Democracy - Does it have a chance?
Posted: Sun Mar 31, 2019 12:15 pm
The idea for me to make this post came when I watched this video by Oliver Thorn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr-ZeToI4R8
I would definitely recommend that you watch that video. Thorn only briefly touches on what I'm going to be talking about, but it's a brilliant video and very interesting, informative and important.
In that video, Thorn, amongst other things, discusses ways in which democracy can become more representative, and whether this ought to in fact happen. Because he focuses on the Brexit referendum as his example of how democracy functions today, he doesn't really talk that much about how democracy functions in elections specifically, and thus doesn't talk about methods of making the results of elections more representative (e.g. by enacting Proportional Representation).
Now, in talking about democracy, Thorn is using a definition which I think most people use. Wikipedia describes it as "a system of government where the citizens exercise power by voting". However, there is another definition of democracy. The literal Greek meaning of democracy is "rule by the people", and democracy has sometimes been referred to as "mob rule". Some libertarians and conservatives have therefore argued that democracy leads to a "tyranny of the majority" and countries like Britain and the United States, therefore, are not and should not be democracies. I personally believe that a tyranny of the majority is just as likely to form with democracy as a tyranny of the minority is without it, and although neither are particularly pleasant, it's preferable that a small amount of people is tyrannised than a large amount. Regardless, there is a crucial difference between these two definitions. Under the first, Britain and the U.S. are democracies. Under the second, they are not, as the United States is headed by a President who has not received the most votes, and the United Kingdom has a right-wing government despite more people voting for left-wing parties than right-wing parties. To avoid confusion, I wish to state that from hereon out when I say "democracy", I will be using the second definition.
The question I wish to ask is this: Is there a chance that a democratic system like proportional representation could be implemented in countries without it like Britain and the U.S. or does the political climate in these countries make democracy, by its very nature, impossible to implement?
So let's begin:
In Britain, when David Cameron was Prime Minister, a referendum was held, the results of which I believe to have been disastrous. The majority of the British people appear to have been hoodwinked into voting against their own best interests, and we are still suffering the consequences of their decision to this day. Nevertheless the people spoke, as it seems that we are obliged to abide by their will.
I am, as you might have guessed, talking about the 2011 referendum on whether the UK ought to switch from its First-Past-The-Post electoral system to an Alternative Vote system.
So, what the UK currently has is First-Past-The-Post (FPTP). In constituencies, whoever gets the most votes becomes the MP. The trouble with FPTP is that it leads to situations where an MP can be elected despite the majority of people not voting for them. If three candidates are running to be MP, a candidate only needs to win 33.333...% of the vote to become an MP. If four are running, they only need 25%. If five are running, they only need 20%. And so on and so forth. The more candidates that run, the less votes they need to receive, which leads to situations like a left-wing MP being elected when most people voted for right-wing candidates, or a right-wing MP being elected when most people voted for left-wing candidates. The problem with FPTP is that can lead to MPs representing constituencies where the majority of the people who live there hate their flipping guts.
Under an Alternative Vote (AV) system, this is resolved. You can rank your preferences for MP from best to worst. So let's imagine we live in a constituency with four candidates running for MP: Gary (Conservative Party), Harry (Labour Party), Larry (Green Party) and Barry (Socialist Workers' Party). In this race between one right-wing candidate and three left-wing candidates, Gary the right-winger receives 30% of the vote, with Harry, Larry and Barry receiving 29%, 27%, and 14% respectively. Under a FPTP system, a right-winger would represent a constituency which is 70% left-wing. However, under an AV system, the votes from Barry would be transferred to whichever candidates received the second place spot on those ballot papers, and whoever got the least votes then would have their votes transferred to their next preference votes. This process would lead to this left-wing constituency being adequately represented by having a left-wing MP. Likewise, in a right-wing constituency with four candidates running for MP: Ben (Labour Party), Ken (Conservative Party), Len (Brexit Party) and Helen (UKIP), Ben only has to receive 25% of the vote to win under FPTP. Under AV, even if this happens, a left-winger like him isn't going to represent a right-wing constituency.
Now, I'm not a particularly big fan of either of these systems. I prefer AV due to the fact that it allows for more majoritarianism in individual constituencies, however, neither system adequately allows for the representation of the country as a whole, like the far sexier electoral system of Proportional Representation does. Nevertheless, there is clearly much more representation under AV than under FPTP.
So here is why the idea of democracy could potentially be self-defeating: it is based on the idea of majority rule, and the majority of people may be against majority rule. This was certainly the case in the AV referendum. The views of the people were represented, and they used that opportunity to vote against more representation. The majority of people did not want AV. A much larger amount of people wanted FPTP, and an even larger amount did not vote at all (which, excluding those who wanted to vote but couldn't, is a consent to not be represented).
This turns the idea of "tyranny of the majority" on its head. Rather than democracy typically leading to the majority voting against the interests of the minority, it could be the case that it typically leads to the majority voting against their own interests. Rather than democracy being two wolves and a sheep voting on what is for dinner, it could be turkeys voting to celebrate Christmas with a meat-eating family.
This leads to the underlying problem of democracy: It only works if the majority of people know what is in their best interests.
In a discussion I had not too long ago with @brimstoneSalad, we debated over whether people generally know what is best for them. In retrospect, my viewpoint that "people generally know what is best for them" would have been better advocated as "people in a particular group are generally more likely to know what is good for that group than people outside that group". There are, of course, exceptions for this. As brimstoneSalad pointed out, an individual with cancer who wants homeopathy clearly doesn't know better than an oncologist without cancer does. However, this doesn't negate the fact that those with cancer will probably be more likely to know what will treat their cancers than those without cancer, and they will have had to undergo much more treatment procedures than people without cancer. However, the point I want to make here is that even though people in a particular group may on average know better than those outside that group about issues affecting their group, they still may not know what is in that group's best interests. I just don't know, and I don't know whether we can ever know for sure (maybe we can).
Whether people in general know what is best for them is something which I am not sure of. It certainly wasn't that way in the 2011 AV referendum, and it doesn't look that way now. There are a whole bunch of examples which I could use to illustrate this, but I want to focus on democracy here, so we're gonna use that.
In Britain, even though AV failed, many people support proportional representation. Most parties other than the Conservative Party appear to support it. It's difficult to know whether, despite most people favouring FPTP over AV in 2011, the situation has changed since. Many people viewed the 2016 Brexit referendum in terms of change and continuity, with "Leave" being seen as the "change" option. The 2011 AV referendum could be seen in the same way, and so if an electoral reform referendum was held today, electoral reform could get voted through by virtue of being viewed as the "change" option. Nevertheless, because of the fact that so much attention is being focused on Brexit, it seems unlikely that electoral reform could happen in Britain in the near future.
In the United States, because of the election of President Trump without the consent of the majority, many people are now supporting the abolition of the electoral college. It's unlikely that this could happen without the election of a Democratic President in 2020. Even if it did happen, this would not necessarily lead to majoritarianism in the United States. If the President was elected using the national popular vote in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have been President. However, like Trump, she would have also been elected despite the majority of Americans voting for another candidate. Whether democracy can succeed in America is uncertain as there doesn't seem to be more people pushing for a more radical alternative than the national popular vote. There doesn't seem to be any major figures pushing for proportional representation and I've only seen one person (Jill Stein) advocating for an AV system. Then again, having the national popular vote instead of the electoral college could pave the way for one of these systems to be implemented.
In France, Emmanuel Macron was elected President under a system that is kinda sorta not really like AV as the two candidates with the most votes in the first round move on to the second round and the candidate with the most votes in that round wins. However, like FPTP, this still leads to an unrepresentative outcome if people don't vote tactically in the first round. Although the combined vote of left-wingers Melenchon and Hamon was 26%, and Macron only received 24%, because the left-wing vote was split with the radical socialist Melenchon receiving 19.6% and the more moderate Corbyn/Sanders-style socialist Hamon receiving 6.4%. I had endorsed Hamon in that election, but in retrospect that seems to have been a mistake. If Hamon voters had voted tactically, Melenchon might have been the French President now. Instead it's Macron who, in my opinion, is buggering things up with his neoliberal policies. I fear that instead of the people of France turning their anger on the electoral system that got him into power this may lead to them electing Le Pen in 2022.
In these countries at least, the situation doesn't look particularly pretty.
There is an argument to be made that if people are more educated, then a system such as proportional representation or AV might have more of a chance. Most of the propaganda produced by the "No to AV" campaign in 2011 seemed to rely on the fact that voters are fucking idiots. For instance, one of their adverts depicted a ballot paper with the choices ranked being inserted into a ballot box that looked like a Rubik's cube. This had the caption "Voting should not be this complicated". The message of this advert? That the average voter is thick as pig shit and too stupid to figure out how to rank their candidates from best to worst and insert their ballot paper into a ballot box that looks like a Rubik's cube.
I don't even think that the people who made this advert believed it themselves. No matter how negative your view on the general intelligence of humanity is, I'm sure you'll agree that most people wouldn't find voting in an AV system "complicated". And if you're not convinced, let me inform you that the voting system used on shows such as The X Factor is essentially an AV system, with the contestant with the least votes being voted off of the show, enabling those who voted for them to vote for somebody else afterwards. AV is so simple that even a fan of reality TV can understand it.
Nevertheless the education system has, in my opinion, failed a lot of people. A lot of people, including myself, want the government to improve education. I know that this is an issue which @Red in particular is very passionate about. However, this seems to not have happened due to a vicious cycle where a poor education system produces uninformed voters, and uninformed voters vote for a poor education system. Because of this, when talking about education, we may need to focus on education coming from the bottom up rather than the top down, and to use our own initiative to educate people rather than relying on change coming from above. However, it remains to be seen whether an educated populace could bring a change to the electoral system.
To conclude, I asked the question "Does democracy have a chance?" and I think I've succeeded in using over 1,000 words to express this answer: "Idk lol". Anyway, if you reckon you have an idea of what the answer might be, let me know.
In all seriousness, having ballot boxes that look like Rubik's cubes would be pretty cool.
I would definitely recommend that you watch that video. Thorn only briefly touches on what I'm going to be talking about, but it's a brilliant video and very interesting, informative and important.
In that video, Thorn, amongst other things, discusses ways in which democracy can become more representative, and whether this ought to in fact happen. Because he focuses on the Brexit referendum as his example of how democracy functions today, he doesn't really talk that much about how democracy functions in elections specifically, and thus doesn't talk about methods of making the results of elections more representative (e.g. by enacting Proportional Representation).
Now, in talking about democracy, Thorn is using a definition which I think most people use. Wikipedia describes it as "a system of government where the citizens exercise power by voting". However, there is another definition of democracy. The literal Greek meaning of democracy is "rule by the people", and democracy has sometimes been referred to as "mob rule". Some libertarians and conservatives have therefore argued that democracy leads to a "tyranny of the majority" and countries like Britain and the United States, therefore, are not and should not be democracies. I personally believe that a tyranny of the majority is just as likely to form with democracy as a tyranny of the minority is without it, and although neither are particularly pleasant, it's preferable that a small amount of people is tyrannised than a large amount. Regardless, there is a crucial difference between these two definitions. Under the first, Britain and the U.S. are democracies. Under the second, they are not, as the United States is headed by a President who has not received the most votes, and the United Kingdom has a right-wing government despite more people voting for left-wing parties than right-wing parties. To avoid confusion, I wish to state that from hereon out when I say "democracy", I will be using the second definition.
The question I wish to ask is this: Is there a chance that a democratic system like proportional representation could be implemented in countries without it like Britain and the U.S. or does the political climate in these countries make democracy, by its very nature, impossible to implement?
So let's begin:
In Britain, when David Cameron was Prime Minister, a referendum was held, the results of which I believe to have been disastrous. The majority of the British people appear to have been hoodwinked into voting against their own best interests, and we are still suffering the consequences of their decision to this day. Nevertheless the people spoke, as it seems that we are obliged to abide by their will.
I am, as you might have guessed, talking about the 2011 referendum on whether the UK ought to switch from its First-Past-The-Post electoral system to an Alternative Vote system.
So, what the UK currently has is First-Past-The-Post (FPTP). In constituencies, whoever gets the most votes becomes the MP. The trouble with FPTP is that it leads to situations where an MP can be elected despite the majority of people not voting for them. If three candidates are running to be MP, a candidate only needs to win 33.333...% of the vote to become an MP. If four are running, they only need 25%. If five are running, they only need 20%. And so on and so forth. The more candidates that run, the less votes they need to receive, which leads to situations like a left-wing MP being elected when most people voted for right-wing candidates, or a right-wing MP being elected when most people voted for left-wing candidates. The problem with FPTP is that can lead to MPs representing constituencies where the majority of the people who live there hate their flipping guts.
Under an Alternative Vote (AV) system, this is resolved. You can rank your preferences for MP from best to worst. So let's imagine we live in a constituency with four candidates running for MP: Gary (Conservative Party), Harry (Labour Party), Larry (Green Party) and Barry (Socialist Workers' Party). In this race between one right-wing candidate and three left-wing candidates, Gary the right-winger receives 30% of the vote, with Harry, Larry and Barry receiving 29%, 27%, and 14% respectively. Under a FPTP system, a right-winger would represent a constituency which is 70% left-wing. However, under an AV system, the votes from Barry would be transferred to whichever candidates received the second place spot on those ballot papers, and whoever got the least votes then would have their votes transferred to their next preference votes. This process would lead to this left-wing constituency being adequately represented by having a left-wing MP. Likewise, in a right-wing constituency with four candidates running for MP: Ben (Labour Party), Ken (Conservative Party), Len (Brexit Party) and Helen (UKIP), Ben only has to receive 25% of the vote to win under FPTP. Under AV, even if this happens, a left-winger like him isn't going to represent a right-wing constituency.
Now, I'm not a particularly big fan of either of these systems. I prefer AV due to the fact that it allows for more majoritarianism in individual constituencies, however, neither system adequately allows for the representation of the country as a whole, like the far sexier electoral system of Proportional Representation does. Nevertheless, there is clearly much more representation under AV than under FPTP.
So here is why the idea of democracy could potentially be self-defeating: it is based on the idea of majority rule, and the majority of people may be against majority rule. This was certainly the case in the AV referendum. The views of the people were represented, and they used that opportunity to vote against more representation. The majority of people did not want AV. A much larger amount of people wanted FPTP, and an even larger amount did not vote at all (which, excluding those who wanted to vote but couldn't, is a consent to not be represented).
This turns the idea of "tyranny of the majority" on its head. Rather than democracy typically leading to the majority voting against the interests of the minority, it could be the case that it typically leads to the majority voting against their own interests. Rather than democracy being two wolves and a sheep voting on what is for dinner, it could be turkeys voting to celebrate Christmas with a meat-eating family.
This leads to the underlying problem of democracy: It only works if the majority of people know what is in their best interests.
In a discussion I had not too long ago with @brimstoneSalad, we debated over whether people generally know what is best for them. In retrospect, my viewpoint that "people generally know what is best for them" would have been better advocated as "people in a particular group are generally more likely to know what is good for that group than people outside that group". There are, of course, exceptions for this. As brimstoneSalad pointed out, an individual with cancer who wants homeopathy clearly doesn't know better than an oncologist without cancer does. However, this doesn't negate the fact that those with cancer will probably be more likely to know what will treat their cancers than those without cancer, and they will have had to undergo much more treatment procedures than people without cancer. However, the point I want to make here is that even though people in a particular group may on average know better than those outside that group about issues affecting their group, they still may not know what is in that group's best interests. I just don't know, and I don't know whether we can ever know for sure (maybe we can).
Whether people in general know what is best for them is something which I am not sure of. It certainly wasn't that way in the 2011 AV referendum, and it doesn't look that way now. There are a whole bunch of examples which I could use to illustrate this, but I want to focus on democracy here, so we're gonna use that.
In Britain, even though AV failed, many people support proportional representation. Most parties other than the Conservative Party appear to support it. It's difficult to know whether, despite most people favouring FPTP over AV in 2011, the situation has changed since. Many people viewed the 2016 Brexit referendum in terms of change and continuity, with "Leave" being seen as the "change" option. The 2011 AV referendum could be seen in the same way, and so if an electoral reform referendum was held today, electoral reform could get voted through by virtue of being viewed as the "change" option. Nevertheless, because of the fact that so much attention is being focused on Brexit, it seems unlikely that electoral reform could happen in Britain in the near future.
In the United States, because of the election of President Trump without the consent of the majority, many people are now supporting the abolition of the electoral college. It's unlikely that this could happen without the election of a Democratic President in 2020. Even if it did happen, this would not necessarily lead to majoritarianism in the United States. If the President was elected using the national popular vote in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have been President. However, like Trump, she would have also been elected despite the majority of Americans voting for another candidate. Whether democracy can succeed in America is uncertain as there doesn't seem to be more people pushing for a more radical alternative than the national popular vote. There doesn't seem to be any major figures pushing for proportional representation and I've only seen one person (Jill Stein) advocating for an AV system. Then again, having the national popular vote instead of the electoral college could pave the way for one of these systems to be implemented.
In France, Emmanuel Macron was elected President under a system that is kinda sorta not really like AV as the two candidates with the most votes in the first round move on to the second round and the candidate with the most votes in that round wins. However, like FPTP, this still leads to an unrepresentative outcome if people don't vote tactically in the first round. Although the combined vote of left-wingers Melenchon and Hamon was 26%, and Macron only received 24%, because the left-wing vote was split with the radical socialist Melenchon receiving 19.6% and the more moderate Corbyn/Sanders-style socialist Hamon receiving 6.4%. I had endorsed Hamon in that election, but in retrospect that seems to have been a mistake. If Hamon voters had voted tactically, Melenchon might have been the French President now. Instead it's Macron who, in my opinion, is buggering things up with his neoliberal policies. I fear that instead of the people of France turning their anger on the electoral system that got him into power this may lead to them electing Le Pen in 2022.
In these countries at least, the situation doesn't look particularly pretty.
There is an argument to be made that if people are more educated, then a system such as proportional representation or AV might have more of a chance. Most of the propaganda produced by the "No to AV" campaign in 2011 seemed to rely on the fact that voters are fucking idiots. For instance, one of their adverts depicted a ballot paper with the choices ranked being inserted into a ballot box that looked like a Rubik's cube. This had the caption "Voting should not be this complicated". The message of this advert? That the average voter is thick as pig shit and too stupid to figure out how to rank their candidates from best to worst and insert their ballot paper into a ballot box that looks like a Rubik's cube.
I don't even think that the people who made this advert believed it themselves. No matter how negative your view on the general intelligence of humanity is, I'm sure you'll agree that most people wouldn't find voting in an AV system "complicated". And if you're not convinced, let me inform you that the voting system used on shows such as The X Factor is essentially an AV system, with the contestant with the least votes being voted off of the show, enabling those who voted for them to vote for somebody else afterwards. AV is so simple that even a fan of reality TV can understand it.
Nevertheless the education system has, in my opinion, failed a lot of people. A lot of people, including myself, want the government to improve education. I know that this is an issue which @Red in particular is very passionate about. However, this seems to not have happened due to a vicious cycle where a poor education system produces uninformed voters, and uninformed voters vote for a poor education system. Because of this, when talking about education, we may need to focus on education coming from the bottom up rather than the top down, and to use our own initiative to educate people rather than relying on change coming from above. However, it remains to be seen whether an educated populace could bring a change to the electoral system.
To conclude, I asked the question "Does democracy have a chance?" and I think I've succeeded in using over 1,000 words to express this answer: "Idk lol". Anyway, if you reckon you have an idea of what the answer might be, let me know.
In all seriousness, having ballot boxes that look like Rubik's cubes would be pretty cool.