Democracyâs time of troubles in the early twenty-first century can be summed up as a tale of two years, 2008 and 2016. The first of these years witnessed the global financial crisis, triggering the Great Recession . The second date delivered an extraordinary electoral cycle across multiple democracies around the world, most notably (but not only) the âBrexitâ referendum in the UK and the Trump election in the USA. Put together, these two moments made what was supposed to be democracyâs time of triumph look like an era of dysfunction and danger.
What makes democracy special, in theory, is its unique ability to deliver political power to ordinary citizens rather than family dynasties , institutional elites, or moneyed tycoons. Elections are crucial to this mission because they are supposed to make governing authorities accountable to voters rather than oligarchs , to outsiders rather than insiders. The ability of outsider candidates and causes to gain ground through elections is therefore a strength of democracy, not a weakness. Yet electoral processes and outcomes alike have been increasingly derided and discredited in recent years. When a majority of British voters chose to exit (hence âBrexitâ) the European Union, and the USAâs Electoral College selected Donald Trump as president, these were merely the most celebrated cases. In 2016 and ensuing years, democracies around the globeâfrom Australia to Italy, from Colombia to France and Spainâhave experienced snap elections with inconclusive outcomes, referendum results that destabilized or brought down sitting governments, and âlesser of two evilsâ contests that yielded pre-emptively delegitimized winners. Are elections now undermining democraciesâ unique theoretical strengths, instead of sustaining them?
This book explains why the answer may be a disturbing âyesââbut also shows how election reform might yet convert that answer to âno.â The design of electoral institutions, especially ballot structure, has played a role in democracyâs recent troubles and will continue to do so in democracyâs future recovery, decline, or stagnation.
Though conventional wisdom says that competitive elections provide tools of democratic accountability for ordinary citizens to keep governments in check, the story emerging from academic research is quite different: Political elites have given us electoral processes, whether deliberately or not, which project the image of accountability without providing the substance. By synthesizing and extending scholarly findings about how elections work in different contexts, this book attempts to bridge the gap between two fields of research: voting theory and comparative electoral studies . Too often they work in mutual isolation, thereby diminishing the public voice of political science as a source of insight about real democracy. My goal is to integrate the virtues and insights of both. Somewhere between the reformers in voting theory, on the one hand, and the realists in empirical research, on the other, we may be able to locate a pathway to realistic reform.
Once academic findings come together in this way, it appears that the central problem with our electoral institutions is that they too often devalue the vote, in the process opening up deficits of accountability. The most direct solution to the problem is to redesign those same institutions so that they revalue the vote. Toward that end, the insights and proposals found in this book are applicable across a wide range of democratic regimes and electoral systems. My argument is that better elections require smarter ballots, not smarter voters. If ballots can be redesigned to elevate the value of the vote, voters might raise their game in response. Elections would then be a platform for âpeople power ââthe conceptual root of âdemocracy,â and still the main source of its appealârather than a disorienting merry-go-round of dysfunctional elites.
Democratic Deficits
In reaction to the electoral upheavals of 2016, a growth industry has emerged in Western academia and civil society with publications on âdemocratic erosion,â âde-democratization,â âdeconsolidation,â and âdemocratic back-sliding.â These attempts to diagnose decline or to forecast regime change have gained a sizeable audience because the success of outsider candidates and parties is viewed by some as a clear and present danger, even (or especially) in the older democracies. Populists of the left and of the right have entered the upper echelons of major political parties, garnered large blocs of votes with brand-new parties, or even taken the reins of government itself in places like Brazil, Italy, Germany, Greece, Mexico, Spain, the UK , and the USA . The outsiders lack the customary reverence for established institutions, and political elites are scrambling for their plan of counter-attack.1
It is easy amid such excitement to lose sight of relevant realities that academic researchers have already been looking into for decades. Any discussion of the troubles of the post-2008 or -2016 eras must take account of a larger and longer story about democratic deficits.
The term âdemocratic deficitâ initially began circulating prior to the end of the Cold War, among intellectuals and policy-makers in Europe who were concerned about the future course of the European Union (EU). Their worry was that increasing the centralized powers of the EU (based in Brussels) might create problems of legitimacy in the minds of citizens of member states, who normally would look to their national capitals (e.g., London or Paris) as sites of democratic accountability. This line of thought gained more traction in the 1990s and has become a staple of both academic and journalistic commentary on the EU in our century.2
The concept of democratic deficits has also been extended beyond the confines of the EU or of any other trans-national organization that detracts from national sovereignty. Now we speak about democratic deficits within sovereign countries, as the gap between a government and its people. Two specific types of extension have occurred in the use of this concept. First, democratic deficits are sometimes identified in the operations of unelected, expert -led bodies that now play crucial roles in domestic policy-making, such as central banks, regulatory agencies, and constitutional courts. Where interest rates or utility rates are set, or where a duly enacted law is subsequently edited or deleted from the statute books, these matters affect the lives of citizens who have no electoral connection to the decision-makers. As Yascha Mounk has written, âthe withdrawal of important topics from domestic political contestation is one major reason why political systems throughout Western Europe and North America have become less democratic.â3
It is likely that the increased use of national referendums in European countries has been an effort to close this representational gap by electoral means. Brexit was following a twenty-year trend of putting the nature of a countryâs EU ties on a direct ballot. Between 2000 and 2005 alone, no fewer than seven member states held referendums on constitutional relations with the EU or the euro currency zone.4
Has more and more voting now proven its ineffectiveness as a way to close the gap? The second extension that has occurred with the concept of democratic deficits is potentially more telling and disturbing, when even elected authorities find room for maneuver to act in unresponsive and unaccountable ways. Citizensâ frustration with the loss of control in their lives has not been confined to the activities of unelected bankers, regulators, and judges; elected politicians are even less trusted worldwide than members of media or business. One of the first overt uses of the concept of democratic deficits in an actual political campaign occurred in Canada in 2003, when Paul Martin was the leader of the Liberal Party. Martin identified declining voter turnout and disgust with political parties as symptoms of a yawning gap within Canadian democracy, and the Liberals rode his message to victory in the general election that year. Yet the same symptoms were subsequently documented across all the European democracies by Peter Mair, the late political scientist whose posthumous book eloquently elaborated the story of decline. The bookâs title employs slightly different language for gaps and empty spaces: Ruling the Void. Similar trends exist in the USA , where the phrase âdemocratic deficitâ has also been used.5
Brexit and Trumpism, seen from the perspective of democratic deficits, were on the cards for some time. The economic and cultural pressures of globalization have well and truly overwhelmed the capacity of established political institutions to deal with them. Now is the time for a fresh look at institutional and structural issues, especially with the set of democratic institutions that are supposed to secure the connection between citizens and governments: periodic competitive elections.
What Is Electoral Realism?
Academic researchers are in a good position to explain how and why elections have become implicated in the larger syndrome of democratic deficits. The reason is that scholarly knowledge, at its best, offers a dose of realism as an antidote to various forms of idealism to which citizens are routinely mis...