It is quite difficult to adequately convey the extent of bewilderment that many in Europe have felt in view of the recent spectacle of the American budget battle. Bewilderment because that battle quickly ceased to be about the deficit or fiscal responsibility; instead, it became about the hard-line ideology of a minority of members of Congress who arrogantly thought they could defy a fundamental rule of democratic politics: Nobody gets everything they want because compromise is the core of any political agreement.
The United States’ federal political system – like most European ones – is one of representative democracy, not direct democracy. Simply put, in systems of the latter category such as Switzerland, for example, the electorate is asked to decide most legislative and many other measures by direct ballot. Although much maligned by the Founding Fathers for failing to protect minorities, elements of such direct democracy are present in the United States at state and sub-state levels today.
The decisive difference in the system of representative democracy at the federal level is the insight that elected members of Congress are better placed to make good decisions because they owe their electorates their informed, balanced and reasoned judgment — but not obedience, and not pork barrelling. Edmund Burke, Anglo-Irish politician, political theorist and great supporter of the American Revolution, put it as follows in his speech to “the electors of Bristol,” who had just elected him to that city’s parliament on November 3, 1774:
“Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion … [G]overnment and legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination; and, what sort of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion; in which one set of men deliberate, and another decide … ?”
Admittedly, Burke spoke in an English setting, and only of men, but he had much more to say on the subject, which makes for an interesting read and continues to be spot on today: not only do “the people” not always know best, but they may not know at all what they want (on highly specialized issues, say), or they may want contradictory things (spending but no taxes, as in California, for example). Of course, every individual voter may be just as rational or irrational as their elected representative; the inevitable aggregate of their views and votes, however, is necessarily complex, equivocal or even incompatible.
Representative democracy was conceived as the least bad solution to this problem – the alternatives, variants of anarchy or authoritarianism, are manifestly less appealing. Elected representatives can, in principle, find broadly acceptable answers to political questions, which is the most that can be hoped for in today’s complicated, heterogeneous world. They should do this by carefully noting both people’s expressed opinions and objective facts, weighing competing interests and perspectives, and assessing costs and benefits. They are meant to do this not just for their voters, but in their stead – after all, we pay politicians to do a job, to make informed decisions on our behalf that we cannot or do not want to make ourselves, because we’ve got our own jobs to get on with. This does not mean that voters get to divest themselves of all responsibility, however. We are called upon to make informed choices in the first place and to hold our representatives to account, but also to accept the compromises they, to the best of their abilities, negotiate on our behalf. In this way, elected representatives can arrive at considered, nuanced positions unlikely to include absolutes and final certainties. Their moderation – rather than unedited channelling – of their voters’ voices should enable them, in cooperation with their peers, to partake in effective democratic decision making for the benefit of all.
In the United States today, five interrelated factors stand in the way of the elected representatives doing their job. The first lies in the nature of the first-past-the-post electoral system, in which the winning candidate merely requires a relative majority, and thus need not even garner 50 percent of the vote in his or her district. As a result, a considerable chunk of the vote in most districts is simply discarded: if you happen to back somebody other than the eventual winner, your vote will not be represented. Therefore, it is nearly impossible for smaller political parties to win any seats and a two-party system has emerged. Most European countries use some form of proportional representation, in which (again, simply put) seats are allocated to parties in accordance with the overall proportion of the vote they receive; but in the United Kingdom, for example, the same problems with first-past-the-post have repeatedly led to campaigns to change the electoral system.
Second, because there are major federal elections every two years (not to mention all the elections on the various lower levels of governance), the United States today experiences a state of quasi-permanent political campaign. As a consequence, legislators have no time or incentive for the kind of bipartisanship and medium- to long-term perspective that is indispensable for sustainable policy making on issues ranging from the budget to fundamental ethics. This problem is compounded by the third factor, the prevailing 24-hours news cycle and the bottomless depths of the Web, which requires constant feeding and at once intensify and disperse the scrutiny policymakers face. They are not encouraged to ponder difficult questions at leisure and issue carefully nuanced answers. Instead, they must constantly compete for attention and be prepared to give short, unequivocal and irreversible sound bites that are faithful to the party line on any issue, right now. This does not produce solutions but empty slogans. Fourth, in order to have a chance of political survival in this maelstrom, politicians must develop a brand; they must become recognizable to their (potential) voters and public opinion more broadly. This further intensifies the pressure for simplification rather than complexity, for confrontation rather than cooperation, and filibusters rather than compromise.
Finally, the legislative process in representative democracies today, but particularly in the U.S. Congress, is further distorted by the amount of time politicians spend not with their voters, but with assorted lobbyists. No member of the House of Representatives can claim to represent a district that is unanimous on anything, and so listening to their electorates rarely provides a clear, unequivocal message — but that is precisely what is required, on the surface, from policymakers. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that too many lawmakers yield to the temptations offered by the deliverers of such ready-made messages and tune out all but the weightiest, or the loudest and angriest voices.
The combined effect of these factors (even leaving aside the inseparable issue of money) appears to point, in the case of the United States today, to new limits of democracy: the system becomes ungovernable when large portions of the electorate simply refuse to participate — by declining to pay taxes, to take informed decisions, to tolerate diversity and to accept compromise — and their elected representatives fail to step up and moderate extreme opinions in order to reach compromise. Thus, the United States appears to be, as Maureen Dowd put it recently, “in political default.” From an outside perspective, it is striking to what extent the political system that has been held up as an international example for so long, and is still supposed to inspire peoples on the brink of democracy today, is broken. The hallowed American Constitution, a historical achievement in its time, is anachronistic; it cannot contain politics that feature cleavages and an absence of civilized discourse more reminiscent of newly developing countries, but powered by 21st century wealth and technology, and has allowed political excesses to develop that undermine American democracy itself.
Clearly, all is not well in the European Union; but we must not forget that the EU is a relatively young political experiment on an altogether new level, which cannot compare itself to a supposedly mature democracy looking back proudly on more than two hundred years of political tradition. Yet the political reactions to comparable debt problems on both sides of the Atlantic have presented to the world a conspicuous contrast: European politicians have – hesitantly, reluctantly, clumsily but repeatedly – pulled together to take measures deeply unpopular with most of their electorate(s) in the short run but broadly recognized as best for the common good in the long run. A decisive minority of American politicians has chosen to hide behind their intellectually lazy slogans and pledges instead, confusing substance with principle, and their dysfunctional political system was barely able to cope with the challenge. Because of America’s weight and legacy in the world, the prospect of a United States resembling a vast sea of unreasonableness with a dwindling number of islands of Enlightenment in it increasingly adds to European worries.
Doreen Allerkamp is a lecturer in the department of political science and history at the University of Mannheim in Germany. Her research is in the theory of European integration as well as the history and politics of the EU. She was invited to blog by Chris Bronk, the institute’s fellow in information technology.