Why Bother With Elections?

Adam Przeworski

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509526635
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

With the collapse of traditional parties around the world and with many pundits predicting a "crisis of democracy", the value of elections as a method for selecting by whom and how we are governed is being questioned. What are the virtues and weaknesses of elections? Are there limitations to what they can realistically achieve? In this deeply informed book world-renowned democratic theorist Adam Przeworski offers a warts-and-all analysis of elections and the ways in which they affect our lives. Elections, he argues, are inherently imperfect but they remain the least bad way of choosing our rulers. According to Przeworski, the greatest value of elections, by itself sufficient to cherish them, is that they process whatever conflicts may arise in society in a way that maintains relative liberty and peace. Whether they succeed in doing so in today's turbulent political climate remains to be seen.

1
Introduction

We select our governments through elections. Parties propose policies and present candidates, we vote, someone is declared winner according to pre-established rules, the winner moves into the government office and the loser goes home. Glitches do sometimes occur but mostly the process works smoothly. We are governed for a few years and then have a chance to decide whether to retain the incumbents or throw the rascals out. All of this is so routine that we take it for granted.

As familiar as this experience is, elections are a perplexing phenomenon. In a typical election about one in two voters ends up on the losing side. In presidential systems the winner rarely receives much more than 50 percent of the vote and in parliamentary multi-party systems the largest share is rarely higher than 40 percent. Moreover, many people who voted for the winners are dismayed with their performance in office. So most of us are left disappointed, either with the outcome or with the performance of the winner. Yet, election after election, most of us hope that our favorite candidate will win the next time around and will not disappoint. Hope and disappointment, disappointment and hope: something is strange. The only analogy I can think of is sport: my soccer team, Arsenal, has not won the championship in many years but every new season I still hope it will. After all, in other realms of life we adjust our expectations on the basis of past experience. But not in elections. The siren song of elections is just irresistible. Is it irrational?

Questions concerning the value of elections as a mechanism by which we collectively choose who will govern us and how they will do it have become particularly urgent in the last few years. In many democracies large numbers of people feel that elections only perpetuate the rule of “establishment,” “elites,” or even “caste” (“casta” in the language of the Spanish Podemos party), while at the other extreme many are alarmed by the rise of “populist,” xenophobic, repressive, and often racist, parties. These attitudes are intensely held on both sides, generating deep divisions, “polarization,” and are interpreted by various pundits as a “crisis of democracy” or at least as a sign of dissatisfaction with the very institution of elections. Survey results show that people in general and young people in particular now consider it less “essential” than in the past to live in a country that is governed democratically – all of which supports the claim that democracy is in crisis (Foa and Mounk 2016).

Yet there is nothing “undemocratic” about the electoral victory of Donald Trump or the rise of anti-establishment parties in Europe. It is even more paradoxical to claim the same about results of various referendums, whether about Brexit or about constitutional reform (but implicitly Europe) in Italy: referendums are supposed to be an instrument of “direct democracy,” regarded by some as superior to representative democracy. Moreover, while the label of “fascist” is carelessly brandished to stigmatize these political forces, such parties, unlike those of the 1930s, do not advocate replacing elections by some other way of selecting rulers. They may be seen as ugly – most people view racism and xenophobia as ugly – but these parties do campaign under the slogan of returning to “the people” the power usurped by elites, which they see as strengthening democracy. In the words of a Trump advertisement: “Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American people” (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vST61W4bGm8>). Marine Le Pen promised to call for a referendum on Europe, in which “you, the people, will decide.” They are not anti-democratic. Moreover, there is nothing anti-democratic about people wanting to have a “strong” or “competent and effective” government – responses to survey questions, which have increased in frequency during recent years and which some commentators interpret as a symptom of declining support for democracy. Schumpeter (1942) certainly wanted governments to be able to govern and to govern competently, and I do not see why other democrats would not.

Dissatisfaction with the results of elections is not the same as dissatisfactions with elections as a mechanism of collective decision-making. True, finding oneself on the losing side is disagreeable. Surveys do show that satisfaction with democracy is higher among those who voted for the winners rather than the losers. Moreover, having been offered a choice, the fact that parties presented distinct platforms in the electoral campaign is valued by the winners more than by the losers. But what people value most in elections is just being able to vote for a party that represents their views, even when they end up on the losing side (based on Harding’s 2011 study of 40 surveys in 38 countries between 2001 and 2006). When people react against “the establishment,” they often just mean either that no party represents their views or that governments change without an effect on their lives, indicating that elections do not generate change. But we can, and a large majority does, value the mechanism of elections even when we do not like their outcomes.

Why should and why do we value elections as a method for selecting by whom and how we wish to be be governed? What are their virtues, their weaknesses, and their limitations? My purpose is to examine such questions, taking elections as they realistically are, with all their blemishes and warts, and to distill their effects on various aspects of our collective wellbeing. I argue below that some popular criticisms of elections – specifically that they offer no choice and that individual electoral participation is ineffective – are mistaken, based on an incorrect understanding of elections as a mechanism by which we decide as a collectivity. I contend that, in societies in which people have different interests and divergent values, looking for rationality (or “justice”) is futile, but that elections provide an instruction to governments to minimize the dissatisfaction with how we are governed. Whether governments follow these instructions (“responsiveness”) and whether elections serve to remove governments that do not (“accountability”) is more questionable: governments that are egregious are subject to electoral sanctions but their margin to escape responsibility is large. I fear that the perennial expectation for elections to have the effect of reducing economic inequality is tenuous in societies in which productive property is held only by a few and in which markets unequally distribute incomes – “capitalism.” The greatest value of elections, for me by itself sufficient to cherish them, is that at least under some conditions they allow us to process in relative liberty and civic peace whatever conflicts arise in society, that they prevent violence.

This is a minimalist, “Churchillian,” perspective, a view that admits that elections are not pretty, that they are never quite “fair,” that they are impotent against some barriers they face in particular societies, and that they are far from realizing the ideals that led to their emergence and are still held by some people as the criteria to evaluate them. But no other method of selecting our rulers, I believe, can do better. No political system can make everyone’s political participation individually effective. No political system can make governments perfect agents of citizens. No political system can generate and maintain in modern societies the degree of economic equality that many people in these societies would like to prevail. And while maintaining civic order and non-interference in private lives never cohere easily, no other political system comes even close. Politics, in any form or fashion, has limits in shaping and transforming societies. This is just a fact of life. I believe that it is important to know these limits, so as not to criticize elections for not achieving what no political arrangements can achieve. But this is not a call for complacency. Recognizing limits serves to direct our efforts toward these limits, elucidates directions for reforms that are feasible. Although I am far from certain to have correctly identified what the limits are, and although I realize that many reforms are not undertaken because they threaten interests, I believe that knowing both the limits and the possibilities is a useful guide to political action. For, in the end, elections are but a framework within which somewhat equal, somewhat effective, and somewhat free people can struggle peacefully to improve the world according to their different visions, values, and interests.

Obviously, when examining what is good, bad, or inconsequential about elections, a natural question is “compared to what?” Rulers were traditionally selected by the rules of heredity, in contemporary China they are selected by the incumbents, and in many places around the world they still impose themselves by only thinly veiled force. Different methods of selecting rulers occur under different conditions, so if we were to consider just the observed world we would not be able to distinguish effects of the historical conditions from the effects of these methods. To make comparisons, we would have to ask counterfactual questions: what would have transpired in the United States if governments were not elected or what would have transpired in China if they were? Such comparisons between observed and counterfactual states of affairs can be and are routinely made but they are based on all kinds of assumptions, which leave a lot of discretion and tend to generate inconclusive results. I do not pursue this path systematically but return to the importance of realizing that all political institutions, elections included, function in particular societies, variously divided by income, religion, ethnicity, or whatever else, and that there are limits to what any government, elected or not, can achieve.

What I am after is the difference elections make when they are competitive, when they offer a real choice of governments, when people can remove incumbents and choose their successors if they so wish.¹ Hence, I am asking about the effects of “democratic” elections, as contrasted with all other methods of selecting rulers, whether they hold elections which they are certain to win or not hold them at all. But, to answer this question, we need first to understand why elections would or would not be competitive, and why the incumbent rulers would place their power at stake in elections.

Competitive elections – again, elections in which those in power lose when a majority of voters so wish – are no more than a speck in human history. The use of force – coups and civil wars – has been frequent and still continues to erupt in poor countries: between 1788 and 2008 political power changed hands as a result of 544 elections and 577 coups. The very idea of selecting governments by elections is quite recent and still quite rare. The first national-level election based on individual suffrage, in which representatives were chosen for a limited term, dates only from 1788; the first time in history that the helm of the government changed as a result of an election was in 1801; both events took place in the United States. Since then people across the globe have voted in about 3,000 national-level elections. Yet electoral defeats of those in power were rare until very recently and peaceful changes of governments even less frequent: only one in about five national elections resulted in defeats of incumbents and even fewer in a peaceful change in office. Still, as of 2008, 68 countries, including the two behemoths, China and Russia, had never experienced a change in office between parties as a result of an election.

Hence, voting need not mean electing. The mere fact that an event called an “election” is held does not necessarily mean that people have a choice of selecting their rulers. Indeed, some such events, elections in one-party systems, were intended to persuade the potential opposition that it has no chance to remove the rulers by any means, aiming to intimidate rather than to select. In many other countries, elections are contested but not competitive: some opposition is legally allowed but the incumbent rulers make sure that no one has a chance to remove them. Yet, even if elections do not decide who will rule, it does not mean that they are irrelevant or even unimportant. Those who see such elections as mere “window dressing” must ask themselves why some rulers, say those in Russia, care to dress their windows, while others, as is still true in Saudi Arabia, do not bother to do it. Holding non-competitive elections is a trick, but it is based on the ideal that the ultimate source of power resides in the people, with recognition of the norm that people have the right to be governed by governments they choose. Admitting a norm and violating it in practice is a tenuous undertaking. Hence, even when they are not competitive, one element that all elections have in common is that they make all rulers nervous. Moreover, even non-competitive elections may reduce civic violence by revealing information about the rulers’ relative military strength, and thus about the probable failure of any attempts to remove the ruler by force.

Why would elections not be competitive? One reason is that losing elections is not only unpleasant but can be dangerous to entrenched elites. Even when the idea that political representation must be based on elections became irresistible, founders of representative governments feared that equal political rights exercised through elections would threaten property. They reasoned that if everyone has an equal right to influence political decisions and if a majority of the people is poor, that majority would vote to confiscate property. Systems of representative government were born under a fear of participation by the broad masses. One would not err much in thinking that the strategic problem of “founders,” pretty much everywhere, was how to construct representative government for the rich while protecting it from the poor.

This divergence between ideology and reality set up a particular dynamic of conflicts that have continued over 200 years and persist today. The successive trenches by which property was defended from majority rule – repression of opposition, non-elected upper chambers, the right of non-ele...