We have a political party that was elected in part because Americans are concerned about the price of groceries. Now that they hold three branches of government, their primary budget goal is to maintain and extend tax breaks that overwhelmingly benefit the very wealthiest in our society. And to pay for it, they are likely to target food assistance and subsidies to health care through Medicaid and Medicare.
While I truly appreciate this blog, most of what is discussed about parties is the same-old, same-old from political science: increase party competition or reform how candidates are selected to achieve a functioning political market. We have been on this train for decades and it has not worked. It is time for fresh ideas and fresh diagnoses of how we got to where we are. In that vein, I wanted to share an excerpt from an article I wrote almost a decade ago, which I happened to be rereading yesterday, and which seems still fitting for this moment.
The puzzle of how to curb the tendency of elected officials to act out of self-interest or at the behest of special interests has plagued the republic since the Founding. Even as the Founders aspired to a republican form of government in which legislators would govern in the public interest, rather than simply vindicate their constituents’ particularized advantages, they fretted over the potential for elected representatives to act out of self-interest or at the behest of special interests. Throughout the ratification debates, for instance, Anti-Federalists raised concerns that the new Constitution would give rise to “a system in which the people would be effectively excluded from the world of public affairs and in which national leaders, only weakly accountable, would have enormous discretion to make law and policy.”
The Constitution’s primary answer to the threat of unaccountable politicians is periodic elections. Regular elections, it was thought, would guarantee that representatives remained bound to their constituents. The structural features of separation of powers and federalism would provide “auxiliary precautions.”
The shortcomings of elections as instruments for ensuring responsiveness are well known. Among their myriad limitations as vehicles for producing accountability, one has proven particularly intractable: the quality of political participation. Even in a world of competitive districts in which turnout is high and representative, democratic accountability turns on voters having sufficient information to assess the adequacy of representation. Unfortunately, individuals face significant barriers when it comes to monitoring elected officials, and policy ignorance among voters is much more common than is policy knowledge.
Responsible party government pursued an indirect solution to the pervasiveness of voter ignorance. Presenting voters on election day with a choice between clear ideological brands, it hypothesized, would substitute for actual knowledge. Meanwhile, an interest in winning office would incentivize the production of brands responsive to voter preferences. As in the economic market, political parties would compete to provide the most desirable good, and accountability would follow.
The shortcut proved to be fool’s gold. Merely consuming the political brands manufactured by party elites has not been enough to produce accountability. Despite the increasingly clear choice voters face, the weight of the evidence confirms the Anti-Federalists’ worst fears. At the national level, our leaders are millionaires, “only weakly accountable” to the people, who leverage their enormous policy discretion largely to the advantage of others like themselves. Donors and ideological partisans have become the target audience for party brands, and concern for the preferences of the general electorate is largely coincidental.
What then would happen if one sought to create a system of political accountability the hard way–by seeking to increase informed political participation? The relationship between electoral participation and democratic accountability is certainly complex.
More to come soon . . . but for the curious . . .
Individual voters may not be capable of monitoring elected officials to hold them accountable, but the same is not necessarily true for organized voters. It is no accident that federal policy is highly solicitous of the needs of older Americans; they succeed in asserting their interests because they are more politically active and better organized than most Americans.
. . .
New possibilities arise when one resists the urge to overstate the implications of the data supporting voter ignorance. While voter ignorance is certainly pervasive, it need not preclude a path to political accountability in which informed political participation plays a critical role. That route, however, becomes visible only when one puts social ties and membership organizations back into the picture. A substantial body of empirical work supports the hypothesis that intermediary associations, including political parties, can spur political participation and facilitate a two-way street of communication between elites and ordinary citizens [in ways, I would now add, improve policy responsiveness and accountability.]
This is basically why I have become, over the last decade, more interested in third-party politics at the state and local level, and hence the problem of anti-fusion law.
