Is legislative responsiveness a good measure of democracy?
To determine whether our democratic system is functioning well, political scientists frequently turn to measures of legislative responsiveness: that is, how responsive policy outcomes are to the political preferences of voters. If voters are getting the laws they want — perhaps within the bounds of the constitution and other laws that protect minority rights — then democracy is, by and large, working. Constituents can communicate their preferences to lawmakers throughout the legislative session, but elections are the primary mechanism by which they make their preferences known. If voters are satisfied with the policies coming out of government, they retain incumbent legislators; if dissatisfied, incumbents are replaced with new faces.
Unfortunately, there are several problems with this approach to measuring democratic success. I address only three in this essay, though more likely exist. First, voters do not hold consistent, coherent policy preferences for lawmakers to act upon. This makes it difficult for even the best-intentioned legislators to represent their constituents. Second, elites can influence the policy attitudes that voters do hold in ways that may not serve voters’ long-run interests; accordingly, a highly responsive government might pass policies that actually decrease public welfare. And third, voters cannot effectively use elections to express their attitudes and hold legislators accountable.
1. Voters lack coherent, consistent policy preferences.
In 1971, Robert Dahl argued that democracy requires “the continued responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens”; other democratic theorists have since continued in the same vein. Bartels argues that for this definition to make any sense, people’s preferences should be “consistently associated with objective states of the world.” Unfortunately, the data suggests otherwise; people’s preferences are inconsistent, varying in response to “arbitrary features of the context, formulation, or procedure used to elicit those preferences.”
Given this state of affairs, it no longer seems appropriate, or even all that feasible, to measure democratic effectiveness by legislative responsiveness. After all, if citizen preferences can change depending on any number of factors, from question wording to context, how can legislators know which preferences to respond to? It would help if we could determine which of the various preferences reflects what voters truly want. But voters may not have one true preference — and even if they did, no normative theory exists for how lawmakers should go about discerning that truth and disregarding everything else.
2. Policy attitudes are shaped by political elites.
Bartels wrote his famous critique of democratic theory a full decade before Lenz published Follow the Leader. The book highlights another reason why legislative responsiveness might not be an appropriate measure of democratic effectiveness: in many instances, voters take their policy preference cues from political elites. “Responsiveness,” then, is not especially democratic; rather, elites shape public preferences and then use those preferences as justification for their policies. Even if we set aside the problem of elite influence, however, it is not clear that voters understand which policies would serve their long-term interests. Indeed, in certain instances, legislators who are insulated from public pressure may be more likely to support “unambiguously beneficial” public welfare policies. Not only are voter attitudes inconsistent, but they might not be a valid signal of which policies would actually benefit the public interest.
3. Voters cannot effectively express their attitudes through elections.
Voters may struggle to form and articulate their policy preferences — but perhaps they can still retrospectively recognize when elected officials have made “bad” policy decisions. Enter the election mechanism, meant to serve as a sort of blunt accountability instrument whereby lawmakers deemed effective at representing voters are allowed to remain in office, while incumbents who have disappointed their constituents are replaced.
However, elections are a problematic means of establishing democratic accountability. First, as Healy and Malhotra (2013) argue, a series of cognitive and emotional biases prevent voters from making rational election-day choices. People’s voting decisions are influenced by irrelevant information, such as the outcome of a local sports game; they have a difficult time benchmarking relevant factors against the broader context in which they occur; and they excessively weight recent events in their political calculations, which has the added consequence of creating perverse incentives for legislators during election years. Each of these biases may lead voters to send the wrong signals to their legislators; if voters upset by a local sports game punish an incumbent at the ballot, his replacement may interpret that punishment as a mandate to pursue different policies, even if that was not voters’ intention.
Even if voters could overcome their cognitive and emotional biases, however, America’s current electoral processes constrain voter choice such that citizens cannot adequately express their political attitudes through the election mechanism. A constellation of the two-party system, single-member districts, and first-past-the-post voting has left most voters in one of several unfortunate scenarios. In many districts, only one major party has a candidate on the ballot. In many others, both parties run candidates, but one is the heavy favorite. (Indeed, in 2012, only fifteen percent of voters lived in districts with competitive elections.) In still other races, both candidates are unpalatable to the plurality of voters, but third-party candidates are considered spoilers and discouraged from participating.
What next?
These are difficult challenges for anyone hoping to improve democratic accountability. Perhaps researchers could identify alternate ways to measure voter opinion that somehow get us closer to the public’s “true” preferences, against which we could measure legislative responsiveness. After all, despite all their problems, voter attitudes do appear to give us some indication of what voters want, or, at least, what they think they want. If zero percent of voters like a policy, we can plausibly assume that the policy has less support than one with 100% support from the public; to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, there is clearly a “there” there.
Even if these preferences could be discovered, however, it is not evident that voters could use them to hold lawmakers accountable at the ballot. Another next step, then, is to ask how elections can become better accountability mechanisms. Improving upon the primary system seems promising, as primaries offer voters the chance to penalize incumbents and select new leaders without abandoning deeply held party attachments and suffering social and/or identity-related consequences. Indeed, Green makes a strong case that voters are unlikely to ever abandon their partisan affiliation once it takes root; primaries, then, might make it easier for them to express their political attitudes without compromising their partisan identity. Other election reforms might include switching to multi-member districts and using ranked choice voting rather than first-past-the-post, both of which would invigorate electoral competition and give voters more choice.
None of the aforementioned approaches to improve democratic accountability, however, will make much of a difference if voters cannot identify which policies are in the public interest. Why should it matter that voters have stable preferences if those preferences have been manipulated by elites, are based on flawed data, or are myopically self-interested? Ultimately, this problem threatens the very idea of democracy itself. Are voters capable of not only holding stable preferences, but of knowing which policies truly serve their interests? If not, then perhaps the best government is not the most responsive government, but the government that most effectively gathers data on how to improve public welfare and translates that data into effective policy.
This, according to Hibbing and Theiss-Morse (2002), is the very form of government that Americans want — a so-called “stealth democracy” in which voters get what they want without having to advocate for their policy preferences or put in the work to truly hold their politicians accountable, because their leaders are inherently committed to the public good. Voters want a “form of latent representation,” characterized by “empathetic, unbiased, other-regarding, but uninstructed public officials” who are “instinctively in touch with the problems of real Americans and that would respond with every ounce of courtesy and attentiveness if those real Americans ever did make an actual request upon the system.”
I am reminded of Mayhew’s note about the election of 1896 and the decades of political stability that followed. Contrary to Burnham’s claims, this stability did not stem from elite isolation, leaving the masses unable to communicate their political preferences; rather, Mayhew argues that the public simply had no desire to shake up the nation’s political leadership, because the country was doing quite well. According to Mayhew, Burnham’s line of thinking “ignores the extraordinary success… of the American society and economy during the generations both before and after the mid 1890s.” Income “nearly tripled between 1870 and 1910; life expectancy rose dramatically.” GDP grew at an incredible 4.3% per year. Voters did not care that their options for holding legislators accountable were limited, at best. All that mattered was that their interests were being served by the legislature.
Establishing a stealth democracy may be an impossible task. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse say as much as their book. Indeed, one could argue that our founders attempted to do just that in the late 18th century. However, our founders could not foresee the development of two-party system, which, when combined with powerful communications tools that facilitate the spread of elite messages, entrenched voters in partisanship, shaped their policy beliefs, and limited their choices at the ballot. Today’s political scientists have the benefit of hindsight. Surely, with enough data and ingenuity, we can do better than our current political system. One can hope.
