“Democracy” is synonymous today with elected representation. While meaningful democracy by any definition is surely larger than this (many authoritarian countries have elections), the conventional or mainstream definition of democracy is principally associated with the freeness, fairness, integrity, and frequency of elections. Contemporary U.S. politics makes this as clear as ever as “democracy” was on the ballot in 2022, not because of threats to political rights (though those abound), but because many candidates were “election deniers” who threatened to throw out future electoral results if they did not agree with them.
Democracy was not always synonymous with elections though. From Ancient Athens to 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, democracy’s institutions were explicitly anti-electoral. Athens used sortition, i.e. a lottery, to choose office holders from amongst their citizens and all citizens had an equal right to attend the legislative assembly. And democracy to Rousseau meant consensus or at least majority rule through referendum. Today, we usually call this “direct democracy”.
Rousseau acknowledged that large countries, such as the United States, France, or Great Britain, simply could not function were all decisions made by popular vote. That’s why he believed the only legitimate governments were democratic city-states like his hometown of Geneva. And the needs of a modern state, with a complex administrative bureaucracy to manage social welfare systems, regulate industry, and prosecute malfeasance, certainly has not made it any easier. For efficiency and effectiveness, a large modern state requires a division of labor between citizens, technocrats, judges, and elected officials. No reasonable person could argue for national direct democracy in the modern context.
So indirect representation is the law of the democratic land. Except it’s not working.
Legislatures in democracies, especially Congress, are notoriously untrusted by the public that elect them. Indeed, the only institutions that do worse in their OECD averages of trust are the media and political parties.
And there is some good reason for this. For example, the least popular U.S. law ever, of laws we have data for, was passed in 2017. Wealth inequality has been growing since the 1980s, intergenerational mobility, i.e. the likelihood that you will make more than your parents, has been declining since the 1940s, and as global inflation in the last year has demonstrated, people feel precarious even when economic indicators say things are going well. Valid human rights concerns, an unwillingness to engage in large-scale wealth redistribution, and ease of scapegoating for their failures have led political officials across political lines to amplify and facilitate the projection of valid economic anxieties and anger upon a racialized global Other, immigrants, while also failing to address any of the driving factors of the global refugee crisis, now including climate change from the decades of inequitable economic growth they support.
The challenges of our time, which intersect with one another, are left unaddressed by the First Branch of government. The representatives of the people are failing at doing just that.
While many will be quick to jump to campaign finance reforms as the solution, there is more to why legislatures have become untrustworthy than just wealthy, corporate influence. It is baked into the system of indirect representation to be insufficiently representative. This is also why, though less strong, mistrust of legislatures and political parties appear cross-nationally in states with more proportional systems of indirect representation. The US Founders did not want a system where the poor many could form a faction which could redistribute the property of the wealthy few. Of the threat of faction and thereby the need for indirect representation, Madison wrote,
But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views.1
The indirect representation system was chosen to counter precisely the threat of the poor demanding equality.2 Ever since, it (as well as the even more unrepresentative Senate and the regressive Supreme Court) has stymied social justice even when it enjoys broad social popularity.
Still, let’s be more fair to the Founders than they deserve. In addition to the desire to limit the “mischief” of faction, the stage of technological development limited the possibilities for the country’s political system. For a country of the United States’ size to be a union and an Athenian or Rousseau’s democracy or a Roman-style republic, endless messages and letters would have to be transmitted by horse or ship for simple governance tasks.
Indeed, part of the Roman Republic’s failure was its incorporation of distant territories and their people as Roman citizens without establishing new governance systems. Rome, the government made up of the citizens actually present in and around the city, made laws for people with no feasible means of representation despite their Roman citizenship. A division of labor was, and remains to some degree, necessary for a modern, large nation-state to be able to make decisions with any respect to efficient time and resource management. Effectiveness and efficiency are necessary and mutually dependent qualities of a well-governed state.
But there has been little modification to that division of labor in the more than two hundred years in which the telephone, radio, personal computer, television, internet, and smartphone have been invented.
There has been insufficient effort to ameliorate the tension between a populace whose access to information, political and otherwise, has skyrocketed in the internet age and a bureaucracy and electoral system that keeps the public at arm’s length by design. Indeed, a number of critics have noted how social, political, and economic elites are out of touch with the public’s concerns. While some propose ways that this gap could be closed, they do not recognize that the social role and view of experts and elites has fundamentally changed.
The Internet has given the public ever greater means to aggregate their political demands and communicate them to politicians and public officials. It has given the public sufficient information to have claims to expertise that justify greater inclusion in policymaking. But there has not been a corresponding growth in the capacity and adaptability of political institutions to respond to these demands.
In particular, Madison believed the system they designed would circumvent factions motivated by “A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project”. (Federalist 10)
Somewhat laughably in today’s context, part of the way it was supposed to work was that the representatives would have “enlightened views and virtuous sentiments which render them superior to local prejudices and schemes of injustice”.