Prof: So today we're
going to talk about majority
rule and democratic competition.
 
Whenever we think about
democracy there is this
automatic almost reflexive
impulse to associate democracy
with majority rule.
 
We saw last time that was one
of the things that frightened
Madison and his contemporaries
that they wanted to limit the
power of majority factions as he
called them.
Limit the power of majority
rule.
But we think today,
reflexively,
that majority rule confers
legitimacy of some sort on
collective decisions.
 
And what our agenda today is to
dig into why it is that anybody
might think majority rule has
some important normative
property.
 
Anyone have any suggestion as
to why it might?
Why should we care?
 
The endless recounts in Florida
in 2000 to see who really had
the majority,
what's the big deal about
majority rule?
 
Why should we care?
 
Any takers?
 
Yeah?
 
Student:  I guess it's
like a somewhat utilitarian
flavor to that.
 
Prof: A somewhat what?
 
Student:  A utilitarian
flavor.
Prof: A utilitarian
flavor, so that's interesting.
There might be a utilitarian
justification for majority rule.
Just say a little more about
what you have in mind.
Student:  Because if the
majority of the society consents
to a certain policy or approves
of a certain person it's kind of
like they're making the judgment
that having this person or
having this policy would
increase their happiness or
their satisfaction with society
the most.
Prof: So maximizing
government by majority rule
might in some sense maximize
utility in the society.
That's certainly an interesting
hypothesis, and I'll revisit it
in this lecture.
 
Any other suggestions about
majority rule,
no?
 
Going once, twice, gone.
 
All right, we'll revisit this
utilitarian thinking because I
think it's a very good
observation to make because
although it's not explicit in
much of the discussion of
majority rule I think it is
implicit and we'll come back to
that.
 
The traditional justification
for majority rule was that it
somehow identified the will of
the people.
That democracy reflects,
embodies, expresses the will of
the people, but of course that
just puts it one-step further
back.
 
What is the will of the people?
 
How do you know the will of the
people when you trip over it?
One of the canonical
formulations of this idea is in
Jean-Jacques Rousseau's
Social Contract where he
says,
"There is a great
difference between the will of
all,
what all individuals want,
and the general will;
the general will studies only
the common interest while the
will of all studies private
interest,
and is indeed no more than the
sum of individual desires.
But if we take away from these
same wills,
the pluses and minuses which
cancel each other out,
the balance which remains is
the general will."
We take away from the
individual wills the pluses and
minuses which cancel each other
out, the balance which remains
is the general will.
 
So people have spent hundreds
of years trying to figure out
whether that makes any sense,
whether this notion that you
find in Rousseau of pluses and
minuses canceling one another
out makes any sense.
 
And what sense could it make?
 
How would we know?
 
As I said, how would we know
the general will if we fell over
it?
 
And it's often been the case
that people have tended to
associate the general will with
the idea of the will of the
majority.
 
But going all the way back to
the eighteenth century there has
been the contrarian impulse
first noticed by a philosopher
called Condorcet at the end of
the eighteenth century,
but that has since preoccupied
many theorists of democracy,
and that is that,
well, actually majority rule
doesn't even necessarily reflect
the will of the majority.
What Condorcet noticed was a
very simple fact which is
suppose you have a society where
there are three voters and each
voter has a preference over
three different policies.
So in this example voter number
one prefers A to B and B to C.
Voter number two prefers C to A
and A to B, and number three
prefers B to C and C to A.
 
What Condorcet noticed was you
get a paradoxical result because
you have a majority for A over
B.
You have a majority for B over
C, but then you have a majority
for C over A,
and that seems like a
contradiction because if you
dial back through your notes to
when we were discussing basic
properties of rationality,
remember when we were talking
about indifference curves and
all of that,
this seems to violate the
principle of transitivity
because you have a majority for
A over B,
you have a majority for B over
C, and then you have a majority
for C over A.
So it seems like our individual
preferences can be rational our
collective preferences might be
irrational in the sense that
they contradict themselves.
 
And so several things follow
from this, or are thought to
follow from this at least.
 
One is that,
this Condorcet noticed in the
eighteenth century,
but a famous,
indeed, Nobel Prize winning
economist called Kenneth Arrow
proved a theorem in 1951 in a
little book called Social
Choice and Individual Values
that this is a perfectly general
result.
 
And so if you have modest
pluralism of preferences which
we were assuming--
remember when we talked about
crosscutting cleavages on Monday
we were assuming it's important
for democracy,
diversity of tastes and
preferences,
then you can always get this
result with majority rule.
 
So that has a number of
unsettling implications because
there's no general will
identified by the majority.
On the contrary,
if things are put in one order
you'll get one result,
but if things are put in a
different order you'll get a
different result.
So the way parliamentary
committees often work you have a
motion and then you have
amendments to the motion.
You always vote on the
amendments first and then the
final motion last.
 
So another important theorem
proved by somebody called Gerald
Kramer about twenty years after
Arrow basically says,
"If you let me determine
the order of voting,
i.e.
 
what the amendments are and
what order we'll vote on them,
I can get any outcome.
 
All I have to do is know your
preferences and control the
order of voting,
and I can get a majority to
appear to support any
outcome."
So this suggests that majority
rule can be manipulated.
Now you might say, "Well,
when millions of people are
voting nobody's really
controlling the agenda in that
specific a sense,
and nobody has all of that
information about everybody's
preferences,
so people can't manipulate the
outcome."
That might be true as well,
but it also suggests that there
shouldn't be much moral
authority attaching to the
outcome if we know--
yeah, nobody manipulated that C
wins,
but if things had been done in
a different order B might have
won,
or A might have won in this
circumstance,
so why should we attach any
particular moral authority to
the idea that C won?
 
We shouldn't.
 
It's just an arbitrary result.
 
So footnote to this,
one important takeaway from
Arrow's theorem is you should
always be the last person to
interview for a job,
because if there are cyclical
preferences among the interviews
over the candidates you want the
others to bump each other off
and then you come along at the
end.
 
So don't say you didn't learn
anything useful today.
You certainly learned that.
 
They call you for an interview
say, "Well,
could I come in three weeks?
 
Why don't you interview your
other candidates first?"
So majority rule.
 
If there is such a thing as the
general will,
majority rule doesn't seem to
identify it.
And the public choice
literature that came out of
economics in the 1950s and 1960s
basically converged on that
proposition.
 
It said, "There is no such
thing as a social welfare
function,"
which is just econ-speak for
saying there is no such thing as
a general will,
or if there is a general will
we don't know what decision rule
would identify it.
 
And a huge amount of ink has
been spilt in trying to figure
out what decision rule might
identify unambiguously something
that we would feel morally
comfortable calling the general
will.
 
And I don't think anybody has
succeeded definitively at that
task.
 
Locke, we always come back to
Locke in this course.
Locke has a somewhat different
defense of majority rule.
Now you might think that's
weird because most people think
of Locke as somebody who
defended rights.
If you go and read about the
debates on The Constitution the
Lockeans versus the Republicans,
those of you who have taken the
history course,
the Lockeans were the people
who wanted to create the Bill of
Rights,
defend against the majority and
so on,
but in fact if you go and read
Locke what you find is that he's
a staunch defender of majority
rule.
He says, "For when any
number of Men have,
by the consent of every
individual,
made a Community,
they have thereby made that
Community one Body,
with a Power to Act as one
Body, which is only by the will
and determination of the
majority."
 
It doesn't say why.
 
"For that which acts any
Community,
being only the consent of the
individuals of it,
and it being necessary to that
which is one body to move one
way;
it is necessary the Body should
move that way whither the
greater force carries it,
which is the consent of the
majority: or else it is
impossible it should act or
continue one Body,
one Community[.]"
So he's saying it's necessary
the body should move that way
whither the greater force
carries it,
which is the consent of the
majority,
or else it's impossible it
should continue to act one body
or one community,
which the consent of every
individual that's united into it
agreed that it should,
and so everyone is bound by
that consent to be concluded by
the majority.
"And therefore we see that
in Assemblies impowered to act
by positive Laws where no number
is set by that positive Law
which impowers them,
the act of the Majority passes
for the act of the whole,
and of course determines,
as having by the Law of Nature
and Reason,
the power of the whole."
 
So that's Locke's defense of
majority rule.
It's not that it identifies
some general will.
It's really an argument about
power, right?
He's basically saying,
"Look, once you have a
community somebody's going to
win."
It's a little bit like Nozick
saying,
"Once you have those
independents out there
somebody's going to force them
to join,"
just a realpolitik argument
that the power of the majority's
going to determine what the
community does.
And indeed, if we delve more
deeply into other things that
Locke says he basically says,
"Look, if you don't like
what the government does,
you can oppose,
but if nobody agrees with you,
you should (as we discussed
earlier in the course),
you should expect your reward
in the next life.
 
If everybody agrees,
or if a majority agrees with
you then you can have 1688.
 
You can change the
government."
So this seems to be an argument
about the legitimacy of the
majority that is a very
hardnosed realistic judgment
about politics,
not a moral claim that the
majority has any particular
intrinsic property that gives it
the right to govern.
 
It's just saying,
"Well, there it is.
The majority is going to flex
its muscles and if it's not
attended to it's going to
win."
 
 
Now I think that we will see
Locke gets,
actually, a lot closer to the
truth of the desirability of
majority rule than Rousseau did
or the people who were trying to
come up with the notion of the
general will,
or what modern economists would
call a social welfare function.
And a way you could think about
this argument,
particularly in light of the
observation about the
relationship between majority
rule and utilitarianism,
is that I think the best way to
think of what Locke is doing
here it's a kind of negative
utilitarianism,
or at least a cousin of
negative utilitarianism.
We generally think of negative
utilitarianism as the doctrine
that we should minimize pain as
opposed to positive
utilitarianism which is,
maximize pleasure.
We didn't make that distinction
when we talked about Bentham,
but it's there in the
contemporary literature.
So this is a cousin,
I think, of negative
utilitarianism in the sense that
I think that Locke thinks of
majority rule and indeed of
resistance to power as a way of
limiting the possibility of
domination.
Limiting the possibility of
domination.
And he's saying you can resist
power if power's dominating you,
but you're only going to win if
you're in the majority,
if you have the greater force.
 
But why is majority rule the
instrument for limiting the
possibility of domination?
 
Why should we think of majority
rule as having that propensity?
 
 
Anyone got a suggestion?
 
Why should we think that
majority rule,
all things considered,
would limit the possibility of
domination?
 
This is a hard question.
 
Yeah?
 
Student:  Well,
it seems it would go back to
the crosscutting cleavages that
we talked about the other day,
that if you're going to be in
the majority you don't know if
you're going to be in the
minority on other things so you
would limit the domination that
you put out.
You wouldn't want to be a
domineering presence for fear
that there'd be other
domineering presences in other
spheres.
 
Prof: I think that's
exactly right.
I think you've hit the nail on
the head.
He said, "Well,
it's related to the
crosscutting cleavages and one's
not knowing whether or not the
policies that get enacted are
going to be the polices that you
want,
or whether you're going to
regard them as being imposed on
you and dominating you."
I'll come back to your point in
a minute,
but as background to it and to
show,
I think, exactly why you're
right and what turns on what you
said,
think about another
prize-winning economist who has
theorized about politics.
This is a book published in
1962 by the economist James
Buchanan and the political
scientist Gordon Tullock for
which Buchanan got the Nobel
Prize in 1986 and Tullock was
not happy.
 
The argument was,
"Well, we don't have any
Nobel Prize for political
science,"
so that's why they gave it to
Buchanan.
Although you may know that last
year,
in a slap at their own
discipline, in fact for the
first time the Nobel Prize
Committee did give the Nobel
Prize to a political scientist,
a woman by the name of Elinor
Ostrom at the University of
Indiana,
but that was then and this is
now.
In 1986 Buchanan got the
recognition and Tullock was not
happy as he widely let it be
known.
So here's the intuition.
 
It is behind a veil of
ignorance.
This book interestingly a long
time before Rawls wrote,
1962, but the basic idea is
behind the veil of ignorance,
how would you think about the
decision rules that should
govern you?
 
How can you reason about that?
 
And they said,
"Well, what you have to
think about is two things.
 
One is, how likely is it that
the society is going to do
something you don't like,
and what can you do about
that?"
 
And related to that,
you have to think how much do
you care, because some decisions
are much more important to you
than other decisions.
 
Why does it matter how much you
care, because being involved in
decision-making takes up time,
effort, energy that you could
spend doing other things.
 
So if it's some utterly trivial
decision you're not going to
want to spend a lot of time on
it,
but if it's a really important
decision then you'll be willing
to spend time on it in order to
make sure your rights are
protected.
 
So they make a distinction
between,
first of all,
what they call external costs,
and the idea here is that as
the number of people in the
society goes up,
the chances that you're going
to have some decision imposed on
you that you don't like also
goes up because there are all
kinds of decisions that people
could make.
 
On the other hand there are
decision making costs too,
and as the number of people in
the society goes up the decision
making costs increase as well
because there are more people to
talk to,
to negotiate with and so on.
And so what you have to think
about is the sum of those two
things.
 
How important is it to you?
 
How important is it to you to
participate in decision-making
is going to be,
how much do you care about the
result,
and how much time are you going
to have to spend on the result.
 
And what they said in a kind of
utilitarian calculus they said,
"What you're going to want
to do is add them up,"
so you're going to want to
minimize the sum of the external
costs and the decision-making
costs.
You're going to want to
minimize that.
So when a decision is
completely unimportant to you
then you won't want to spend a
lot of time,
but when a decision is really
important to you,
you will be willing to spend
time.
And so then they said,
"Well, so how should we
think about the organization of
society?"
For questions that people think
are really important we should
have something like unanimity
rule because,
after all, unanimity rule is a
veto of one.
If you have unanimity rule it's
like the Pareto principle.
Anybody can veto.
 
Everybody's agreement has to be
gotten in the limiting case.
If you had absolute unanimity
rule you can't do anything
without that.
 
Whereas for less important
decisions,
this point here when you're
minimizing the sum of external
costs and decision-making costs,
what would be something less
than unanimity rule?
 
It might be a two-thirds rule,
and even less important things
you might say majority rule,
and even less important things
than you might say,
"Let the bureaucrats
decide.
 
It's just not worth my
time."
So for Buchanan and Tullock,
there's no presumption that
there's any particular
importance attaching to majority
rule.
 
On the contrary,
we should say for the most
important things we should start
with unanimity rule and then we
can come down the ladder or we
can think about steadily
declining supermajorities as
things become less important to
us.
 
And so the argument was that
for constitutional questions it
should be something very close
to unanimity rule,
and we should have entrenched
or semi-entrenched clauses that
are virtually impossible to
change.
They're telling a story that
more or less reflects the
structure of the American
Constitution,
where amending the Constitution
does take very hard to get super
majorities,
but regular legislation takes a
lot less.
 
And it's simply this
calculation, this
self-interested calculation that
leads you to often be willing to
go with majority rule and
there's nothing more to be said
about it than that.
 
So now we come to your
observation, and your
observation is basically the
observation that Buchanan and
Tullock are wrong;
that Buchanan and Tullock are
wrong because they confuse
unanimity as a state of affairs
in the world where we all agree
about something with unanimity
as a decision rule.
 
And your observation was first
made by Brian Barry,
who sadly died last year,
in a very good book called
Political Argument and
was developed by Douglas Rae,
who teaches here in SOM,
in two important articles in
the American Political
Science Review.
And what Barry and Rae pointed
out was exactly what this
gentleman here pointed out a few
minutes ago,
which is the whole Buchanan and
Tullock story assumes we have
agreement at the baseline.
 
The whole Buchanan and Tullock
story assumes that everybody's
happy with the initial state of
affairs.
And so then we say,
"Well so."
We started at that baseline and
then we say,
"The things that are most
important to you from that
baseline we'll create unanimity
rule and give you,
everyone in the room,
essentially a veto,
but then we'll work down from
that."
But what Rae and Barry said
was, "Well,
what if we say that behind this
veil of ignorance we don't know
whether we're going to like the
status quo or not.
Maybe we will,
maybe we won't,
but if you don't want to give
any special status to the status
quo,
then you shouldn't bias
decisions to the status quo,
because maybe it'll turn out
that you don't want the status
quo and then you're stuck with
something that's impossible to
change."
And so what Barry and Rae
showed was,
well, actually if you assume
behind a veil of ignorance that
you're as likely to be against
the status quo as in favor of
the status quo then you would
choose majority rule or
something very close to it.
 
So if the number of people in
the society is even you would
choose N over two plus one or N
over two minus one.
If you were wanting to minimize
the probably that a decision's
going to be imposed upon you,
not knowing whether or not it
was the decision favored by the
status quo.
So there's a kind of veil of
ignorance logic in the Rae and
Barry critique of Buchanan and
Tullock which says that the
presumption should be in favor
of majority rule or something
very close to it unless we want
to bias the whole system toward
the status quo,
and we don't actually have any
ultimate good reason for doing
that,
because even if somebody at
some constitutional convention
preferred to entrench whatever
it is,
the right the bear arms two
hundred years later we might not
take the view that we want to
entrench that,
but now it becomes impossibly
hard to change.
So if you say behind the veil
of ignorance we're going to be
as likely to oppose as to
support there does seem to be a
kind of negative utilitarian
logic which says if I want to
minimize the likelihood of
having decisions I don't like
imposed upon me,
I would prefer majority rule to
the going alternatives.
 
Well, that's all very well,
and I think that the Barry and
Rae argument is pretty robust.
 
It's certainly stood up for
what now;
close to half a century.
 
It's regarded as conventional
wisdom on this point.
Still in all it doesn't tell us
a lot about the dynamics of
actual politics.
 
How does competitive democracy
play out when we're thinking
about how actual political
systems, actual democratic
systems operate?
 
And you'll recall that from
Monday's lecture I said to you
that Robert Dahl was the most
important democratic theorist of
the second half of the twentieth
century,
but I didn't talk about the
first half of the twentieth
century.
 
And I think the most important
democratic theorist of the first
half of the twentieth century,
who in many ways Dahl built
upon, was actually an economist
by the name of Joseph
Schumpeter.
 
Economists had a lot of
influence in democratic theory
in the twentieth century.
 
Schumpeter wrote a book called
Capitalism,
Socialism and Democracy
which he published in 1942,
eight years before his death.
 
And most of that book is
actually completely
unremarkable.
 
Most of that book is a long and
rather tortured critique of Carl
Marx,
but the piece of it we're
focusing on are those two little
chapters called The Classical
Theory of Democracy and
Another Theory of
Democracy.
 
And I should say that those two
little chapters may be the most
influential writings about
democracy in the real world that
have come out of the twentieth
century.
Now it should also be said just
as a prefatory matter that the
title of the first chapter of
those two chapters is
misleading,
because what he calls the
classical theory of democracy is
actually a neoclassical theory.
It is Rousseau's idea of the
general will,
which we now know to be
chimerical,
but you know from Monday's
lecture that Rousseau's idea of
the general will was actually a
neoclassical adaptation,
because the ancient Greek idea
was ruling and being ruled in
turn.
 
So Schumpeter's critique of
what he calls the classical
theory of democracy we should
remember as actually a
neoclassical eighteenth-century
idea.
But he starts from the
proposition that the critique of
the idea of the general will is
valid.
There is no such thing.
 
There is no social welfare
function, as an economist would
put it.
 
But he, Schumpeter,
says, "Let's think about
democracy in a fundamentally
different way.
Let's define it as follows.
 
'The democratic method is that
institutional arrangement for
arriving at political decisions
in which individuals acquire the
power to decide by means of a
competitive struggle for the
people's vote.'"
 
 
 
And now he's going to develop
this idea in that second little
chapter with an analogy to the
market.
 
 
He's going to think about
democracy as shopping.
 
 
Schumpeter says,
"Look, think about
democracy, think about the
polity as an analog of the
economy."
 
What do we have in the economy,
and what do we have in the
polity?
 
Well, one thing we have in the
economy is consumers,
and what is the political
analog of consumers?
Any guesses?
 
What's the political analog of
consumers?
 
 
Student: Voters.
 
Professor Ian Shapiro:
Yeah, voters.
Another thing we have in the
economy is firms.
What's the political analog of
firms?
Anybody?
 
You have the mic, guess.
 
Student: Various candidates for
positions?
Professor Ian Shapiro:
Yeah, parties.
That's good enough.
 
Firms make profits.
 
What is the political analog of
profits?
Student: Whoever wins the
election?
Professor Ian Shapiro:
Close.
What do they get?
 
How do they win?
 
Student: They get votes.
 
Professor Ian Shapiro: Exactly.
 
So firms want profits,
parties want votes.
Then firms produce products.
 
What is produced in the polity?
 
Student: Various party
platforms.
Professor Ian Shapiro:
Platforms, yeah and
legislation.
 
And so when we think of the
doctrine of consumer sovereignty
in economics what would the
political analog of it be?
This won't leap out at you
immediately, but okay.
It's the idea of democratic
legitimacy;
it's the equivalent.
 
When we say this consumer
sovereignty in markets there's
democratic legitimacy in the
polity.
And so we have this basic
parallel between the economic
system where firms are
competing,
firms are competing for
profits, and they engage in a
competitive struggle for the
consumer's dollar,
to paraphrase Schumpeter,
and parties are competing for
votes and they engage in a
competitive struggle for the
people's vote.
 
And democracy is not about
participation,
or deliberation,
or all of the things that
people try to identify with,
it's essentially,
as I said, it's about shopping.
 
You shop for politicians and
policies in just the same way as
you shop for iPads and Maseratis
or whatever it is you buy.
This is how we should think
about democracy.
Hugely influential,
hugely influential.
And what disciplines the
elites, what disciplines the
elites that creates the
democratic legitimacy,
or maybe I should have put
democratic accountability there,
is the fact that the voter can
kick the bums out.
Gordon Brown's worrying about
this for the next few weeks.
The British voters can heave
him out.
That is what disciplines the
political elites.
That is what prevents them
ultimately from exercising
domination.
 
And so we think about a
competitive system driven by
politicians who are competing
for votes.
Turns out there's a big
tradition in American political
science of studying this that
goes back to,
again, another economist,
kind of depressing all these
economists but there it is.
 
In 1929 Hotelling,
who wrote a paper trying to
explain why is it that if you
look at a town,
any town, you'll find Target
and you'll find--
what's another?
 
You'll find Shaw's and Stop
& Shop right next to each
other on Main Street.
 
And Downs developed this into a
political argument.
Basically he said imagine
you've got a continuum here from
left to right,
so the people with
ideological--this is ideology.
 
People on the left are here.
 
People on the right are here.
 
Well, we should think the
population is more or less
normally distributed,
so most people are in the
middle and some people are at
the two extremes.
Well, if you have two political
parties where are they going to
head for?
 
They're going to head for the
median voter because that's
where most of the votes are.
 
So you might have differences
of opinion within the parties,
I'll come back to that in a
minute, but basically--oops,
where are we?
 
We're getting too far ahead of
ourselves here.
 
 
Parties are going to head for
the median voter because that's
where the votes are.
 
When they asked whoever it was,
"Why did you rob
banks?"
 
Because that's where the money
is.
Politicians are going to go for
the median voter.
That's where the votes are.
 
Now, of course,
they could be wrong.
They're going to guess.
 
So for example,
1964 Goldwater running for
president thinks that the median
voter is way over here,
but he's wrong so he loses.
 
Then 1980 Ronald Regan
basically runs on exactly the
same platform that Goldwater had
lost on in 1964 and everybody
says,
"This crazy right-wing
nut's going to be creamed.
 
We saw that in 1964,"
but either because he knew
something,
or because he was lucky or some
combination,
it turned out that between 1964
and 1980 the median voter had
moved and Jimmy Carter was wrong
about where the median voter
was.
So generally speaking,
other things equal,
the parties would converge to
the median voter,
or at least where they believed
the median voter is and the
people who get it right will
win.
Now that seems to have the
implication that particularly as
polling gets better and better,
so you don't make the kind of
mistakes the Democrats made in
1980 or the Republicans made in
1964,
the parties are going to start
offering exactly the same
policies.
And indeed, if you look at
the--I don't know how much
attention you folks are paying
to the British election,
but basically they're offering
the same policies.
They're both saying the others
are going to lie to you about
what they're going to do,
but we're going to keep the
National Health Service.
 
We're not going to cut this.
 
We're not going to cut that.
 
We're not going to do this to
taxes.
Because they've done all the
polling they know what the
median voter wants,
and so they're basically
offering the same policies.
 
I'll come back to what that
means for political competition
in a minute.
 
But if they're competing,
if they're basically offering
the same policies,
what are they competing over?
What are they putting in front
of electorate?
 
 
If they're basically both doing
the same thing,
they're going to compete over
things like character
assassination.
 
They're going to say,
"He's a liar.
Vote for me because he's a liar.
 
He says he won't cut the health
service but he will."
The other one will say,
"He says we won't raise
taxes, but he will.
 
He's dishonorable.
 
He was involved in this,
that, and the other
scandal."
 
That's what they're going to do.
 
They're going to compete over
personalities,
right?
 
Now one way you could imagine
something that would change that
is if there were other variables
that kept these parties apart.
So, for example,
we have primaries now in the
U.S.,
and of course the primary
voters on the Democratic Party
are over here probably normally
distributed,
and the primary voters in the
Republican Party are here.
 
If you have to win the primary
first then you're going to get
pulled down here,
and the Republicans are going
to get pulled over there,
and so what happens is if you
have some other force that pulls
the parties apart,
then you might get competition
over policy.
Some people say, "Oh,
it's bad to have primaries
because if you have primaries
the activists get control of the
parties and extremists in both
parties,
you know, the unions control
what the Democratic Party does
and the far right controls what
the Republican Party does."
It's true, but the flipside of
that is that when the general
election comes,
you actually have competition
over policies because the
parties have been pulled apart
by the fact that they had to win
these primaries first.
Now there are other bad sides
of primaries,
but part of the point here is
you need to see that what it is
that parties compete over can
change.
So when we put in the general
election the parties have been
pulled somewhat apart.
 
So if you have something in the
structure of political parties,
it could be primaries,
it could be a strong control of
the party selection process by
the leadership or something like
that,
then you will get competition
over policy.
 
Now some people would say
that's better because people get
a clear choice as opposed to
just character assassination and
that sort of thing.
 
It's actually better for them
to compete over policies.
Notice, though,
if you do have strong parties
that are kept ideologically
apart,
and you have competition over
policy,
you can get results like in
Britain,
the British Railways have been
nationalized and denationalized
three times in the twentieth
century,
because Labor comes in and
nationalizes them and then the
Tories come in and
denationalizes them.
So you get policy alternation
and that could be good or bad,
but it's a different thing to
compete over.
So you can have competition
over personalities,
you can have competition over
policies,
and of course you can have,
as we do in our system,
you can have competition over
pork.
If you have a system in which
you have individual
constituencies like we do in the
U.S.,
you have congressional
constituencies and then you have
states,
each representative is really
looking for,
not the national median voter,
but the median voter in their
district or in their state.
That's who they're serving.
 
And so there's a lot of
literature about whether it's
better to have proportional
representation where you have
basically one national
constituency,
or whether you should have a
system in which politicians
compete with one another as to
who's going to bring more pork
back to our district.
 
So I mention these things only
so that you're aware that once
we talk about political
competition we haven't settled
what it is that parties compete
over.
But Schumpeter didn't address
these because Schumpeter
ultimately didn't care.
 
He didn't care,
really, whether they were
competing over personalities,
policies or pork.
The point was that they were
competing, and they wanted to
throw one another out.
 
This is the system,
to hearken back to Monday's
lecture,
in which ambition really
counteracts ambition,
whereas separation of powers
and all that,
for the reasons Dahl gave,
doesn't really work.
 
There's no mechanism,
but this creates a mechanism
for ambition to counteract
ambition.
So Schumpeter and Dahl are much
more sympathetic to the idea of
pluralism and crosscutting
cleavages,
and a competitive struggle for
the people's vote than they are
to institutional checks and
balances to discipline elites.
Of course there are problems
with Schumpeter.
I'll just mention them briefly
because we're running short of
time, and you can pursue them in
section.
But one is, you're going to
have two parties,
or maybe three parties,
or four parties;
it's oligopolistic competition.
 
It's not a very thoroughgoing
form of competition,
so that's one thing to think
about.
Secondly, this whole thing
doesn't address the role of
money in politics.
 
We'll see this in sharp relief
in the state of Connecticut in
the next eight months where the
likely Republican nominee for
Chris Dodd's Senate seat has
already announced she's going to
spend fifty million dollars of
her own money on her campaign.
And so Attorney General Richard
Blumenthal who's the likely
Democrat has to raise a lot of
money.
So it's not necessarily
competitive struggle for the
people's vote,
but rather struggle for money
and that has implications which
you should think about.
Notice third that this
Schumpeterian story completely
devalues participation.
 
After all, it buys into the
Buchanan and Tullock definition
of the problem where we saw
participation was defined as a
cost.
 
If you have to spend time
participating in politics it's
time you could be spending
driving your Maserati and you'd
rather be doing that.
 
That's the assumption.
 
How good an assumption is that?
 
Maybe participation is
inherently valuable then you
have to think about that.
 
And then finally it really is a
minimal conception of democracy.
Now some people have
operationalized Schumpeter to
say,
and this is true in the
comparative politics literature
about new democracies,
that we can't call a system a
democracy until the government
has twice lost an election and
given up power.
This is sometimes called the
Schumpeter two turnover test.
Famous Harvard political
scientist who recently died
called Samuel Huntington came up
with the two turnover test.
We can't call something a
democracy unless there's been
this turnover at least twice.
 
In one way that's a stiff test.
 
Japan didn't meet it until very
recently.
The U.S.
 
didn't meet it until 1840.
 
India didn't meet it until
recently.
South Africa which people crow
about as a new democracy has yet
to meet it.
 
We don't know what would happen
if the ANC lost an election.
Would they give up power,
maybe, maybe not?
So in one respect it's a robust
test,
but people criticize it as
being minimal saying really
there's more to democracy than
that,
and we'll come back to that
question next week,
but what I want you to take
away is I think the enduring
insight of the Schumpeterian
model that really starts with
Locke's linking.
 
Locke was very prescient;
he saw three centuries ahead.
Linking of majority rule to
this idea of resisting
domination,
that non-domination,
this idea of resisting
domination,
however you institutionalize it
and operationalize it and all of
that,
that is the basic animating
ideal of democracy.
 
We'll pick up from there on
Monday.
 
 
