There’s Nothing Wrong with Democracy

Few people nowadays will admit that they dislike democracy. But the Brexit result, and the reactions to it in the press and on social media, have finally convinced me of something I had long suspected. Democracy, even in countries where the practice is long-established, is not as popular as it seems.

One or two friends of mine have openly admitted that they are having doubts about democratic government. They tell me that democracy is all very well in small doses, but that it is dangerous to give everyone the vote, which should, perhaps, be reserved for people with a certain level of education.

Few commentators have been so courageous, or so clear-eyed about their own views. Rather than admit that they have doubts about democracy, most critics of the Brexit vote have preferred to argue that the referendum was not really democratic at all.

How do they reach that conclusion? A few arguments turn up time and again. Democracy is not really about majority voting. Democracy is less about the sovereignty of the people than about checks and balances. Democracy has less to do with the people expressing its will than with the deliberation of elected representatives. And this is all to the good, it is implied, because if democracy was really about the direct rule of the majority, our states would be run by ignorant people rather than by experts—with predictably disastrous results.

All of these arguments feature in a prominent article in the Guardian by the senior lawyer Geoffrey Robertson. They also have a central place in a recent front-page opinion piece in Die Zeit, published under the lurid headline “Diktatur des Volkes”, by the veteran journalist and academic Josef Joffe.

These arguments have been influential, but they are misguided. To see how, we need to look in more detail at their recent uses by Robertson and Joffe. And we will also need to look at the long history of democracy, going right back to its originators in ancient Greece.

“Democracy,” according to Robertson, “has never meant the tyranny of the simple majority.” This assertion is falsified by one of the world’s earliest democracies, classical Athens. Citizens made decisions by a simple majority vote in an assembly whose authority was supreme—for the duration of the fifth century, at least.

If not all democracies vested as much power in a citizen assembly as Athens did, several put majority decision-making at the centre of their systems. The historian Egon Flaig, in his recent book on the practice, finds evidence for decision-making by simple majority in a number of past societies, from ancient India to medieval Iceland.

As the political scientist Melissa Schwartzberg shows in her book Counting the Many, there are good reasons for sticking to voting by simple majority. The simplest one is that voting by super-majorities is the only alternative, and super-majorities fail to respect the principle of political equality by favouring the status quo.

Both Robertson and Joffe point out that several contemporary democracies (the US, Australia and Germany) require some sort of super-majority for constitutional change. Britain has no written constitution, but there is a broader point here.

In the states mentioned above, laws that are part of the constitution get special protection from the majority will. Who grants them that protection? The small number of people who drew up the constitution!

Obviously, there are some things that need to be protected simply to keep democracy in operation. For example, a democracy should not be allowed to take a vote on its own existence. This has happened too many times already, from classical Athens to Weimar Germany. We might also want to protect certain rights, such as freedom of speech, on the grounds that political equality would be meaning­less without giving everyone an equal right to contribute to debates. But decisions about whether to belong to a particular international organisation hardly pose an existential threat to democracy. There is therefore no reason to give them constitutional protection—no more reason, that is, than for any other controversial political issue.

This brings us to the question of checks and balances. For Robertson, democracy involves governments that are “subject to certain checks and balances such as the common law and the courts, and an executive ultimately responsible to parliament”. Joffe appeals to James Madison’s contributions to The Federalist Papers.

Where Robertson and Joffe go wrong is in thinking that they are describing democratic systems rather than republican ones. In particular, they are advocating what ancient authors such as Polybius called the “mixed” or “balanced” constitution. Madison found this type of system particularly appealing, mainly because his reading of other ancient authors (such as the aristocratic historian Thucydides) had convinced him of the perils of unrestrained democracy.

The checks and balances that Robertson and Joffe find so attractive—and so democratic—were added to the US Constitution in order to make it less democratic, not more. This explains some peculiarities of that system, such as the electoral college that takes the final vote on the presidency.

Madison believed that the views of the people should be “filtered” through the views of more enlightened statesmen. To their credit, Americans have over the years steadily moved their Constitution in a more democratic direction (so that members of the electoral college almost always cast their votes in accordance with the will of the people, for example). This would have dismayed Madison. And it has led to a confusion about what democracy is. Americans have continued to honour their Constitution just as they have grown increasingly democratic. As a result the Constitution is now seen as a model for democracy. But it was meant as a structure within which the will of the people might be restrained—or, at least, refined.

This was, of course, what Madison saw as the proper role of representation—“to refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens”. Robertson concurs, emphasising the centrality to the British system of parliament, whose members can vote on issues “according to conscience and common sense”.

Having representatives of the people vote on behalf of the people may have certain practical considerations on its side. In a large nation-state without the technology for remote voting (like the eighteenth-century US), representation may have been the only option. But the idea that representation is more democratic than the direct rule of the people is an odd one. The Greek word demokratia, after all, means “the power of the people”. And Greek democracies always featured an assembly in which citizens voted directly on issues facing their city-state.

It is hard to say whether Robertson and Joffe really think representation is more democratic than referendums, or whether they simply think it produces better results. Certainly, they do not argue, as some have, that the kind of reasonable discussion that tends to happen in small groups of debaters—deliberation—is a good in itself.

Instead they appeal to the value of expertise, an idea emphasised by Joffe in particular. He begins his article by quoting Richard Dawkins, who said that Brexit was “much too difficult and detailed” an issue “to be left to voters”. Dawkins’s argument is an enticing one, and it has a fine pedigree. But we should firmly reject it.

The opinion expressed by Dawkins is a version of Plato’s central argument against democracy—that it puts political power into the hands of people who are not qualified to exercise it. The point is by no means a silly one. After all, I would hardly entrust my health to someone who had no training in medicine, so why should I entrust my country to people who have no training in politics?

One possible response is to say that a nation voting on an issue is a very different matter from somebody chosing a doctor. In particular, when a whole country votes in a referendum, those who happen to have a high level of training in politics or economics are not excluded.

To that extent, Plato has presented us with a false dichotomy. The question is not so much “experts or the masses” as “experts plus the masses, or experts on their own”. Some political scientists—Hélène Landemore, for example—argue that groups including experts outperform the experts on their own in terms of the quality of the decisions they make. This is debatable. And in any case it misses the key point. This was glimpsed by the philosopher Protagoras, who (according to Plato) argued that questions of morality and politics simply do not admit of expert knowledge in the way that medicine does.

The question of Britain’s vote to leave the EU is a case in point. Obviously there are plenty of considerations relevant to that decision that admitted of expert knowledge. One of these, of course, was how Brexit would affect the economy. And the experts duly weighed in. What is important to notice, though, is that the experts’ opinion on this point did not have the power to end the debate. The experts’ opinion on how the economy might fare in the event of Brexit could not compel assent in the way that a mathematical proof might have.

Political problems are nothing like the problems of mathematics, or of any of the sciences. They are rarely even empirical questions. Referendums never ask the people to vote on Pythagoras’s theorem, or on whether the economy of Japan is larger than that of Mexico. This unsurprising fact contains an important truth. Political questions are not chiefly concerned with what will happen, or how it will happen. Rather, they are about what we think should happen.

And there is another reason why we might want to decide what we think should happen collectively (besides the fact that nobody is an expert in ethics in quite the same way as a doctor is an expert in medicine). This is because a vote about some question of ethics or politics need not be seen as a way of coming to the right answer about it.

The vote about Brexit, for instance, can also be seen as a way of gauging how people felt about Britain’s involvement in the EU, whether or not we think they had good reasons for feeling as they did. To use political science jargon, the referendum aggregated people’s preferences. To some, this is an indictment of the process, not an endorsement. The referendum, they might complain, simply added up people’s opinions without checking whether they were rational or not.

This, in fact, is a central aspect of why voting is democratic. By giving each person one vote—and by counting them equally—we grant everyone an equal voice in the decision-making process. And we do so without privileging anyone’s ideas about what is true or false, reasonable or unreasonable, good or bad.

When it comes to decisions about what we should do, this is exactly how we should conduct ourselves. When it comes to questions of ethics and politics, there is rarely one right answer. And there is even more rarely any way of checking what the right answer is.

In such circumstances—the circumstances in which groups of humans have always found themselves—there is no firm ground for claims to special authority to be built on. We can pretend that there is, or we can give everyone an equal say in collective decisions, as democrats.

On June 23, the people of Britain made a decision on a question of great importance by a simple majority vote. Ancient Greek democrats would have heartily approved. And so should we.

James Kierstead is a Lecturer in Classics at Victoria University of Wellington. He has published a number of academic articles on ancient Greek democracy.