Misrepresentative Government:
Why Democracy Doesn’t Work,
Part I

3,530 words

Part 1 of 4 (Part 2 here)

Under our constitution it is We The People who are sovereign. The people have the final say. The legislators are their spokesmen. The people determine through their votes the destiny of the nation. — Citizens United v. FEC

Don’t tell me how it works in practice, my postmodern colleagues insist. How does it work in theory? — James McManus[1]

But what in fact is an election? We call it an expression of the popular will. But is it? We go into a polling booth and mark a cross on a piece of paper for one of two, or perhaps three or four names. Have we expressed our thoughts . . . ? Presumably we have a number of thoughts on this and that with many buts and ifs and ors. Surely the cross on a piece of paper does not express them . . . [C]alling a vote the expression of our mind is an empty fiction. — Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public[2]

The subject began with what seemed to be a minor problem with majority rule. “It is just a mathematical curiosity,” said some . . . But intrigued and curious about this little hole, researchers, not deterred by the possibly irrelevant, began digging in the ground nearby . . . What they now appear to have been uncovering is a gigantic cavern into which fall almost all of our ideas about social actions. Almost anything . . . anyone has ever said about what society wants or should get is threatened with internal inconsistency. It is as though people have been talking for years about a thing that cannot, in principle, exist, and a major effort is needed to see what objectively remains from the conversation. — Charles Plott[3]

. . . were the whole frame here,
It is of such a spacious lofty pitch,
Your roof were not sufficient to contain’t. — William Shakespeare, Henry VI

Democracy promised to make the people rulers.

By granting citizens the ability to elect their political representatives through free, fair, and frequent elections, democracy was supposed to enthrone the people as masters over their governments.

And yet the democratic world is immersed in popular discontent, despair, and disaffection.

Most people in democratic countries do not actually believe that “elected officials . . . care what ordinary people think.” Throughout the free world, most citizens feel that their voice matters “never” or only “rarely” in politics. 64% of people feel that their government “never” or “rarely” acts in their interests. Dissatisfaction with democracy has risen to ‘record highs,’ voter turnout and participation has declined to historic lows, and many people are beginning to feel disillusioned with democratic government altogether. In this climate of overwhelming dissatisfaction, a growing number of countries have begun to abandon “traditional democratic norms” entirely in what is being called a global ‘democratic recession’ by panicked Western political elites and intellectuals. Cracks are rapidly spreading throughout global democracy’s pristine veneer of legitimacy, as popular discontent is metastasizing into a global political crisis. A headline from Politico reads: “Democracies on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”[4]

In America, public trust in government is at historic lows and perennially low Congressional approval ratings, which generally float between 10 and 20%, have not passed 30% in more than ten years, sinking at times to single-digit levels. A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center described the attitudes of Americans towards their government as “beyond distrust.” These feelings extend throughout the world, as “citizens in nearly all advanced industrial democracies [have become] increasingly skeptical toward politicians, political parties, and political institutions.” Others feel “sullen anger and frustration with a mainstream political class seen as detached and remote, incompetent and venal, and often illegitimate.” After a recent election, a Greek citizen complained that “the only right we have is the right to vote and it leads us nowhere.” Through 2015 and 2016, Spanish political parties failed to cooperate and form a majority government for nearly 300 days, which caused some citizens to hope the deadlock might continue “until hell freezes over,” because it meant that “politicians were in no position to do more harm.” Another expressed to reporters: “No government, no thieves.” After the January 6 Capitol “riot,” one protester confided to an interviewer:

This is wrong. They don’t represent anyone. Not Republican, Democrat, Independent. Nobody . . .  Congressmen and women, they don’t care. I mean, they think we’re a joke . . . We have to do something. People have to do something.[5]

While representative democracy promised responsive government, there is an overwhelming sense that democracy “falls well short in living up to [its] ideals.” Since the 1970s, the proportion of the population that believes that “corporations and their lobbyists have too much influence” has steadily grown from a small minority to the great majority of Americans. In one recent survey, more than half “of respondents said they have little or no confidence that American elections reflect the will of the people.” In another, most respondents agreed that “politicians always talk like they want citizen input but like a lot of other things politicians say, they don’t really mean it.” Another found that the vast majority of people generally feel that politicians are “out of touch with average Americans” and “do not understand what ‘most Americans’ think.” Another found that less than one-third of respondents believed that “the people we elect . . . try to keep the promises they make during the election campaign.” Another found that 70% of respondents agreed with the statement that the government only collects polling information to “sound as if they were listening to the public’s wishes,” rather than to use it for “responding to the public’s wishes.” 92% of respondents believed that the government prioritizes and benefits “big interests” over ordinary people. 85% agreed that Congress “does not serve the common good,” and 89% felt that “elected officials think more about the interests of their campaign donors than the common good of the people.” And they are right to feel this way.[6]

You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died here.

In 2014, the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page examined approximately 2,000 American public opinion polling survey questions about government policy taken between 1981 and 2002. The policy categories considered in their study included “defense and foreign policy; economic regulation; social welfare policy (help with jobs, wages, education, health care, pensions, and the like); cultural and moral issues (women’s rights, abortion, civil liberties, civil rights for minorities, gay rights); and just about every other important kind of policy change that was proposed between 1981 and 2002.” Gilens and Page then compared these answers with government legislation that had been adopted or rejected within four years after the survey data had been collected. The results showed that

the preferences of the vast majority of Americans appear to have essentially no impact on which policies the government does or doesn’t adopt… The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.[7]

Studies show that the American electorate tends to be economically liberal and socially conservative. This is the opposite of the socially liberal and economically conservative policies “favored by much of our professional-managerial leadership class” and promulgated by Washington, a perspective which “enjoys virtually no electoral support.” Gilens and Page found in their study that if American policy actually reflected the electorate’s preferences, “we would have seen a more protectionist trade policy and even lower levels of foreign aid [and immigration] than we did”; “moral/religious policies at the national level would be more conservative than they currently are . . . [and] in particular we might expect to find greater restrictions on abortion”; and “we would expect greater representational equality in the economic sphere to result in a higher minimum wage, more generous un-employment benefits, stricter corporate regulation (including the oil and gas industries in particular), and a more progressive personal tax regime.”[8]

In Gilens and Page’s study, the only occasions that average citizens got what they wanted was when their preferences happened to coincide with affluent citizens, a phenomenon which they called “democracy by coincidence.” This is the same degree of correlation that you might expect “if policies were chosen by flipping a coin without any attempt to align them with citizens’ preferences.” Commenting on the study, the political scientist John Matsusaka observes that it is simply “remarkable how little connection there is between public opinion and policy on prominent issues” in America. Gilens and Page conclude that

the magnitude of this difference, and the inequality in representation . . . suggest[s] that the political system is tilted very strongly in favor of those at the top of the income distribution . . . The vast discrepancy . . . in government responsiveness to citizens with different incomes stands in stark contrast to the ideal of political equality that Americans hold dear… [America seems to be] antidemocratic . . . to the extent that it reflects the preferences of only a privileged subgroup of citizens.[9]

Gilens and Page’s study adds to the growing body of academic literature published in recent years that reveals “representational biases . . . [that] call into question the very democratic character of our society.” The political scientist Larry Bartels’ similarly discovered that both major American political parties “are consistently responsive to the views of affluent constituents but entirely unresponsive to those with low incomes.” This is true not only with legislators but also with senators, who “consistently appear to pay no attention to the views of millions of their constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution.” Elmer Schattschneider also found that the “system is skewed, loaded and unbalanced in favor of a fraction of a minority . . . [It privileges] the most educated and highest-income members of society . . . [and exhibits a discernible] business or upper-class bias . . .  [that] shows up everywhere.” In another study, Henry E. Brady and Kay Lehman Schlozman concluded that “inequalities of political voice are deeply embedded in American politics.”[10]

We expected democracy to give power to the people. Elections were supposed to put the people in charge. And yet despite appointing their governments through elections, the majority of “average citizens exert little or no influence on federal government policy.” Political institutions are totally deaf to the voting majority’s preferences, while the preferences of wealthy elites seem to be privileged to a “profoundly troubling” degree. Any empirical examination of our political system inevitably seems to suggest that the idea that our democratic political institutions are “automatically representative of the whole community is a myth.” Our expectations of democracy are, “whether out of naïveté or disingenuousness, surely mistaken.” We are forced to conclude that there must be foundational problems with our understanding of democracy.[11]

“The great deficiency of American democracy is intellectual,” observes Schattschneider. “[T]he modern American does not look at democracy before he defines it; he defines it first and then is confused by what he sees.” This preconceived picture of democracy that prevails in the public consciousness is sometimes referred to as “the classical theory,” “the classical doctrine,” or the “folk theory of electoral democracy.” Elegant but naïve, it goes something like this: “parties formulate policies to win elections” by appealing to the preferences of the majority and advertising these policies to voters (Anthony Downs’ famous formulation); voters choose between these policies and voice “coherent and intelligible policy decisions” through elections; competitive elections force “parties [and] candidates . . . [to] compete for the votes of the citizens,” which keeps government “responsive to citizens’ preferences” and compels elected officials to carry out the “wishes and desires” of the people. In other words, it is “the notion that elections can ‘reveal the ‘will’ or the preferences of a majority on a set of issues,’ as Dahl put it.” In the words of Joseph Schumpeter, it is the idea that our system of government “realizes the common good by making the people itself decide issues through the election of individuals who are to assemble in order to carry out its will.” It is the notion that “democracy makes the people the rulers.”[12]

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This theory has proven remarkably persistent. Despite the unceasing failure of democratic institutions to function this way in practice, nothing seems able to dislodge this enduring fiction from the public mind. Writing two decades after democracy was introduced in Germany, the economist Joseph Schumpeter remarked at how “action continued to be taken on that theory all the [while] it was being blown to pieces . . . the more untenable [democracy] was being prove[n] to be, the more completely it dominated official phraseology and the rhetoric of politicians.” Even today this enduring fantasy continues to deceive us, despite “more than seven additional decades of demolition work” proving that this is not “how it really works . . . or could ever work” in practice.[13]

The sociologist Robert Michels observed in 1913 how the defenders of democracy “point out that the masses have at their disposal [the] means . . . of controlling and dismissing their leaders” through elections. Elected officials need votes to win elections. This, in theory, incentivizes elected officials to work diligently to please voters to secure their support during elections. However, while “this defense possesses a certain theoretical value,” Michels observed that “in practice,” whatever influence voters might exert through elections tended to be counteracted “by the working of [a] whole series of conservative tendencies . . . so that the supremacy of the autonomous and sovereign masses is rendered purely illusory.” In practice, a series of foundational logic problems severely compromises the reliability of elections as a tool to translate the people’s preferences into government policy. Because of these problems, election-based political systems tend to be less responsive to voters, and instead become highly sensitive to money.[14]

As Mark Hanna, the legendary Republican Party organizer and Senator, once remarked, “There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can’t remember the second.” Rahm Emmanuel, Obama’s former Chief of Staff, once explained that “the first third of your campaign is money, money, money. The second third is money, money, and press. And the last third is votes, press, and money.” “That’s politics, that’s politics, it’s all about how much,” one infamous Capitol Hill lobbyist once stated. It’s “not about whether or will, it’s about how much, and that’s our politicians in New York, they’re all like that because of the drive that the money does for everything else. You can’t do anything without the fucking money.” Of course, politicians need public support to win elections; however, they also need to make themselves known to the public before they can secure their support, which tends to be incredibly expensive. Politicians need money to run their election campaign and “influenc[e] public opinion,” which includes hiring campaign staff, consultants, and pollsters to study public opinion and craft winning campaign messages, purchasing “issue advertising, funding friendly authors and think tanks, and placing news and opinion pieces in the mass media,” as well as hosting events and rallies. All these activities, which are indispensable to winning elections, make running an election an exorbitantly expensive enterprise. In the famous words of the former Speaker of the California State Assembly and national Democratic Party campaign manager Jesse Unruh, “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.”[15]

The political scientists John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney describe the American political system as the “money-media-election complex.” The political scientist Thomas Ferguson describes our election-based political system as a “money-driven political system.” Campaigning to achieve the public exposure and name recognition required to win an election is incredibly expensive, and as Anthony Downs notes, “the expense of political awareness is so great that no citizen can afford to bear it” alone. Because the cost of reaching potential supporters is so prohibitively expensive, politicians require the support of individuals and institutions with vast financial resources at their disposal. The political scientist Thomas Ferguson notes that not even Theodore Roosevelt, one of the most popular incumbent presidents in American history, “could run insurgent campaigns without support from investors like U.S. Steel or [the] investment banker George Perkins.” For this reason, Ferguson argues that political parties should be more properly interpreted as “blocs of major investors interested in securing a small set of specific outcomes . . . who coalesce to advance candidates representing their interests,” because the financial dependence of political parties allows donors to influence political parties in the same way that investors influence any other private industry. “The electorate is not too stupid or too tired to control the political system,” suggests Ferguson. “It is merely too poor.”[16]

Notes

[1] Quoted in Larry Peterman, “Aimless Theorizing: The Progressive Legacy for Political Science,” in The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science: Transforming the American Regime, John Marini et al., eds. (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers: 2005), 347.

[2] Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (Transaction Publishers: 1993), 46.

[3] Charles Plott, “Axiomatic social choice theory” (American Journal of Political Science 20, no. 3: 1976), 511.

[4] Richard Wike et al., “Many Across the Globe Are Dissatisfied With How Democracy Is Working” (Pew Research Center: 2019). Sean Coughlan, “Dissatisfaction with democracy ‘at record high’” (BBC News: 2020). Chloe Taylor, “Global dissatisfaction with democracy has reached a record high, research claims” (CNBC: 2020). Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa, “The Danger of Deconsolidation: The Democratic Disconnect” (Journal of Democracy 27, no. 3: 2016). Gwynn Guilford, “Harvard research suggests that an entire global generation has lost faith in democracy” (Quartz: 2016). Ishaan Tharoor, “Democracy is in decline around the world — and Trump is part of the problem” (The Washington Post: 2020). Andy Gregory, “Millennials more disillusioned with democracy than any generation in living memory, research suggests” (Independent: 2020). Sean Kates et al., “New poll shows dissatisfaction with American democracy, especially among the young” (Vox: 2018). Dan Kopf, “Voter turnout is dropping dramatically in the ‘free world’” (Quartz: 2017). “Freedom in the World 2019: Democracy in Retreat” (Freedom House: 2019). Blake Hounshell and Bryan Bender, “Democracies on the verge of a nervous breakdown” (Politico: 2019).

[5] “Public Trust in Government: 1958-2022” (Pew Research Center: 2022). “Congressional Job Approval” (Real Clear Politics). “Congress and the Public” (Gallup). Lucy Madison, “Congressional approval at all-time low of 9%, according to new CBS News/New York Times poll” (CBS News: 2012). “Beyond Distrust: How Americans View Their Government” (Pew Research Center: 2015). Ian Traynor, “European elections: union left sullen by fury and frustration with political class” (The Guardian: 2014). Quoted in Ron Formisano, American Oligarchy: The Permanent Political Class (University of Illinois Press: 2017), 199. Quoted in Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (New Press: 2016), 112. Benas Gerdziunas, “Citizens disillusioned with democracy: poll” (Politico: 2018). Quoted in Raphael Minder and David Zucchino, “Spaniards, Exhausted by Politics, Warm to Life Without a Government” (The New York Times: 2016). Quoted in Frances Mulraney, “New Jersey man, 28, who stood next to Air Force vet as she was fatally shot by police in Capitol riot is arrested after FBI track him down using his TV interview about witnessing her death” (Dailymail.com: 2021).

[6] Lawrence Lessig, They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy (Harper Collins: 2019), xiii. John G. Matsusaka, Let the People Rule: How Direct Democracy Can Meet the Populist Challenge (Princeton University Press, 2022), 3. CNN Newsource, “CNN Poll: A growing number of people lack confidence in American elections” (ABC17News: 2022). Quoted in Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Y. Shapiro, Politicians Don’t Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness (University of Chicago Press: 2000), 314, 316-317.

[7] Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (Princeton University Press: 2012), 57, 60, 1. Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America?: What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It (University of Chicago Press: 2020), 67. See also Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” (Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3: 2014).

[8] Mark Krikorian, “The Social-Liberal/Economic-Conservative Mirage — Immigration Edition,” Center for Immigration Studies, 2022. Gilens, Affluence and Influence, 108, 113-117. See also Lee Drutman, “Political Divisions in 2016 and Beyond: Tensions Between and Within the Two Parties” (Democracy Fund Voter Study Group: 2017). See also “Citizens with economically left-wing and culturally right-wing views vote less and are less satisfied with politics,” (Democratic Audit UK: 2019).

[9] Gilens, Democracy in America?, 69. Matsusaka, 54-55. Gilens, Affluence and Influence, 70. Martin Gilens, “Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness” (The Public Opinion Quarterly 69, no. 5), 778.

[10] Ibid. Bartels quoted in Ron Formisano, American Oligarchy: The Permanent Political Class (University of Illinois Press: 2017), 53. Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton University Press: 2016), 282. Kay Lehman Schlozman et al., The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy (Princeton University Press: 2013), 8. See also Joshua Kalla and Ethan Porter, “Politicians Don’t Actually Care What Voters Want” (The New York Times: 2019).

[11] Gilens, Democracy in America?, 68. Larry Bartels quoted in Schlozman, 144. Elmer Eric Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America (Dryden Press: 1975), 35. Schlozman, 575.

[12] Elmer Eric Schattschneider quoted in Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton University Press: 2017), 297. Achen, 3, 22-23. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (Harper: 1957), 28. George Monbiot, “Lies, fearmongering and fables: that’s our democracy” (The Guardian: 2016). Dennis C. Mueller, Public Choice III (Cambridge University Press: 2003), 264. Dylan Matthews, “The trolling presidency” (Vox: 2017). Achen and Bartels, 49, 22, 1.

[13] Achen, 50. Monbiot.

[14] Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (Batoche Books: 2001), 98.

[15] Quoted in Schlozman, 19. Quoted in Formisano, 187, 70. Schlozman, 273. Quoted in Adam D. Sheingate, Building a Business of Politics: The Rise of Political Consulting and the Transformation of American Democracy (Oxford University Press: 2016), 133.

[16] John Nichols and Robert W. Mcchesney, “The Money & Media Election Complex” (The Nation: 2010). Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems (University of Chicago Press: 1995), 384. Downs quoted in Ferguson, 24. Ferguson, 36, 27, 37, 384. See also Robert W. McChesney et al., Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America (PublicAffairs: 2013).