Simple arguments about democracy get lost during election posturing by candidates. Politicians mostly make proclamations even the least educated can understand, and avoid delving into the academics of governance. News media likewise do not want to alienate readers and viewers by burdening them with deep thoughts. Jonathan Rauch’s What’s Ailing American Politics? published in the October 2016 The Atlantic inspired just such academic discussion. Excerpted here are a few answers to the title question:
~~~~
… An underlying assumption appears to have been that direct democracy is somehow “more democratic” than representative democracy.
Direct democracy is fraught with potential dangers. In the first place, is it even possible to determine the will of the people? Participation in elections is rarely universal, and disgruntled voters are more likely to cast a ballot than the uninterested or indifferent. Prior to the recent Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, polls indicated that about 70 percent of young people supported remaining in the European Union, but only 36 percent of voters ages 18 to 24 showed up to vote.
On any complex issue, poorly informed voters will usually outnumber the well informed. This means that the result of a popular vote is more likely to represent the views of the uninformed than the views of the informed. It also means that complex questions must be simplified to be voted on. The complexities of the Brexit decision were reduced to a binary choice: leave or remain.
All of this does not mean that the uninformed voter should be disenfranchised. But should the will of the people be determinative or merely advisory? Devices such as the Electoral College demonstrate the caution of the Founding Fathers in this regard. And in any case, public opinion is an unreliable guide to sensible public policy. What if 51 percent of Americans believed that Muslim immigration to the U.S. should be suspended? Or that 14-year-olds should be allowed to take guns to school?
Both American political reformers and the British Conservative Party appear to have forgotten the rationale for representative democracy. The reason to elect someone to office is because we respect his or her judgment, even if it disagrees with ours. Unfortunately, in today’s political climate we are likely to infer that if someone’s views differ from ours, that by itself disqualifies the person from representing us.
In Profiles in Courage, John F. Kennedy documented the courage of those who defied popular opinion to do what they felt was best for the common good. Today such behavior is more likely to be derided as elitist or, worse, condemned as traitorous. Indeed, it would be far easier to document “profiles in cowardice.” Repeated polls show that more than 90 percent of Americans support background checks for gun purchases, but even that is insufficient to get such legislation through Congress. So much for deferring to the will of the people.
~~~~
Chaos is not a uniquely American phenomenon. Brexit is just the latest worrying development from Europe, where a dangerous new strain of anti-intellectual, anti-establishment, anti-immigrant, nationalist populism has taken hold among a significant share of Europeans …
Like Trump voters, these nationalist-populist Europeans are most likely to be poorly educated and rural. They feel betrayed and condescended to by elites who do not share their economic and social anxieties amid rising immigration and social change … Politics has ignored their concerns for a while. No wonder they are angry. In this way, the U.S. and Europe are similar. This shared pattern suggests a shared explanation.
This is problematic for Rauch’s argument, since compared with American political parties, European political parties are much more formally top-down machines, just like Rauch would want. European politics is much less candidate-centric and much more party-centric than American politics, as Rauch would also want. Europeans also tend to be more comfortable with the concept of political power than Americans, again, as Rauch would want. Yet European democracies are suffering from the same problems.
~~~~
One issue Jonathan Rauch overlooked is the fact that two political parties can’t possibly represent a diverse country of more than 300 million people.
… Colombia … has a little fewer than 50 million people, and at least six major political movements. Part of the reason for this is Colombia’s runoff format for presidential elections, in which everyone who wants to runs in the first round, and if no one wins more than 50 percent of the votes, there is a second round for just the top two candidates.
People get to vote their heart the first time around, and choose the lesser of two evils the second time. Candidates have to face the general electorate right away, which forces them to broaden their appeal in order to have any chance of winning, rather than clumsily pivoting from extremism to moderation between the primary and the general election.
Imagine that format being applied in the U.S. In the first round, the Democrats would have run Clinton and the Republicans Rubio or Bush, with Trump and Sanders running as independents or representing smaller parties.
The election probably would have come down to Clinton versus Rubio or Bush, but Sanders and Trump would have gotten millions of votes, enough to give their smaller parties real weight and a good chance to take seats in Congress in the near future. Their supporters would have felt they had a voice in the government, but that voice wouldn’t have overwhelmed the moderate majority.