Representative Democracy?

It’s an election year once again on both sides of the border in North America, and the spectacle that is our democracy is on parade again. As I get older (and apparently more crotchety), our electoral process disgusts me more and more every time I have to sit through it…

My main complaint is that our democratic / electoral / legislative processes seem horribly inefficient and wasteful given the quality of the results we receive. The problem, I think, is we’re focusing on the wrong things, like style over substance for example. Given we’re in the 21st century now, you’d think we could improve upon a process that’s been essentially unchanged for more than 100 years…

Representatives

Let’s start from the beginning. The intent of democratic government is essentially:

• “Government of the people, for the people, by the people”

In North America we implement democracy using representative government, meaning we select a local representative to run government on our behalf. Originally each representative represented 10,000+ people; it’s now 100,000+ people. How can these representatives know what their constituents want? They can’t. So a key characteristic of democratic representatives is:

• “While representatives are elected by the people to act in their interest, they retain the freedom to exercise their own judgement as how best to do so.”

In other words, I can’t possibly figure out what my constituents want, so I’ll simply explain my views, and if they elect me, then my views must be most representative of their views. In the 1800s, in the world of the horse and buggy, and no telephones, this process made sense. What other alternatives were there at the time?

But what about now? Do our representatives still need to be completely autonomous? Or could they instead be more of a conduit for our interests? Hmm…

Parties

So we’ve successfully elected representatives to represent us. But having a bunch of random people with a bunch of different views attempting to govern would be very difficult, nothing would ever get done. So long ago, candidates got together with other like-minded candidates and formed political parties to present a more unified set of views.

But slowly, over time, the importance of the individual representatives diminished and the importance of the parties increased to the point where the local representatives are now largely irrelevant, at least in Canada. For example, many people will vote for the same party every election regardless of who the local candidate is. I bet in many ridings you could elect a monkey – I know I’d vote for a monkey if it got the party I wanted elected…

Our local representatives could remain relevant if they sometimes voted against the party line, but they don’t. In Canada, voting against the party line will usually get you kicked out of the party. Constituents and conscience be damned – tow the party line or else…

So, during the election, we’re no longer voting for a representative individual, we’re voting for a representative party. Fine. This isn’t horrible. Our regional interests may not be well represented, but the federal government should, in theory, be dealing mostly with national issues anyway, right?

But at least the majority of voters will be represented by the governing party, right? Wrong. Because we have more than two major parties in Canada, and we don’t have proportional representation (which I’m not necessarily convinced is the answer to anything), the party that forms the government rarely gets more than 50% of the votes (it’s usually about 40% – 45%), even though they hold the majority of the seats. Oops…

But my main complaint about our party system is the governing party completely controls the agenda, which means the policies of the other elected parties are irrelevant. What if I like some policies from each party?

Campaigning

On to my least favorite part – the elections.

The amount of money and the number of people it takes to organize, run, and report on all the candidates’ campaigns is enormous. For example, the cost to the taxpayers for the last Canadian federal election was something like 300 million dollars. Which means it cost a million dollars per person elected. I don’t know about you, but to me, that seems like a lot of money to be spending every election. And I don’t think I want to know how much the U.S. spends…

But the worst part of the election is, it’s not about debating policy, it’s about appealing to the superficial desires and the basic instincts of the voter.  If you listen to politicians or their strategists in interviews, it’s all spin and rhetoric; same thing during the political debates. There’s no real debate, no discussion, no give and take, no listening, everything is about “talking points”.

Elections are popularity contests. It’s not about doing the “right thing”, it’s about winning. No one is ever going to admit they were wrong, or give their opponents credit because there’s no incentive to do so. The goal is to undermine your opponent as much as possible.

So in the end, the politicians treat the voters like children – and we let them! For example, if one parent offers broccoli and the other offers ice cream, what do you think the child is going to pick? The child doesn’t care what’s good for them, they want the instant gratification. So if one party offers new social programs, and the other offers to cut social programs, who do you think is going to elected? It’s not about intelligent, well thought out policy. It’s about manipulating votes – which leads to more and more targeted spending or micro tax break for very specific groups.

Governing

All the dirty campaigning and rhetoric leads to a thoroughly adversarial environment during the election. This adversarial environment carries over into legislative process, because there’s always another election eventually. The opposition will attack everything the government does, just because it was someone else’s idea. There’s very little civility or cooperation left in politics.

But if you think about a corporate boardroom or a project team, would this type of atmosphere be productive? Not likely… In fact, this type of poisonous environment would likely be extremely detrimental. Healthy debate is good, but the ability to compromise and cooperate is essential to make a team work effectively. The term “office politics” is used to describe negative, subversive behavior in the office. Yet this is what governing is about every day. Hmm…

So where does all this get us? Does it get us the best possible government? I don’t think so…

A Better Way?

Right now, there is no incentive for politicians to cooperate or be civil. Quite the opposite. They have every incentive to destroy their opponents. But all the energy spent on the rhetoric, posturing, and political theater is energy not spent on actually governing the country. So how do we take the “politics” out of politics?

I think the root of the problem is that in politics, personality and ego are attached to everything. But what if we broke this link? What if politicians didn’t pass laws? What if they simply wrote them? For example, what if we had the following system:

• Any elected representative (not just one from the governing party), or large group of citizens could propose an initiative
• All the representatives would then debate and frame the wording of the initiative, and come up with a reasonable set of choices for the voter
• The initiative couldn’t be put to voters until the all the representatives agreed on the wording and choices (with some remedy for dealing with obstructionists)
• The voters would vote, say once a quarter, through the Internet or mail, on finished initiatives, and the politician would be bound by the outcome
• Voters could reject an initiative if they weren’t happy with the list of choices provided
• Voters could recall representatives if they wanted

Since all representatives would need to approve the finished initiative, it would ensure that all points of view would be covered, and it would also require that politicians compromise in order to get their initiatives finished. Regardless of all its potential flaws, I think, at the very least, a system like this would put the emphasis back where it belongs, on policies rather than the politicians, and promote healthy debate rather than bickering.

Obviously there would be many criticisms of such a system. The most obvious ones would be:

• People aren’t interested in day-to-day goings on of government
• Laws are much too complicated for the average person to understand

But I don’t buy that people aren’t interested. The amount of media coverage of elections and government legislation is fairly high. If people didn’t care, they wouldn’t watch, and the media wouldn’t spend so much time on it. I think a substantial percentage of the population would like more input into the functioning of their government. As for the complexity of laws, I think forcing legislators to simplify our legislation would be a net benefit anyway. Our laws and our tax system, and government in general, is way too complicated already.

But would it really be possible to simplify all government legislation into bite-sized pieces? I think so. Start with the simpler social policy questions like the propositions that many U.S. states vote on already and work your way up.

Bottom line, I think our current representative democracy in Canada is seriously flawed, and could benefit from incorporating more elements of direct democracy. In some ways, the U.S. has much more input into their government than we do. For example, they have (and actually use):

• Citizen’s initiatives
• Referendums (ballot questions)
• Recall

But in the end, the problem, of course, is any changes require our elected representatives to make them, and they don’t really have much incentive to change the status quo, do they?

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