. Dahl, especially A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 1956); Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven, Yale University Press: 1971) and Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy: Autonomy vs. Control (New Haven, Yale University Press: 1982). Dahl has coined the useful term “polyarchy” to designate the regimes we usually call democratic in Western countries.
2. On ancient democracy see M. J. Finley, Democracy, Ancient and Modern (London, Chatto and Windus: 1973) and E. S. Stavely, Greek and Roman Voting and Elections (London, Thames and Hudson: 1972). All officials other than generals were appointed by lot in Athens, and the business of the assembly was handled and the agenda set by the council of five hundred, again chosen by lot, working through its smaller executive. Another place where appointment by lot was used extensively was in early renaissance Florence. There, however, the proportion of citizens eligible for office was a good deal smaller than in Athens. The reasoning behind the preference for sortition was simple and sound. If people had to choose they would attempt to elect the best candidates. The candidates with upper-class backgrounds would normally appear superior. The result would be rule by upper-class people who engaged in demagogy rather than democracy. British political history nicely illustrates this point. In other Western countries, where class differences are not so clearly marked and socially respected, the result of elections is a professional stratum of politicians whose class connections are more significant than their origins. Of course, it has usually been taken for granted that democracy is inferior to rule by the best. The dominant verdict in Western political thought is in favour of electoral aristocracy.
3. “Demarchy” is an archaic word which Hayek used to describe the view he advocated in Law, Legislation and Liberty (3 vols., London, Routledge and Kegan Paul: 1973, 1976, 1979). How ever, since he did not employ it persistently, it has not passed into current use and I feel justified in attempting to appropriate it.
4. Rousseau still made this assumption about class societies, though not about classless societies, Social Contract, Book IV, Chapter 3. To Godwin, however, writing at the end of the eighteenth century, sortition seemed a merely superstitious practice. The point had been lost.
5. The complexities of problems of rational public choice have been studied intensively in recent years. The best survey is that of D. C. Mueller, Public Choice (Cambridge Surveys of Economic Literature), (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 1979). See also H. Van den Doel, Democracy and Welfare Economics (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 1978).
6. The great exponent of this doctrine is John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press: 1971). There is a very large Introduction 15 literature on Rawls’s work. See particularly N. Daniels, Reading Rawls (New York, Basic Books: 1974) and Brian Barry, The Liberal Theory of Justice (Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 1974).
7. Like most nineteenth-century radical democrats, Marx placed his faith in measures designed to ensure that the representatives of the electors acted as their delegates. This assumes that the electors arrive at a well-considered verdict on every important question. I shall argue that this is unrealistic and inappropriate. Not everybody should have an equal say on every question. Moreover, the construction of the common good is a matter of negotiation between different interests, and negotiations can not be carried out effectively in structures of the kind Marx envisaged. In general, Marx underestimated the extent to which political structures were subject to inherent laws quite as constraining as those governing economic structures. He saw clearly enough the economic absurdities of nineteenth-century populist radicalism but failed to criticize its political prescriptions. It is easy to excuse Marx’s oversights in these matters. It is less easy to excuse his followers, who use the lamest of anti-utopian arguments to absolve themselves from thinking about politics beyond immediate issues.   




John Burnheim, "Introduction" in Burnheim, J.: Is democracy possible? The alternative to electoral democracy. pp 1- 15.

Is democracy possible? (Bruce Gilley)

Tecto de Bruce Gilley[1]


The global spread of democracy over the last generation or so has been accompanied by the global spread of criticisms of democracy. In a sense, this is unsurprising: Popular ideas tend to generate their own opposition. Democracy’s current popularity—almost universally valued, institutionalized in more than three-fifths of the world’s states, and demanded by large movements in many among the remaining two-fifths—makes it an ideal target for critique. As a result, in recent years, a slowly accelerating wave of skeptical and at times even hostile thought has arisen to challenge democracy’s claim to be the best form of government. This wave is distinct from the inchoate illiberal ideologies that autocrats in China, Russia, Iran, or Cuba like to promote. Unlike those ideologies, it is a carefully argued, social-scientific, and respectable critique of democracy that has been developed largely by Western scholars. Almost unbeknownst to the legions of democracy-builders or to the nearly four billion democratic citizens worldwide, the belief in democracy has begun to crumble inside some of the world’s finest minds and institutions.
Some of this dissent is healthy. Assuming a feasible democratic ideal, criticism of democracy as practiced in the world’s 121 electoral democracies (the vast majority of which do not belong to the traditional “West”) directs attention to shortcomings and can spur corrective action. Now that democracy is the typical form of government, consideration of the “varieties of democracy” and how they can be improved is a progressive endeavor. A steady stream of new books describes the many improvements possible, from involving citizens in “deliberative” efforts to make public policy to tinkering with electoral rules.1
In other instances, however, this dissent is destructive because it aims [114] not to improve democracy, but to eliminate it altogether. Lacking any comparative or historical context, antidemocratic thought easily spills into a disdain for all existing democracies. This disdain feeds doubts within established democracies while strengthening antidemocrats in autocratic countries.
Since it comes at a time when democracy has, for the first time ever, become humanity’s dominant form of political organization, this new wave of antidemocratic thought is best described as dissent rather than reaction.2 As such, it has drawn a sympathetic hearing from those predisposed to seek the progressive change of any entrenched practice. Democracy and its defenders are described as “hegemons” in the marketplace of ideas. Styling themselves as dissidents, these critics claim to be asking “subversive questions” about democracy which, if left unaddressed, will threaten “our very existence.”3 They see themselves as underdogs, or “realists” challenging the untenable “romanticism” of democracy’s defenders. They encourage citizens to disengage from democracy and put their faith in undemocratic alternatives—to make an “exit” from the political realm rather than to exercise “voice” more effectively, to borrow Albert O. Hirschman’s famous terms.4 The disastrous results of such disenchantment can be read in the historical record of the period between the two world wars of the last century, and are hinted at by the “democratic recession” that has stalked the early years of the current century.
As David Spitz wrote in his 1949 classic Patterns of Anti-Democratic Thought, critiques of democracy have long come in two varieties.5 The first questions democracy’s feasibility, while the second questions its desirability (see Figure below). Dissenting claims about the desirability of democracy are often grounded in personal dissatisfaction with democratic outcomes: Rightists decry the debasement of virtue or the purloining of property, for example, while leftists denounce the repression of women or the poor, or the degree to which private property is protected. This is all fairly easy to dismiss as routine complaining so long as those outcomes remain within some limits, which they usually do. Democracies tend to produce polities that are stabler, wealthier, fairer, more innovative, and better at respecting rights than any available alternatives.6
Dissenting claims that democracy is infeasible are more corrosive, however. They threaten to weaken the very ideal of democracy—the notion that citizens, situated as political equals, can exercise common control over political power. Democracy, the prophets of infeasibility contend, is based upon a Great Lie,7 or several Great Lies. The sooner we wake up to this, they add, the sooner we will be able to move on to some better age, untrammeled by democratic delusions. When compared to the promised benefits of these alternatives—more prosperous economies, scientific policies—actually existing democracy can appear shabby indeed.
In many cases, critics of democracy’s feasibility are moved by dissatisfaction [115] with democracy’s outcomes. A government that does not rule for the people must not be a government by the people. Critics of both right and left are prone to rationalize their discontent with democratic outcomes by mounting sophisticated critiques of the process itself (at least until those outcomes come back into line with their own views, at which point the procedural constraints on the “silent majority” are said to have magically vanished). But this tactical shift to the question of democratic feasibility is harder to unmask as mere ire at democratic results. As a general rule, feasibility critics on the right focus on the unwillingness or inability of citizens to take up the heavy burdens of self-rule, or on the logical problems of translating individual preferences into public choices. Critics on the left focus on differences in power and resources, or on elites’ efforts to fool or mystify the people. Critics on the right, in other words, are suspicious about all citizens while critics on the left are suspicious about only some of them. The historical trend has been for such criticisms to migrate from the right (Plato through Burke) to the left (Marx through Chomsky). But in the past decade, the critiques traditionally offered from the right have enjoyed a resurgence, and indeed something of a boom.
More interestingly still, these right-wing critiques are now often voiced by figures who align themselves with the left. This is surprising because those on the right never claim to be anything but elitist, whereas those on the left pretend to be the true representatives of “the people.” In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke commented wryly on “the consistency of those democratists who, when they are not on their guard, treat the humbler part of the community with the greatest contempt, whilst, at the same time, they pretend to make them the depositories of all power.” But in many ways, it is the ability of these right-wing critiques to appeal to the misanthropic tendencies of left-wing intellectuals that makes them so potent.
For this reason, I want to focus here on the feasibility critiques of the right. This is not to deny the influence (and far less the continued production) of traditional leftist feasibility critiques—if anything, the academy continues to publish and lavish attention on these far more.8 My approach, rather, is to focus on the unexpected resurgence of what was once deemed a reactionary, antidemocratic intellectual tide, now reborn as a current of dissent.
Unpublic Choice
Feasibility critiques of the right long aimed a good deal of analytical throw weight at the aggregate level of democratic policy making, often under the rubric of “public-choice theory.” Accepting the assumption of rational and informed citizens, public-choice theory asks whether it is possible to take a set of individual preferences or judgments and translate them into a public policy that reflects those views.[116]
Figure—Varieties of Antidemocratic Thought

Democracy is not possible because of…
Democracy is not desirable because it causes…
So it should be replaced by…
Say critics on the Left
·         Propaganda Power differences Social exclusion Agenda control
·         Repression Inequality Westernization
·         Mass-party rule Worker rule Direct citizen rule
Say critics on the Right
·         Citizen stupidity Citizen ignorance Aggregation problems
·         Instability Mob rule Inefficiency
·         Markets Experts/Guardians Free association Weighted voting

In 1785, the Marquis de Condorcet noticed that when public preferences are fairly evenly spread across three choices, the option that wins the most votes might be inferior to another one in the minds of most voters— Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative victory over a divided opposition in 1983 is a commonly cited example. In modern times, political scientists such as William H. Riker have had a field day devising examples where “majority rule” however conceived does not lead to a “popular” outcome (or in the jargon of the field, a “Condorcet winner”). Democracy, the reasoning goes, is thereby exposed as meaningless, and struggles for it as misconceived. Riker wanted democracy, which he derided as “populism,” replaced with rule by virtuous philosopher-guardians, who were supposed to spearhead a system that he misleadingly called “liberalism.”9 Right-wing East Asian critics of democracy from Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew to China’s neo-Confucianist Kang Xiaoguang are heirs to Riker’s elitism. So are such Western critics of “illiberal democracy” as journalist Fareed Zakaria and political scientist Jack Snyder.
Not everyone who studies the problems of public choice concludes that democracy is a sham, of course. Indeed, most of the important work in this field has been done by scholars searching for ways to minimize rather than eliminate the difficulties that can arise when many individuals try to arrive at a single decision. Yet the challenges of public choice have driven many to despair, giving rise to the conclusion that democracy is impossible and should therefore be abandoned.
In his important 2003 work Defending Democracy, Gerry Mackie considers classic “problems of public choice” and finds that upon closer examination they are better described not as problems inherent in the decision-making process itself, but rather as dilemmas of competing [117] values or preferences that reflect the complexities of the real world in which people and groups must make their choices and take their chances.10 Moreover, determines Mackie, few of the problems touted by publicchoice theory actually erupt in practice. Logical possibilities conjured by the academic mind are not in the same as empirical probabilities in real-world democracies. While outcomes never align perfectly with the common will, they are seldom much at odds with it either, at least in wellfunctioning democracies. Agenda-setting and manipulation, for instance, are rare in real-world politics because all players tend to be well aware of—and on guard against—such tactics. When manipulations do occur, fairly simple institutional fixes that improve rather than reject democracy are capable of solving the problem.
In practical terms, public-choice critiques have the serious drawback of lacking a revolutionary edge. No one is ever going to rush to the antidemocratic barricades shouting “Down with strategic voting, cycling majorities, and multidimensional issue spaces!” Whether because they are false or because they are unprovocative, or quite likely for both reasons, these critiques stand more as academic curiosities than as real threats to actually existing democracy.
The Ignorant Public
More recently, right-wing critics of democracy’s feasibility have returned to an older concern, the quality of citizens themselves. In particular, the hottest claim today is that citizens are too ignorant, irrational, or both to rule themselves. Democracy is impossible because the demos is defective. “Idiocracy” and “dumbocracy” are the favorite terms of abuse. In Thailand, middle-class protestors who backed the 2006 military coup and now agitate for weighted-voting rules that would disenfranchise most of their country’s rural dwellers and hand vast powers to unelected experts are willing to say openly that “it’s too easy to manipulate poor people.”11
The public-ignorance critique, which has been led in the United States by the Texas-based journal Critical Review, says that citizens lack even the minimal information needed to make intelligent choices.12 Commentators in this tradition like to make sport of citizens’ ignorance regarding basic political facts such as the identity of their local legislative representative or where a certain country is located on the map. The argument is not that citizens should be better informed so that democracy will work better, but that any imaginable level of citizen information is still too low for democracy to be possible in our day and age. The U.S. jurist and legal scholar Richard Posner, for example, argues in his 2003 book Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy that since people are and always will be “basically ignorant” about politics, U.S. democracy should never aspire to be anything other than a means of rotating elites.13 Similarly, George [118] Mason University law professor Ilya Somin says that ignorance makes claims of democracy untenable because citizens are unable to choose the policies or leaders that best fit their interests.14
Like many antidemocratic critiques, the public-ignorance critique has a long pedigree—in this case going all the way back to Plato. Its more enduring modern formulation began with Phillip Converse, who in a 1964 paper called “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics” argued that most people have only half-baked attitudes subject to easy manipulation by informational assault. Frustrated that citizens did not offer consistent answers to survey questions, an exasperated Converse would eventually conclude that “what needs repair is not the [survey] item but the population.”15
As Converse’s descent into unintentional self-parody hints, the publicignorance critique has a paradoxical quality. People may well count it as one of the blessings of life in a free and stable society that they face no urgent need to learn about politics. Moreover, in a truly democratic society where each person’s voice counts equally, the impact of a single voice is so slight as to make investing in political learning seem irrational. The democratic reply to this is that fairness demands that beneficiaries of a free society devote sufficient attention to politics to ensure that leaders and policies continue to aim at the common good, somehow conceived.
The word “sufficient” is key: How much and what kind of information do citizens need in order to do their civic duty? And what exactly does it mean for citizens to “exercise” political power in an era in which government has grown in size and complexity such that even heads of state can be at best only generally aware of what occurs within the states they head?
In the first place, “gotcha” survey questions ask about irrelevancies. Citizens need to know—and often do know—whether or not their local roads are being repaired, their neighbors harassed by police, or their taxes rising. Citizens, in other words, can and do carry out their democratic mandates, even if they cannot list all the constitutional powers that subnational governments enjoy in their country.16 From this perspective, being “well-informed” may be easier than antidemocratic critics allow.
In addition, being “well-informed” is not the same as agreeing with the views of some academics. In an era of multibillion-dollar media industries all jostling to be seen as “fair” and “objective,” not to mention research universities and policy think tanks generating extensive research, valid information is not in short supply. Even the “attack ads” so often decried [119] as a feature of U.S. politics often contain valuable information, as John Geer has pointed out.17 Highly educated and amply informed people still disagree on many basic issues. Complaints about “public ignorance” may mask an inability of critics to come to terms with the fact of complex moral and empirical disagreement.
Somin, for example, argues that “collusive politicians” in the United States secretly band together to maintain public ignorance of the fact that since U.S. blacks tend to die younger than their white, Asian, and Hispanic compatriots, the country’s Social Security program amounts to “a major hidden redistribution from black workers to white retirees.”18 Yet no major black political leader argues that blacks should pay lower Social Security taxes (nor for that matter, does any major male politician argue that men should pay lower rates because women tend to outlive them). Again, wellinformed people may simply differ on the appropriate policies that should follow in response to a given set of facts. Elsewhere, Somin argues that ideologies are no substitute for factual knowledge because there might be “a factual or analytical error in the ideology in question”—as if the world’s great and enduring ideologies could be snuffed out by hiring a few graduate students to do some fact-checking.19
A few years ago, Larry Bartels of Princeton claimed that public support for tax cuts that U.S. president George W. Bush had persuaded Congress to enact in 2001 was based on pure ignorance.20 Revisiting this claim, Arthur Lupia and colleagues found that Bartels had introduced a sleight of hand: He had built into his analysis the assumption that most informed voters should oppose the tax cuts. Bartels began with his own idea of what people “should” think, and then declared them “ignorant” when they failed to conform to his expectations. Imputing what informed voters “should” think is one of the more scandalous misuses of the academic bully-pulpit. “Citizens have reasons for the opinions and interests they have,” wrote Lupia and colleagues in their response to Bartels. “We may or may not agree with them. However, we, as social scientists, can contribute more by offering reliable explanations of these reasons than we can by judging them prematurely.”21 More generally, Lupia has argued, the public-ignorance critique is less about gathering evidence of what people do not know than it is about masking an elitist dislike for the substance of what most people believe.22
Even where citizens patently do lack the information needed to make rational choices linked to their self-identified interests, they may be able to rely on the opinions of people who make it their business to be wellinformed. Experts, groups focused on particular issues, and political leaders can all act as “shortcuts” that allow citizens to become quickly informed by proxy, in essence delegating the job to trusted others. Robert Erickson, the coauthor of a book that shows how U.S. democracy works well in tracking public opinion, argues that even if people should happen to become better informed, U.S. public policies would not change [120] much.23 Signals, in other words, are effective substitutes for personal learning.24
Where ignorance persists, it is still not clear that this means democracy is a failure. A well-known finding is that if 95 percent of the population is ignorant and votes randomly, the better-informed 5 percent will still be the deciding voters, leading to the best choice most of the time thanks to the “wisdom of crowds” described in James Surowiecki’s 2004 book of the same title. In a two-party system such as the one found in the United States, that better-informed (and therefore “swing”) vote can be critical to electoral success.
The public-ignorance thesis, then, is either false or else true but not threatening to democracy. As such, this critique does not come close to challenging the democratic tenet that citizens “exercise” collective political power in the sense of taking actions that reflect credible facts about the political world. Claims of public ignorance are certainly more provocative than those of unpublic choice. But they quickly reveal problems of disagreement more than ignorance.
The Irrational Public
This leaves the claim that citizens are irrational, or cognitively incompetent, as the final charge of infeasibility from the right that could doom the democratic project. Such a charge verges most nearly on the misanthropic since it concerns inherent rather than remediable defects in the demos. In new democracies, we are told, citizens are too tribal or too easily swayed by demagogues to exercise self-rule. In established democracies, citizens simply refuse to act logically. If this is so, the “miracle of aggregation” that underpins the wisdom of crowds must fail because citizens are not merely ignorant and given to believing random things, but are actively irrational and persistently believe things that make no sense. The rational and well-informed 5 percent is swamped by the crazed 95 percent.
The most recent and public example of this line of argument is Bryan D. Caplan’s 2007 book The Myth of the Rational Voter. Columnist Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times called it “the best political book this year,” while the Economist called it “a treat.”25 It is probably the most widely read antidemocratic work of the post–Cold War era.It has found a wide audience beyond the United States. Its enthusiastic readers include elites in China who have long been fond of arguing that their country’s peasants are both ignorant and irrational.26
Caplan, who is a professor of economics at George Mason University, argues that citizens systematically vote for economic policies which make them worse off (and that politicians duly heed their wishes), not because citizens are ill-informed but because they are irrational (or “boneheaded” as he wrote in one essay based on the book).27 As evidence, Caplan cites [121] studies in which voters are systematically at odds with economists concerning the correct economic policies in areas such as trade, regulation, employment, and taxes.
It is far from clear that the mistakes which Caplan purports to identify are in fact errors. For instance, Caplan believes that voters irrationally support minimum-wage laws despite the role that such laws play in worsening the plight of the poor by making jobs more scarce. Although economists generally concur that minimum-wage laws decrease employment, there is no agreement on the magnitude of such decreases, which many studies show to be minimal.28 If so, then citizens who are also concerned about worker dignity and overall income distribution (taking into account unemployment benefits) may quite rationally decide to support minimumwage laws. In this case, Caplan’s claim of irrationality is glossing over an area where the rational truth is far from evident. The same goes for his arguments about corporate regulation and trade barriers.
Caplan is right that voters do make some patently irrational mistakes. But their impact is limited, especially in the United States. Caplan struggles to unearth the ravages that democracy should, by his telling, have wreaked upon American economic policy. His results do not impress. He notes, for example, that most U.S. citizens believed that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would worsen their living standards, yet President Bill Clinton signed it into law anyway (not exactly an example of a politician slavishly following irrational citizens). When regulation becomes inefficient it is usually reformed, whatever its popularity. Irrational tax breaks for the ethanol industry are being challenged by state governments in the United States. Democracy is self-correcting in a way that alternatives are not. Caplan notes the “pessimism bias” of people thinking things are worse than they really are. But the same logic applies to his own pessimism about the depredations of democracy.
Perhaps the greatest weakness of Caplan’s critique, however, concerns the meaning that he assigns to rationality. Economists often operate on the presumption that some narrowly defined material self-interest is the only rational basis of choice (a view with its roots in the political economy of the Scottish Enlightenment and later, Marxism). Yet emotion, community, fairness, freedom, and dignity are typically no less important, especially in wealthier societies such as the United States where increased material well-being often has a steeply declining utility.Caplan, then, forgets or dislikes the variety of human motives, especially in wealthy, postindustrial societies. As with claims of citizen ignorance, being rational is not the same thing as agreeing with the views of certain intellectuals. The rationality critics have not thought hard enough about what it means for a pluralistic society to be truly democratic, or more accurately for a democratic society to be truly pluralistic.
All three lines of right-wing feasibility critique can thus be refuted. Democracy, or rule by the people, can be defended as the first-best system—[122] rule for the people. But these critiques will persist and in some instances may be proven all too true. After all, people can easily be uninformed or boneheaded, and sometimes democratic outcomes satisfy no one. Democracy’s defenders can then fall back to the Churchill trench, resisting not this or that critique of the democratic ideal, but instead denying the superiority of any proposed alternative. Can this battle be won as well?
Those who adopt “rightist” critiques of democracy typically call first for a reduction or elimination of democratic participation. If citizens are the problem, out of the judgment seat they must go. Public-choice critic Russell Hardin argues that “[t]he more of these issues we can get off the collective agenda, the better for making collective choice coherent.”29 Public-ignorance critic Jeffrey Friedman writes that “[i]f the public doesn’t know what it’s doing politically, why should it have the power to do so much?”30 And public-irrationality critic Caplan wants to “reduce or eliminate efforts to increase voter turnout” since that would discourage the uneducated and the poor from voting.31
Democracy’s Divided Opposition
It is notable that this first step of departicipation is the polar opposite of the prescription demanded by left-wing critics of electoral democracy. They want citizens to be more empowered, to “take back power” from nefarious actors such as lobbyists, corporations, political operatives, and the media.32 This is a reminder that even when it is up against the ropes, democracy often remains standing because its opposition is so divided.
Is departicipation even feasible in a democratic age? Given the popularity of democracy, is it not more cost-effective to educate and inform rather than try to disempower citizens? The legitimacy and thus stability of even the “correct” policies delivered by other means of rule might be gravely undermined if unceremoniously taken out of the hands of voters. Given that most of these critics see democracy as a means to an end, the danger of these ends being undermined by popular discontent is a serious problem. Many critics recognize this, and argue that departicipation should come only through democratic consent. But why would supposedly ignorant, irrational citizens do the putatively well-informed, rational thing by disempowering themselves?
Let us suppose for the sake of argument that it would be relatively easy to convince democratic citizens that it is a good idea for them to back voluntarily away from the exercise of political power. The sober arguments of these critics are exactly attempts at such persuasion, and they have certainly found a sympathetic audience that could broaden. Will the alternatives be less bad than democracy?
In place of democracy, these critics usually propose some combination of three things: markets, experts, and freely formed associations. A fourth proposal—giving the better educated or the wealthier more voting power— [123] is less often heard these days, although arguably the appeal to experts is its close cousin. And it does crop up, as current events in Thailand show.
In many realms of social choice, there is little doubt that experts, markets, and free associations work better than democracy. Indeed, that is why most democratic countries already leave so much in the hands of precisely these three forces. It is no small irony that the country on which the vast majority of democracy’s right-wing feasibility critics have based their views, the United States, is the one where those prescriptions have been taken most seriously. The U.S. economy is one of the most liberalized in the world and delegates many complex decisions (some prodemocratic critics say too many) to institutions such as the Federal Reserve Board and the Supreme Court. Parties and governments with reputations to protect make sure they get key policies right even by ignoring public opinion (on issues such as NAFTA). Price controls have been unheard of since Richard Nixon, and free-trade agreements are nearly sacrosanct. In many ways, then, these critics are preaching to the choir. Their message would be more controversial, and possibly more germane, in “overmobilized” democracies such as France or the Philippines.
But markets, experts, and free association are not infallible. Indeed the ongoing debate in most democracies is when to adopt them and when to nullify them. Markets in particular are easiest to judge because they are subject to many of the same problems that critics attribute to democracy. The delegation of U.S. health care to markets, for instance, leads to “public” choices that no one prefers, and is plagued by problems of citizen misinformation (especially about the likelihood and costs of care options) and irrationality (overinsuring or underinsuring). In highly marketized Hong Kong, public decisions are made by a small group of property developers, prompting an ongoing struggle for democratic control there.
Experts and their political judgements, meanwhile, have come under sustained critique as being boneheaded themselves of late.33 Experts appear to be no better than nonexperts at coming up with “correct” policies, and are subject to their own “spirals of conviction” about the right thing to do. Worse still, mistakes made by experts with unrestrained power tend to have higher social, environmental, and economic costs. Hapless citizens of many developing countries have suffered one wave after another of rule by economists, often with only wreckage to show for it. As Machiavelli wrote in his Discourses: “The defect[s] with which writers usually charge the multitude may also be charged to individual men, and particularly to princes . . . [In fact] the people are more prudent, more stable and more judicious than princes.” As public-ignorance critic Friedman, after contemplating the problems with experts, ruefully concedes: “If the actual alternative to rule by the ignorant is rule by the doctrinaire, then modern democracy poses a true Hobson’s choice.”34
Rule by free association, finally, can yield some truly democratic results, as one finds in the autonomous cultural spaces that minorities [124] have created in many democratic countries. But the problem of political inequality inherent in such unstructured decision making can easily create a problem shared with markets and experts, an overweighting of the interests of the powerful. Free association– based land-use zoning in Houston, Texas, caused widely acknowledged environmental, economic, and social harm. The free association of fundamentalist Christian communities in Arizona, Utah, and Texas led to the spread of coercive polygamy.
None of these comparisons are easy, of course, and it may be that there is indeed greater scope for markets, experts, and free association in most democracies. But once one enters into this comparison, democracy is unlikely to be pushed aside completely, and indeed might expand its remit in a country such as the United States. It is surprising how rarely feasibility critics of the right point to any other country as an example of how things could work better. Caplan’s flippant dismissal of comparative analysis (“It beats life in the Middle Ages”) ignores the many nondemocracies that might serve as examples of his advice. Does it beat life in Singapore today, or the United States of the nineteenth century? Antidemocrats of the right typically want to avoid having to attack Churchill’s trench, often arguing that the question of what might beat democracy is “far too complex to be settled here.”35 Yet allowing the debate to be held on these terms is already a concession to the critiques of democracy as a first-best system. The least they can do is accept a vigorous debate on the alternatives.
It is hard to avoid concluding that, given the unalterable facts of pluralism and social complexity, democracy as actually practiced in most of the world’s democracies is the first-best and therefore unbeatable means of political organization. It need not be defended as merely less bad than existing alternatives that might yet prove superior. The enduring challenge posed by democracy, then, is not just to strive to fulfill the radical implications of political equality and public control of politics, but to do so in the full knowledge that serious alternatives are wanting. This latter condition may be the most challenging of all, because it affords room for democracies to slip into complacency.
In some obtuse way, then, even the unfair and invalid cavilings of democracy critics such as those discussed here may play a constructive role. There is an almost functionalist sense in which democracies that are hampered by their inherent superiority produce critiques such as these just to keep themselves on their toes, shadow-boxing in the absence of any real challenger. To be forced to reckon again with the alternatives [125] is to be reminded of why so many different peoples in so many different contexts have chosen democracy. If this functionalist logic is valid, then one would suppose that the virulence (and cleverness) of feasibility critiques will increase in proportion to the strength of a country’s democratic commitment. The reason that these criticisms have multiplied with such fecundity in the United States may be that it is where the democratic ideal is strongest, and therefore the dangers of complacency greatest. It is also the place where, in any comparative sense, taking into account its huge and diverse population of 300 million, democracy works “pretty good.”36 By grilling U.S. democracy about its peccadilloes, these critics end up saving it from backsliding. In an ironic way, then, they are democracy’s benefactors. Unfortunately, the possible benefits for established democracies might be outweighed by the damage done to new and struggling ones, where authoritarian rule is still a very serious alternative.
It takes tolerance, a feel for context, and most of all a full understanding of the varieties of human motivation to see why feasibility critics of the right are so frighteningly wrong in their analysis of democracy. Democracy is possible not just because no one has quite worked out the details of the promised alternatives. Rather, it is possible for the simple reason that it is the one form of government which evolves constantly to ensure that it is possible. It is a self-correcting system in a way that others are not. And the reason, ultimately, is that the demos has chosen to make it that way—people decide to be democratic. In the final analysis, that is the most compelling evidence for the continuing possibility of democracy.
NOTES
1. Steven J. Brams, Mathematics and Democracy: Designing Better Voting and Fair- Division Procedures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Robert E. Goodin, Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice After the Deliberative Turn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
2. Bruce Gilley, “The New Antidemocrats,” Orbis 50 (Spring 2006): 259–71.
3. Jeffrey Friedman, “Ignorance as a Starting Point: From Modest Epistemology to Realistic Political Theory,” Critical Review 19 (January 2007): 4, 15.
4. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).
5. David Spitz, Patterns of Anti-Democratic Thought: An Analysis and a Criticism, with Special Reference to the American Mind in Recent Times (New York: Macmillan, 1949).
6. Morton H. Halperin, Joseph T. Siegle, and Michael M. Weinstein, The Democracy Advantage: How Democracies Promote Prosperity and Peace (New York: Routledge, 2005).
7. Benjamin Ginsberg, The American Lie: Government by the People and Other Political Fables (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2007).
8. Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); and Dorothy C. Holland et al., Local Democracy Under Siege: Activism, Public Interests, and Private Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2007).
9. William H. Riker, Liberalism Against Populism: A Confrontation between the Theory of Democracy and the Theory of Social Choice (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1982).
10. Gerry Mackie, Democracy Defended (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
11. Thomas Fuller, “Thai Government Backers Take to Streets,” New York Times, 1 September 2008.
12. In 1998, Critical Review carried a symposium on “Public Ignorance and Democracy.” In 2006, it carried another on “Democratic Competence.” At the 2008 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Boston, the journal convened a special “Conference on Political Ignorance” subtitled “Homo Politicus: Ignorant, Closed-Minded, Irrational?”
13. Richard Posner, Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 16.
14. Ilya Somin, Democracy and the Problem of Political Ignorance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009).
15. Philip E. Converse, “Attitudes and Non-Attitudes: Continuation of a Dialogue,” in Edward Tufte, ed., The Quantitative Analysis of Social Problems (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1970), 176–77.
16. Doris A. Graber, “Government by the People, for the People–Twenty-First Century Style,” Critical Review 18 (Winter 2006):167–78; Arthur Lupia, “How Elitism Undermines the Study of Voter Competence,” Critical Review 18 (Winter 2006): 217–32.
17. John G. Geer, In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
18. Ilya Somin, “When Ignorance Isn’t Bliss: How Political Ignorance Threatens Democracy,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 525, 22 September 2004, 14.
19. Ilya Somin, “Knowledge About Ignorance: New Directions in the Study of Political Information,” Critical Review 18 (Winter 2006): 265.
20. Larry M. Bartels, “Homer Gets a Tax Cut: Inequality and Public Policy in the American Mind,” Perspectives on Politics 3 (March 2005): 15–31.
21. Arthur Lupia et al., “Were Bush Tax Cut Supporters ‘Simply Ignorant’? A Second Look at Conservatives and Liberals in ‘Homer Gets a Tax Cut,’” Perspectives on Politics 5 (December 2007): 773–84.
22. Lupia, “How Elitism Undermines the Study of Voter Competence.”
23. Robert S. Erikson, Michael B. MacKuen, and James A. Stimson, The Macro Polity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
24. Robert S. Erikson, “Does Public Ignorance Matter?” Critical Review 19 (Winter 2007): 23–34. He was writing in response to Scott L. Althaus, Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics: Opinion Surveys and the Will of the People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
25. Bryan D. Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Nicholas D. Kristof, “The Voters Speak: Baaa!” New York Times, 30 July 2007; “Vote for me, dimwit,” Economist, 16 June 2007.
26. See, for example, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher Liu Yanhong’s review of Caplan’s book in the February 2008 issue of the widely read Chinese academic journal Guowai Shehui Kexue (Social sciences abroad), “Voter Rationality and the Efficiency of Democratic Politics.”
27. Bryan D. Caplan, “The Four Boneheaded Biases of Stupid Voters,” Reason, October 2007, 24–32.
28. See David Neumark and William Wascher, “Minimum Wages and Employment,” Foundations and Trends in Microeconomics 3 (2007): 1–186.
29. Russell Hardin, “Ignorant Democracy,” Critical Review 18 (Winter 2006): 195.
30. Jeffrey Friedman, “Public Ignorance and Democracy,” Cato Policy Report, July– August 1999, 4.
31. Caplan, Myth of the Rational Voter, 198.
32. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated; John Burnheim, Is Democracy Possible? The Alternative to Electoral Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985); Frank M. Bryan, Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
33. Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
34. Friedman, “Ignorance as a Starting Point,” 6.
35. Ilya Somin, “Democracy and Voter Ignorance Revisited: Rejoinder to Ciepley,” Critical Review 14, no. 1 (2000): 107.
36. John E. Mueller, Capitalism, Democracy, and Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).




[1] Bruce Gilley is assistant professor of political science at Portland State University in Oregon and a member of the Journal of Democracy editorial board. His latest book is The Right to Rule: How States Win and Lose Legitimacy (2009).