Democratic Theory Research Paper

1. Who Is Included?

Early democratic institutions, such as those in ancient Athens, enfranchised only a tiny portion of the population. But the 2500 year history of democracy can be viewed as one of progressive inclusion— through the gradual elimination of restrictions based on narrow definitions of citizenship, on property and/or educational qualifications, on race and ethnicity, and on gender. Most modern developed democracies approach universal enfranchisement of adult citizens (Dahl 1989). Of course, many citizens theoretically entitled to participate do not actually do so. Except for a few countries such as Australia and Brazil that have successfully implemented compulsory voting, most democracies leave participation to individual decision with variations in terms of how much of the burden of voter registration falls on the individual. Countries such as the USA or Switzerland that are distinctive for offering many opportunities for public consultation routinely have low turnout rates. In the United States, only about one-half of the citizen adult population actually votes, even in the most important elections, such as for the US Presidency.

Much of the modern dialogue about adapting democracy to the large-scale nation-state began with the famous debate over the American Constitution between Federalists and Anti-Federalists. The American Founders did not even use the term ‘democracy’ to apply to the ‘Republic’ that they wished to establish. The term ‘democracy’ was reserved, for example, by James Madison (author of many of the key Federalist papers and one of the chief architects of the US Constitution) for small-scale city-states where everyone could gather together. The danger in direct democracy, Madison and the Founders thought, was that passions or interests might motivate ‘factions’ endangering some people’s rights (Madison et al. 1788).

2. What Is Public Opinion?

The American Founders wanted institutions that would give expression not just to any public views, but to those opinions that had been ‘refined’ or ‘filtered’ so as to produce ‘the deliberative sense of the community.’ Representatives, they believed, serve to ‘refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through a chosen body of citizens’ as Madison argued in Federalist No. 10. ‘The public voice’ pronounced by representatives under such a regulation ‘will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves convened for the purpose.’ Small deliberative bodies, such as the US Senate or a Constitutional Convention, allow representatives to come to a better determination of the public good than one would get just by bringing the people together and asking them. There is a difference, in other words, between the deliberative or thoughtful public opinion one can find in representative institutions, at least at their best, and the uninformed and unreflective preferences commonly found in the mass public.

A central problem in democratic theory is how to reconcile the aspiration for thoughtful and informed preferences with another key aspiration—counting everyone’s preferences equally. Deliberative bodies may represent highly informed and competent preferences, but those preferences are often shared only by an elite. Direct consultation of mass preferences will typically involve counting uninformed preferences, often simply reflecting the public’s impressions of sound bites and headlines. Hence the hard choice between politically equal but unreflective mass preferences and politically unequal but relatively more reflective elite views.

This basic dilemma is reinforced by the tendency of ordinary citizens in the large-scale nation-state to have little incentive to become well informed. Each voter can understand that his or her individual vote or individual opinion is only one out of millions and is, as a result, unlikely to make much difference to the outcome of an election or to public policy. As a result, individual citizens have little reason to become well informed about complex political or policy issues. Anthony Downs coined the term ‘rational ignorance’ for this situation in which voters find themselves (Downs 1957). A host of empirical studies confirm that the mass public in most modern societies is not well informed about politics (see Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996, for an overview of both American and comparative data).

3. The Design Of Institutions

We seem, in other words, to face a forced choice between elected elites and uninformed masses. But there are institutional experiments with deliberation among representative microcosms of the mass public. These experiments, ranging from so-called ‘citizens juries’ to Deliberative Opinion Polls, take random samples of the public and subject them to situations where they are effectively motivated to get good information, hear balanced accounts of competing arguments, and come to a considered judgment. These experiments show that ordinary citizens are capable of becoming informed and dealing with complex policy matters. And it is possible to get an input to policy-making that is representative of the mass public while also embodying deliberation (Fishkin 1995).

Once opinions are solicited by some democratic process, how should they be aggregated? There is a long-standing claim for majority rule as a procedure that counts everyone’s views equally. Modern work in rational choice theory has shown that majority rule is the only decision rule that satisfies a number of appealing normative criteria (May 1952). But majority rule, like other decision rules, is subject to ‘instability’—to cycles, violating transitivity (the requirement that if A is preferred to B and if B is preferred to C, then A should be preferred to C). This problem is part of a more general account of problems in social choice theory developed in the modern era by Kenneth Arrow in Arrow’s so-called ‘impossibility theorem’ (Arrow 1951, 1963). For our purposes, it is worth noting that the conundrums of social choice theory, including the violations of transitivity, presume ‘universal domain’—they presume that all logically possible preference orderings may occur. One way out is to limit the range of preference orderings that occur in a given decision-making process. If preferences are, for example, organized according to some overarching dimension so that they are ‘single-peaked’ (Black 1958) then violations of transitivity will not occur. Some political theorists have suggested that if citizens deliberate, they will come to some shared under- standing of the questions at issue and achieve a structure for their preferences that tends to satisfy single peakedness (Miller 1992). To the extent this turns out to be the case, then deliberative preferences could avoid cycles that undermine the claim to rationality for democratic decisions.

Most democratic decisions in the large-scale nation- state do not conform to the simplified situation of citizens voting directly on policy alternatives. Of course, they do fit that picture in initiatives and referendums. And citizens do elect representatives through a variety of electoral systems. However, these systems vary greatly in how well they translate majority preferences into seats in legislatures and into public policies. Robert Dahl, in a classic work (Dahl 1956), described two competing pictures of democracy—‘Madisonian’ and ‘Populistic.’ The former offers significant impediments to majority rule (in the interests of avoiding tyranny of the majority). The latter offers a high degree of correspondence between majority preferences and public politics. Most systems, however, are somewhere in between. For example, the United States, Dahl argued, was a ‘hybrid’ of the two that actually was best understood as operating not on ‘majority rule’ but on ‘minorities rule’—a system in which intense minorities tend to get their way. People who feel most strongly tend to participate actively to make sure their voice is heard. People who do not care tend not to participate.

4. Tyranny Of The Majority?

A remaining central problem of democratic theory is how to avoid ‘tyranny of the majority.’ A decision may count all or most people’s preferences, it may be supported by the public’s considered judgments, it may be aggregated by an appropriate decision rule such as majority rule, and it may, nevertheless, conflict with justice or impose unacceptable consequences on some portion of the population. In other words, the people may, democratically, decide to do bad things. For 2500 years, the image of mob rule in Ancient Athens did much to discredit democracy (Roberts 1994). The fact that the Athenians had killed Socrates worried the American Founders.

Attempts to address the problem of majority tyranny usually rely on answers to the questions addressed above: Whose preferences count? What kinds of preferences are considered? What decision rule is employed? What is the design of democratic institutions? First, the spread of the franchise to most or all adult citizens has been an important factor in making sure that the interests of those citizens are considered. The spread of voting rights across racial, ethnic, religious, gender, and class divisions has proven to be an important factor in creating institutional incentives for addressing the problems of those who were previously disenfranchised. But such a solution is imperfect. A group can have its votes counted, but outvoted, its interests considered but neglected—or even despised.

Hence, the second issue bears on majority tyranny: what kinds of preferences do people bring to the democratic process? The fear of majority tyranny has long focused on ‘passions’ or ‘interests’ that might motivate ‘factions’ adverse to the rights of some members of the community, to use terms that James Madison made famous in the Federalist Papers, especially No. 10. One of Madison’s strategies for insulating democracy from factions is to ‘filter’ preferences through deliberation that ‘refines and enlarges’ the public’s views. The idea is to get the ‘cool and deliberate sense of the community’ rather than the kinds of passions that might motivate faction. Hence democratic theory has long recognized that the kinds of preferences brought to the democratic process may influence whether majority tyranny results.

Third, some theorists have looked to the decision rule itself to limit majority tyranny. Supermajority requirements, specifying a percentage greater than 50 percent plus one, but usually less than unanimity, can make it harder to get new measures passed. Such decision rules bias decision making toward the status quo, as it becomes harder to get changes passed. Hence if there arc bad outcomes that result from inaction, from the failure to pass new measures, then those bad outcomes are made more, not less, likely by such a decision rule. Hence supermajority requirements are an imperfect protection against the system producing unacceptable outcomes.

Fourth, there are institutional designs that can protect, to some degree, against tyranny of the majority. One strategy is to specify a list of rights that are immune to majority decision, and that are protected by judicial review. However, the bad outcomes that might be considered or adopted by democratic decision making can never be fully anticipated. And the empowerment of judges through judicial review, when it is broad enough to provide protection against tyranny of the majority, also threatens democracy in another way. It seems undemocratic for the judiciary to overturn decisions of the public expressed through their representative institutions. Hence, judicial review that can set aside democratically passed legislation, or a bill of rights that takes certain issues off the democratic agenda, protects democracy from itself, by limiting the purview of democratic institutions.

Democratic theory provides us with conflicting visions rather than some uniquely authoritative answer to the questions posed here. Questions about democracy remain unsettled. But unlike any other period in its history, the authority of the basic democratic idea is virtually unchallenged in the modern era. Democracy (in some sense) triumphs even as disagreements proliferate as to what it is, or might be.

Bibliography:

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