Are Elections Truly Democratic or Just an Illusion?
Photo by Janine Robinson on Unsplash
I will start this article—like I do most ones about elections—by saying that you should vote during this upcoming election if you want to. Elections take, at most, only a couple of hours, one or two days a year. A far more significant barrier is that for the states that don't have automatic registration, your name has been removed from the rolls before you vote (so please ensure you are properly registered before voting).
That said, I have shifted my opinion on how I perceive elections. They are less a forum where all ideas can have their day and more like a jousting match, where candidates—and the rich backing them—gauge applause (i.e., votes) to see the best way to rule. While I think it's fine to participate in that ritual, these jousting matches are not democratic in the sense that the public has a say in policy.
Instead, they are a form of consensus-building among elites purposefully used to insulate their rule from the will of the majority.
A brief recount of the elitist origins of elections
My position may sound confusing because elections (i.e., where people vote, often via ballot, to choose a representative or other public official) are often seen as synonymous with democracy. David Van Reybrouck mentions in his book Against Elections how we have all become electoral fundamentalists, writing:
“Electoral fundamentalism is an unshakeable belief in the idea that democracy is inconceivable without elections, and elections are a necessary and fundamental precondition when speaking of democracy. Electoral fundamentalists refuse to regard elections as a means of taking part in democracy, seeing them instead as an end in themselves, as a holy doctrine with an intrinsic, inalienable value.”
And yet, when founding fathers such as James Madison argued for elections, which at the time were rare in Europe except for maybe the election of the Pope, they were doing so because they thought such a process would have explicit political outcomes. Madison, in particular, feared both minority and majority control, writing in Federalist Paper 51: "If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure."
As a result of this concern, America created institutions such as the Senate (i.e., a chamber in the US legislature where each state has two representatives) and the Electoral College (i.e., a method of electing the president that tends to inflate votes from less populous states) to insulate American leaders, at the time often composed of the slave-owning elite, from the majority's will. As a result, we now regularly elect presidents and congressional bodies that are not representative of what most Americans want.
This anti-public, pro-elite bias becomes even more transparent when you look at the anthropological roots of elections. David Graeber and David Wengrow mention this tension in The Dawn of Everything, writing:
“The political philosophers of later Greek cities did not actually consider elections a democratic way of selecting candidates for public office at all. The democratic method was sortition, or lottery, much like modern jury duty. Elections were assumed to belong to the aristocratic mode (aristocracy meaning ‘rule of the best’), allowing commoners — much like the retainers in an old-fashioned, heroic aristocracy — to decide who among the well born should be considered best of all; and well born, in this context, simply meant all those who could afford to spend much of their time playing at politics.”
We spend so much time in our society heralding the democratic virtue of elections, but as we can see, elections were never intended to be democratic. They were always a tool used by elites to control the masses.
Elections are still for elites
When we talk about "reforming democracy," we ignore this history, often instead focusing on narrow electoral reforms: e.g., abolishing the electoral college, automatic voter registration, mandating everyone vote, changing how ballots are cast via Ranked Choice or Approval, etc. It's always about shifting electoral procedure and never whether we should select another democratic method entirely.
However, we have been experimenting with elections for over a century, and many countries have implemented these reforms, but it hasn't lessened the central problem with elections. Australia mandates voting for all its citizens, and corruption and declining trust in government are still the norm. California was the first state to adopt automatic registration, which did not significantly affect public trust. The world over has likewise adopted "secret ballots" (i.e., the voter's identity is not revealed to the public), and it has not lessened the crisis of modern democracy.
Why is this?
Graeber and Wengrow theorize that there are three ways to gather power: a right to violence, control of information, and charisma. Elections are about this last point, i.e., selecting charismatic leaders. These are people who have the training, skills, knowledge, and social capital to get other people to like them, and that leads to potential moral hazards. As the two anthropologists write:
“…it is worth recalling that ancient Greek writers were well aware of the tendency for elections to throw up charismatic leaders with tyrannical pretensions. This is why they considered elections an aristocratic mode of political appointment, quite at odds with democratic principles...
With elections, the inherent focus on likeability leads to an unstated focus on selecting individuals with privilege because those are the ones who generally can afford to acquire such skills and/or are awarded for them. It's not a coincidence that many people deemed "worthy" of electoral leadership come from wealthy backgrounds, receive prestigious schooling, or, often, both. This fact is evident in America, where over half of the people elected to the Senate and House are millionaires, and a not-so-insignificant amount have attended prestigious universities. These politicians also usually need significant investment to even run a campaign (we are talking potentially millions or billions of dollars), which often beholden them to more wealthy interests.
Yet it's hard not to find a part of the world where this focus on the privileged isn't the case with electoral politics.
In South Korea, the Citizens' Coalition for Economic Justice estimated recently that the average wealth of lawmakers was 3.33 billion won or $2.44 million USD per person (note: this includes real estate and securities assets).
In the UK, it's hard to acquire this estimate as members of Parliament are not required to disclose their personal financial information to the House of Commons, but given the rampant wealth accumulation by those in the Tory party, we can speculate that it is significant (note: current prime minister Rishi Sunak has a net worth of over 600 million pounds or north of 800 million USD).
In India, the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) found in 2022 that the upper (Rajya Sabha) and lower (Lok Sabha) houses of Parliament possessed, on average, ₹20.47 core (over $2 million) and ₹79.54 crore ($9 million), respectively.
In France, the pathway to power in government often involved attending the recently closed (circa 2021) grande école (ENA), which schooled four French presidents, including Emmanuel Macron.
Furthermore, individual concentration of capital is not the only issue. There are also concerns about nepotism and cronyism, where charismatic people in power tend to give preferential treatment to their friends and family. This is a problem in even countries known for their functioning democratic institutions.
When we look at the Scandinavian social democracy of Norway, for example, there has been a well-documented culture of giving, receiving or asking for bribes. Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store has received steady criticism for appointing personal friend Jens Stoltenberg to a high-profile NATO position. Former Prime Minister Erna Solberg has long been suspected of assisting her husband with stock trades.
As we can see, this focus on the privileged in politics is not because of Citizens United (i.e., campaign finance laws), the Electoral College, or whatever your US-specific justification might be, but a more general trend found in most electoral democracies. Elections tend to prioritize the privileged, with even self-proclaimed socialist politicians often being quite wealthy themselves.
If someone manages to get elected who is both working-class and has not received elite schooling, they are navigating against a system not meant for them. Many such politicians struggle to swim upstream and either get gobbled up by established interests to keep their power or quickly lose pace and become one-term candidates.
Politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is an excellent example of this. She entered office as a disruptive influence, but as her tenure matured, she quickly softened her approach to be slightly left of the (American) center. Some of this was undoubtedly due to the pressures she faced from Democratic Leadership, as it's widely speculated that the party establishment wished to gerrymander her out of her district following her upstart victory in 2018.
Despite the rhetoric we often hear, this system is not designed for the common man or woman to enter office, and elections are a huge reason why.
How to engage in true democracy
The natural question becomes, if elections are so bad, how should we govern? Should we revert to a monarchy or some benevolent form of authoritarianism? Am I arguing for technocracy?
No. It must be stressed that I am not against democracies. I believe democracy is the best way to govern, but I think there are better ways to reach a democratic consensus than through an election. We have already briefly talked about one method, which is aleatoric democracy, or selecting leaders through lot or sortition (i.e., choosing leaders at random). This system has been used throughout history, from ancient Athens to parts of South Asia.
One thing that speaks in this method's favor is that we already use it in America to decide whether or not someone is guilty of a crime (i.e., jury duty)— literally life and death in some cases. This is done as a call toward impartiality by getting as large a slice of the public as possible.
It's easy to imagine the same system being used to select our leaders. Imagine a world without elections and career politicians. Someone devotes one year of their life to office and then moves on. And that person is far more likely to be statistically representative of their actual country than the elite representatives elections are designed to give us. In the words of Alpa Shah in What if We Selected our Leaders by Lottery?:
“This idea of leadership prioritizes the notion of service and duty to the collective, and devalues merit, status, wealth or power acquisition by individuals which create political and economic inequalities between people.”
Lot could be used in combination with other methods, such as direct democracy, which was also used during Ancient Athens. The assembly of Athens allowed any citizen (regressively constrained by class and sex) to decide magistracies and other important political matters. Many small towns and cities aren’t that much bigger than Ancient Athens, which had upward of 60,000 citizens at its height.
It's often argued that sortition would be inefficient for larger political bodies such as the US Senate, and maybe that could be true (again, lot could be used for these larger roles), but this criticism also assumes a level of efficiency that doesn't exist with the modern system. The American Congress is so dysfunctional that it often struggles to do basic tasks such as passing a budget or repairing vital infrastructure. By this logic, elections aren't a valid method either.
More to the point, our electoral system already has a robust history of state-wide referendums, where citizens vote for the passage or rejection of laws. We have technology in place that far surpasses that of ancient Athens. Consequently, we can assess public opinion on a range of issues on a massive scale. It does not take much imagination to adapt this process — which often requires legislative approval in many polities — and allow referendums to be passed into law when the public ratifies them.
In essence, removing the electoral intermediaries from the equation.
Whether our society advocates sortition, direct democracy, or some combination of aleatoric, direct, and electoral methods, there are clearly many worthwhile paths ahead.
A political conclusion
Elections are not democratic—they never were. Their roots come from an elitist fear of majority rule, and over time, they tend to favor those already at the top of the economic and political hierarchy. The United States has helped import electoral democracy worldwide, but it has not lessened the class-based stratification we see in nearly every modern country.
To end our current era of instability, we must abandon elections in favor of greater democracy. We must implement a combination of lot and direct democracy that allows our modern governments not just to survive but to thrive.
For once, let's leave it up to chance.