These are the major reasons why the US government is a poor representation of the people’s will
Since the Jan 6 attack on the US Capitol in 2021, I have noticed a disturbing trend. It’s Americans insisting that their country is not a democracy, but a republic. It disturbs me because after World War II, the allied forces, especially Americans, made sure that coming generations of Germans would receive a solid education in what democracy is and why it’s worth protecting.
Maybe they should have done the same in their own country, then I wouldn’t be in this awkward situation now. Because today I have a brief rundown on the difference between a democracy and a republic, why the voting system in the United States and also in the UK is so much worse than that in Germany, according to my entirely unbiased opinion, and whether we would all be better off with randomly selecting members of parliament.
Democracy comes from Greek and literally means rule of the people. Today we take it to mean that a government is elected by the people and each person’s vote counts the same.
This means, among other things, that the relevance of a person’s vote should not depend on how wealthy they are, otherwise we’d be buying members of parliament rather than electing them. Though a cynic might argue that a billionaire promoting candidates on his social media platform is doing exactly that, but let’s not get distracted. All existing democracies are representative, meaning that people vote for a group of typically some hundred members of parliament, whose day job it then becomes to sleep through debates while being livestreamed to the electorate.
Sorry, I meant, whose day job it then becomes to sort out the nitty gritty details of laws and policies. This arrangement is basically division of labour. I sleep on my desk, politicians sleep in parliament, so we all get our fair share. It doesn’t make sense that every person sleeps on each desk. So, representatives. Democracies usually have special decisions that are made directly by the people, in some countries more so than in others. Switzerland is probably the most direct democracy in existence. But there’s a spectrum from more direct to more representative democracy, and each state does it their own way.
Indeed, there’s no agreement on exactly what democracy even means. In China for example you can only vote for candidates that have been approved by the ruling party. The Chinese say that’s democracy.
The word republic on the other hand comes from the latin phrase “res publica”, meaning a matter of the people. It means that a state has a government that represents the people and that the members of the government didn’t inherit their positions.
The difference between a republic and a democracy is that being a republic doesn’t necessarily mean that the representatives were elected by the people.
Calling a state a republic was a way to set it apart from a monarchy. The USA and Germany are both democracies and also federal republics. The UK on the other hand is a democracy, but it’s a unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Basically, a state can be a republic and not be democratic, and it can be democratic and not be a republic. The USA and Germany happen to be both.
Stressing the republic part is somewhat redundant at this point, because there aren’t many monarchs left and most people will think this sentence is about butterflies. But even the least democratic states on the planet usually pretend to be democratic, such as the democratic republic of Congo or North Korea.
So why do American republicans try to claim that their country is not a democracy but a republic? Well one explanation is that they don’t understand what either a democracy or a republic is. The other explanation is they try to pre-emptively excuse attacks on democratic norms by trying to argue that such attacks are constitutional.
An interesting insight into why this might happen comes from a study published last year in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. The researchers recruited a sample of almost 2,000 adult Americans. Amazing. I didn’t know there were so many.
The researchers then sorted the participants into republican and democratic camps and asked them whether they support actions that benefit their own party at the expense of democracy.
For example, they’d ask whether the participant supports reducing the number of voting stations in areas where the opposing party is popular. Or whether they support banning social media accounts that support the opposing party. And they also asked what they think the other side would reply. It turns out that democrats are slightly more willing to sacrifice democracy, and that both parties think the other side is substantially more antidemocratic than they are themselves.
But most interestingly, the participants who saw the other side as more willing to subvert democracy were more willing to subvert democracy themselves. And this, I think, explains why members of one party may accuse the other side of being antidemocratic. They do it to justify their own antidemocratic actions. It’s a race in which each party is trying to destroy democracy before the other can do it. And that’s the position in which the United States finds itself in today, with both republicans and democrats willing to sacrifice democracy. How did they get into this position? I don’t know. I’d be surprised if anyone knows.But I suspect that a big factor is that the US election system leads to a poor representation of the people’s will in the parliament.
The biggest issue with the US democracy is that its voting practices basically haven’t been updated for hundreds of years. Like the UK, the US has what’s called a “first past the post” system in which the candidate with the most votes wins and that’s that. The term derives from horse races in which the winner is the one who literally made it first past the post. This system is not used in all elections, but it is still used in the elections that matter most. In Germany and in most other modern democracies we have instead what’s called a proportional representation, meaning we count the proportion of votes for different parties and assign representatives based on these proportions. The issue is that in the first past the post system, like the US uses, people who vote for candidates that are unlikely to win basically throw away their vote. Since they don’t want that, they vote only for those candidates who have a chance of winning. As a consequence, the political landscape thins out until there are only two parties left. This is why in the USA you basically have only democrats and republicans and nothing else.
In these two-party systems, each party bends their program to try and appeal to as many voters as possible. The biggest change you might get in the political landscape is parties splitting up or joining, as has happened in the UK repeatedly. In the representative system, in contrast, parties tend to stick to their program more closely. Political changes are reflected instead in the changing representation of the parties, not so much in changes of party programs. To give you a sense of the difference, scientists have a way of measuring the average number of parties in a parliament which is using the inverse of the square of the relative proportions. China has 1. In the US it’s 2, in the UK about 2.4, Germany has 5.5 and Brazil a whopping 9.9.
If you've already forgotten half of what I've said, you can take my quiz on QuizWithIt to help your memory. The other thing that’s very old-fashioned about the US system is the electoral college which compounds the problem with the first past the post system. You see, Americans don’t elect the president directly, they instead vote for electors who elect the president.
Each state has a certain number of these electors, but they’re not proportional to the number of voters in these states. Basically this means that depending on where you live in the US, your vote counts more or less in the presidential election. If you live in Florida, for example, your voting power is a third of someone in Wyoming.
This is why you can end up with a situation in which a candidate who gets the majority of votes from the people ends up not getting the majority of votes from the electoral college, and hence doesn’t become president. This is what happened with Hilary Clinton in 2016. She won the popular vote and yet lost the election. According to a poll from just a few weeks ago, a solid majority of Americans would prefer to abandon the electoral college in the election of the president. Though I’m sure this problem can easily be solved by conducting polls through an electoral college.
To make matters worse, in the US, the parties in power sometimes try to skew the odds in their favour by redrawing the boundaries of districts for one elector. You can do this for example by breaking up areas with a strong support for the opposing party into many smaller ones and join them with larger areas that support your own party. Or you isolate them and lump them into as few districts as possible. These techniques are known as “gerrymandering” and are for the most part legal. These are the major reasons why the US government is a poor representation of the people’s will.
But democracy has a lot of problems in general, not just in the USA. For example, several psychological studies have found that the people who aspire to become politicians are more likely to be narcissists and machiavellians.
Narcissists have an inflated sense of self-worth, tend to exaggerate their achievements, and care little about other people. Machiavellians try to achieve their goals by manipulating others. They are often comfortable with using deception or lies to get what they want. You can probably think of a few politicians who fit that description. Basically, candidates who want to be in office are generally not who the people want to be in office. This is the key problem with democracy that Plato in his book “Republic” wanted to solve by letting philosophers rule. And that would indeed be a great idea if you want the government to stop coming to any decisions. A recurring idea to solve this problem is to select people randomly to sit in the government. Many countries already use some sort of “citizen’s assemblies” that inform governmental policy, so why not make this more formal not just informative.
The idea is not new, and indeed a study from 1998 found that groups with randomly chosen leaders perform significantly better in problem solving tasks than those with formally or informally selected leaders. It was a rather small study though among 188 students, and the problem they had to solve was surviving after a bus stranded them in a desert which, seeing the current state of public transportation in Germany, is maybe not so far fetched.
So randomly selecting members of parliament might actually be a good idea, but whether people would accept it is another question entirely.
Last year, researchers asked more than 15 thousand Europeans whether they “think it is a good idea to let a group of randomly-selected citizens make decisions instead of politicians on a scale going from 0 to 10 where 0 is a very bad idea and 10 is a very good idea. The median reply was 4.3. So one can’t say that people are super excited about it. I wouldn’t be excited about it either because I think it’d be a good idea if the people who sit in parliament actually know how their government works to begin with. Basically, you want candidates who are qualified to at least do the job, never mind their political orientation.
Democracy is having a hard time at the moment because most decisions that governments need to make have become too complex for voters to understand. As a consequence, political discussions often focus on a few topics that most people have strong opinions about, such as childless cat ladies, the appropriate uses of a couch, and whether immigrants eat the dogs. From my perspective the issue is that most voters just don’t know which political decision is most likely to work towards their personal values. This is why in the past decade we have seen a lot of apps springing up that help voters match their values to political orientations and parties. I believe that in the next decades we will see more of this, powered by AI, and with that a trend towards more direct democracy. People will just explain an AI what they want and the AI will try to figure out what’s the best policy to realize that. And then they will expect their representatives to represent that. This is possible already, which is why I think it’s only a matter of time until one party tries it, after which, I am convinced, it will spread all over the world. I think that this will solve the currently biggest problem with democracy, which is that it’s just become too slow. So, I am optimistic about the future of democracy. But until AI solves all our problems, it’s up to you to put your cross in the right place. Choose wisely.
