Democracy, what is it good for?
American politicians and their love-hate relationship with democracy
Americans love democracy, right? In many ways it is our democracy that defines us as a nation, born as we were out of a revolution over “taxation without representation”. I mean, we export this stuff to other countries for heaven’s sake.
And yet with his domestic agenda stalled and his super-majority in the Senate eliminated by the voters of Massachusetts, President Obama has turned to arguably less democratic tools to push his policy proposals. And liberals as a whole, The Weekly Standard claims, “have assigned responsibility for the mess they’re in…to larger, structural faults in American politics and society. Beginning with you.”
The turn against democracy should come as no surprise. Every President faces falling approval ratings. Every Congress sees its electoral stars fading. And almost every time, the instinctive response is to scorn public opinion and “stand on principle.” In some peculiar way, we even encourage our politicians to ignore us. A January Allstate/National Journal poll found that 83% of Americans would trust politicians more if they made a “stronger effort to stand up for principle.”
Obama the dictator?
The use and abuse of executive power
On Friday The New York Times reported that the Obama Administration, faced with an uncooperative Congress, is looking into “a list of presidential executive orders and directives” to push its governing agenda forward. The article was, unsurprisingly, met with a barrage of criticism from the right. RedState writers suggested Obama was “dusting off his best Hugo Chavez imitation” and that his Administration had become a “DICTATORSHIP BY FIAT” (emphasis in original).
As The New York Times article notes, presidents can legally make policy without Congressional legislation “through executive orders, agency rule-making and administrative fiat.” But just because a president can doesn’t mean a president should. So should Obama use his executive powers, like executive orders and directives?
Landlines, cell phones, and polls
Why my opinion has never mattered…
Here’s something nobody ever talks about, but nevertheless seems like it should be very important: Public opinion polls are almost all done by calling landlines. Do you own a landline? I don’t. In fact, I’d be hard pressed to name a friend in my generation who has one.
The demographic implications are pretty obvious - landline polls are likely to skew heavily toward older populations. Comparative studies show that landlines also favor females and whites. (So just replace the word “Americans” in poll results with “Elderly white women” and you’ll get a better picture)
This is a tough issue to get around, and understandably, polling companies have been quick to downplay its significance. Pew says that mobile-only and landline-only polls produce “virtually identical” results. But the same study they used to draw that conclusion provided the numbers that demonstrated the demographic gap described above. Mobile- and landline-based populations will likely converge on some issues, but certainly not all. Politically, it would seem to follow that polls err to the right.
In my view, the increasing scarcity of landlines poses a major obstacle to an already unreliable service; pollsters already have to worry about people without any phones, people who don’t answer phones, and people who aren’t sincere or who don’t understand the questions. Now, with some estimates suggesting that half of adults 30 years old and younger use only cell phones, we can be fairly certain that our voices just aren’t being represented.
It’s unlikely that polls will go away, however. I can’t imagine what the media and anyone with an agenda would do without them (and their infinite, and rather convenient, layers of interpretation).
On the bright side, polls are no more misleading than other mainstay methods of generalizing the “general will” (hat tip to Rousseau), such as, say, voting. The voting demographic is as small and unrepresentative as any, yet we don’t exactly stop political commentators mid-sentence and protest, “Well, technically, New Yorkers didn’t elect Senator Schumer, a relatively small number of voters in New York elected him.”
In other words, whether we’re talking about polls, elections, workers, readers, or viewers, we’re likely to be generalizing the views of a smaller subset onto a much larger population. We’re often reminded after references to the beloved “town hall” government of our Forefathers that civic participation was actually quite limited. Things may not have changed as much as we might like.
UPDATE - I’ve received some rebukes and note here that Gallup, for its part, claims that it’s known about this for years and is continually fixing the issue and including cell phones in their polls. This may be true, but if it wasn’t still a problem, they wouldn’t be calling for so much research on the topic. Someone call me and poll me so I can get over my skepticism.
-Colin
Tyranny of the filibuster?
The New Republic carried an article last month arguing that there exists a realistic way to get the Senate to abolish the filibuster. Taking a page from John Rawls’ “veil of ignorance” principal, which states that people should choose just moral rules as if they have no knowledge of how they would be effected by the chosen rules, author Nicholas Stephanopoulos argues that the Senate should pass a law today to ban the filibuster in the future. Since there is no way to know which party would be in the majority in, say, seven years, senators would not know how the rule would affect themselves or their party (satisfying the Rawlsian test). And political self-interest could stop being an excuse for keeping the filibuster in place, as the current majority may very well be the minority in 2017 (satisfying the political feasibility test).
As Stephanopoulos writes:
A debate now on whether to eliminate the filibuster in the future would transform senators’ decision-making calculus. The key questions would no longer be whether they enjoy the personal clout conferred by the filibuster, or whether it advances or threatens their parties’ agendas. The issues, instead, would be whether it makes sense for almost all Senate business to require a supermajority.
Implicit in Stephanopoulos’ argument is that it does not in fact make sense for Senate votes to require a 60-person majority. But why not? Read more
Congress - run by the minority?
Matt Yglesias makes an interesting point:
We’re suffering from an incoherent institutional set-up in the senate. You can have a system in which a defeated minority still gets a share of governing authority and participates constructively in the victorious majority’s governing agenda, shaping policy around the margins in ways more to their liking. Or you can have a system in which a defeated minority rejects the majority’s governing agenda out of hand, seeks opening for attack, and hopes that failure on the part of the majority will bring them to power. But right now we have both simultaneously. It’s a system in which the minority benefits if the government fails, and the minority has the power to ensure failure. It’s insane, and it needs to be changed.
Perhaps our current gridlock isn’t just a matter of partisan politics. If Yglesias is right (that legislative minorities should either have to wait to take power, a la the UK, or share power in a proportional way), then it seems that our system is built for simple obstruction.
-Colin
Being an ass for the republic
Snark and political conduct
There are several justifications for the republican form of government, in which citizens elect representatives who then legislate for the nation. One perennial argument, for example, is the expertise and time ruling demands. Another is the net efficiency of a more limited voting process. An enduring basis for republicanism, however, has been the quality of deliberation it supports.
This position actually originated as an anti-democratic argument.
Who does the United Nations represent?
States or Individuals? A lesson from Daniel Webster.
Sam mentioned Vaclav Havel’s op-ed on the absurdity of undemocratic, illiberal states sitting on the U.N. Human Rights Council. America’s founders have some thoughts germaine to this crisis.
In late January of 1830, Daniel Webster and Robert Y. Hayne debated the meaning of the U.S. Constitution–unscripted–and it was arguably the most important and eloquent floor debate ever heard in the 200 some years since the Capitol Building’s construction. Hayne, representative from South Carolina, argued that the States came together to found a constitution and a nation. As such, States had the right to nullify Congressional law. The Congress represented the States interests and if it did not do so, the States had a right to disobey. Webster, representative from Massachusetts, replied that “the people” founded the Constitution and a nation, not the States. The Constitution was supreme (Art VI, par. 2 says so) and the Supreme Court is the only body that can nullify acts of Congress (Justice Marshall said so in Marbury v. Madison). The people rule; the people founded a government based upon a Constitution that demands its supremacy over the States; thus, the States cannot nullify federal law.
John C. Calhoun, a supporter of State nullification, declared earlier: “The Union; second to our liberty most dear!”, which meant that States rights guaranteed liberty (by preventing a tyrannical central government), and those State interests took priority over the federal ones. Webster replied: “Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable!” His point was that individual interests and liberty were protected by a strong and centralized national government; because it was their government.
Chait on representation
Jonathan Chait ponders the complexities of representative democracy while thoroughly skewering conservative commentator Fred Barnes:
Even funnier, if it wasn’t so morally deranged, is the way Barnes cites a poll showing little concern for global warming and immediately concludes that nothing should be done. Uh, Fred, aren’t you skipping the step where you say that Americans are correct to think global warming is not a danger? I mean, that view’s totally at odds with the scientific consensus, but saying so at least gives the the veneer of caring about something other than the short-term political interests of the GOP.
Barnes is pretty clearly out of line here. However, Chait dismisses the argument out of hand which would argue that political parties should indeed reflect the will of the majority of the electorate and, further, that the short-term political interests of a party are simply to reflect that will and are thus entirely appropriate.
Clearly global warming is a real problem and one whose costs are not perceived in the day-to-day of the American electorate, but Chait needs to do more work here to demonstrate his conclusion that politicians should disregard the will of the public when the politicians themselves hold a different view on a given issue.
-John
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