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

1
10Not Quite Right, but Still Good The
Democratic Ideal in Modern Politics
2
Arrows Theorem

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

3
Arrows Theorem

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

4
Arrows Theorem

• With a typical methodthe candidate with the most
  votes winsBruce wins with 27 percent of the
  vote.
• It turns out that the vast majority73 percent
  would rather have anyone other than Bruce.

5
Arrows Theorem

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

6
Arrows Theorem

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

7
Arrows Theorem

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

8
Arrows Theorem

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

9
Arrows Theorem

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

10
Arrows Theorem

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

11
Democracy and the Liberal Ideal

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

12
Democracy and the Liberal Ideal

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

13
Democracy and the Liberal Ideal

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

14
Direct Democracy

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

15
Direct Democracy

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

16
Direct democracy

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

17
Representative Democracy

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

18
Representative Democracy

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

19
An Economic Theory of Democracy

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

20
An Economic Theory of Democracy

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

21
An Economic Theory of Democracy

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

22
Winner-Take-All

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

23
Winner-Take-All

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

24
Winner-Take-All

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

25
Winner-Take-All

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

26
Winner-Take-All

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

27
Winner-Take-All

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

28
Winner-Take-All

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

29
Winners Take Their Share

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

30
Winners Take Their Share

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

31
Winners Take Their Share

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

32
Winners Take Their Share

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

33
The Real versus the Ideal Again

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