Competitive "Democracy"
From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 9.4
Some sort of competition is inevitable in any political system, whether between orators in classical Athens, or between policy options supported by different individuals or interests today. The optimal public policy can sometimes best be uncovered through the contestation of competing ideas. However, it is often hard to tell which conflicting ideas reflect deep-rooted disagreements or interests, and which conflicting ideas are essentially manufactured by politicians in order to inflame and mobilize their base, or demonize opposing politicians.
The idealized version of the competitive model imagines the process of politicians competing to win votes, allowing “the people” to effectively control government and win the policies they prefer. While traditionally presented in high school civics classes, few political scientists subscribe to this myth of how our electoral system works. An electoral political system makes competition for power (rather than policy) its heart and soul. In a competitive electoral system, the people do not rule themselves, but are instead given the hypothetical opportunity to choose, through elections, which team of the “political class” will get to rule them. Unlike a traditional oligarchy, whether based around family ties or class, competitive elections allow a steady circulation of oligarchs in and out of power.
The person most often credited with popularizing the elite competition view of democracy is Joseph Schumpeter. Born in Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, in 1883, he was Austrian finance Minister, a bank president, and ultimately an economics professor. Contradicting the stereotype of the humorless economist, he is said to have claimed that his life’s goals were to be the greatest economist in the world, the greatest horseman in Austria, and the greatest lover in Vienna – and that he had achieved two of the three goals.
Schumpeter moved to the United States in 1932 becoming a professor of economics at Harvard University. He popularized the phrase “creative destruction” as a description of the dynamism of capitalism. He influenced many students and future economists ranging from Alan Greenspan, eventual chair of the Federal Reserve, to Paul Sweezy, the most important American Marxist economists of the twentieth century.
Schumpeter’s 1942 book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, has had a profound impact on the field of political science. Expanding on the concepts of the famous German sociologist, Max Weber, Schumpeter sought to describe how “democracy” actually did function, rather than how it was imagined, or how it ideally should work. He argued that “democracy is the rule of the politician.” Schumpeter wrote,
“democracy does not mean and cannot mean that the people actually rule in any obvious sense of the terms ‘people’ and ‘rule’. Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them.”
This is not the understanding of democracy that is presented in high school civics classes, nor in speeches by politicians at 4th of July events, but it is widely accepted among political scientists as unvarnished reality (though some dispute his unconditional “cannot mean” in the quote). The respected British professor of political theory John Dunn wrote,
“In no modern state do the people in fact rule, and… there is little reason to see in the history of any modern state over any period of time a reasonably straightforward intention to permit them to do anything of the kind.”
Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, in their book, The Civic Culture, argued that too much participation can be detrimental to democracy. A constant flood of demands from divergent groups on a political system, especially a winner-take-all system, can fracture a society. They suggested political participation should be only “intermittent and potential.” We are left with a shadow of democracy, in which the deliberative skills and participatory spirit have atrophied, or more accurately, never been developed or allowed to mature.
Joseph Schumpeter asserted that modern representative democracy was essentially a system of competing teams of politicians, vying for power . The politicians cheer on the other members of their own party against the “enemy,” even when they disagree on critical policy issues. Not unlike sports teams, allegiance to one team or another is not necessarily based on policy preferences. In many cases, parties do not so much exist to promote a platform, but rather platform planks exist to help get members of the party team elected.
Anthony Downs extended the Schumpeter concept one step further in a two-party, left/right environment. While it may not be literally true all the time, electoral democracy can usefully be thought of as a system in which politicians
“never seek office as a means of carrying out particular policies; their only goal is to reap the rewards of holding office per se. They treat policies purely as a means to the attainment of their private ends, which they can reach only by being elected. … Parties formulate policies in order to win elections, rather than win elections in order to formulate policies.”
A few individual politicians change their policy choices depending on which way they believe the wind is blowing (or the policy preferences of campaign donors), and where the most votes are to be had. However, the negative ramifications of being seen as a “flip-flopper” means that these partisan shifts often occur behind the scenes or over a long enough time frame that most voters don’t notice the change. Party platforms and policies can even become mirror opposites over time. In 1971, the Republican president, Richard Nixon, imposed wage and price controls, a profoundly anti-free market policy, and unimaginable in the current Republican Party. While most African Americans are likely to vote Democratic today, in the first half of the twentieth century it was the party of white supremacy, with some Democratic Party state rules expressly prohibiting the participation of Blacks in party primaries.
Downs’s point that policies are tools created to engage in electoral battle, rather than being the goals for which elections are fought, was specific to winner-take-all two party elections systems like that in the US. It is possible that in multi-party systems with proportional representation that parties and candidates actually are engaged in electoral battle in order to implement preferred policies. The Green Parties in various European countries come to mind as parties with a mission. But the steady mutation of various European socialist parties to social democratic goals, and then often ending in policies completely amenable to capitalism, suggests that winning elections indeed does have higher priority than policy. Of course, prioritizing core policy demands versus electoral imperatives can lead to internecine battles within parties (as illustrated by the swings within the UK Labour Party with Tony Blair and Ed Miliband). When I served in office, I frequently heard fellow legislators explain why they couldn’t vote for an amendment they actually liked, saying that they needed to stay in office in order to do good work. Even if true, this is a convenient rationalization for prioritizing winning elections over policy.
In all modern “representative democracies,” the use of elections has propelled the development of political parties. Parties establish the framework for electoral choices by the voters, mobilize voters and organize governance (or opposition) once the election is over. In multi-party systems with proportional representation voting, it is often the party negotiations after the election where the trade-offs between power and policy are actually settled (without any voter involvement). Most political scientists assert that parties are an inevitable element of electoral systems. In the U.S. political parties have a tiny vanguard of active members (candidates, party officials, fund-raisers and the like), while the mass of citizens have minimal partisan connection, at most exhibiting some level of party identification. Perhaps sixty to seventy percent of Americans have a more or less consistent partisan preference, but this allegiance has historically been shallow and not policy-based. The rise of Donald Trump, fomenting both loyalty and hatred, almost certainly increased the feelings of partisanship. The growing view that supporters of the other party are “enemies of the country '' rather than merely “opponents,” is clearly dangerous. A trend that may accompany this trend, but was less noted by commentators, is increased disdain for politics and public engagement of all sorts.