What About Electing a Chief Executive?

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 2.6

Selecting a president, governor, mayor or other chief executive is a very different task than selecting a representative legislative body. Simple random selection would be a mistake. Lotteries are appropriate for selecting a group rather than an individual (unless the pool has first been narrowed such that any one of them would be good). A chief executive needs specific skills. It is also impossible for a single person to be descriptively representative of a diverse population, so the analysis in the previous section dealing with a legislature cannot apply. 

A chief executive is thought of as being either an agent working on behalf of the population through careful administration of the laws adopted by the legislative branch, or as a leader who sets a path, guiding the legislative branch and the population as a whole. The framers of the American Constitution intended the legislature to be the principal center of federal power, with a primarily administrative president, who could also respond to emergencies. Over time, however, more and more power has shifted to the executive. Many political observers have written about the rise of an “imperial” presidency, and during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt and again of Donald Trump, even the possibility of an authoritarian one. Vesting both administrative and policy powers in a chief executive is a holdover from non-democratic governments and monarchies of the past, and not appropriate for a true democracy.

One vision of modern political leadership involves policy promotion and inspiration to get the group, or even a whole society, working for a common goal. Competitive elections for offices such as the presidency limit the effectiveness of leaders as unifiers in crises or times of national disaster. Unlike a symbolic head of state, such as a modern figurehead king or queen, a policy-drenched elected executive inevitably has opponents who may seek out opportunities to undercut the office holder. It can be argued that following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 that President George Bush successfully played that unifier role. However, he soon took advantage of the role to enact policy initiatives unrelated to the attack, including the invasion of Iraq.

A sortition-based democracy would certainly still have many policy leaders seeking to gain public support for particular proposals — but they would not have power over people. One problem with elected leaders is that each is expected to lead on the full range of issues. Thus an elected official who is leading in a positive direction on issue A may also be undercutting the public well-being by misleading on issue B. Rather than taking leaders as package deals for a whole host of policies, it would be better if society could recognize issue leaders à la carte.

 Political leadership is an extremely misunderstood and convoluted phenomenon. It is a practice that has been culturally enshrined. But beyond custom, a readiness to embrace leadership, with its enabling and necessary correlate – followership –  may be hard-wired into us by evolution. Followership is one of our pre-human survival strategies for handling the problem of group coordination. Members of a pre-language hominid band might have had different ideas about whether it would be better to look for ripe fruits by heading into the valley now, or up on the hillside. What mattered more was that they didn’t get separated such that a member got picked off by some predator. Which decision is made often matters less than whether the group acts together. Literally following a leader solved that problem by facilitating coordinated action. Followership also reduced the overall cognitive burden on the community. 

The development of language has allowed alternative means of coordination, such as teaming (nonhierarchical teamwork) that is not based in the stereotypical followership/leadership dynamic, but instead on synergistically pooling diverse knowledge and skills. In the modern world, the negative effects of hierarchical leadership and followership often outweigh the positive. Leadership’s benefits are often dramatically over-rated due to a hind-sight halo effect. Renowned professor of business management Phil Rosenzweig examined this in his book The halo effect: how managers let themselves be deceived. When things go well for an organization or government, we tend to credit the “leader,” rather than the actions of many others and the countless random factors that the leader had no control over, or even awareness of. Likewise, when things go badly, it is satisfying to personify the failings as those of a bad leader. We have a psychological proclivity for seeing outcomes as being the result of specific actions and intentions — what is called narrative bias. Straight line cause and effect presumptions are satisfying — even comforting. It is uncomfortable to realize how much of what ends up happening is the result of a vast array of unknowable chance events. As the political scientist Murray Edelman observed in his incisive book, Constructing the Political Spectacle,

“Leaders are ready symbols of good and evil, while historical trends, social conditions, relations of production, and modes of discourse are not. Leaders become objectifications of whatever worries or pleases observers of the political scene because it is easy to identify with them, support or oppose them, love or hate them.”

Edelman goes on to argue that the vilification and focus on “bad” leaders serves to reinforce the underlying structural problems of the society. 

“To personify failure in a conspicuous official is to minimize the chance that public restiveness or protest will force institutional change. Individuals are expendable so that established power relationships and modes of allocating resources can continue with minimal challenge in spite of unpopular policies.”

The quality of leadership, like our ability to judge good or bad leaders, is suspect. However, in any group of people, when a communal difficulty arises, it is common for some people to take on, or be thrust into, leadership roles. This will doubtless be true in a sortition-based democracy as well, just as juries in most current court systems select a foreman. There are many different types and styles of leadership — some of which serve the group and some of which are self-serving, narcissistic, or feed an individual’s hunger for status or domination over others. There is no evidence that people who seek election as political leaders make any better leaders for groups than people who don’t seek election. Indeed, harking back to Steve Taylor’s observations earlier in this chapter, there is some logic to the witticism that anyone who seeks power over others through political leadership should automatically be disqualified.

I subscribe to the social construct analysis of political leadership advanced by Murray Edelman. Rather than viewing it as a noble or inherently positive thing for democracy, he argued that “belief in leadership is a catalyst of conformity and obedience.” A popular political leader with savvy public relations skills can be an existential threat to the survival of a true democracy. The psychiatrist and Former Foreign Secretary of the UK David Owen had a close-up, insiders view of political leadership, and argues that many “great men” in power succumb to what he calls hubris syndrome, leading to harmful narcissistic behavior. He even proposed that it become a medically recognized and diagnosable psychiatric condition.

As Rosenzweig argues, narratives about the accomplishments of “great leaders” should be treated with extreme skepticism. As one example, Winston Churchill is facilely remembered today as having been a great leader. But that halo is tarnished when the fact is recalled that his openly racist views of the British Empire prompted him in 1943 to order the diversion of grain supplies from starving Indian civilians to top-up already well-stocked European stores, leading to the preventable deaths of approximately three million people. Edelman observed that

“Beliefs about success and failure are among the most arbitrary of political constructions and perhaps least likely to be recognized as arbitrary. The issue turns on which actions and which consequences are to be highlighted and which ignored, for every act brings a chain of consequences that help some people and hurt others. The acts that rationalize and perpetuate incumbent leadership are for the most part those that can readily be dramatized; they consist largely of defeats of foreign and domestic enemies and threats. Slow contributions to the well-being of large numbers of people are rarely the stuff upon which leadership is built, and gradual declines in such well-being are easily ignored as well.”

Much of the criticism of elections in this book does indeed apply to the election of a chief executive as well as a legislature. However, the remedy is significantly different for the two branches. A successful democracy requires a chief executive who is fundamentally an honest, competent administrator, more akin to a recruited city manager than an elected mayor. There is a serious danger in using direct popular elections from among those few citizens who have the inflated ego, connections, access to money, and public relations skills to seek to elevate themselves to an exalted position. The fact that the citizens get to vote is not a failsafe. It is worth remembering that Hitler rose to power through free and fair elections. I will return briefly to the issue of selecting an executive in Part III of this book, but the bulk of our attention will be devoted to the selection of representative lawmakers.

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