Who Rules in a Representative Democracy?

Who rules in a representative democracy?

In the most basic sense, democracy is about self-rule. It is about the rule of people over people. Theoretically speaking, there are two types of democracy: direct democracy, and representational democracy. Direct democracy works on the premise that everyone within a democratic polity participates in the democratic process hands on. All decision making will be made through an aggregation of the votes of every individual in the democratic society. There are many problems with this approach. In a modern society, it is prohibitively difficult to get people to come together to make decisions on things. Not only is this approach is highly time consuming, there is a tricky issue of those who wills not to vote. Representational democracy tries to get around the unfeasible nature of direct democracy by delegating the mandate to a central decision making body (most commonly known as the parliament). By doing so, sovereignty is transferred from the people to the parliament. Parliament, thus, is technically acting on behalf of the people. This relationship can, however, be easily undermined, as it is often seen in practice, when 1) there might not be a definable “common will”, 2) even if there is, “common will” can be manufactured by politicians, and 3) voting mechanisms prevent the common will to be expressed effectively. The question then turns to: to what extent are the people ruling themselves, or are they essentially being ruled by a group of people they elect every four years, the politicians? 

First of all, let us begin with assumption that in a representative democracy, people are ruled by the common will. Constituencies elect representatives who would go on to the parliament to get the ordinary people’s voices heard. Through this process we see the stable mechanism of a democratic system, in which the common will is represented by the ministers. The true picture, as pointed out by Schumpeter, is much less peachy. Firstly, there might not be a singular entity we can safely call the “common will”. For Schumpeter, the “common will” is an illusion. In a democratic polity, not everyone will have a will, and even if they do, it might not be well-informed, and even if everyone has well-informed wills, they may very well will different things. For instance we can look at the US 2012 elections. Only 30% of the youths turned up to vote in 2012 - this signifies that 70% of youths (18-24s) do not have a political “will”, so to speak. Amongst those who turned up, at least some of them would have voted based on misinformation or prejudices, as people often do due to the sensational nature of election coverage. On top of that, those who have come to their decisions via a rigorous rational process, understandably and naturally, vote for different candidates. If representative democracy is the rule of the common will, it might be rule by nothing at all. The common will, as we see it, is fractured, disorganised, misinformed and at times indifferent.

Although the will of all is perhaps out of reach, we can perhaps concede that there might be the will of the majority. In a way, then, as long as the majority’s will is represented in parliament through representatives, then it can be said that the majority rules in a representative democracy. However, this doesn’t get around the fact that the majority’s will can still be manufactured. Indeed, as Schumpeter argues, factors such as the psychology of crowds (herd mentality), irrational consumption fueled by advertising, and the notion that it is in a politician’s best incentive to be corrupt, all work towards distorting the purity of the voters’ will. By using organs of the state to shape agendas, the political parties may have effective hegemony in creating voter’s wills such that their demands work to their favour. For instance, the Willie Horton case illustrates how political advertising attempts to subconsciously influence the voters mind by creating a sense of fear. Schumpeter famously says that the “typical citizen drops down to a lower mental performance as soon as he enters the political field” not because he is elitist - he claims that lawyers and doctors are actually the most susceptible to such behaviour - but because such political advertising works on our subconscious minds and could make us immune to reason, manufacturing, in the process, the political agenda. 

We have thus a situation where there is no common will, so to speak, and that even if there is, it could be manufactured. All these are genuine problems facing representative democracies. Without solving them, it is difficult to decide who is actually ruling. But let’s accept that even though our “common will” is not perfect, it is still, in a sense, workable. Doing so will allow us then to turn our attention to a more practical question: do representative institutions represent any kind of link between the decisions of those who govern and the electorate's policy preferences? In other words, are the electorate’s decisions actually taken into account in policy making? What institutional safeguards are there in representative democracies (if any) that ensures that the public will is reflected?

For Bernard Manin, there are two voids in the institutional mechanism that preclude the possibility of perfect representation: “imperative mandates”, and the “discretionary revocability of representatives”. Imperative mandates are basically legal contracts that ensure that politicians work on their promises once they’re elected. This feature is absent in representative democracies for it requires the electorate to know in advance the issues the government will confront, and given that a large number of concrete decisions has to be made everyday, it is simply not feasible (Manin). However, such a justification assumes that imperative mandates has to be all encompassing in scope - indeed, it is perfectly possible to conceive of a smaller, targeted mandate, such as, say, tax rates will be cut. If that is the case, then there seems to be no good reason not to have imperative mandates. On the other hand, “discretionary revocability of representatives” refers to the ability for the public to revoke representatives they feel are not serving their interests well. Manin puzzles over why this is never implemented, and concludes that its lack of use is due to “principle”. In a way, he is not wrong. Both voids actually operate on a principle, the principle of executive privilege. Not being able to hold representatives directly accountable can be a good thing, in the sense that the political scene will be extremely messy if the electorate wants to will the representative out of office at every mistake that he commits. Also, if we accept that a four year election cycle breeds short-termism, then “discretionary revocability of representatives” will probably mean the death of hard policies. In representative democracy, it can seem that it is the elected politicians that rule over the people, more than the people themselves, especially when we consider that the link between the will of the electorate and the behaviour of the elected representatives cannot be rigorously guaranteed. 

However, there are institutional safeguards built in place to ensure that the preferences of the electorate are respected. As Schumpeter rightly pointed out, the only check on power that the public has is throwing politicians out of power. Between elections, there are no transference of preferences from the represented to the representative: the only means is through election time. Manin also emphasises the point that the true power of the represented lies in their ability to dispose of the rulers. His points are, however, more nuanced than Schumpeter’s. First, he distinguishes it from the Hobessian state, where the governed can “once and for all” transfer to some entity the right to govern itself. Modern representative democracies only transfer the right temporarily, via election mandates that recur every few years. Second, the reason why recurring elections confer legitimacy to representative democracy is twofold. First, power is transferred to the votes when the incumbents know that their decisions will implicate them come next election. Secondly, votes can be used to express rejection and stop incumbents from pursuing a certain policy, or it may show favour a new policy from a different position. 

The central mechanism that governs recurring elections is the fact that politicians will have the incentive to anticipate future judgments made against them. Unlike Schumpeter, who dismisses the voter’s influence no public decision making wholesale, Manin feels that the anticipation works on a very practical level in incentivising certain behaviour while disincentivising others. That said, Manin is also acutely aware of the fact that without imperative mandates, the voters cannot be certain that the alternative party will carry out it’s promises; the only thing they could do, is to vote them out if they don’t. Featured prominently in this model of representative democracy is the mechanism of “retrospective voting”(Manin). Manin feels that the entire logic of representative democracies rest on the ability of voters to retrospectively consider the track records of the representatives. It is only through retrospective judgement that our model gains internal coherence. From this, we can see that in a representative democracy, it is the representatives who rule; but not entirely, because their actions are chained to the preferences of the electorate through the mechanism of recurring voting, in which the electorate retrospectively judge them for their actions. 

Before we conclude, it must be recognised that a few criteria must be met for the system of retroactive judgments to work well. Firstly, voters must be able to clearly assign responsibility. Coalitions governments in particular often pose difficult problems for voters in terms of responsibility assignment as the divided parliament often point fingers at one another when policies go bad. Second, voters should be able to get rid of those whose policy they reject. This is done through elections, and for that to happen, there must at least be a viable opposition party. Third, incumbents must not have access to resources that their opponents don't, because then it will be "structurally more difficult for voters not to reelect a representative than to reelect him”(Manin).

Perhaps more importantly, for representative democracy to be fully functional, freedom of political opinion has to be present. Freedom of opinion help keep the level of incentives healthy for the representatives, and is the mechanism through which the common will can be expressed. To Manin, it is the “counterpart to the absence of the right of instruction”(Manin). In other words, it compensates for the lack of imperative mandate. Not only does it "bring popular opinions to the attention of those who govern”, it also “connects the governed amongst themselves”. The "horizontal" communication between the governed affects the "vertical" relationship between the governed and the government: the more people are aware of each other's opinions, the stronger the incentive for those who govern to take those opinions into account. Hence, through freedom of political opinion, accountability is created. This accountability is crucial if we do not want representative democracies to be about the rule of the elite over the masses. 

Ultimately, representative democracies are not perfect. It suffers from many institutional problems, and there are no simple answer as to who rules: there are certain mechanisms which favour the executives, while others, such as voting and transparency, confer power onto the citizens. It is the dynamic thrusts of representative democracy that has made it the political structure of choice for most liberal countries today, but for it to not start hollowing out, it is crucial for us to start understanding the intricate institutional mechanisms and what they do for incentives of different parties, at every stage of the democratic process/cycle.