In 1948, four years before he was deposed and sent into exile, Faruq al-Awwal (known in the west as King Farouk), the penultimate monarch of Egypt, complained, āThe whole world is in revolt. Soon there will be only five kings left: the king of England, the king of spades, the king of clubs, the king of hearts, and the king of diamonds.ā1 So amusing a conclusion could certainly be drawn from the history of the four decades preceding Faruqās own overthrow. Portugal abolished its monarchy in 1910, Russia in 1917, Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1918, Spain in 1931, Italy and Bulgaria in 1946, and Romania in 1947. In every case save Spain, which restored the monarchy in 1978, various republican forms of government are still in place to this day.
As the kings (and princes) departed, to be replaced by elected presidents or self-appointed despotsāenlightened or otherwise, a parallel and even more important development was occurring in many countries: the transfer of political power to the masses in the name of democracy, defined these days as government in which the people hold the ruling power indirectly, through their elected representatives. The United Kingdom, the realm inherited by the daughter of the last king of England, was among the first countries to undergo this transition, beginning with the first Reform Act in 1832 and ending ninety-six years later, with universal adult suffrage. Complementing these developments has been the rise to prominence of a new professional, one whose task it is to facilitate the relations between the people and their government: the modern liberal democratic politician.
The politician is unique in our society, for he serves as a proxy of the people in setting the rules by which the people, himself included, will be governed. These rules, whether in the form of legislation or regulations, touch every aspect of our lives. They may set us at war with another country, increase the amount of taxes withheld from our paychecks or paid on a property we own, or determine the kinds of information we find on the labels of common household products. Governments have the power to decide such things, and the decisions that governments make rest in the hands of the politicians we elect to office. Of course, this arrangement assumes general agreement on a need for rules and rule makers, an assumption not shared by anarchistsānot as they are commonly viewed, as advocates of socio-political disorder, but as opponents of a coercive state in any form.
So the politician has power, much like that which the prince once exercised. For that reason, what my illustrious ancestor wrote in his treatise The Prince should be read by any citizen who wishes to understand the politician, or indeed, who wishes to pursue political officeāto become a politician.
Yet, there are differences.
Princes can inherit power, marry into power, or seize power by force. Politicians obtain it from the people through elections, and once they obtain it, they exercise and retain such power by means princes never needed to consider. It is those means which we will explore below.
The greatest art of a politician is to render
vice serviceable to the cause of virtue
Lord Bolingbroke
Comment (c. 1728) in Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes and Characters, in The Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations, Anthony Jay, ed. (Oxford: 1997), p. 50. I believe Bolingbroke would have loved The Federalist Papers for this very reason: it is the best exposition ever written of how to render vice thus serviceable in a liberal democratic state. We will reference several of the papers below.
End AbstractWhen he whose namesake I am said the prince could not hope to rule successfully without the goodwill of the people, he could not have anticipated the extent to which that insight applies to the modern politician. For unlike with the prince, democracy deprives the politician of the option of attempting the role of despot. Unless she is prepared to launch a
coup dāĆ©tat , the politician is bound to depart the corridors of
power when the people kick her out of office. But while in office, politicians in the liberal democratic state are expected to act in the best interest of the people they
ārepresentā, a word with multiple meanings. One dictionary
1 offers eleven definitions:
- 1.
To bring clearly before the mind; to present
- 2.
To serve as a sign or symbol of
- 3.
To portray or exhibit in art; to depict
- 4.
To serve as a counterpart or image of; to typify
- 5.
- 6.
To take the place of in some respect; to act in the place of ā¦ to serve especially in a legislative body by delegated authority usually resulting from election
- 7.
To describe as having a specified character or quality
- 8.
To give oneās impression or judgment of
- 9.
To serve as a specimen, example, or instance of
- 10.
To form an image or representation of in the mind ā¦
- 11.
To correspond to in essence; to constitute2
It is obvious that the sixth definition best applies in our case. Once we have delegated authority to our representatives by way of an election, we expect them to act in our place in the setting of the rules that govern our society. But the question whom do we mean by āusā immediately produces a conundrum. Should a given legislature (whether a congress, a provincial parliament, or a municipal council) reflect as closely as possible those its members are supposed to represent? If so, then if half of the population is female, and only fifteen percent of the members of their legislature are women, the female half of the general population must go under-represented. Similarly, if senior citizens (those aged sixty-five and over) form twenty percent of the population, but hold thirty-five percent of the seats in a legislature, are they not over-represented? No doubt, but on this score, it seems the task of assuring such congruency is impossible without compromising the choices the electorate would be permitted to make. Would a female voter accept the suggestion she be compelled to vote for a female candidate, just because the latter is a female? Not at all!
Another matter is turnout. If, in an election where only sixty percent of all eligible voters turn out at the polls, the winning candidate receives fifty-one percent of the votes cast (so that in effect she has only been elected by thirty percent of eligible voters), can she be said to represent, other than figuratively, all of the eligible voters in her district? No, she may not. But, again, would not any remedyāsupposing one were availableābe worse than the problem; expecting the legislature to mirror only those who in fact voted? And what about those who donāt bother to cast a ballot, as many as seventy-five percent of eligible voters in some jurisdictions? Perhaps they donāt wish to be represented by anyone. Indeed, as one elderly American female is reported to have said, āI never vote. It only encourages them.ā3
A related issue is the principle of equal representation across electoral districts: commonly referred to as āone man, one voteā in the United States when it comes to electing members of the House of Representatives, meaning that the boundaries of each electoral district should be drawn in s...
