Doubts about democracy

Coming from different perspectives, Will Wilkinson and Henry at Crooked Timber make a similar point. Henry says:

Human beings may not want the kinds of autonomy that liberals presume they do

Will says:

The public does not want libertarianism. Which means that the public does not want a system that respects fundamental rights.

There’s a conflict between liberty and democracy.
The problem here, though, is that the public’s preferences might be systematically irrational; contrary to the optimism of wisdom of crowds thinking, their errors might not cancel out.
There are at least three different reasons for this:
1. We adapt our preferences to our circumstances; part of our psychological mechanism for coping with hard times is to reduce our expectations. The upshot of this, as Amartya Sen and John Roemer have pointed out, is that democracy - in the sense of giving the public what they want - gives too little to those who, in Henry’s words, “know their place.” The broken-spirited poor get too little whilst the rich, with their over-inflated sense of entitlement, get too much.
2. A basic cognitive bias - the availability heuristic - can lead to us under-estimating the value of freedom. This is because the gain from any restriction of freedom always seems clear, whilst the losses are more obscure. Hayek expressed this thus:

Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseeable and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom. Any such restriction, any coercion other than the enforcement of general rules, will aim at the achievement of some foreseeable particular result, but what is prevented by it will usually not be known....And so, when we decide each issue solely on what appear to be its individual merits, we always over-estimate the advantages of central direction. (Law Legislation and Liberty, Vol I, p56-57)

3. Other cognitive biases depress demand for radical change, be in it a leftist or libertarian direction; the status quo bias, endowment effect and loss aversion all conspire to lead people to prefer the devil they know.
This raises the question: why should leftists and/or libertarians respect democratic outcomes when these are founded upon preferences that might be irrational? As Will Kymlicka said:

[The aggregative or ’vote-centric’ conception of democracy] provides no opportunity for citizens to distinguish claims based on self interest, prejudice or fleeting whims from those grounded in principles of justice or fundamental needs…the outcome of the aggregative model has only the thinnest veneer of legitimacy. (Contemporary Political Philosophy, p290)

I’m surprised this issue isn’t more prominent. The growing interest in cognitive biases within centrist politics - be it Cameron’s embracing of “Nudge” or the “libertarian paternalism” of Julian Le Grand also suggest a scepticism about conventional democracy. After all, if people are poor judges of their best interests in health or pensions, why should they be good judges of their interest at the ballot box?
Now, if you’re with me so far, the question arises: how to respond to this tension between democracy and substantive outcomes?
One possibility is the retreat into Guido-style cynicism. Another is a vanguardist Leninist reaction - which I fear is a version of New Labour's position. But there is a third - to recognise that what’s valuable about democracy is not the aggregation of preferences - Kymlicka’s “vote-centrism” - but rather the opportunities we have to influence each other’s preferences. It’s the processes of deliberation that matter, not the cross in the ballot box.

Comments

[reason]

Yes.

But more than that - there is the problem of what alternatives are there? Seriously - what other form of government comes as close in terms of legitimicy?

P.S. One idea I think could be tried is to have the constitution come with an expiry limit - and a long consultative process started to create a new one requiring a super majority. It is easy to vote in a new constitution whole (with all the necessary compromises) rather than modify an existing one (where single issue fanatics tend to find a way to derail it).

[RobW]

"Human beings may not want the kinds of autonomy that liberals presume they do"

This a rather presumptuous statement about Liberals. Liberals don't presume anything for anybody. Generally they just want to be left alone. If someone else wants their life dominated by some higher body that's down to them. So long as I'm left out of it.

Also there is the typical problem of the left placing too much weight on democracy. Most liberals recognise that democracy is a tool not the be all and end all.

[ortega]

'There’s a conflict between liberty and democracy'

Not only that, but it is very possible to have the second without the first.
In the case of Athens, whose often called brief democracy lasted more than any in continental Europe, there was a higher degree of democracy than anyewhere now(*) and, at the same time, nothing that we would today call individual liberty.

(*) We must remember that for them, even for the adversaries of democracy, it equalled with selection by draw. In Aristotle view, election implies oligarchy.

[Diversity]

Democracy tends to give people what we can agree about; not exactly what they want nor what I think is going to be good for them. I suspect that Will Wilkinson and Gordon Brown (among others) could forgive the former fault but find the latter one irritatingly presumptuous.

Democracy is a way of forming common values and taking common decisions in a way which leaves not too many of us dissenting so violently as to make common decision impossible. To assent, many of us have found that we require the protection of law and legal rights against the common will of the moment. In the process of assenting, we cede some claims to liberty but not the parts which matter most to us.

It is, as Chris suggets, the process of deliberation which is critical. Considered over decades and generations, the votes cast may be a vital part of that deliberation.

[Jackart]

You're also ignoring the simple Darwinian advantage of democracy. By chucking the rotters out, we can get someone better, or at least less bad. That way new Labour does not become Robert Mugabe...

[charlieman]

CD: "I’m surprised this issue isn’t more prominent. The growing interest in cognitive biases within centrist politics - be it Cameron’s embracing of 'Nudge'..."

When italicised, Malcom Gladwell's book Blink reads as Bunk, short for bunkum. If you want to read uplifting homilies, read Gladwell, books about cognitive biases constructed on biases. Don't take it seriously.

[Howard]

Part of the problem appears to be one of method. The public want services that work well, when they need them. They want the health service to fix them when they are unwell, the want benefits when they need them most and the current regime isn't delivering.

I believe that politicians want to deliver these things but they seem unable to escape ideology and good ideas

Politicians are surrounded by lots of bright people who have good ideas about how services should be improved. You hear it now - they have to have 'choice' or its needs 'targets' or shared services. These are ideas from people who don't work in the work.

The problem being that these don't deliver what service users want. If you go to your doctor you want to be healed - 'please fix me' - 'in a place that is convenient to me' - not give me the choice which doctor or which hospital to fix me in.

The same with shared services as a method to save money. John Seddon has highlighted as much in Systems Thinking in the Public Sector and in The Systems Thinking Review that shared services reduce quality and increase costs.

To understand how to improve, you need to study your system as a system (each individual organisation) and work in the work with the workers to improve. It takes humility and understanding.

Ideas pushed-down from above, quality inspected in, targets don't deliver. If services began to deliver, the public would regain faith in politicians pretty rapidly!

[Bob B]

"The broken-spirited poor get too little whilst the rich, with their over-inflated sense of entitlement, get too much."

That phenomenon may help to explain the rise of "fascist" movements, as in Italy after WW1:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini

Note: "Mussolini held great admiration for Plato's work."

Another example:

"Perón and his second wife, Eva, were immensely popular amongst many of the Argentine people, and to this day they are still considered icons by the Peronist Party. The Peróns' followers praised their efforts to eliminate poverty and to dignify labor, while their detractors considered them demagogues and dictators."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Peron

[Russell]

Great post, Chris. Thank you.

[Eric Dewey, Portland, Oregon]

good point, Chris. But it seems as if it is the deliberative aspects of democracy that people are least likely to engage in - at least, not for very long, because it's very difficult to sustain being calmly deliberative unless one has been trained to it, and unfortunately, most aren't.

[Dain]

The phenomenon of motivated skepticism in evaluating political beliefs and even facts sort of derails the effort at deliberative democracy in important ways.

And the findings of Diana Mutz show that those most active in politics are least likely to be open to deliberation - they are more closed minded and confined to their 'side' than the apolitical. Rather sad. She asserts a tradeoff between deliberation and participation.