Is democracy capable of producing a desirable result for itself?
“To him or her within whose thought rages the battle, advancing, retreating, between Democracy's convictions, aspirations, and the People's crudeness, vice, caprices, I mainly write this book.”
Walt Whitman’s concerns about the discrepancy between an ideal democracy and the perceived ignorance of the electorate, expressed more than 150 years ago, seem as relevant today as ever. Behavioural research on elections shows that most voting decisions are based on political loyalties acquired in childhood and how people feel about 'the nature of the times'. The ideal of a well-informed public that carefully weighs up political decisions seems almost utopian. This begs the question: Is this really the way we want to choose our leaders?
The death of policy?
Last November’s US election for President, House of Representatives and Senate produced some intriguing results, particularly in the state of New York: 69.2% of the state’s 14th congressional district voted for left leaning Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), but only 65.83% voted for Kamala Harris. Conversely, around 3.4% of voters split their ballot, choosing AOC for House and Trump for President. AOC advocates for progressive policies like the Green New Deal, Medicare for All and expanding social welfare programmes, while Donald Trump is promoting a conservative agenda focused on tax cuts, immigration restrictions and an 'America First' foreign policy. Long story short, the two candidates could hardly be further apart on policy. The result left AOC perplexed, asking her social media followers to explain their seemingly illogical choice. Justifications ranged from "I feel like Trump and you are both real." and "I feel like you are both outsiders compared to the rest of D.C. and less establishment." to "I know people that did this, and it was because of Gaza."
Character judgements dominated the vote, and when policy was brought up, as in the case of Gaza, the reasoning behind it remains unclear. 93% of Americans say a candidate's public image influences their vote, but for how many does policy make a difference? And even if it does, to what extent does the electorate understand the vast amount of complicated information involved in modern day politics?
The myth of the educated voter
“The political belief systems of ordinary citizens are generally thin, disorganized and ideologically incoherent.”
The notion among political scientists that the electorate lacks the wisdom to make an informed decision about its leaders is not a recent one. American founding father Alexander Hamilton devised the Electoral College as a deliberative body to compensate for the public's inability to conduct such “complicated investigations”. But how "incompetent" are voters really? What information do voters base their decisions on, and how accurate is that information?
As noted above, personalities and public images influence voting decisions and make it difficult to examine how important policy is to the voters. The Brexit referendum, however, was a vote specifically for a policy decision, not a politician. Britain's decision to turn its back on the EU was preceded by a fierce campaign of populism and misinformation, the most notable example of which was the Leave campaign's 'battle bus', which read: “We send the EU £350m each week. Let’s fund our NHS instead” The National Health Service (NHS) was the world's first nationalised free health service, which the British take pride in. This 'battle bus claim' caused a wave of outrage regarding the credibility of the 350 million figure. It did not take into account rebates and money the UK received from the EU, leading the UK's statistics agency to call it “misleading” and the UK fact checking charity FullFact to call it a “clear misuse of official statistics” . Nevertheless, this argument was a major contributor to the Vote Leave campaign's success in swaying public opinion towards Brexit.
The Brexit campaign led to the formation of two camps, and the decision of which camp to join quickly rivalled the referendum decision itself. As Dominic Cummings, the 'architect' of the Leave campaign, put it:
“Almost none of these people [graduates] know more about what a Customs Unions is than a bricky in Darlington. They did not vote on the basis of thinking hard about the dynamics of EMU or about how Brussels will cope with issues like gene drives. Millions thought – there’s two gangs and I know which one I’m in.”
Brexit was not a right-wing tactic to lure an ignorant public into a rash decision. Both camps profited from misinformation or the sheer complexity of the decision. An example can be found in Google search trends immediately after the polls closed. A shocking amount of people searched for "What is the EU" or "What will happen if we leave the EU". Local spikes in these searches occurred in Northern Ireland and Scotland - both of which voted to remain in the EU. No matter what the people that made these searches voted for, it seems puzzling that they would have entered the polling booth at all if they were unaware of such basic information.
Similarly, In the recent US presidential election, a majority of working class people voted for Donald Trump. This contrasts with the party's traditional representation of corporate interests and focus on wealthier individuals. As Republican Senator Mitt Romney pointed out, this presents a bizarre challenge for the Republican Party: “Now one of the challenges in my party is that our policies do not necessarily line up with the interests of our voters”. The Republican Party won the votes of the majority of the working class, although its policies are not even in their interests. What does that say about modern election campaigns? Just throw out a net of populism and see what you catch? And perhaps more importantly, what are the decisions of those voters who vote for a party whose policies don't even represent their interests based on?
The roots of decision making and the impact of groups on individual beliefs
“What, then, is a ‘group’? How does it acquire the capacity for exercising such a decisive influence over the mental life of the individual?”
Human life is group life. The cultural, political and religious tendencies of that group shape the beliefs of its members. The exact manner in which this happens has been studied in many ways, but for this purpose I will focus on a 2014 study on white American independents that were asked about their party preferences after being shown specific information. The group that was told that California had become a majority-minority state (a state where the countrywide majority of whites is a minority) saw a six-point increase in Republican leaning voters over the control group. This effect was almost twice as strong in the West. The Republican Party, known for its tough border policies and generally less welcoming attitude towards immigrants, benefited greatly from this effect. A threat to the numerical majority of white Americans triggered a defensive reaction of their group identity, which strengthened their Republican partisan ties and conservative views. As Achen and Bartels put it: “For most people, partisanship is not a carrier of ideology but a reflection of judgments about where ‘people like me’ belong.” The study did not mention parties at all, yet resulted in a connection of social identity with a particular party. Once affiliated with a political group, its members tend to adopt the views and beliefs of that group. This is much easier than creating one's own ideologies and goes some way to explaining why policy seems so unimportant to many voters. Their partisan affiliation represents an expression of their social identity, which, paired with a set of core beliefs, forges a political opinion.
Policy is a remarkably minor component in that equation. If policy matters so little to large parts of the electorate, how can voters ensure the accountability of their leaders? Can't politicians just follow their own political convictions regardless of what their constituents think, since they care so little anyway?
Retrospective voting – Democracy’s safeguard?
The electorate’s most powerful tool to control its leaders is retrospective voting. What political scientists describe as “the electorate in its great, and perhaps principal, role as an appraiser of past events, past performance, and past actions.” can be summarized as voters deciding whether they want to re-elect the incumbent or not. They are constantly evaluating the performance of their current leaders and judging it as good or bad. Thus, the incumbent cannot go too far off the rails because it could cost him re-election. However, the effectiveness of this approach depends on how clearly voters can see the impact of the incumbent government on their wellbeing. Researchers found that voters deviate from optimal retrospection for two reasons: they allow unrelated events that affect their welfare to influence their decisions, and they focus on recent rather than cumulative performance.
Both of these flaws can be observed when examining retrospective economic voting: “If the economy is flourishing in the final weeks of a campaign, when the music stops, the incumbent is likely to be re-elected.” New York Times writer Louis Uchitelle compares economic voting to the children's game of musical chairs. The incumbent is just as likely to have a thriving economy on election day as a child is to be near a chair when the music stops. This shows that retrospective voting is not a reliable tool for holding politicians accountable.
So, the people are ignorant and do not care about policy, and politicians can basically do whatever they want without really being held accountable. Many publications on the subject of modern democracy end at this point with the famous quote from Winston Churchill: “democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried”. This, however, provides as little of a defence for democracy as it is idealistic. Western societies have basically declared democracy to be their holy grail; a status that seems unjustified given the flaws mentioned above. Is there some kind of miracle rushing to democracy’s defence?
“The worst form of government”
When bees are looking for a new home, scout bees go out to find potential nesting sites. They return to the hive and communicate their findings through intricate waggle dances that convey information about the location and quality of the site. Other bees evaluate this information and, over time, the hive collectively 'votes' by gravitating towards the site with the most enthusiastic dances. Surprisingly, this decentralised process often leads to the selection of the best possible site for the colony's survival.
What biologists refer to as swarm intelligence, political scientists may call the ‘miracle of aggregation’. It assumes that a large enough public will always make wise decisions about common interests because it's members will collectively provide information to support that interest. According to theory, incorrect information tends to be random and thus to cancel each other out. At a time when misinformation is on the rise, and some parties are even spreading it systematically, there's reasonable doubt that it's entirely random. However, on average, and in the long run, the miracle of aggregation ensures that democracies, compared to other forms of government, make higher quality decisions and have less bias. As Yuhui Li, author of the book ‘dividing rulers’ stated: “Democracy is an imperfect remedy, but not a cause of that bias.”
The miracle of aggregation works in the realm of common interests. An example of a common interest would be the avoidance of disasters such as famine. Remarkably, famines do not occur in democracies. Voters collectively provide information to support common interests (in this case, avoiding famine), so democracies have a certain standard by which the basic common interests of the public are guaranteed. But of course our expectations of our system of government go much further than simply ensuring survival. What about those interests on which the public fundamentally disagrees?
For this one, we have to go all the way back to the very foundation of democracy, which is the rule of the majority. In our large modern democracies, majorities are not singular entities, but alliances of smaller factions working together to achieve a majority. Political groups are therefore always forced to negotiate with everyone else in order to be part of the majority in power. This process takes place at the interparty level in many European democracies and at the intraparty level in the American system of only two major parties. In both systems alike, the minority has the opportunity to make concessions to factions of the majority in order to gain a majority itself. This leads to a constant alternation of winners and losers in a democracy - a process called majority cycling. Through majority cycling, all political groups will eventually have their turn to be in a majority coalition and thus have the chance to implement their policies.
In summary, democracies guarantee the basic common interests of a society and can additionally act as a sophisticated mechanism for the fair representation of all political beliefs and groups. This is by no means meant to override the shortcomings pointed out earlier, but it does leave some hope for democracies ‘convictions and aspirations’ to overcome the ‘people’s crudeness, vice and caprices’.
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