The Hopes and Claims of Democracy and Elections

Optimistic and Minimalist Views of Democracy

Over the centuries, the meaning of the word democracy has undergone a fundamental transformation. The Founders and Framers of the American experiment were, by and large, opponents of democracy, equating it to chaos and “mob rule”. They were forming a republic, modeled on Ancient Rome, which nominally derived its authority from a segment of the population, but was distinctly not about democratic “self-rule”, as in Athens. James Madison wrote in the Federalist Paper No. 10: “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths” (Madison 1787b).

Eventually, the term “democracy” changed what it had meant for thousands of years. The word was redefined to refer to electoral systems, which had originally been adopted as a defense against democracy. Rather than using it as a derogatory term, elected rulers started using it as a positive ideal. Some historians credit the presidential campaigns of Andrew Jackson for the rehabilitation of the word, while others trace it back to Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party founded near the end of the eighteenth century. By 1835, when Alexis de Tocqueville published his acclaimed book, Democracy in America, the word had completed its transformation.

Walter Lippmann, the twentieth-century writer and political observer, noted that

The American people came to believe that their Constitution was a democratic instrument … It is a fair guess that if everyone had always regarded the Constitution as did the authors of it, the Constitution would have been violently overthrown, because loyalty to the constitution and loyalty to democracy would have seemed incompatible. (Lippmann [1921] 2018, 283)

A leading twentieth-century political scientist, Robert Dahl, used the term polyarchy to describe the system of electoral government commonly referred to as “representative democracy”. Dahl noted that no real-world governments were actually democracies. Unlike monarchies or traditional oligarchies, in which family lineage determines who should rule, polyarchies have multiple competing alliances of elites contending for oligarchic power. Recognizing that elections revolve around subsets of elites competing for the right to govern, Dahl believed there were various cultural and institutional prerequisites for a functioning polyarchy, such as an independent press, freedom to form political parties, and a near-universal adult franchise. A polyarchy may be placed somewhere between democracy (rule by the people) and an authoritarian oligarchy (rule by the few).

Dahl set out a more demanding set of criteria to constitute an actual democracy. Citizens would need equal rights and equal opportunities to influence the public agenda. They would need to have information, time and other resources necessary to form enlightened opinions and form policy preferences. They would need equally weighted power. In particular, the necessity for an entire citizenry to be well-informed makes achieving this vision of democracy by means of election a Utopian goal, rather than a possible reality. Nevertheless, Dahl believed existing polyarchies might be judged as either more, or less democratic.

However, these distinctions between polyarchy, republic, and democracy are generally only recognized within academia. In common parlance, polyarchy is unknown, while the republic of Madison has essentially been rebranded as a representative democracy. The word “democracy” among ordinary people and politicians is now a catch-all term that is underpinned by different, and perhaps mutually exclusive, ideals. Free elections, political equality, the rule of law, freedom, majority rule, and the prevention of tyranny are some of the commonly understood ideals of democracy.

The hope of electoral democracy can be grounded in at least two distinctly different claims—one optimistic and one minimalist. In brief, the optimistic claim is that by voting for preferred candidates, the population can steer the ship of state in their preferred direction. It is forward-looking. The minimalist view is that at least when things go badly, voters can throw the bums out.

The optimistic claim is grounded in the notion that the people know their own interests best, and therefore democracy allows for optimal decision-making by a society. Utilitarian philosophers like Jeremy Bentham argued in the eighteenth century that each person was the best judge of their own self-interest. Setting aside concerns of individual self-delusion or circumstances that foster error, extrapolation of an individual’s ability to judge self-interest to society as a whole is still complicated. Since individual interests vary and are often in conflict, it is not certain that “the people” can also judge their collective self-interest. Yet the notion that everyday people (as opposed to powerful elites) are the better judges of their own interests seems reasonable as a general rule. Each individual does have some unique knowledge about what makes them happy, but perhaps more importantly, each individual, and the people collectively, are unlikely to intentionally work against their own interests. Even if people make mistakes in judging their own best interests, at least they will sincerely seek to promote them, and won’t have corrupting hidden agendas. Such corruption is nearly inevitable when an oligarchic elite substitutes its judgment for the people’s.

When we overlay an electoral scheme on this optimistic view of democracy, the hope is that voters, knowing their own preferences, will judge the candidates by this measure and elect candidates who most closely match their policy preferences. But careful examination of actual voter behavior refutes this optimistic view of elections. In his book Follow the Leader? How Voters Respond to Politicians’ Policies and Performance, Gabriel Lenz summarizes his research, indicating that

Voters don’t choose between politicians based on policy stances; rather, voters appear to adopt the policies that their favorite politicians prefer. Moreover, voters seem to follow rather blindly, adopting a particular politician’s specific policies even when they know little or nothing of that politician’s overall ideology. (Lenz 2012, 3)

As an example, Trump supporters chanting “build the wall” at a campaign rally in New Hampshire almost certainly took up their candidate’s policy opinion, rather than having a policy preference about the Mexican border (2,000 miles away) first and then seeking out a candidate who had such a position. The optimistic view also requires that voters know the policy positions of both incumbents and challengers on myriad issues and have given enough thought to have formed distinct preferences of their own. In Part II of this book, I will examine the interplay between candidates, partisan supporters, and policies, showing why this positive democratic vision, when translated through elections, is a mirage.

“Throw the Bums Out”—The Minimalist View of Democracy

The minimalist, or perhaps pessimistic, argument for electoral democracy is agnostic about the first optimistic claim (that people are the best judges of their own interests, and will use an election system to elect candidates that match their preferences), but asserts that at least giving people the ability to replace the current ruling elite with a different ruling elite is a powerful defense against tyranny. In this view, democracy is about the power to throw the current bums out, and little more. This concept of democracy is more widely held than generally acknowledged (even by those holding it) because the shibboleths like “self-rule” will still be piously mouthed.

The celebrated American philosopher, John Dewey, described Lippmann’s book, Public Opinion (Lippmann [1921] 2018) as possibly the most effective indictment of existing democracy ever penned. Lippmann argued that real democracy was dependent on the general public being nearly omniscient and omnicompetent, which was impossible. He pointed out that most citizens would not take a keen interest in policy, study the facts, read reports and carefully monitor their representatives’ daily activities. The media critic, Eric Alterman, summarized Lippmann’s views, saying he compared the average citizen to a deaf spectator in the back row of a sports stadium. “He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen; he lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand and is unable to direct” (Lippmann quoted by Alterman, 2008). Thus, it fell to the media and the elite to “manufacture consent”.

Voters may not know what particular candidates will actually do in the future if elected, nor know what policies would be optimal, but, so the thinking goes, they can vote retrospectively and remove the current crop of politicians if things have gone badly lately. This has been compared to driving a car while only looking in the rear-view mirror, taking note of what carnage your car is leaving in its wake.

The American experience of democracy through elections clearly comes up short of the “optimistic” hope, but with a solid incumbent reelection rate typically above 90 percent, there isn’t any evidence that it satisfies the minimalist “throw the bums out” vision in most elections either. The one scenario where there is evidence of this dynamic being in play is the election of chief executives. Political science research has proved beyond any doubt that vanishingly few voters have a good grasp of the vast array of policy issues, have been able to monitor the incumbents’ performance on these countless issues, understand the proposals of the incumbents’ competitors, or have even formed opinions one way or the other on which policies would be better. The one thing voters presumably can evaluate is whether their personal circumstances, or their community’s, have recently gotten better or worse.

In their book Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, Christopher Achen of Princeton University and Larry Bartels of Vanderbilt University examined the relationship between growth or decline in disposable income per capita during the preceding immediate period and the election prospects of incumbent party in national elections through much of the 20th and early 21st century in the United States and various other countries (Achen and Bartels 2017). They confirmed that there is a definite correlation.

While this broad-brush analysis does not affect all voters (since many have a persistent partisan favoritism), enough voters are swayed by what they call this “myopic” view to throw elections one way or the other. It is not clear how much influence incumbent presidents actually have over the typical ups and downs of business cycles. It is also not clear whether policies that may result in short-term pain or benefit, compared to long-term impact, should be weighed more heavily.

Yet there is an argument to be made that the threat of being thrown out of office by vindictive voters may induce politicians to do all they can to assure positive economic outcomes in the period immediately preceding the election (and for parties in opposition to try and tank the economy, knowing the dominant party will take the blame).

As an analogy, imagine that the optimal course for the ship of state is due east. If one team of partisan politicians steers off to the northeast, the voters might remove that team and replace it with one that steers back to the southeast, resulting in a zig-zagging course in the desired direction. But instead, as we will see, the course changes are much more chaotic. Depending on the politicians offered on the ballot, emotional triggers, and countless unknown factors, one team may head due north while their replacements head southwest, making no progress at all along the optimal easterly route.

Achen and Bartels did an analysis of the impact of the international “Great Depression” of the 1930s. They looked at both the real GDP per capita and government elections of eight major countries, finding that:

Around the world, electoral reactions to the Depression produced momentous realignments of established party systems in a bewildering variety of configurations. Incumbent governments were deposed with impressive consistency during the worst days of the Depression, regardless of their ideologies. And new incumbents who presided over robust economic recoveries [not of their doing] were rewarded with long runs in office—again, regardless of ideologies (Achen and Bartels 2017, 201–202).

So, throwing the bums out in the United States led to replacing the Republican President Herbert Hoover with the Democrat Franklin Roosevelt, while in Germany the same “throw the bums out” dynamic replaced a center-left government (akin to Roosevelt) with Adolf Hitler (far to the right of Hoover).

Achen and Bartels also report that factors for which politicians cannot reasonably be blamed can have a similar effect on reelection prospects. In one interesting example, they point to a spate of shark attacks on swimmers at New Jersey beaches in 1916, and the apparent effect on that year’s vote totals in President Wilson’s reelection. They compared Wilson’s level of support in 1912 and 1916 in waterfront beach counties, where the local tourism-dependent economy had suffered, with inland New Jersey counties, which had seen no impact from the more distant shark attacks. They found a substantial diminution in Wilson’s vote percentages in counties that had experienced the shark attacks.

If your economic (or shark) situation gets worse, your emotional instincts steer you to vote the incumbents out. Voter anxiety or elation resulting from matters that politicians have no impact on at all decides elections all the time. The authors write, “Politics is full of complexities and uncertainties, even for those who can devote full time to it. The voters, not knowing what the best policies are, content themselves with asking at election time whether events have gone well or badly lately. Then they vote that myopic judgment” (Achen and Bartels 2017, 211).

Imagine a scenario in which the dominant incumbent party was pursuing the objectively best possible policy to deal with some crisis. The voters, having minimal information or policy awareness, cannot know this is the case. Further, imagine that the opposition party did everything in its power to sabotage and undercut those beneficial policies. If the crisis was too powerful to fend off or the sabotage worked, the “throw the bums out” minimalist dynamic would likely result in replacing the beneficial policies with worse ones.

About Voter Participation

Election participation rates in the United States are far lower than in most other developed democracies. Partisanship and fear prompted a spike in turnout in recent federal elections, but typically fewer than half of eligible voters turn out for most elections, with municipal elections often having turnout below 20 percent, and even dropping into single digits.

Collective political activity of all sorts has been in decline for decades. In their book Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public, Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg make the argument that mass mobilization of citizens through politics (whether voting or street demonstrations) has been giving way to special interest professionalism, and the management of mailing lists (and today, email lists and social media) (Ginsberg and Crenson 2002). They argue that a heavy reliance on lawyers for litigation, lobbying of regulatory agencies and legislators, etc., has reduced the role of average citizens to symbolic supporters on online petitions, or sources of funding for these professionally-run interest groups. Some citizens still comment from the sidelines through blogs and letters to the editor, but real politics is the realm of professionals. Citizens are essentially encouraged to contribute money, cheer or jeer the activities of the professionals, but keep out of the way.

What’s more, with few exceptions, membership in political parties in developed democracies has also been declining for decades. In Britain, membership in any political party dropped from 20 percent in 1950 to around 8 percent by 1970 and just 1 percent today” (The Economist 2014). Low voter participation is a symptom of a much bigger issue, and the solution is not to simply drag more people to the polls.

Voting as the primary form of participation can be described as “feeble”, and does not manifest the essential civic character of democracy. Democracy requires the sense of a society-wide common project, using give-and-take to forge a path for the community as a whole, which includes the needs of the minorities within it.

Participation confined to voting and election campaigns is more akin to a mobilization of a symbolic volunteer army to defeat or even destroy the “other side”.

Partisan Polarization

Periods of government gridlock and partisan “bickering” have been regular components of politics. Each nation has its own unique variant, but the dynamic is extremely common. In the United States, it is standard now to describe this polarization with a “red state/blue state” metaphor. Indeed, it is true that most politicians and political partisans have sorted themselves via the Internet and choice of media news sources into camps of like-minded adherents. They hear and see a constant stream of corroborating information that reinforces their existing biases and world views. Here I will be focusing on the United States, but this dynamic is playing out around the world.

Partisanship has shifted in recent decades, primarily in terms of negative attitudes toward the other party, more than support for one’s preferred party. Even before the rise of the Trump phenomenon, political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster observed in a 2015 essay entitled “The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is the Other Party”,

The rise of negative partisanship in the American electorate appears to be part of a vicious cycle of mutually reinforcing elite and mass behavior. Confrontational politics in Washington and in many state capitols is causing Democratic and Republican voters to develop increasingly negative views of the opposing party and to vote along party lines from the top of the ticket to the bottom. Negative views of the opposing party among voters, in turn, encourage political elites to adopt a confrontational approach to governing. Given these mutually reinforcing patterns of elite and mass behavior, negative partisanship is likely to remain an important feature of American politics for the foreseeable future. (Abramowitz and Webster 2015)

Over the decade-plus since that essay appeared, the trend these researchers noted has gotten even more extreme.

While a divergence of partisan candidate and media preferences is real, the sharp political divide of the red state/blue state shorthand is far too simplistic. The extreme polarization has been confirmed among elected officials of different parties by a stringent scientific analysis of Congressional voting behavior. There appears to be a reinforcing feedback loop between elected officials and partisan activists who make up a relatively small segment of the general public, but can be decisive in party primaries in which even fewer voters participate.

As Josh Pacewicz, assistant professor of sociology and urban studies at Brown University, observed in a 2016 interview: “That American politics has been polarized more by changes among party activists than changes among voters is fairly well established in political science” (Kiley 2016).

Two researchers at Stanford and Princeton, Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood, showed through various experiments that members of the public who identify with either the Democratic or Republican Party sort themselves into distinct social groups. Interestingly, this in-group–out-group division is independent of policy preferences. Partisans are inclined on both a conscious and unconscious level to discriminate against people seen to be part of the opposing party, even on purely non-political matters. While driven by candidate campaigns and hyper-partisan activists, this polarization seeps out into the wider public. In a 2014 article published in the American Journal of Political Science, the researchers wrote,

The mass public may offer centrist preferences, but they certainly sense that ‘the other side’ is an out-group. While Americans are inclined to ‘hedge’ expressions of overt animosity toward racial minorities, immigrants, gays, or other marginalized groups, they enthusiastically voice hostility for the out-party and its supporters. (Iyengar and Westwood 2014)

Stunningly, their rigorous psychology experiments showed that “the level of partisan animus in the American public exceeds racial hostility.” They analyze this finding by stating:

Unlike race, gender and other social divides where group-related attitudes and behaviors are constrained by social norms … there are no corresponding pressures to temper disapproval of political opponents. If anything, the rhetoric and actions of political leaders demonstrate that hostility directed at the opposition is acceptable, even appropriate. Partisans therefore feel free to express animus and engage in discriminatory behavior toward opposing partisans. (Iyengar and Westwood 2014)

The elections during the 2020s that occurred after that particular study was done have only increased the social acceptability of personal attacks on Democrats by Republicans and on Republicans by Democrats. To some extent, this is a “chicken or egg” question—does partisan animosity among citizens simply reflect fundamentally different world views, values, or psychology, which prompts politicians to respond in kind, or do the campaign strategies and attack ads of candidates and associated pundits model and generate such animosity? In a reinforcing feedback loop, candidates encourage citizens to be suspicious of the motives and even morals of candidates and supporters of the other party, and then cater to that suspicion to win votes in their party primaries.

But this red/blue polarization exaggerates divisions within the general population as far as policy is concerned, except for a handful of signature issues that serve to define in-group membership. Even purveyors of this color cliché readily admit the obvious fact that all states have a combination of “red” and “blue”, conservative and liberal leaning citizens, and no state is fully red or blue. This self-evident observation only scratches the surface of the simplification in the red/blue state description. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Brigham Young University conducted a study that looked at what policy polarization actually exists among residents of red and blue states. Using Utah as the archetypal red state and New York as the blue, they found that 77 percent of voters in the two states generally agree on social policy and 69 percent have common ground on economic issues. Indeed, any one voter from Utah has a 46 percent chance of scoring more liberal than a random voter selected from New York on economic issues and a 51 percent chance of being more liberal on social issues. So if the voters in red states and blue states are generally pretty similar, why are their elected officials so polarized? The researchers suggest “this points to the key role played by electoral institutions”, such as primaries and winner-take-all plurality election rules. The election process magnifies slight differences in public preferences into extreme electoral outcomes (quoted in Collins 2011).

Even when people have divergent policy preferences, those preferences aren’t necessarily set in stone. In one study published in The Journal of Politics in 2025, researchers asked 500 people to write persuasive arguments for their view on three currently hot topic issues: immigration, climate change, and transgender rights. Over three thousand “receivers” who held a different view were presented with one of these randomly selected persuasion arguments, and a surprising 30 percent changed their opinion on the issue. These were not professionally crafted persuasion pieces, just the arguments of ordinary people. The lead researcher, Martin Naunov, noted that

this shows while there isn’t a cascade of attitude change, it’s also not the hopelessly calcified political landscape we often hear about. Yes, Americans are increasingly polarized, but at least among ordinary citizens, there’s still a fair amount of openness to competing political viewpoints. (Kulke 2025)

Many ordinary people can change their policy preferences, but politicians simply aren’t very representative of the population. The Rasmussen Reports polling firm found in 2010 that “76 percent of voters generally trust the American people more than political leaders on important national issues” (Rasmussen Poll 2010). While responses to such survey questions fluctuate from year to year, Rasmussen Reports concludes that over time, 65 percent of Americans “tend to trust the wisdom of the crowd more than their political leaders and are skeptical of both big government and big business”. What’s more, “a majority of Republicans, Democrats and unaffiliated voters share those views”. The other end of the spectrum of opinion—those who support the “political class”—according to Rasmussen, make up a mere 4 percent. The rest are somewhere in between these extremes. In 2023, the Rasmussen survey on the same question found 70 percent still held this view (Rasmussen 2023), despite Donald Trump’s oft-repeated exhortation to his followers that “only I can fix it”.

This provides a tantalizing hint that the standard right–left, Republican– Democrat, red–blue spectrum that the political parties and the media focus on may mask another, more significant axis of concern about a democracy deficit and elite power. Whether a conservative, a moderate, a liberal, or a progressive, most Americans, whether politically active or not, look at Congress and recognize that something is fundamentally wrong with how our supposed democracy is working.

The Un-Representative Congress

Elected politicians do not only have a heightened level of polarization compared to the average citizen. They are unlike their constituents across a vast array of demographic, ideological, and even psychological dimensions. I will be using the US Congress as my primary example, because I am familiar with it, but most of what appears below could be applied to elected legislatures around the world.

As we will examine in later chapters, there is a common-sense view that a representative body should be like the population represented. John Adams, who would later become the second President of the United States, composed an essay in 1776 entitled “Thoughts on Government”. He wrote that a legislature “should be in miniature an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason and act like them” (Adams 1776). The famous proposition of equality, expressed as a set of prepositions in Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address—”government of the people, by the people, for the people”— encapsulates the true spirit of democracy.¹

Political scientists describe a demographic match between the legislature and the population as being “descriptively representative”. Elected members of Congress, as a whole, are quite unlike the population, and hardly an “exact portrait of the people at large”.

A 2011 analysis by the Washington Post found that over a twenty-five-year period, the inflation-adjusted median net worth of Americans declined slightly, while the median net worth of members of the House of Representatives increased by 259 percent. According to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, by 2012 a majority of the members of Congress were millionaires (Choma 2014).

Typically, about half of the ten richest members are Republicans and half are Democrats. The median wealth of Democratic and Republican members of Congress is virtually identical. Nicholas Carnes of Duke University examined the class background of members of Congress during the twentieth century and the impact on voting behavior. He concluded:

One of the defining features of America’s political system is that men and women from the working class seldom occupy important political offices. If legislators’ class backgrounds shape their political outlooks in some systematic way, the numerical underrepresentation of working-class Americans could have dramatic effects on who wins and who loses in the policymaking process. The evidence presented in this paper suggests that this is the case. (Carnes 2012)

In 2023, women still made up only 29 percent of the House and 25 percent of the Senate (the most ever), though both declined slightly by 2025. The percentage of African Americans in the Senate peaked at 3 percent. The US House of Representatives also under-represents most minorities (other than rich white males, who are over-represented by a huge factor), though less so than the Senate. This is thanks to gerrymandered “majority-minority” de facto racial districts. Members of Congress come overwhelmingly from legal, business and finance backgrounds. Congress is a strikingly homogeneous group, compared to the diversity of the people it purportedly represents. As Peter Stone wrote in the introduction to the new re-release of Callenbach and Phillips’s book, A Citizens Legislature, “Congressional elections, notoriously, are marvelously good at electing wealthy white men, mostly lawyers, and not very good at electing anyone else” (Stone 2008, 11).

Some might argue I am making too much of descriptive unrepresentativeness. Whether selecting a dentist, or a lawyer for yourself, or a politician, you want a skilled agent who will work on your behalf, regardless of demographic traits. But there is no evidence that elections reliably pick uniquely skilled agents working on our behalf. Psychologist Steve Taylor of Leeds Beckett University notes that:

There’s a great deal of research showing that people with negative personality traits, such as narcissism, ruthlessness, amorality or a lack of empathy and conscience, are attracted to high-status roles, including politics. In a representative democracy, therefore, the people who put themselves forward as representatives include a sizeable proportion of people with disordered personalities—people who crave power because of their malevolent traits. And the most disordered and malevolent personalities—the most ruthless and amoral—tend to rise to the highest positions in any political party, and in any government. (Taylor 2023)

Political scientist Kevin O’Leary argues in his book Saving Democracy: A Plan for Real Representation in America, that elected politicians, at least on a national level, and in the larger states, constitute a breed apart—a virtual elected royalty, complete with fawning personal staffs.

Within their world, legislators are the center of attention, the star attraction, the king or queen of their domain. It is not so much that national legislators are economically and socially part of the upper strata, though many are, given the cost of winning a seat in Congress. What is more important is the psychological distance that gradually grows between them and their constituents. True, successful politicians develop what Richard Fenno calls a “home style” for dealing with constituents back in the district. But this technique masks the psychological distance that naturally grows when elected officials take up residence in Washington, DC, or the state capitol and become players in the capitol scene. (O’Leary 2006, 19)

Just as members of Congress become alienated from their constituents, constituents become alienated from Congress. Congress suffers from abysmally low approval ratings, occasionally dipping into the single-digit percentages. When Americans are asked about their confidence in various institutions, Congress often ranks at the absolute bottom, below every other institution listed by the pollsters. Interestingly, the distrust is mutual.

The Pew Center conducted a survey of members of Congress in 1998. When asked, “Do Americans know enough about issues to form wise opinions about what should be done?” just 31 percent of members of Congress responding answered “yes” (Pew Research Center 1998). Interestingly, this distrust of American decision-making ability is even more extreme at the level of local government. A survey of elected and appointed local officials conducted by researchers at The Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy at the University of Michigan found that while sixty-four percent of Michigan officials said that people should be encouraged to give input,

Few [of the legislators surveyed] see deeper roles for citizens, whether by identifying policy options from which officials would choose (7 percent), by recommending specific policy choices (9 percent), or actually making decisions on behalf of the local government (1 percent). (Ivacko and Horner 2013)

It seems likely that this has a lot to do with an assessment of public ignorance, rather than inherent incompetence. Politicians primarily come in contact with citizens who either have not studied the issues or are motivated activists with extreme views. I will dig into the issue of public ignorance in subsequent chapters, showing how citizens’ assemblies have repeatedly overcome that default problem.

As a general rule, Americans do not think Congress cares about the people or is responsive to them. A 2013 Rasmussen poll found that just 16 percent of likely voters believed most members of Congress cared what their constituents thought (Rasmussen Poll 2013a). This likely overstates the level of public confidence, since non-voters were not included in the survey, and they may have an even more negative view. Yet, efforts by political scientists to quantify how responsive elected legislatures are to the population by comparing public opinion survey data to legislative action have found some correlation—that is, legislatures are more likely to pass laws that most people favor, than laws that most people oppose. However, correlation does not indicate causation. These studies could only examine the coherence of public opinion and legislative action on those few issues that were raised to a sufficient level of prominence that they made it onto polling organizations’ surveys. The countless “under the radar” issues that legislatures deal with couldn’t be analyzed through such studies.

Martin Gilens examined the same polling data and found that this apparent responsiveness masks, rather than reveals, the full story. Gilens compared the “responsiveness” of Congress to policy preferences of high-income people (top ten percent), with Congress’s “responsiveness” to the preferences of the poor (bottom ten percent), specifically for those policies where the wealthy and poor had significantly different preferences. He found a fairly strong correlation between Congressional action with the top income preferences, but a “complete lack of responsiveness to the policy preferences of the poor” (Gilens 2005). Of course, the poor may have different preferences than most people, so he then compared Congressional “responsiveness” to the wealthy with “responsiveness” to middle-income people. Gilens found that “median income Americans fare little better than the poor when their policy preferences diverge from those of the well-off”.

Since Gilens published his research, some other academics have called his methods, analysis and conclusions into question. In my view, the entire issue of politician “responsiveness” may be spurious. I put the word “responsiveness” in quotes because this research didn’t establish whether the correlation between Congressional action and the policy preferences of the wealthy is the result of Congress responding to the wealthy (perhaps due to campaign contributions), or merely reflects the fact that nearly all members of Congress are themselves in the top 10 percent, and naturally share the preferences of their economic class. It may be that politicians reward campaign donors, but since most actions of politicians are completely invisible to their nominal constituents, as a ruling elite, they are generally free to do whatever they (or their donors) wish.

There is also a common opinion in the US that many, or most, elected officials are corrupt, or are at least looking out for “special interests” rather than the general public. Over the past decades, the Rasmussen polls have found that typically 12 percent of respondents thought members of Congress were sincerely interested in helping people, while 76 percent said members of Congress were more interested in their own careers. The popular rating of the job Congress is doing peaked in 2023 when just over one-fourth of respondents said it was good or excellent (Rasmussen poll 2023). However, typically around 40 percent said that most members of Congress (not just a few bad apples) were corrupt, and only one-third disagreed with this view. These attitudes are hardly new.

Since 1952, the University of Michigan’s Center for Political Studies has conducted an opinion survey of the American public every two years. One of their standard questions has been “Would you say the government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves or that it is run for the benefit of all the people?” Substantial majorities (often more than two-thirds) believe government is run by “a few big interests”. For decades, this has been the finding in every survey, except the one conducted following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when forty-eight percent held this negative view. As Professor John Gastil wrote in the introduction to his book By Popular Demand, “There are two fundamental problems in American politics. The first is that most Americans do not believe that elected officials represent their interests. The second is that they are correct” (Gastil 2000, 1).

While distrust of elected politicians is particularly rampant in the United States, it is not a uniquely American complaint. In an article entitled “What’s gone wrong with democracy?”, the British magazine The Economist reported that “A survey of seven European countries in 2012 found that more than half of voters ‘had no trust in government’ whatsoever” (The Economist 2014).

The old adage that we “get the government we deserve” is a blame-the- victim rationalization that disguises the inherent failings of our electoral system. Our elected representative bodies are extremely un-representative. It is stunning just how unlike the American people Congress is. Though Adams’s 1776 definition of “the people” did not include women, indigenous people, slaves or non- property-owning white men, his likeness principle of representation is compelling. Yet, despite progress, after more than 230 years, working-class people, women, racial minorities— indeed, as I stated above, almost all demographic groups other than old, wealthy, white men—are dramatically under-represented in our legislatures.

Presidential and Other Executive Elections

Selecting a chief executive, such as a president, governor, or mayor, is a very different task from electing 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 actual emergencies. Over time, however, more and more power has shifted to the executive. Many political observers have written of the rise of an “imperial” presidency, and during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt and again of Donald Trump, even the risk 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 is 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, like 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 (Van Vugt 2006). 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 could have 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 (non-hierarchical teamwork) that is not based on 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 overrated due to a hindsight halo effect. Renowned professor of business management Phil Rosenzweig examined this in his book The Halo Effect: How Managers Let Themselves Be Deceived (Rosenzweig 2008). 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 1988, 39).

Edelman goes on to argue that the vilification and focus on “bad” leaders serve 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. (Edelman 1988, 42–43)

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” (Edelman 1988, 37). 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, insider’s 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 (Owen 2012).

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. (Edelman 1988, 43)

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 began his rise 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.