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Aristotle, Christopher Achen, democracy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Larry Bartels, Matthew Yglesias, Maura Healey, United States
Matthew Yglesias has a better understanding of the details of public policy than almost anyone I know. He excels at being a technocrat. But there’s a reason technocrats and populists are at odds: populism, whether of the Bernie Sanders or the Donald Trump variety, comes out of a fundamentally democratic impulse, promoting the rule of the people against a perceived élite (even at the expense of lost expertise). And one post of Yglesias’s shows me that he’s not so good at understanding what the rule of the people actually is.
In the case of the particular topic that Yglesias was writing about, he makes a characteristically important point on the practical implications: community meetings, and other forms of providing popular input into government actions, slow down those actions and often prevent them entirely. There is indeed something wrong with “a world where the New York State Legislature can decide in 2019 that it wants congestion pricing for Manhattan and then spend three years compiling a 4,000+ page NEPA review.” Community input often leads to bad policy outcomes. Where Yglesias is wrong, though, is in saying this interferes with democracy.
Yglesias at least states his incorrect position with characteristic clarity: “is democracy about people expressing views at hearings or is it about entrusting elected leaders with the authority to make decisions on subjects of public concern? I think it’s the latter.” And that is where he’s wrong.
There are two things we tend to take for granted about democracy in the contemporary world: one, that democracy is good, and two, that it primarily means elections. In the modern self-proclaimed democracies beginning with the United States and France, elections are typically what “democracy” has meant. But is that what it should mean?
Elections were not what democracy meant to the ancient Athenians who invented the term. Their “democratic” system involved an assembly of all eligible citizens. The officials who ran the place were selected not by election but by the random chance of sortition (lottery). Indeed Aristotle explicitly contrasted democracy with elections: “It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election.” (Politics 1294b) After all, democracy is supposed to mean rule by the people. Elections aren’t rule by the people, but by their supposed representatives. In the modern era, Rousseau thought that representative democracy was no democracy at all: “the moment a people allows itself to be represented, it is no longer free: it no longer exists. The day you elect representatives is the day you lose your freedom.” (Social Contract, III, 15) If there had to be representatives, Rousseau too thought they should be chosen by sortition, not election.
Aristotle and Rousseau don’t get the last word, of course; Aristotle didn’t even like democracy. Their views are important to remind us that the equation of democracy with elections is a historical accident; democracy doesn’t only mean elections, and there’s no reason why it has to. The question now is: what should it mean? Yglesias takes a stand on that question, but doesn’t give us a whole lot of reason for the stand. To answer it, I think we need to remember the first assumption here, that democracy is good: it’s an ideal we basically all agree on even if we don’t agree what it means. No party to the debate is disputing that democracy is good. So what is good about it? Why is democracy an ideal, or why should it be?
Achen and Bartels in Democracy for Realists mention one basic advantage of democracy, which is that it prevents capture of the system: the system has a built-in mechanism for peaceful transfer of power, making sure that power doesn’t fall permanently into the hands of one single self-perpetuating clique. That’s an underrated advantage of democracy – but it would also be satisfied by lottery rather than elections. It is not the reason people assume democracy is a good thing.
Rather, the power of the idea of democracy is that the people being ruled should have a say in how they’re ruled. Governments are supposed to be for the constituencies they govern, there to serve the constituencies they govern, rather than being a colonizing power élite that maintains a hierarchy over the governed. People should have a voice.
And there is nothing magical about elections – about “entrusting elected leaders with the authority to make decisions” – as the process for giving that voice. For one thing, we are all too familiar with ways in which elections do not give that voice, even on a representative basis. Never mind the absurd minority-rule farce that is the American Electoral College; even when the winning candidate actually receives the majority of votes, that still doesn’t mean people have a voice. In the most recent Massachusetts state election, Maura Healey ran effectively unopposed in the Democratic primary, while the Republicans ran a Trumpist firebrand with no chance of getting elected in this liberal state – and Massachusetts keeps the American two-party system. This combination effectively meant: if you didn’t like Maura Healey, whether on leftist or rightist or centrist grounds, too bad. You didn’t get a say – either to pick a different Democratic candidate or to pick a candidate from a different party. You were going to get Maura Healey as your governor and you were going to like it.
But even when elections are genuinely contested, there’s still something missing when democracy is reduced to “entrusting elected leaders with the authority to make decisions”. Yglesias’s entrusting phrase already suggests something off here. In 2024, only 22% of Americans said they trusted the American government to do what is right “just about always” (2%) or “most of the time” (21%); that number has been below 30% since 2006. Numbers like that indicate that a great many people do not trust the politicians whom they themselves voted for to do the right thing. Which makes sense – for it is not the people, or even a majority of the people, who have entrusted elected leaders with their authority. It was the creators of a constitution in the long-ago past – who could just as easily have decided on a different system. (The American founders were writing in Rousseau’s time, and had the option of government by lottery.)
By contrast, in community meetings people get to express their own voices, their own ideas, on issues that actually matter to them. They’re not pretending to “entrust” anyone with anything: they are making their own case for how they themselves want to be governed. These places offer precious room for a democracy of intellect and not just will. They are much more true than elections to the ideal of people having a say in how they will be governed.

So: no, democracy isn’t about “entrusting elected leaders with the authority to make decisions on subjects of public concern”. When people express their views – at hearings or in other public forums – and those views are taken into consideration in the decision-making process, that gets us a lot closer to democracy. The policy outcome might still be worse – but the case for democracy is not that it produces effective policy outcomes. It’s easier for an administrator to do things efficiently when she can do them by arbitrary fiat. Democracy is about the people having a say in how they’re ruled. And they get more of that say by expressing their actual voices to the powerful than by picking which of two people they don’t trust will get to decide everything.
Policy outcomes matter, of course. Sometimes things just need to get done. But that is just to say that democracy isn’t the only consideration that matters in decision-making.
I have been reading your blog for a while. Your thoughts are usually interesting. This essay on “democracy” however has me scratching my head. I respectfully suggest that it would have been helpful if you expanded on your statement that “[Democracy is] an ideal we basically all agree on even if we don’t agree what it means.” I think that is essentially correct. It’s a muddled concept that is perplexing and potentially dangerous. When one is free to define democracy in many ways one is given an opportunity for political manipulation. You do pose what I think is a path to a solution—“So, The question now is: what should it mean?” But all you do is claim—other than democracy is not about elections—that “Democracy is about the people having a say in how they’re ruled. And they get more of that say by expressing their actual voices to the powerful than by picking which of two people they don’t trust will get to decide everything.” I tend to agree, modern democracy is about at least that. And maybe that is a better quality than mere voting—at least compared to the American procedures of voting you describe. But, like it or not, the contemporary ideal of democracy includes fair elections—although it didn’t mean that in ancient times. I’m ok with that too and I agree with that part of the modern ideal. The modern ideal includes many things that don’t fit an ancient definition of democracy like civil rights protections against the majority and separation of powers with an independent judiciary among other ideals. I guess I’m missing the point.
Glad you’re enjoying the blog. Separation of powers and civil rights protections are important – but I don’t think it makes sense to speak of them as part of democracy. Democracy doesn’t just mean “everything good”. It needs to mean the people having a voice that counts in the process. So far elections are the main means we have figured out for doing that, but they’re not the only means, and the best we can really say about elections is Churchill’s point that they’re better than anything else that has been tried. The point here is that other means of democratic participation, such as community meanings, need to be encouraged and are at least as important as elections are.
I respectfully disagree. Classically democracy is defined as basic sovereignty residing in the people. They rule directly or through elected representatives as envisioned by the American Founding Fathers. In fact, the Founders were not democrats, believing in a mixed form of government. However, over time “democracy” has developed a much broader definition in the market place of ideas encompassing civil liberties guarantees and separation of powers including an independent judiciary (obvious checks on democracy’s excesses). That was my point—I was suggesting that you expand on your basic question of “what should it mean.” I get that you want the definition to include “other means of participation” which “need to be encouraged” like participation in forums to help craft policy initiatives. But I would also suggest election reform measures like ending gerrymandering, increasing the number of elected representatives in the U.S. Congress—one of the least representative of modern democracies, which itself would make the electoral college more representative, or perhaps genuine open primaries, ranked voting and a variety of other methods intended to make voting more meaningful. Personally I think each of these policy proposals is at least equally important—especially since you have great criticism of American voting procedures.
I’m not disagreeing with any of the latter part, actually. Elections are not our only form of popular participation and they shouldn’t be treated as they are, but they are the one that’s binding (as community meetings are not), and so insofar as we have them, it’s important to strengthen their ability to be genuinely representative. That’s especially true in a place like the US, where the system is so clearly the opposite.