Accountability for Politicians: Part 2

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 13.8

Carl Sagan and others testified to a Senate subcommittee about the urgent need to address the danger of greenhouse gasses and climate change in December 1985

Many electoral systems around the world have corruption-prone features that stymie accountability. These include campaign finance procedures and legislators enacting and enforcing ethics rules self-referentially. While such procedures could be changed to eliminate these particular avenues for corruption, there are more fundamental traits of electoral systems that make accountability by sanction unworkable.

Legislator accountability is generally about acts of commission, rather than acts of omission. Casting a bad vote, or taking a bribe could theoretically make a politician subject to removal (though it is vanishingly rare for such punishment to actually occur). However, as discussed in chapter 3 (in the section on setting the agenda), politicians often avoid certain issues altogether, and this act of omission can be far more consequential and harmful to society than the votes they take. The danger of climate change is a damning example. NASA scientists gave urgent warnings to Congressional committees in the 1980s that greenhouse gasses were already affecting the climate and that by the first half of the 21st century the impact would become devastating. The needed response of transitioning away from fossil fuels was deemed too harmful electorally for those politicians,¹ so it took decades for this vital issue to finally get onto the political agenda (when the  response needed had been multiplied.) The fear of short-term electoral “accountability” overpowered the fear of global devastation. 

Electoral accountability is premised on the assumption that the constituents know what their representatives have done. First it must be noted that many of the most significant actions representatives take are done in secret behind closed doors. It is the deals, rather than the roll call votes that often matter most. But just considering their voting records, hardly any constituents know how their representatives vote on any given issue. This means it is lobbyists who actually reward or punish a representative with money or publicity. Careful research has confirmed that voters are unlikely to make accurate assessments of representatives, even when resources and financial incentives are provided. Gregory Huber, lead author of a study of four thousand citizens participating in a series of exercises assessing how people incorporate information in evaluating incumbent politicians, told a reporter

“Our results suggest severe limitations in humans’ ability to accurately and impartially judge the performance of politicians. This is a worrisome finding for democratic accountability because it creates a breeding ground for politicians to manipulate their electorate.”  

Professor Alexander Guerrero at the University of Pennsylvania has written about the problem of holding elected representatives accountable. After discussing the various impediments to fair elections (money, voter registration hurdles, gerrymandering and the like) he observes:

“Even if these problems were addressed, they would succeed only in making elections fair. But meaningful accountability requires not just open and fair elections; it also requires that we are capable of engaging in informed monitoring and evaluation of the decisions of our representatives. And we are not capable of this. Not because we are stupid, but because we are ignorant: ignorant about what our representatives are doing, ignorant about the details of complex political issues, and ignorant about whether what our representative is doing is good for us or for the world.

“Our ignorance means that representatives can talk a good game, and maybe even try to do a few things that benefit the majority of us, but the basic information asymmetries at the heart of the representative system ensure that, for many issues — defence manufacturing and spending, policy that affects the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, agribusiness policy and regulation, energy policy, regulation of financial services and products — what we get is what the relevant business industries want. In the presence of widespread citizen ignorance and the absence of meaningful accountability, powerful interests will effectively capture representatives, ensuring that the only viable candidates — the only people who can get and stay in political power — are those who will act in ways that are congenial to the interests of the powerful.”

Political scientists have shown that American voters generally can’t accurately assign blame when things go wrong. The electoral retribution following the New Jersey shore shark attacks and the Great Depression I discussed in chapter 2 are examples of this. Political scientists and party leaders know that a bad economy will tend to hurt the re-election prospects of an incumbent president, even if the fault lies with Congress, Wall Street, or beyond any politician’s control. It’s like punishing the cat for urine on the carpet left by the dog. The assumption that elections are the appropriate tool for guiding law-makers prevents consideration of alternatives like sortition.

This problem is compounded by the fact that partisans often seek to intentionally misinform voters about factual matters. As Prof. Russell Muirhead of Dartmouth College notes, electoral partisanship:

“is embedded in a politics of power and domination. In practice, partisans are a part that seeks to rule the whole. Partisanship is thus a peaceful cousin to civil war: It is a legally sanctioned mode of acquiring power and preventing one’s adversaries from doing the same. Often, one side wins because it has managed – by election, by manipulation of fact, by deception, by craft – to claim the levers of power.”

In large scale elections, voters must rely on second-hand information, since few have significant first-hand knowledge of their representatives’ actions. Voters either rely on partisan labels, some unique policy concern, or rudimentary assessments of a candidate’s character (as presented through carefully designed propaganda techniques) in deciding how to vote. Gabriel Lenz, author of Follow the Leader? How Voters Respond to Politicians’ Policies and Performance, examined a large number of voter surveys from the U.S., Great Britain and the Netherlands from the 1940s to the present and found that policy considerations are simply not a major determinant for how most people select candidates.  Lenz summed up his findings, saying

“Unfortunately for democracy, the results are not reassuring.”  Most voters can’t match candidates with the policies they espouse. “It’s not that voters are dumb or stupid,” Lenz observes. “It’s just that they have better things to do with their lives.”

This leads us back to rational ignorance, discussed previously. While acknowledging voter ignorance about their representatives’ behavior and policy positions, some political scientists suggest there is a way to successfully use elections as a tool for accountability. The work-around they propose is voters’ reliance on the  knowledge of surrogates, such as special interest advocacy organizations and special interest lobbyists, who do pay attention and study legislators. Can simply following the guidance and endorsements by such interest groups compensate for individual voter ignorance? I discussed the research of  Broockman, Kaufman and Lenz at the end of chapter 8, in the section on voter decision making,  which found little evidence of any efficacy of this strategy. The rational ignorance that makes voters ill-informed about politicians also makes them ill-informed about these advocacy organizations. Quoting myself from that previous chapter:

“a recent study found that voters widely misinterpret candidate endorsements from special interest groups, frequently drawing the opposite understanding by incorrectly assuming an organization agrees with the voter’s policy preferences, when in fact they are at odds. In other words such off-boarding to surrogates has a high likelihood of failing for all but a few well-known special interests.”

While most representatives’ policy work is invisible to constituents, a handful of issues do garner substantial media coverage, and may indeed cause legislators to worry about how voters will react. Most of these high-visibility issues are selected by politicians for their campaign value. Different parties seek to highlight different issues, and those that do rise to the top are often more symbolic than substantive. Politicians also seek to frame them so that in typical polarized safe-district elections both major party candidates can “deliver” by voting the way their base thinks they should. Occasionally, the reality on the ground forces an issue, which was not pre-selected by politicians for campaign purposes, into public awareness. But these represent a tiny fraction of legislators’ workload.

Even if electoral accountability could work, it has a severe dark side. Harking back to Edmund Burke’s independent agent vs. delegate dichotomy discussed in chapter 7, in some cases the lack of accountability by election may actually free a representative to act in the true interests of the public, even if the polls don’t favor the policy. To any extent that sanction accountability (the fear of losing the next election as a consequence of behavior), is effective, it is a double-edged sword with both positive and negative consequences for the constituents. An elected representative may pander, or promote short-term policies that are popular (thus beneficial for re-election), yet he or she knows will harm the public in the long run. Legislators often pass new laws in response to threats that are dominating the news, even when they know the legislation is costly and certain to be ineffective. A huge portion — trillions of dollars worth — of Congressional and Presidential actions following the 9/11 attacks probably fit this description. What’s more, the representatives’ “accountability” to the public pressure to “do something” generated increased opportunities to shoehorn in corrupt action, such as rewarding campaign donations from weapons manufacturers.

The next post will address accountability under sortition.

1. A bill was introduced, S.2891, the Global Climate Protection Act of 1986, requiring the president to set up a taskforce, but the bill never received any action or a vote.