The
Case for Direct Democracy
WHY NOT
NATIONAL BALLOT INITIATIVES?
Vincent
Campbell
Government is dysfunctional, many
are saying, meaning that it doesn’t work. Actually, it works quite
well---for the rich. They are making a lot of money, often with help from the
government, and are paying the lowest taxes in decades, while ordinary
Americans who still have jobs work harder than ever at about the same pay, or
less. We complain that government is serving the top 1% much better than
the other 99%, but we seem to be stymied at finding ways to do something about
it. Attempts to improve government have largely failed so far, to
wit:
- Campaign finance reform laws---but Congress waters them down and
corporations find ways to work around them, now with the support of the
Supreme Court.
- Term limits---but cushy
lobbying jobs follow anyway for those serving in Congress.
- Ethics reform---big talk (shocked! shocked!), and a
slap on the wrist for ethical violators.
- Public financing of Congressional campaigns---always
spurned by Congress.
Most
Americans want such reforms. They
consistently fail, nevertheless, because of the close ties between Congress and
big money. It’s not hard to fathom why many Congressmen cater to the
rich, when getting re-elected and later lobbying jobs depend on
it.
So
the 99% want a government that acts more in the public interest. At the
core this means making better laws. If Congress cannot do this, maybe the
people can. Half the states in the U.S. allow direct popular votes as one way
to make state laws. We could make federal laws by this initiative process as
well, if the mechanisms were put in place. A project led by former Senator Mike
Gravel would do this. (See vote.org
for details. Disclosure: I have advised on it.) But the effort to
introduce direct democracy at the national level has had little success to
date. As it is now, with only representative democracy, citizens can beg
Congress to pass the laws they want, and Congress may do so, or may not.
Mendicant democracy, some call it.
But
would ordinary people make better laws for the 99% than Congress does? Those
who think elected leaders are better suited to legislate usually assert that
the common people have inadequate motivation, skills or knowledge for the task.
Social critic H. L. Mencken famously said that nobody ever went broke
underestimating the intelligence of the American public. And commentator Walter
Lippmann insisted that we must abandon the notion
that the people govern, and accept that their role is only to support or oppose
those individuals who actually govern. Alexander Hamilton and John Adams
would have agreed.
On the other side,
Theodore Roosevelt claimed, “the majority of the plain
people will day in and day out make fewer mistakes in governing themselves than
any smaller body of men will make trying to govern them.” Thomas Jefferson said: “The will of the majority, the
natural law of every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of man.
Perhaps even this may sometimes err; but its errors are honest, solitary and
short-lived.” Pollster George Gallup adds, “On the most major
issues we’ve dealt with in the past 50 years, the public was more likely to be
right…based on the judgment of history…than the legislatures or Congress.”
Social scientists have
recently provided some evidence bearing on the question. One of the more intriguing facts coming to light is that in
many situations the average judgment of many ordinary people is superior to the
judgment of almost any individual, however expert. This was found for
estimation tasks, such as judging livestock weights, and for predicting complex
events, such as election results, product sales, movie ticket sales, and stock
values. Writer James Surowiecki summarized this evidence in The Wisdom of Crowds. A few individuals
may do better than the average on one prediction, but the average judgment is
better over the course of several predictions.
The conditions of voting on an initiative are much like those found favorable
to crowd wisdom. That is, the group is diverse, and each voter makes an
independent judgment, usually after reviewing basic facts and arguments pro and
con. Voters may ignore these facts and arguments, but that is true of nearly
all situations in which the wisdom of crowds has been demonstrated. Ordinary
people, as a group, make amazingly accurate judgments in these conditions.
A limitation of the crowd-wisdom findings is that they usually involve
near-term predictions. Would people do as well in predicting the long-term
benefits of a social policy? How would they compare to elected leaders in this
skill? Perhaps elected leaders have more relevant expertise than ordinary
citizens in political, economic and social matters, expertise that might make
their long term forecasts and policy decisions better.
Social psychologist Philip Tetlock tested this proposition. He compared experts
of varying prominence and degrees of expertise to each other. What he examined
was how well they could predict future economic and political events over a
period of 15 years. He found that experts were on average no better than
“dilettantes” (professionals with less expertise on that topic) at predicting
the future. And experts did only slightly better than simply guessing that all
outcomes were equally likely. Another investigator, K.C. Green, found
that college undergraduates playing the
role of experts made more accurate forecasts than experts themselves.
If experts can’t predict much better than chance guessing, this does not give
us much confidence that leaders will make wise civic choices, whoever they may
consult, and whatever their own political and economic expertise.
In highly technical fields, such as engineering and biology, there is
little doubt that experts play a vital role in creating solutions to civic
problems, but in any field involving human behavior, expertise is quite
limited, and we should not be surprised if individual experts cannot predict
complex events better than the average judgment of a diverse group of lay
persons.
Accurate forecasting is only one indicator of decision skill, of course.
Another is the soundness of the logic used by the decider. Decision scientists
and psychologists have documented at length that most people make thinking
errors of several kinds. But experts appear to make such mistakes no less than
ordinary citizens. Take the vividness bias. In this error, a “Muslim terrorist
strike,” for example, is predicted to be more likely than a “terrorist strike,”
because the image is more vivid. Logically this is not possible. “Terrorist
strikes” is a larger set of events that includes “Muslim terrorist strikes.”
Yet experts make such errors just as lay persons do. No study has emerged of
the logic of politicians, but it is hard to imagine they would do better than
experts, who usually have more scientific training than politicians.
Thus, there is no clear evidence that elected representatives, or political
leaders of any kind, are superior to citizens in their decision skills. So if
their skills are no better, do leaders have any advantages over ordinary
citizens?
A common assumption is that the politicians spend a good deal more time
studying the issue at hand than most citizens do, and so know more about it.
This is often true for members of the mark-up committee that creates a bill,
although more and more bills are drafted by lobbyists and accepted with little
change by such committees. Even when committees study the matter in
detail it is rare that their colleagues in the full legislative body give the
details much attention, especially in Congress. They rely instead on the advice
of their party leaders and friends, or make a deal to swap votes. They usually
devote very little time to one bill since there are so many bills, and since
they spend half their time trying to get re-elected. So time spent on the task
is at best a weak advantage for leaders when only five percent of Congress
marks up a bill and the other 95 percent of those voting spend so little time
on it.
Yet surely they must know a bit more than ordinary people. Conventional wisdom
decries the general lack of information possessed by voters, who often cannot
name office-holders and other similar facts about government. The implication
is that they are therefore not fit to govern. But many of us doubt the
relevance of such knowledge to making good judgments on civic issues. As
discussed above, crowds can be wise without much information, and experts in
political and economic matters are not so wise even though they possess a great
deal of knowledge. So general factual knowledge per se seems to be overrated as a component of civic wisdom.
Still, few doubt that whatever the political wisdom of the people, it would
likely be improved by more review of key assumptions and arguments on the
specific issue at hand. To this end, some state initiatives present arguments
pro and con. And political scientists have recently demonstrated new techniques for enhancing deliberation by
citizen groups before they vote on issues, such as letting them question
experts on the issue, followed by further discussion.
In trying out direct democracy in San Jose, California in 1973, for the
National Science Foundation we at the American Institutes for Research (AIR)
found that citizen participation in deciding policy issues increases their
knowledge of those issues, including greater awareness of arguments on both
sides of an issue. It appears that participation and knowledge of the issue at
hand are mutually reinforcing, so perhaps the more responsibility citizens have
for deciding civic matters, the better they will be at it.
In all, ordinary people appear to be approximately as competent as the elite
and the experts when it comes to judgment, fairness and the skills a civic
decider needs. So let’s look at the results of actual legislation by
voters and by state legislatures. Have ordinary citizens up to now done any
better than their leaders in deciding important civic issues at the state
level? Opponents of direct democracy frequently cite some state initiative
passed by the people that they think is disgraceful, such as California’s
Proposition 13 that cut property taxes but impoverished state and local
government. There is no doubt that occasionally initiatives produce results
that are regrettable, as do legislatures. What is rarely noted by opponents,
however, is that many good policies we now take for granted began as state
initiatives, including women’s suffrage, child labor laws, and the eight-hour
work day.
Some object to direct democracy because they fear ordinary people will abuse
minorities. In hard times, especially, people are sometimes hostile to
foreigners or those of a different race or religion. Aroused
mobs have done horrible things to minorities, it is true. But a street mob
is quite different from voters privately marking ballots. In the Mideast, for
example, Islamic extremists at emotional street rallies can arouse great
antipathy toward Westerners or minorities, but polls of a representative sample
in Muslim countries do not usually support the view that majorities there are
hostile to either minorities or Westerners. And in the U.S. popular acceptance
of diverse races, cultures and sexual orientations has increased markedly over
the last century. Prejudice remains, obviously, but laws against ethnic or religious
minorities have long been ruled unconstitutional by the courts, and the record
over a century of initiatives shows that the electorate is no more likely to
disadvantage minorities than are legislators.
Elisabeth Gerber and other political scientists have compared states that
have popular initiatives with states that make laws only through
legislatures. These studies found that states with popular initiatives tend to
have policies more aligned with public values and preferences than states that
rely entirely on representative government.
Having ordinary people make laws to suit their values is only desirable if one
agrees with the values, of course. And we do agree, I submit, on most values
related to public policy. For example, in measuring citizenship
achievement for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, our team at
AIR found that a panel of Americans from all walks of life agreed on nearly all
behaviors and values (hundreds of them) proposed as criteria of good
citizenship. Criteria such as participating in the community, caring for
others, obeying the law, and thinking rationally about civic issues. Daily news
gives the opposite impression because the media tend to highlight controversy
rather than agreement, and clearly there are specific issues such as abortion
where we do not agree. But we do seem to agree on most of the fundamental
values and behaviors that are important in our civic lives. So perhaps Gerber’s
evidence reflects well on ordinary people as lawmakers, at least to the extent
of making laws that reflect their common values.
By far the biggest weakness of leaders, compared to citizens, is their
corruption by power and money, as discussed earlier. Not that ordinary citizens
are less susceptible to temptation. Greed seems to well up in many of us when
we imagine we can indulge it secretly. It is doubtful that politicians as a
group are inferior to ordinary people in ethics or character. Ordinary citizens
are more likely to vote in the public interest, not because they are more
upright morally than Congresspersons, but because they are not wooed by
lobbyists. The role of leader invites corruption. The role of citizen does not.
This difference alone is the most significant
advantage citizens have over leaders in setting public policy.
The usual rejoinder from defenders of the status quo is that voters are
influenced by big money too, through media campaigns to persuade people to vote
for or against an initiative. This argument, true on its face, has some major
weaknesses. First, at the national level it would cost corporations about a
thousand times as much to influence voters as it does to buy Congressmen.
Second, even after spending millions to persuade voters, the effort would often
fail. Gerber’s analysis showed that while powerful interests are sometimes
successful in defeating state
initiatives, they generally do not
persuade voters to pass initiatives.
Third, their campaign advertising is out in the open where lies and distortions
are more easily revealed, compared to the subtle ways in which lobbies
manipulate Congress. So the powerful find the initiative process much more
expensive and risky as a way to shape laws to their liking.
There is a strong case, then, for having direct democracy work
alongside representative democracy in making national laws, as it already does
in making laws in many states. In the
future, the key decisions of government will be made, for better or worse,
either by ordinary citizens acting in concert or by leaders and their wealthy
backers. Americans can go on searching for leaders who will make the federal
government work for all of us. Or, if they believe that ordinary people
will usually make good laws, national initiatives may become a reality. Most
politicians will object strenuously to such direct democracy, as they always
have, but they can be bypassed, just as they were in 1787 when we created our
constitution. Some think the Constitution forbids anyone but Congress from
making national laws. It does not, and even if it did, the people could change
it. But few people know this. As Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice
Walker said, “The most common way people give up
their power is by thinking they don't have any.”
It’s our choice. Maybe we are the
ones we have been waiting for.
Vincent Campbell is a social
psychologist. He directed research on citizenship and democracy at the American
Institutes for Research. Email: vincecampbell@cableone.net
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