Equality by lot

Larry Bartels is an American political scientist. In 2016 he published, together with Christopher Achen, the book Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, in which the authors argued that voters can’t really tell what’s good for themselves. One possible takeaway from this argument could have been that elections are not a democratic mechanism. A recent interview with Bartels, on the occasion of the publication of a new book of his, indicates that he draws a very different conclusion. Bartels gives up on the people altogether (“they are what they are”) and wants to focus democratic theory on the behavior of elites.

I think what we need is a theory of democracy that has some real understanding of, on one hand, the inevitable power and leeway of political elites and, on the other hand, the goals they should strive to achieve when they exercise that power. Much of our thinking about democracy is very focused on ordinary citizens and what they should or shouldn’t be doing in their role in the process.

I’ve come increasingly to think that that’s a futile exercise. Ordinary people are pretty much what they are. We have a pretty good sense of how they behave. There are a lot of commonalities in their behavior across political systems with different cultures and different institutions. In all those places, regardless of the role of citizens, it’s the political leaders who really call the shots. So what we need is a better understanding of what democratic leadership entails, and how institutions can be made not to ensure, but at least to increase the probability that leaders will govern in enlightened ways, and on behalf of the interests of ordinary citizens.

Bartels ends on an overtly aristocratic note, where, perhaps taking a page from the Chinese, he wants to cultivate better elites. But at the same time he is overtly pessimistic and warns his audience that we should not expect too much from democracy.

[W]hat would a better system of democracy look like? I don’t have the answer to that. I do have the sense that we tend to focus too much on trying to avoid every conceivable threat to democracy and to imagine that if only we got the system and the rules right, that the system would operate happily in perpetuity. I think in reality there’s a huge gray area between democracy and autocracy, and lots of different dimensions in which democracies perform better or worse. Maybe the sense that a lot of people in the U.S. and elsewhere have now that we’re in a period of crisis is a belated recognition that democracy in all times and places is partial and risky and chancy.

[W]hat we really have to focus on is how we can socialize leaders to want the right things, and constrain them to avoid the worst excesses of misuse of power in political systems.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Press, Theory | 1 Comment »