Democracy: How We Get It Wrong.

The integrity of US democracy has been called into question time and again in the last few years (one should note that most of the criticism has been political posturing rather than objective analysis). On the liberal left they decry Trump and his MAGA Republicans as the existential threat, while on the right they point to an unelected “deep state” and corrupt elite. When less obsessed, critics tend to focus on the two-party electoral system, the Electoral College, and the Senate. Not all these accusations and potential threats pass scrutiny. To begin, let us define exactly what democracy means.

• de·moc·ra·cy

noun late 15th century: from French démocratie, via late Latin from Greek dēmokratia, from dēmos ‘the people’ + -kratia ‘power, rule’.

1. a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.

Many people overdetermine democracy as one-person = one-vote. Then all the votes are added up to determine the outcome reflecting the majority will. This is one voting rule that can fulfill the requirements of democracy, but it is not the only one. As we see from the Greek origins, democracy means “rule by the people.” How that rule is determined and administered can vary widely with the ways people choose to govern themselves. For example, a representative democracy is a democracy, as the people choose to “rule” through their elected representatives. This does not negate their self-determination. A two-party system is one way of structuring that representation, while a multiparty parliamentary system is another way. A third example that some favor these days is simple majority rule, cited above, where one-person = one-vote applies for all those eligible to vote. This has been referred to as the national popular vote, or NPV. It approximates a national referendum and is also democratic.

So, a democracy is any political system where eligible citizens participate in an open voting system. Of course, voter eligibility also varies, but most modern democracies have adopted universal suffrage to define “the people.” (We often get confused between democracy and a republic: democracy is a form of citizen participation in determining how they govern themselves; a republic is a form of representative government that is governed by established law, usually embodied in a constitution. The USA is a democratic, representative, constitutional republic.)

The American Founders decided on a specific system of democracy that decentralized political power through a federal republic of semi-sovereign states that would be represented in national politics through the House of Representatives and the Senate. House reps would be elected by the voters for each single-member district, while Senators were appointed by the elected state legislatures. (Today, our senators are elected by the state popular vote.) The bicameral legislative structure promotes a balance between the population, as House representatives are proportional to the population of each state, and the singular states that would each be assigned two Senate seats without regard to population size. Given the size and geographical spread of the country, this would seem to make the most sense.

The Electoral College, which only determines the election of the President, seeks to affirm the result by balancing the national popular vote by state. Neither population nor different sized states nor regional power blocks would be overrepresented to impose their narrow interests in choosing a single national leader. (Instances when the EC and NPV diverged have happened only five times out of fifty-nine presidential elections, so they are exceptions that require further investigation as to various causes – not reason to question the efficacy of the system that has 90% consistency.)  

With this voting system and governing structure, the Founders intended to avoid two potential threats to freedom and justice: a concentration of power in the state and federal governments or a tyranny of a popular majority. The overall objective of our democratic voting system is to ensure a cohesive union where national interests would most closely reflect the “will of the people.” This is a democracy by any reasoned definition.

The questions critics raise is whether this voting system is actually reflecting the will of a majority of Americans. These critics usually point to several different problems that we can consider in turn. The first problem seems to be whether voters truly understand their own will, or political interests. Critics argue that democracy requires an educated and well-informed voter population, so the problem could be either poor education or misinformation.

The poor education explanation, which has been suggested by some elites who should know better, is a rather unconvincing one. The population of every nascent democracy has hardly been well-educated. Democratic rule usually comes first, universal civic education later. If democracy required highly educated voters to thrive, it would hardly ever get out of the starting gate. Benevolent elites could conceivably jumpstart a just, workable democracy but what would prevent benevolent elites from becoming rapacious tyrants?

The second problem of misinformation can be due to voters either being uninformed or misinformed. The former is similar to the uneducated explanation but the question to ask is “uniformed” about what? The war in Ukraine? The doublespeak of the Federal Reserve?

In fact, democracy really only depends on voters knowing and voting their own narrow self-interests. In this sense, democracy’s invisible hand is much like Adam Smith’s invisible hand in free economic markets. Explaining why this is true requires a bit of statistical understanding of normal distributions of random variables, or the famous bell curve, and the median voter theory.

The following illustration is a simple two-dimensional representation of a multidimensional voting space.

This bell curve is often used to illustrate the left-right divide in party politics. A cluster of left-liberal political preferences represent the left side of the center median, while conservative political preferences define the right of center. The bell curve represents how many random voters prefer a left vs. right ideological positioning on policy issues, with more than 50% confirming the majority. Defining complex issues to fit into a two-dimensional space reflects the dynamics of a two-party system that incentivizes candidates to try to secure the “median,” or swing, voter and thus secure a majority of the voting population.

What this simple representation tells us is that the extreme tails of the distribution tend to cancel each other out – these are the political extremists who drift away from the consensus on policies. So, uneducated fools randomly distributed cancel each other out and fail to determine the outcome of an election. With this design, candidates can safely ignore those positions (and they do). 

The other take-away from this voting dynamic is that it forces candidates, parties, and voters toward the center of the majority consensus in order to win elections. In a multidimensional issue space, this also forces voters to prioritize their various political interests and vote accordingly. The sufficient and necessary conditions for this democratic voting design require voters to understand and vote their particular interests, which gets us to the more serious problem of misinformation.

The normal bell curve distribution of political interests is dependent on the random distribution of those interests as defined by statistical theory. Of course, a society could have homogeneous interests that singularly unify all voters’ preferences, where elections would be simple and uncompromising as everyone would agree. This is hardly the case in a country as large, pluralist, and diverse as the United States. US political interests have diverged since the beginning along lines of geographical regions, economic industries, trade interests, class, demographics, etc. We expect these interests to be randomly distributed across voting spaces.

The problem arises when voters are systemically misinformed by a singular bias. This systemic bias would have anti-democratic implications if it favored one political faction over another. This is demonstrated empirically in the rise of dictatorships where the fundamental imperative of the dictatorship is complete control over all communication channels and their information content. In this way, the dictator controls what citizens can know about issues that might trump their narrow parochial interests. We’ve seen how authoritarians use this control to create a common external enemy in order to mobilize for war, and thus distract the population from rebelling against the loss of their freedoms.

Of course, the free flow of information does not exist today in autocratic states such as China or Russia. A single or dominant source of news media violates the necessary conditions of the bell curve for democratic voting—randomness and independence of voting preferences—and subverts the role of the press as a check on political power. This systemic bias can influence and determine political outcomes, thereby violating the true meaning of a free, open, and just democracy.

Lastly, we should address the perceived threat of an autocrat taking control of our political system by means of force. The institutional foundation of the US federal republic is structured with cross-cutting functions and jurisdictions. We have the separation of the three branches of executive, judicial, and legislative functions not only at the federal level but also at the state and municipal levels. This provides individual citizens with recourse against any single threat to their constitutional liberties. An autocrat or a coup would require the support of the massive Federal bureaucracy, as well as the military, the courts, and the state governors, courts, and legislatures. These hardly seem assailable under current conditions and certainly any digressions would face insurmountable opposition. So far as we can see, our democratic institutions hold.

Thus, beyond total war, systemic bias of information is conceivably the only serious threat we face in Western democracy these days by undermining the free flow of information. The free press, as the Fourth Estate, is intended to be the check on elite political power but the threat arises when all the media is singing in the same choir and is aligned with the narrow interests of the unelected bureaucracy or a single political party. This should start to sound faintly familiar and concern us when it comes to western democracy.

Democracy dies in darkness, yes, especially when that darkness results from denying the public free access to information from all sources. Censorship and cancel culture are today’s weapons targeting these freedoms and should remind us of the dangers spelled out in George Orwell’s fictions. May they not become our future.