The problem of representative democracy

This week will mark the first presidential debate between the incumbent Barack Obama and his challenger, Mitt Romney. Although the two are certain to discuss a number of hot-button issues, major media outlets have begun to suggest that the debate will serve mostly as an evaluation of the candidates themselves. Thus, the winner of the debate is perhaps less likely to be measured by reason and strength of argument than he is by his eloquence and the vague category of “likeability.”

Although they can in this way remain generally uninformative, presidential debates can serve as a vibrant illustration of one of the pitfalls of the particularly American form of democracy. In order to observe this, however, it is important to appreciate exactly what characterizes the variant of democracy in question, and how it differs from democracy qua democracy.

In the most direct form of democracy, each citizen is awarded a vote on every issue, and every issue is decided strictly by the voting patterns of the majority. In the case of universal health care, for example, citizens would somehow decide on the terms of the vote, and then the polls would open to the entire nation for a straightforward vote. The side with the most votes would win, and in that way the question of universal health care would be decided entirely by the people. So it would go with any other issue that the people saw fit to put to the vote.

It goes almost without saying that a state under direct democracy would be a nightmarish society, indeed. This, of course, is one of the main reasons why America itself was not structured as a direct democracy. It was conceived instead as a federal constitutional republic, under which the people would vote on leaders to represent them and make (presumably) informed decisions on their behalf. The rationale typically given for this is that, under a direct democracy, the burden of understanding placed on the citizen is too high. A functional direct democracy would require that each citizen be entirely informed on every issue, which itself would require that each citizen be capable in the first place of adequately consuming and evaluating social, political and statistical information. Since it is unlikely that most citizens will achieve such nuanced knowledge of every issue, it is supposedly better to allow them to elect experts to make these decisions for them.

This solution of representative democracy, however, comes with its own set of often overlooked problems. For one thing, it does nothing to mitigate the challenges facing the uninformed citizen, for even in a representative democracy is the citizen forced to come to a conclusion on political issues on the basis of incomplete knowledge. A citizen who is trying to formulate an informed opinion on universal health care will, under a representative democracy, still suffer from a lack of medical and economic knowledge. He and his decision-making process are not altered simply by virtue of the fact that he is now living under a representative democracy instead of a direct one. There is nothing about representative democracy that resolves this issue, and thus it cannot really be said to be any improvement over the problems offered by direct democracy.

If anything, in fact, representative democracy actually requires the citizen to navigate an even more difficult decision-making process. In addition to encountering all of the same problems in evaluating the issue itself, the citizen is now introduced to a new set of variables that complicate his decision even further. It is no longer enough for him to understand only how he feels about universal health care; he must now attempt to understand how a political candidate feels about it as well.

This is easier said than done. In the first place, it is relatively common knowledge that politicians are dishonest, and thus the citizen must first decide whether or not to take a given candidate at his word. This would require a discerning evaluation of the candidate’s moral character, which is difficult to accomplish without extensive personal contact. On top of that, even if he decides the candidate is trustworthy, he must make up his mind on a number of other issues. Could it be likely, for example, that the candidate will be weak once he makes it to office? Will he cave under political pressure and abandon his pursuit of universal health care? Or will he pursue it too aggressively, and in the process make too many enemies to reach the goal? Even if he is reliable on universal health care, will he be derailed by some other personal or political issue before he is able to achieve it? Is it possible that, once elected, he will become too concerned with holding on to his office to go out on a limb and propose legislation? Will he become corrupted by money and the pull of special interests? Is he already? Does he suffer from either an inferiority complex or a megalomania that, hidden even to him, could influence his decision-making? And, after all of this, why does he espouse the views that he does? Is it because he genuinely agrees with the progressive agenda, or because it simply works well to serve an agenda of his own?

To answer some of these questions, a citizen would need a level of personal familiarity with the candidate. To answer others, he would need either a behind-the-scenes understanding of political privilege in Washington or an advanced degree in psychology. It is thus time to appreciate that representative democracy not only fails to mitigate the problems of the direct democracy, but it actually builds on them. If, after all, the people are unfit to decide how they themselves feel on any given issue, then it is a contradiction in logic to suggest that they are fit to decide how one candidate or the other feels about it instead.