Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels. Princeton University Press. 2016.

The recent election of Donald Trump to the position of US President left many people perplexed. How could his campaign – a toxic mix of exaggerations, lies, fearmongering, xenophobia and sex scandal – succeed, elevating a man who has never held public office, and who some fear is temperamentally unfit to become president, to the highest political position in the land? And was his campaign a unique confluence of circumstances or did it merely highlight the long-term, structural flaws within the democratic system?

Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, by Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, offers answers to these questions, as the authors – two of the world’s most prominent and celebrated political scientists – distil an entire career’s worth of learning into a single book.

The authors squarely take aim at the romantic notion of democracy, which they describe as ‘folk theory’. The folk theory of democracy is grounded in the Enlightenment tradition of rational choice: voters seek information, weigh the available evidence and then choose the government with the strongest policies to deliver on their pledges.

According to the authors, this ideal bears little resemblance to how democracy actually works. In fact, the ‘omnicompetent, sovereign citizen’ found in the influential writings of Robert Dahl and Walt Whitman is an unattainable myth: voters are incapable and uninterested in fulfilling the role required of them by democracy. Most people are too busy with jobs and families to give politics sufficient attention: rather than spending their leisure time studying the minutiae of trade deals or infrastructure planning, they, quite understandably, pursue more enjoyable pastimes.

Even the minority of voters that have the time and inclination to inform themselves about politics do not behave as folk theory contends. When faced with choice in a democracy, human judgement is overwhelmed by the complexity of the world and bent by self-interest. Voters use information not to challenge their own opinions but to rationalise them, which the authors describe as ‘enhanced bias’. To minimise cognitive dissonance – when an individual holds inconsistent opinions or beliefs – voters adjust their views to those of their favoured party, or simply avoid finding out what a party’s position is altogether if it conflicts with their own.
Image Credit: Donald Trump in Reno, Nevada, 2016 (Darron Birgenheier CC BY SA 2.0)

The authors argue that voters are also afflicted by ‘duration neglect’, where individuals are only able to recall the past few months and are therefore incapable of accurately assessing political performance over the standard four-year term of office. Voters are guided by their own personal circumstances, often punishing leaders when economic conditions worsen and rewarding them when they improve, paying little heed to the politician’s actions.

This point is illustrated using the example of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1936 landslide election win. The author’s analysis finds that this election was not a ringing endorsement of FDR’s New Deal response to the Great Depression, but was rather the consequence of the relatively small economic upturn in the months prior to the election.

Additionally, external factors beyond the control of politicians regularly skew election outcomes. Natural disasters, such as droughts and floods, normally lead to voters attributing blame to whoever the incumbent is at the time: this is illustrated by how a spate of fatal great white shark attacks around the beaches of New Jersey in the summer of 1916 led to a ten per cent swing against Woodrow Wilson in the presidential election later that year. Bartels and Achen liken the habit of punishing politicians in this way to ‘kicking the dog to get back at a difficult boss at work’.

Instead of folk democracy’s rational voter, most voters base their political decisions on who they are rather than what they think. Political behaviour reflects our membership of a particular group, an expression of our social identity. Voters choose parties which represent their culture and community, and stay with their political tribe long after they have ceased to serve their interests.

Due to the spurious and capricious nature of democracy, the authors write that elections are little more than ‘a coin toss’ or a political version of ‘musical chairs’. The flaws in the democratic system mean election campaigns are fertile ground for exploitation by unscrupulous and powerful actors or, as the authors put it, ‘crackpots, rogue doctors and extreme interest groups’.

While the scope of the book is superb – particularly the opening chapters, which offer an excellent summary and primer of political science theory over the past century – the case studies draw exclusively on US examples, with many of these severely dated. There is very little reference to the media’s role in a democracy, while the digital revolution that has changed politics and voter behaviour in the past decade is not covered at all. Finally, the concluding chapter of the book, which offers proposals on how democracy can be made to function more effectively, feels somewhat cursory, given the multitude of flaws they have presented.

Bartels and Achen’s main recommendation is to limit private money in politics to curtail the role of special interests who exploit the weaknesses in the democratic process. But the advances in our understanding of psychology since the inception of the folk theory they highlight suggest that a complete overhaul of our governance is required. The grotesque spectacle of Trump’s campaign, and the danger that the next four years of his presidency poses to global stability, could at least have the silver lining of bringing this question to greater prominence.

While the authors emphasise that democracy remains far superior to alternative forms of governance, their argument that its virtues are not the ones that have been commonly attached to it throughout history is likely to make this book a timeless resource for political science scholars. And for anyone who is still struggling with the puzzle of Trump’s election, this book is a vital and enlightening companion to help us understand the strange events of late 2016.

How Europeans View and Evaluate Democracy. Mónica Ferrín and Hanspeter Kriesi (eds). Oxford University Press. 2016.

Two European researchers offer a new edited volume on How Europeans View and Evaluate Democracy. Mónica Ferrín specialises in research on public opinion, political participation, citizenship, immigration and gender studies, while Hanspeter Kriesi’s research interests cover political and electoral behaviour, political communication, political participation and social movements. Their book includes fourteen chapters, written by twenty authors including the editors, most of whom are Professors of political science in European universities. The purpose of this edited volume is to show the views of democracy in Europe, how Europeans evaluate their democratic experience and how they assess the legitimacy of current democratic regimes on the continent. To answer these questions, the authors rely on statistical data collected in Round Six of the European Social Survey (ESS), conducted in autumn 2012. The main premise of the book is that a democratic regime is considered legitimate if normative and descriptive public opinions match: that is, if the views of what democracy should be are identical to evaluations of the way that particular democracy works.

The book exclusively targets an academic audience, those not only familiar with comparative politics and European studies but also trained in descriptive and inferential statistics. It should not be recommended to undergraduate students in comparative and European courses, but it may be a useful didactic tool in methodology classes. Although it is an edited volume, it is not a collection of heterodox chapters dealing with similar topics. Rather, this book represents a comprehensive study in which all chapters are elements in the same chain. These should therefore be read in the same order that they are presented as the research questions in many of them follow on from the conclusions in the preceding chapters. In addition to fourteen chapters, the book also includes three appendices, in which the editors have summarised useful information regarding the ESS, the source questionnaire in ESS Round Six as well as additional tables and figures that were not included within the chapters.

Although any review will miss the target if it does not cover all the chapters, I will present the main arguments not by following each and every one, but by combining them into clusters that correspond to each of the three analytical parts, focusing on the main questions. The first two chapters deal with the general presentation of the topics and cover methodological challenges regarding the construction of the questionnaire for further statistical analysis. Subsequently, Chapters Three through Seven focus on the general question of how Europeans view democracy or, in other words, what a political regime should look like in order to qualify as a democracy.

Image Credit: Su voto aquí (Joan Sorolla CC BY 2.0)

In order of appearance, the answers begin with two elements considered indispensable for any democratic political system across Europe: the rule of law and free and fair elections. In addition, people across the continent consider the freedom of the press and protection against poverty as very important. Press freedom opens the door towards a more participatory model of democracy that builds upon a minimalist liberal approach. However, these normative views of democracy are not equally embraced by all Europeans regardless of their social status. People with higher social status in terms of income are more likely to espouse meanings of democracy that conform to the status quo, and people with lower social status are more likely to espouse meanings that challenge it (110). Furthermore, in young democracies, individuals with higher social status are less supportive of liberal and direct democracy; in established democracies, it is the people with lower social status that are less supportive of liberal democracy (110).

Chapters Eight through Ten summarise how Europeans evaluate their democratic regimes. Here, the conclusions are much more diverse than those regarding normative visions of democracy. European countries are divided into clusters. On the one extremity, in countries like Bulgaria, Albania and Italy, the population is very critical of the performance of their democratic systems; on the other, in nations such as Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland and Finland, people hardly find any failure to report. Interestingly to note, regardless of how Europeans evaluate their democratic regimes, they give higher marks in terms of how they protect basic liberal values such as the rule of law and free and fair elections than in terms of going beyond the basic liberal model to embrace social justice and direct democracy. Citizens are more dissatisfied with democracy and have more maximalist conceptions of democracy in low-quality democracies.

Chapters Eleven through Fourteen deal with the issue of democratic legitimacy: that is, with the match between the normative and descriptive dimensions of democracy in Europe, arising not from legality but from the judgements of the people. They conclude that the liberal dimension of democracy enjoys substantial legitimacy across Europe. As far as a broader understanding of democracy is concerned, the results are not as good. Regarding direct democracy, in four European countries – Albania, Bulgaria, Kosovo and Ukraine – the majority of people do not regard political systems as legitimate. The situation is worse when the social dimensions of democracy are considered. In this case, majorities in more than half of the countries think that systems are not behaving according to their expectations. More developed and older democratic countries show higher aggregate levels of democratic legitimacy. It should be noted, on the one hand, that short-term economic factors in both more and less developed democracies can substantially affect perceptions of democratic legitimacy. On the other hand, however, some intuitive factors, such as trust in other people, party identification and the social status of people, do not substantially affect their perception of democratic legitimacy.

Methodologically, How Europeans View and Evaluate Democracy applies positivist techniques of data collection and analysis. Within this approach facts speak for themselves: they are uni-dimensional and do not allow multiple interpretations. This is the strong side of this approach. As with many things in the natural and social world, the advantages and disadvantages are usually the same. The rigidity in the analysis leads to a lack of flexibility; the obviousness in the conclusions does not allow for alternative interpretations.

That said, the book is a well-written text that asks multiple questions, verifies numerous options and makes firm conclusions within its methodological protocol. Within this approach, I can only make some minor suggestions for further studies on the same topic. First, on the level of conceptualisation, it may be appropriate to think about alternative ways of defining the key concept of legitimacy. Second, in terms of data collection, it will be pertinent to think about other data, e.g. the World Values Survey, that may either confirm or reject the findings from the current study. Third, in terms of analysis, it may be useful to apply non-positivist techniques in order to find multiple meanings for democracy and its legitimacy. However, these minor methodological suggestions notwithstanding, How Europeans View and Evaluate Democracy is an excellent read for political comparativists and Europeanists.

Against Elections: The Case for Democracy. David Van Reybrouck. Bodley Head. 2016.

Against Elections: The Case for Democracy. David Van Reybrouck. Bodley Head. 2016.





Against Sortition


In governance, sortition (also known as allotment or demarchy) selects officers as a random sample from a larger pool of candidates.In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the traditional and primary method for appointing political officials and its use was regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy.Sortition is commonly used to select prospective jurors in common law-based legal systems and is sometimes used today in forming citizen groups with political advisory power (citizens' juries orcitizens' assemblies).
The public sphere is full of analyses and lamentations about the inability of Europe’s current political parties and elites to represent their peoples/electorates/nations. Peter Mair’sRuling the Void provides an excellent history of the problem. The end of the Industrial Revolution in the 1960s-70s saw the decline of large class structures, and thus the identities that allowed parties to represent big class or occupational groups; the end of Communism and the triumph of neoliberalism left existing parties with only one ideology to choose from. Parties became state-funded agencies run by media or policy experts as there was no mass base to provide a wider pool of leadership recruits; they became a ‘cartel’ of parties and a ‘caste’ of party leaders. These are despised by an increasingly disengaged, volatile, capricious and angry electorate. The end result is nasty or irresponsible populism.

This review looks at one author’s novel approach to solving our crisis of representation. David Van Reybrouck, a Belgian author and public intellectual, wrote an excellent history of The Democratic Republic of Congo. In his newest book, Against Elections: The Case for Democracy, he reprises some of Mair’s points about the decline of party-electorate linkages. His solution is to bring back sortition – that is, the selection of public officials through the drawing of lots. To Van Reybrouck, the problem isn’t democracy, it is ‘electoral-representative democracy’ and ‘electoral fundamentalists’.

Van Reybrouck argues that the electoral principle has long been understood as undemocratic. The ancient Athenian polis, whose constitution he discusses in great detail, only deployed election to offices requiring specific expertise, such as military positions; otherwise, magistracies were chosen by lot. This system found endorsement by Montesquieu and Rousseau, but was abandoned for the more aristocratic principle of election by the bourgeois meritocrats of the French and American revolutionary eras. It became the election of ‘men who possess the most wisdom to discern, and the most virtue to pursue the common good of society’ (The Federalist Paper #57). This mechanism eventually became embedded in a system of mass parties: a ‘democratisation of elections’ Van Reybrouck condemns as ‘a bogus process’ aided by the redefinition of the word ‘democracy’ and the association of sortition with military conscription.
Image Credit: (Jeff Turner CC BY 2.0)

Key to Van Reybrouck’s diagnosis and proposed solutions is a specific idea of democracy, and an implicit idea of how society is organised and should be represented. Van Reybrouck seems to see elective representation itself as aristocratic, at least for offices not requiring special knowledge. ‘Democracy is not government by the best in our society, because such a thing is called aristocracy, elected or not […] Democracy, by contrast, flourishes precisely by allowing a diversity of voices to be heard’ (152-53). He wants to deal with the problem of the elite-electorate gap by collapsing it completely.

Van Reybrouck certainly makes a valuable contribution to political theory and discussion with his book, and he is a skilled author and researcher. His sketch of how classical Athens worked is one of the best parts of the book, and I would enjoy seeing him put his skills to a history of its democracy. Indeed, the book serves as a very good introduction to the history of sortition in classical, medieval and modern politics, using examples from Europe and North America. Anyone wanting to experiment with Van Reybrouck’s theories will find plenty of practical guidance here.

However, Van Reybrouck’s proposals, however innovative and fresh, only deal with a single aspect of modern disaffection: the alienation of voters from parties and politicians. That’s no small thing, but it is also not a freestanding problem. Politicians may seem like cookie-cutter reproductions of the same neoliberal PR account manager, but that is partly because free-market liberalism has been the only ideology on offer for something like a quarter century, because capital has broken free of national borders and eroded the public sphere. Those global pressures transcend national boundaries, and the ideologies that justify them do as well; simply changing the way states select officials fails to address that larger problem. Greece could pick a new government by drawing lottery balls tomorrow; that government would still have to deal with the bond markets. And Van Reybrouck’s model still relies on experts and officials to help advise the citizens chosen by lot. Nothing suggests that these counsellors would be any more ideologically diverse than the technocrats currently employed by the IMF, the European Union or various finance ministries.

Another problem is Van Reybrouck’s approach to structures other than parties that lie between the citizen and their state. It is perfectly legitimate to complain that ‘lobbies, think tanks and all kinds of interest groups’ have more access to the policymaking process than ordinary citizens (156), but he also seems to assume that those sorted into policymaking or review roles will neither be members of political parties nor engage in ‘tactical voting […] political haggling [or] back-scratching’, instead making decisions ‘according to their conscience, according to what he or she feels best serves the general interest in the long term’ (146).

This implies that there is only one definition of the general interest, which everyone can neutrally work out with enough ratiocination and good will. This ignores questions of class, race, occupation, sub-nationalism and all the other identities, material interests and philosophical concerns we carry into politics. How would this work in a federal system, where you effectively have not just one general national interest, but also the general interests of several states or provinces? From an economic standpoint, how do you come up with a general interest that distributes (or more challengingly, redistributes) resources? For all his condemnation of the first bourgeois republicans of the late-eighteenth century, Van Reybrouck borrows their ideas about a politics without party. That worked for Enlightenment liberals because they could pretend there was only one general interest, since the elected represent only one class of capital owners. He lists several examples of premodern political units that used lot-drawing, but in all of these cases, the ‘citizens’ were a homogenous group of a few thousand or ten thousand men of similar wealth.

In any case, choosing governors by lot does not automatically mean that the public will see those chosen as representing them. Sortition may produce a more representative assemblage of policymakers, but it does not actually empower ordinary citizens unless they are chosen. In Van Reybrouck’s touchstone, Athens, this was not a problem: every citizen was part of the legislature, and there were more than a thousand executive and legislative posts chosen by lot. Every citizen was in some way empowered (a task made easier by excluding most inhabitants from citizenship), and service in an executive role was almost impossible to avoid. In a modern state, this sort of mass participation is not possible, so most citizens will, at most, get to leave comments on the assembly website or vote in occasional referenda. Elections are democratic precisely because they grant choice to citizens, even if it is only a Schumpeterian choice between elites.

Finally, the book’s model for a system run on these ‘aleatory-democratic’ (‘aleatory’ meaning ‘based on chance’) lines, though very thoughtful, is also hugely complex. It involves no fewer than six types of assembly: An assembly to set the overall agenda; ‘interest panels’ to propose specific legislative topics; a review panel to prepare detailed bills; a ‘policy jury’ that would vote on the bills (but not debate them); an oversight council to handle complaints and judicial review; and a rules council to set rules for the other bodies. It is unlikely even the most educated, wonkish voter would find such a Rube Goldberg machine an attractive model. It reminded me of Olivier Bernier’s description of the legislature in Napoleonic France: ‘The Tribunat was composed of one hundred members who discussed the bills brought to it by the executive, but could not vote on them. The Corps Législatif had three hundred members who voted the bills into law, but could not discuss them’ (65).

Van Reybrouck does politics a great service by opening up our discussions of political structure and agency, questioning age-old ideas about elections, representation and the division of powers. That, and his considerable and well-presented historical research, make this book well worth reading. But in an age of such profound citizen dissatisfaction, it is far from clear we can leave something as central as representation to mere chance; leaving things to the supposedly ‘aleatory’ justice of the market is, after all, part of what got us into this mess.

Citizens in Europe: Essays on Democracy, Constitutionalism and European Integration. Claus Offe and Ulrich K. Preuss. ECPR Press. 2016.

Citizens in Europe: Essays on Democracy, Constitutionalism and European Integration. Claus Offe and Ulrich K. Preuss. ECPR Press. 2016.

In Citizens in Europe: Essays on Democracy, Constitutionalism and European Integration, two prominent German political researchers, Claus Offe and Ulrich K. Preuss, offer a collection of essays dealing with contemporary European issues, the place that European citizens play in building up-to-date political institutions and the ways to solve some of the problems within what journalists, policymakers and academics refer to as the current ‘Euro crisis’. This is not the first time these authors have worked together: English readers will likely be familiar with theirseminal book on institutional design in post-communist societies, published almost twenty years ago.

In Citizens in Europe, Offe and Preuss present 22 essays published since 1983, written by one or by both of them, either in the form of peer-reviewed articles or book chapters. The main goal of this collection is to use the normative and analytical arguments presented in their earlier work to throw light on the issues that the European Union and its citizens must come to terms with if the current turbulences in the European integration process are to be endured (1). Without presenting specific policy recommendations, the authors suggest keeping the old or creating new institutional mechanisms that enforce citizens’ political participation and turn the EU into a supranational welfare state.

The book targets both a general and academic public – not necessarily current university scholars or students but readers interested in recent European developments but with minimum knowledge about many issues. The writing style rarely uses specific social scientific terms. Nevertheless, it is not a collection of journalist writings, even if the subject matter can look quite similar.

For the purpose of this review, I focus on the four most recent essays, published since the beginning of the current Euro crisis. Two were written by Offe and two by Preuss; two were first published as peer-reviewed articles and the others as book chapters. This narrowing down is necessary to provide enough material for further critical assessment, yet these four chapters are not representative as far as the discussed topics are concerned. They are, however, representative regarding the model of demonstration that typically leads the authors from the research question to different institutional solutions.

Image Credit: Lights of the Night, Europe (Mapbox CC BY 2.0)

In Chapter Four, ‘Crisis and Innovation of Liberal Democracy: Can Deliberation be Institutionalised?’, Offe discusses institutional designs for democratic innovation to improve the functioning of liberal democracies. Two groups of innovation are currently considered as remedies for some of the observed deficiencies of democracy. The first deals with strengthening the voice of citizens and the expression of their will, such as through changes to the electoral system, making voting mandatory, allowing for direct democratic legislation, increasing the autonomy of local authorities, introducing gender quotas, etc. The second group, which Offe implicitly recommends, deals with improving will-formation through deliberations. Deliberations make citizens better informed on the issues at hand, increase the scope of citizens that are informed and have the potential to widen the social inclusion of participants.

In Chapter Eleven, ‘Constitutionalism in Fragmented Societies: The Integrative Function of Constitutions’, Preuss discusses how to reform corrupt political structures that pervade society, further political apathy and cynicism and encourage the renaissance of nationalist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic tendencies. The solution is to include within constitutional texts several vague principles open to very diverse, even opposing, interpretations. The idea is that such vagueness will invite political actors to fight in the field of constitutional interpretation and will therefore guide antagonists away from the brink of civil war (223).

In Chapter Sixteen, ‘Revisiting the Rationale Behind the European Union’, Preuss considers whether the peoples of the member states of the EU have believed, and still believe, in the dominant narrative about the Union: a narrative that sees ever-closer Union as an embodiment of lasting peace and economic prosperity. Has this story undergone changes in the course of the 60 years since the EU’s foundation? The author concludes that it is the end of the political vision of the European Union as a polity in which many peoples blend into one body whose coercive character requires the homogeneity of the rulers and the ruled. Instead, he offers a new vision in which the idea of solidarity is grounded in the mutual recognition of otherness and the development of modes of cooperation, which requires a reduction of social inequality among Union citizens.

Finally, in Chapter Twenty-Three, ‘Europe Entrapped: Does the EU Have the Political Capacity to Overcome its Current Crisis?’, Offe discusses what should and can be done to overcome the crisis with the common European currency. The solutions, as expected, require reforms within institutional settings. Among them, the author signs up to the idea of an EU-wide tax harmonisation applying to direct taxes; to an increase of taxes on high income and wealth; and to proposals for creating an EU-wide system of unemployment insurance and social assistance, which will have as a side effect a boost to mass identification with Europe as a political entity. Politically, Offe suggests strengthening the European Parliament and transforming the Commission into something like a parliament government (487).

The institutional design school is one of the main approaches within contemporary political science when it comes to suggesting solutions for acute social, economic and political problems. It is strong, especially within comparative analysis, because it can demonstrate how among several cases one significant change within institutional design can lead to different outcomes. However, the major limitation of this approach comes when similar institutional designs still produce different political outcomes, or when unexpected new outcomes emerge without significant changes within institutional designs.

Citizens in Europe is a good example of both the strengths and limitations of the institutional design approach. The essays are not formal discussions detached from empirical foundation; instead, suggested institutional solutions are grounded in comparative political experience. In other words, these solutions are expected to work as planned because they have worked in similar situations elsewhere. The possible critique of these solutions is also rather typical and comes from comparative politics too. For example, empowering citizens through deliberations (Chapter Four) may have unexpected consequences in also empowering charismatic leaders with anti-liberal and anti-democratic political agendas. Shifting the dominant discourse of the EU from liberal ideas to ideas of solidarity (Chapter Sixteen) may unexpectedly backlash; instead of taming the market beast, the result may be an impoverished, greying Europe, and  the same criticism could follow each and any of the suggested economic and financial measures presented in Chapter Twenty-Three. Yet, these theoretical limitations notwithstanding, Citizens in Europe is a very useful read for people curious to find institutional ways for solving the current European crisis.