Elections and Dilemmas of American Democratic Governance:  Reflections

Demetrios James Caraley

I take as a central dilemma of American democratic governance that while all the adult citizenry have gained the opportunity to vote freely in elections on who the president and members of Congress are to be, they seem to be losing influence on what those officials do on questions of policy once in office. The election campaigns since 1988 have produced more criticism both of the process of choosing these officials and of the lack of policy mandates than any others in recent memory.  This article attempts to organize that criticism under three heads, reflect upon it, and offer some prescriptions for change. 

The bill of particulars being leveled against the American democracy, as I would summarize it is:  First, presidential and congressional election have become much more like popularity or beauty contests, con games, and television spectacles than a means of choosing the best persons to rule or producing a policy mandates to our highest officials from the voters. Second, voters cannot fix responsibility for successful or unsuccessful governmental policies because of the constitutional separation of powers between the presidency and Congress and because of the high frequency in the past thirty-four years of different parties controlling the two branches. Third, appointive federal justices with life tenure on the Supreme Court have the power to nullify the policy preferences of voting majorities working through the president and Congress. 

Functions of Elections 

According to the Founding Fathers—who would not have liked to be called “democrats”—elections were the main guarantee against oppressive government.  In the Declaration of Independence, the Founders argued as a “self-evident” “truth” that governments derived their just powers from “the consent of the governed,” meaning through elections.  Even before the Revolutionary War, colonists had argued that the lack of opportunity to vote for representatives to Parliament made its laws illegitimate. Moreover, the colonists had experience with elections; they had been voting for at least one house of the normally two-house colonial legislature.

In the Constitution, the Founders provided for direct election of the members of the House of Representatives by those eligible in each state to vote for the lower house of the state legislature—a large franchise for the time, though it excluded women and people of color. The Founders made members of the Senate appointive by their state legislatures, which contained representatives elected directly by the people. In the clumsy electoral vote system of choosing the president, the Founders did not make him a popularly elective official.[1]   But they also did not give the appointment of the president to Congress. If they had, the chances of Congress agreeing later to a constitutional amendment for the almost direct election of the president that we have now would have been zero.

The Founders deliberately left open for each state to decide how its presidential electors were to be selected.  As early as Thomas Jefferson's election in 1800, the electors did not act as sets of elites who, as the Founders intended, would use independent judgment to cast their ballots for the person the electors felt best fit to become president. By 1800, the electors had become slates of party rubber stamps who promised if elected by the people to cast their electoral votes for one or the other party's informal nominee—John Adams for the Federalists and Jefferson for the Jeffersonian-Republicans. By Andrew Jackson's presidency, the electors were chosen by essentially universal white, male suffrage.

Today we take the choosing of rulers in elections for granted, but this was not the case in 1787 nor is it the case in many nation states even in the beginning of the twenty-first century. The most “election-based” government of 1787 was that of the British. And while Britain had restricted its king to reigning rather than ruling and was governed by a cabinet and Parliament, the right to vote for members of Parliament was extended to only about one-fifth of the adult male population.

The Founders, on the other hand, insisted it was “essential” (their word) that the right to vote be extended to:              

the great body of the society, not . . .an inconsiderable proportion, or a favored class of it; otherwise a handful of tyrannical nobles, exercising their oppressions by a delegation of their powers, might aspire to the rank of republicans, and claim for their government the honorable title of republic.[2] 

The Founders were proud that in the House of Representatives, they provided the strongest restraint to would-be oppressive rulers—frequent elections, every two years.[3]  Alexander Hamilton asked: 

Is it not natural, that a man who is a candidate for the favor of the people, and who is dependent on the suffrages of his fellow-citizens for the continuation of his public honors, should take care to inform himself of their dispositions and inclinations. . . ? This dependence [creates] strong chords of sympathy between the Representative and the constituent.[4] 

The Founders never said they were building a “democracy.” To them, a “democracy” meant “direct democracy,”  “a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person” and where there would be “nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual.”[5] In short, the Founders saw democracy—a Greek word that means literally “the people hold power”-- as equivalent to tyranny of the majority or even mob rule. These they feared would expropriate the rights and property of the minority of the better off and oppress unpopular individuals, as for example the Athenian democracy had done in executing Socrates.

The Founders preferred the word “republic,” because in a republic “the scheme of representation takes place” and the government is delegated “to a small number of citizens.” This small number would be able “to refine and enlarge the public views” and their wisdom could “best discern the true interest of their country.”[6]  The question of direct democracy is now moot because no nation-state is small enough for it to be possible. 

Elections and Public Policy

Today, as a result of the 15th, 17th, 19th, and 26th amendments, plus the Voting Rights Act of 1965, senators are directly electable, and the president is virtually directly elected. (Technically the president is still chosen by “electors” who are elected by state-by-state voting pluralities even though their names in most states don’t even appear on the ballot.)[7] The suffrage for all offices has thus been extended to every citizen over the age of eighteen, regardless of race or gender. The influence of majorities of the general public on who is to govern is thus controlling. But what does that mean about the public's influence on the content of governmental policies?

            Theoretically the vote on candidates can be used to have an impact on policy. At election time the voter can compare the policy positions of all the available candidates on the issues on which the voter feels strongly. The voter can then cast his or her ballot for the candidates whose policy views most coincide with the voter's own.

The actual way that the average voter makes up his or her mind does not coincide with this civics textbook theory of voting. All the voting studies available show that the average voter does not differentiate the specific issues being discussed by the competing candidates very much and does not have sufficient information to make the connection between the candidate's stands and the voter's own preferences. These studies also show that a candidate's personality and party may influence the vote as much or more than stands on the issues.

There are also intrinsic difficulties with policy voting, such as the crosscutting nature of issues. For in any real election, each candidate stands for more than a single policy position. Unless the voter happens to have exactly the same set of policy preferences as one of the candidates, he or she will find only some issue positions appealing, but the rest unappealing and unpersuasive.  The issue-oriented voter can cast his vote only for what can be called a “market basket” of preferred policy positions that suits him or her more than any other market basket that happens to be available in that election.  Almost never can a voter find a candidate who offers the precise market basket of positions that the voter would have chosen if he or she could have selected from the shelves all the items with which it is filled. Furthermore, even if issues were fully debated in presidential campaigns, they could not be the actual full agenda of a new administration. For unforeseen problems force themselves on a president's agenda, and the president and other elected officials must have freedom of action to deal with new situations as they come up, given the facts and circumstances at the time. 

Given these intrinsic difficulties of issue voting, one could hope that in the interests of democracy, candidates and their staffs, television producers, editors, reporters, and internet web pages—who together now dominate campaigns—would try to help the voters understand the issues. But the way presidential campaigns are run and the way they are covered by the mass media, especially television—personality at the expense of issues—all but prevents the possibility of policy-oriented, mandate-giving elections.

Elections as Evaluations of Candidate Personalities

Although not much interested in the specifics of issues, voters are greatly interested in the personality characteristics and style of the candidates—their apparent sincerity, warmth, intelligence, commitment, speaking ability, family life, war record, sex life, ethnic background, polish, glamour, charisma, and general likability. Television provides most people with the opportunity to view presidential and Senate candidates, and to develop impressions about their personalities seemingly at first hand.  Television thus has greatly increased the weight that personality characteristics—both real ones and those manufactured in commercials by the ad agencies and by the candidates' handlers—have in shaping the vote.

Some aspects of the candidate's personality—competence, honesty, commitment to the Constitution and the rule of law, keeping his or her word, etc.—are relevant for a policy-oriented vote.  Such characteristics bear on whether that candidate will have the ability or the commitment to implement the particular policy point of view that he or she espouses.  But even these qualities must be evaluated in conjunction with policy stands, and often they are not. In short, voting for the “best” man or the “best” woman begs the question of best for what? Elections based primarily on these surface personality characteristics are akin to beauty and popularity contests and provide no mandate from the people on how the winners should govern. The winners can adopt any policies they want without the slightest twinge of guilt for having betrayed the voters.

Candidates overstress character issues and especially stress attacking their opponents' character in negative attack campaigns—”raising the opponent's negatives.” They believe that if they discuss substantive solutions to difficult problems, the voters will not like to hear bad news about the future and will reject the candidate who brings it to them. And because elective politicians place the supreme value on winning, they are unwilling to take any risks in order to educate the voters on the tough issues and burdens that must be faced.

A campaign that focuses on personality and competence is especially prone not to discuss issues in a way that would educate, rather than confuse the issues. Television, a medium with an inherited show business ethic, seems governed by a kind of Gresham's Law in its coverage of news: the trivial, because it is often pictorially interesting, drives out the serious, because it is frequently pictorially dull.

There seems to have developed almost a complete split between campaigning and governing in American presidential politics. During campaigns the opposing candidates ignore important issues, exaggerate or blur differences between their positions depending on the tactical situation, and use all the techniques of advertising to sell themselves and demean their opponents. It looks like only when the election is over, does the winning presidential candidate start thinking about what he must actually do to govern a country with problems that he essentially said in the campaign were nonexistent.

Governance in our system of separation of powers and a party-organized Congress requires skills at forging agreements and building governing coalitions. Presidential candidates, whose campaigning skills in ignoring or fudging over issues and in raising their opponent's negatives made them most successful on the campaign trail, may find those skills useless or even counterproductive once in office. Surely such campaigning skills are no evidence of having the best skills for governing.        

Media Manipulation

Can voters resist manipulation to vote against their best interests in candidates and policies when their only information comes through mass media and television spots and photo opportunities and false rumors? Don't voters lose their sense of efficacy and ability to influence officials when the choices presented sound so similar, all in favor of broad general values without the details of how to achieve them? My answer would be no to the first question, and yes to the second.

And trend is worsening, with the tools of manipulation increasing all the time, and cable television repeating manipulating coverage 24 hours a day. Candidates use systematic polling and focus groups to find out what the voters want to hear. The candidates don't then try to lead public opinion but pander to it. There is now a relatively new campaign expert—the spinner—who is loosed on media reporters to manipulate the media's perceptions of what is happening so that the media can report as straight, neutral news, a version favorable to their candidate. The moral code of most candidates and their handlers permits the systematic confusing of the voters in order to get their votes, even if the outcome is having voters manipulated into voting against the things that are good for them and for things that will harm them.

There were speech teachers called Sophists who made their living in fifth and fourth century Athens, at least as Plato reports it, by teaching politicians how to make the better argument appear the worse and the worse argument appear the better. How envious these ancient Sophists would be of their modern equivalents, who have the same morals but terrific new toys like computer graphics, television spots, teleprompters, emails and web pages, and tracking polls.

Voters are not stupid. Elective politicians say they worry about the increase in public cynicism and the decline in voter turnout—in 1996 the voter turnout of 54.2 percent for the presidential election was the lowest since 1924.[8]   But that cynicism and low turnout are probably the direct result of the voters realizing that they are being manipulated by their would-be rulers rather than allowed to exercise their sovereign privilege of choosing in elections how they want the country to be governed.

Elections as Registering Party Affiliations

The voters who are most resistant to campaign manipulation are those roughly two-thirds that voting studies show have persistent, long-term, emotional attachment to the Democratic or Republican party. Some of this attachment is reflected in being registered as Democrats or Republicans on the voting lists.  These party attachments provide a motivating force of varying intensity to vote for candidates of the party with which the voter identifies, independent of the candidate's personality characteristics or even of their specific views on the issues. The strongest party identifiers don't even have to follow the campaign, because they always vote for their party's candidates.

Party voting—or blind party voting as its detractors refer to it—has been under attack by so-called reformers at least since the turn of the century. But party voting need not be ineffective in promoting a voter's policy ends on the leading issues.  Suppose the parties had clear, cohesive, and differentiated long-term sets of policy and programmatic principles that all of its candidates shared. Suppose the voters acquired their party identification through conscious choice based on an evaluation of the respective party principles. Then voting automatically for or against candidates because of party labels would be an economical, issue-relevant, mental shortcut.  That shortcut would reduce the need to consider specifics and to make new judgments at every election and for every candidate, just as a consumer buys products with a particular brand name.

In actual fact, not all candidates bearing a party label are guaranteed to share any particular policy position, since capturing a party's nomination in a direct primary or a nominating convention does not require the passing of any test on issues or ideology.  Also, the images of the parties that most voters have — more willingness to use government action to solve social problems and more concern for the disadvantaged on the part of the Democrats and more resistance to government regulation and more concern for the welfare of the better-off on the part of the Republicans — are based primarily on the performance of past presidents and the rhetoric of presidential nominees. Congressional candidates running with either party label may have completely different policy orientations than their party label implies.

It is important to understand that the largest “party” in presidential elections—clearly larger than the Republican and according to many polls slightly larger than the Democratic—consists of the voters who self-identify as independents.  Those voters make electoral choices without feeling any emotional pulls of party loyalty to anchor them and thus without regard to the presidential or congressional nominee's party label. These independent voters and the party identifiers who have only a marginal, rather than a strong, attachment to their party are most susceptible to manipulation on personality characteristics or issues. Yet it is precisely these independents and weak party identifiers who decide presidential elections. This is because the strong Democratic or Republican voters are simply too few in presidential elections to constitute a majority of the electorate.

Do Elections Serve Any Policy Purpose?

Because our top officials are chosen in competitive, free elections, what we have in our national government certainly is a democracy. But it is a democracy of a special kind and most emphatically not a direct, majority-rule democracy with respect to policy.  The chief role of voters is not to decide policy in a kind of continuing referendum, but to elect officials who make policy. And the top official elected—the president—may be chosen because of personality characteristics such as his likability and warmth relative to his opponent, rather than on the basis of his policy stances and indeed even despite policy stances that the voters disliked, as in the case most recently of Ronald Reagan. More and more, the only way voters register policy preferences in presidential elections is by punishing for some obvious disaster the presidential candidate of the party whose president is in power. With respect to future performance, the voters seem to make some kind of summary evaluation—perhaps only a guess— of which candidate is more likely to improve bad conditions and/or maintain good conditions, particularly economic ones, in the short run. If things seem to be going well, why should voters change party in the presidency or persons in Congress?

By choosing the president, the voters do have another impact on policy, though not in a foreseen way. The election of one candidate instead of the other means the appointment of one rather than another set of high-level presidential appointees (some needing but almost always receiving senatorial confirmation): departmental cabinet and subcabinet heads; White House staff members including a chief of staff and the national security adviser; a council of economic advisers; ambassadors; federal reserve board members and the chairman; and district, court of appeals, and Supreme Court judges. And because there is sufficient discretion possible in how these top executive branch officials and members of the judiciary make executive and judicial decisions, significant policy differences may be implemented by them even without Congress changing legislation. But again, the new president-elect's appointments come as pleasant or unpleasant surprises to the voters and were not information available to help the voter make a decision before election day.

Occasionally, there can take place what the political scientist V. O. Key was first to call a “critical election”[9] that does produce a widely understood policy mandate. An incumbent president or a candidate running on the sitting president's record, who scores a tremendous victory, can claim a general vote of confidence on the policies he has been espousing (Roosevelt in 1936 and Reagan in 1984). Or a resounding defeat of an incumbent can indicate a vote of massive lack of confidence and a need to change course (Hoover in 1932 and Carter in 1980). But the policy mandate of even this type of election has started to become confusing because the party of the winning presidential nominee does not always make large gains in Congress or worse, as in 1988 and 1996, the winning president's party didn’t gain control of either house of Congress.

 Elections, finally, do serve another important policy function even though it is not much discussed and, therefore, not much appreciated: Some policy departures aren't made or even attempted not because of a past mandate, but because of the anticipated reaction of the voters, the next election time around. If there were no elections, even imperfectly conducted as they are now even in the United States, the preferences of the citizenry could be largely disregarded because the public would have lost its chief sanction. That sanction is the ability of the voters to punish officials retrospectively, by turning the “ins” into “outs” at the next election, which in the United States is never more than two, four, or six years away.

Separation of Powers           

The Founding Fathers saw elections as essential protections but not as sufficient protections against oppressive rulers and at the extreme against tyranny.  Jefferson wrote in his “Notes on the State of Virginia” that if “all the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judiciary” were given to the legislative body, which Jefferson assumed would be elective:

It will be no alleviation, that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one.  One hundred and seventy-three despots would surely be as oppressive as one. . . An elective despotism was not the government we fought for.[10]   

          The Founding Fathers resorted therefore to “auxiliary precautions” (again their words) to prevent this kind of “elective despotism” or “tyranny.” In the new national government, they separated constitutionally—as a matter of supreme constitutional law not changeable by ordinary legislation passed by congressional majorities—governmental powers among the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary. This way they gave  “to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. . . .”  As Madison phrased it: 

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.  It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government.  But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?  If men were angels, no government would be necessary.  If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.  In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.  A dependence on the people [i.e., elections] is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.[11]

Party as Bridging Separation of Powers

Broadly speaking, for almost 150 years of history, the major fragmentation of authority between the president and Congress was bridged by officials of a single party having control of the White House and Congress. The presidential nomination of a major party virtually guaranteed a nominee with policy orientations shared by congressional majorities. The new president and a handful of majority party leaders from the House and the Senate could negotiate legislation that the Congress as a whole would pass.

Major actors in election campaigns used to be party organizations, and electoral victory was viewed as a party victory, not just a victory for an individual presidential nominee. In any event, until the 1930s, the federal government didn't do much in domestic affairs that directly affected the public.  The federal government today does do a multitude of things that affect us directly, like having programs for health, education, environment, poverty, unemployment, interest rates, as well as protecting us against foreign terrorism and aggression against allies. But the selection of officials is now very decentralized and they need not have a common point of view. There is no party organization either with formal authority or de facto powers to insure that the party's nomination is conferred on someone in the party's mainstream or even that the candidate has minimal qualifications for governing.  Presidential nominations get captured by self-selected, self-starting candidates with personal followings and money and television smarts.  The nomination is secured by winning a majority of delegates in state primaries and caucuses. The nominating convention is no longer a national meeting of state and local public and party officials who make independent decisions. It is simply a gathering of the delegates chosen in the primary season because they are pledged to a particular candidate plus a smattering of “superdelegates” from among government and party officials.  Thus far the superdelegates have been picked too late in the primary election season to affect who had a first-ballot majority at the convention.  The extreme case came in the 2000 nominating campaigns where the front runner in each party—Albert Gore and George Bush—had all the delegates they needed for the nomination by early spring.                                       

Presidential campaign strategy and tactics are completely controlled by the nominees. There are no party elders or peers with whom they must be cleared. The candidates' self-selected crowd of pollsters, television advisers, and personal aides call the shots, and call them exclusively in the interest of their particular campaign. Campaigns thus are not fought between parties on issues of public policy and governance, but rather between two individual entrepreneurs. They communicate with the voters not through party organs, but through the mass media in photo opportunities that the networks will report as straight news, in paid television commercials, and in highly-rehearsed presidential television debates. Meanwhile, would-be members of Congress wage their own media-oriented campaigns to win the party nomination in the direct primary of their district or state and then to win the general election.

The central point is that the president and members of Congress do not run as a team to become a putative new government. They run as individual entrepreneurs to hold their particular jobs. The members of Congress and the president of their party thus have little incentive to cooperate when in office. In any event since the end of World War II, divided party control between the executive and Congress has occurred in twenty-two out of the forty-two years between 1947 and 1989. In these years, as preparation for the next election campaign, presidents and leaders of the majority party in Congress had an incentive to make each other look bad, primarily in order to maximize their party's chances of winning the presidency or control of Congress at the next election. As James Sundquist has written:    

. . .If the president sends a proposal to Capitol Hill or takes a foreign policy stand, the opposition-controlled House or houses of Congress—unless they are overwhelmed by the president's popularity and standing in the country—simply must reject it. Otherwise they are saying the president is a wise and prudent leader. That would only strengthen him and his party for the next election, and how can the men and women of the congressional majority do that, when their whole object is to defeat him when the time arrives? By the same token, if the opposition party in control of Congress initiates a measure, the president has to veto it—or he is saying of his opponents that they are sound and statesmenlike, and so he is building them up for the next election.[12] 

It has become very difficult—even for political scientists who watch these things—to know whether it is the president and Congress or whether it is different party or cross-party coalitions within Congress, that are responsible for policy successes or failures. When things go wrong, the president blames Congress, and Congress blames the president. Within Congress the Republicans blame the Democrats and vice versa, and the conservative coalition blames the liberal coalition and vice versa. This makes it almost impossible for voters even retrospectively to reward or penalize officeholders for what they actually did in office.

The fragmentation of political power in the American democracy often leads to stalemates, and presidents sometimes try to break the stalemates by illegal and even unconstitutional means. If the president's measures are successful, the public excuses the means and bad precedents are set.[13]   Or else the measures fail and are exposed, and the presidency is further weakened vis-a-vis Congress even for the purpose of doing laudable things.

These last paragraphs are definitely not meant to be a brief against Congress and the separation of powers. The lifeguard measures they have produced over the past two decades in Watergate and Irangate are self-evident justification. But for many people who were born and grew up while President Franklin Roosevelt led the nation out of the Great Depression and to victory in World War II, the president could do no wrong. And the invention of nuclear weapons and the possibility of instant annihilation gave the president claims of authority that he had to make some decisions without the time for consultation. Also congressional opposition in the past was seen as selfish and parochial and not reflective of popular opinion nationally.

Congress in the past twenty years has, however, reformed itself. When congressional majorities resist the president now, it's not at all clear that they are the bad guys or gals and the president is the good guy.  Since the 1960s there’s no longer malapportionment in the House with rural areas greatly overrepresented in terms of their population and central cities and suburbs greatly underrepresented. There is no longer an inflexible seniority system for committee chairmanships, which gave disproportionate power to southern conservatives and allowed chairs to rule their committees with an iron hand. Now if committee chairs run their committees dictatorially or greatly out of tune with the sentiments of a majority of their party colleagues, there is precedent for seniority being set aside and the chairmanship being taken away at the next reorganization of Congress, two or fewer years hence. In short, Congress is now organized very democratically—indeed some think too democratically for the development of cohesive and coherent policies and programs and for focusing accountability.[14]   The upshot is that the voice of Congress can be deemed just as validly to be the voice of the people as can the voice of the president. But these very reforms have further aggravated the fixing of accountability.

Consequences of Fragmentation and Party Decline

 Members of Congress are not easily penalized by the voters for their policy decisions. Members of the House are insulated from all but the most serious crises and swings of popular opinion; about 95 percent of the incumbents who run for reelection win. Senators too, while not as highly insulated as representatives, can generate personal popularity that insulates against popular tides of discontent more than can the president.

The separation of powers combined with our current mode of elections gives us no mechanism through which the voters can deliver a mandate on the direction for the government overall, whether to continue “steady as you go” or to change course “a little to the left,” “a little to the right,” or a “lot” to the left or right. We have some 470 separate, personality-oriented, media-based elections taking place simultaneously in a presidential election year. This number of separately run elections defocuses attention and eclipses any discussion on where collectively, from the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, each party all together will try to take the nation.

Great Britain offers a clearly contrasting way to run a democratic government. Candidates for Parliament run as members of a team whose chief responsibility is to support the government's—which used to mean the Cabinet's, but now means more the prime minister's—program, without individual judgment on the merits. There is crystal clear accountability for good or bad governmental programs because there is never doubt as to who was in charge. But it also means that between elections—which can be as long as five years—the British really live under a “despotism,” admittedly an elective despotism, with almost no checks and balances within the government during its term and subject to no constitutional restrictions as supreme law.[15]

         Let me offer some questions for the reader to think about. The answers may reflect what aspects of our governmental system we value more and less. To have more accountability, would it be desirable to amend the Constitution so that a new president would have a working majority in both houses of Congress? One way is to allow the president and/or Congress to appoint enough additional, like-minded, at-large representatives and senators of the president's party. A better way to focus debate and accountability might be to require each party's presidential candidate, vice presidential candidate, candidate for the House, and candidate for the Senate (if one is running that year) to run as a slate so that the voter could not split his or her ticket for those four offices.

To put it more concretely, would it have been better if President Reagan had had enough like-minded members of Congress elected with him in 1980 to have gotten all of their policies through? To perform this thought experiment, we must obviously keep in mind that if Reagan really had the power to get all of his policies enacted, he might not have asked for some of the more drastic cutbacks of domestic programs that he did.  Also, even Republican members of Congress might have objected to what the president wanted and therefore denied him congressional majorities on all his proposals. Similar questions can be raised about Clinton’s reelection in 1996.

The Founders had no place in the Constitution for political parties. They counted on Congress, because it was independently chosen, to have the necessary “ambition” to counteract the president if he overreached. But now that we do have parties, would providing the president with automatic majorities of his party in Congress run the risk of an American elective dictatorship? It is relevant that unlike in Britain, we have constitutional limitations on what an administration even with a responsive Congress can do.  And all members of the House and one-third of the senators must run for election only two years after a presidential election, and at that time without a presidential candidate as part of the slate. Or is it the case that for the checks and balances between the executive and the Congress to work in today's Washington, what is required is not only separately elected officials in Congress but also majorities of the party other than that of the president's?[16]  Would a Republican-controlled Congress have investigated Republican President Richard Nixon's Watergate or Republican Ronald Reagan's Irangate or a Democratic-controlled Congress, Clinton’s scandals? The big dilemma here is how much protection against tyranny and against drastic, rapid changes in policy we should be willing to trade off, for a government that in policy outcomes is more reflective of a current presidential majority's votes.

The Founding Fathers gladly sacrificed government that could provide speedy, effective, cohesive, and internally consistent policies. They opted for one that had a maximum number of veto points and checks and balances and protections against tyranny by officials or tyranny by selfish majorities. These veto points and checks and balances also have prevented radical changes in policy from administration to administration. If we had a choice, would we still strike the balance the same way as the Founders?  Or might we choose a course that made it somewhat easier for majorities to impose a cohesive set of policies while still protecting against such a “concentrating [of powers] in the same hands,” as Jefferson thought would be “precisely the definition of despotic government”?

Limited Government and Judicial Review

         Over and above trying to protect us against oppression and tyranny by means of elections and of the separation of powers between the President and Congress, the Founders bequeathed us a government that was also constitutionally limited.  Certain kinds of individual activity and belief and certain procedures in dealing with accused defendants in criminal trials were so important, the Founders believed, that they had to be protected even against voting majorities working through elections and having the support of a particular president and majorities in a particular Congress.

The Constitution written by the Founders contained, as Hamilton put it, “certain specified exceptions to the legislative authority; such, for instance, as that it shall pass no bills of attainder, no ex-post-facto laws, and the like”[17]  and it also limited the suspension of habeas corpus. Further limitations were to be those protective of civil liberties and procedural due process in criminal trials that everyone agreed would be added to the Constitution as soon as the first Congress met to propose, and the states had the opportunity to ratify, the necessary amendments.  These now constitute the Bill of Rights.

But these limitations could be preserved, according to the Founders, “no other way than through the medium of courts of justice, whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void.  Without this, all the reservations of particular rights or privileges would amount to nothing.”[18] Justice Robert Jackson perhaps put the concept most eloquently when he spoke for the Supreme Court when it declared unconstitutional in 1943, in the middle of a world war, the requiring of schoolchildren to say the pledge of allegiance and salute the flag every morning. The West Virginia state government working through majority rule had decided these practices were reasonable to inculcate patriotism.

“The very purpose of a bill of rights,” thundered Justice Jackson:

  . . . was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.... If there is any fixed star in our Constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, in nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances that permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.[19] 

Constitutional safeguards of free speech, free press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion for those who become at odds with majority thinking and constitutional procedural due process in criminal trials for individuals accused of even the most heinous crimes should be perceived by anyone with a modicum of foresight as not being in the interest of liberals only, or of conservatives only, but in the interests of all.  This is because no one can know in advance when he or she will be in the minority in terms of party or ideological viewpoint or be accused of a crime and therefore need constitutional protections to escape unfair oppression of the weak by the strong.

But even more important, these constitutional limits on majorities are also essential for maintaining our political system as a democratic government. Constitutional limitations, beyond the reach of majorities to change, insure that losers in a particular election will be allowed to survive as the “outs.” And not only will the losers be allowed to just survive, but they will not be arrested or imprisoned and will be allowed to compete for office unhindered by the majority-supported “ins,” whom they will be trying to displace in the next election.

According to the brilliant turn-of-the-century journalist Henry Jones Ford, it was the “great unconscious achievement” of Jefferson to take advantage of these “open constitutional channels of political agitation.”  By channeling and organizing the forces of discontent with the Washington-Adams administrations into a political party, change “became possible without destruction.”[20]

 An even greater achievement, I would argue, was the noninterference with Jefferson's campaign by the Federalists and the acquiescent, peaceful, albeit ungracious, but still voluntary leaving of presidential power by John Adams when Jefferson won the 1800 election. (Adams chose not to stay in Washington for his successor’s inauguration and started the coach ride back home to Massachusetts the previous night.)  This, and the giving up of the control of Congress voluntarily by the Federalists to the victorious Jeffersonian-Republicans in 1801, established the precedent that fundamental change in personnel and policies—this one was surely a “critical election”— could be accomplished without the violence of a revolution or coup d'etat but by what became their functional equivalent—free elections protected by constitutional guarantees. The acid test of any new democracy thus is not whether it institutes elections of officials, it is whether when elected incumbent officials lose elections at the end of their terms, they give up power peacefully.

Clearly constitutional limits put a damper on the ability of a newly elected majority to enact its programs if they contain infringements of civil liberties and procedural due process as most recently defined by the Supreme Court. This doesn't mean, however, that majorities can be frustrated forever and that here is finally, the fatal dilemma in our democracy. It does mean that to prevail, those majorities need to be extraordinarily large—two-thirds in the House and Senate to propose constitutional amendments—and must be sustained long enough to secure separate ratification by additional majorities in three-fourths of the states. The Founding Fathers saw the conundrum, Hamilton writing that he trusted:

 . . . the friends of the Constitution [will never question] that fundamental principle of republican government, which admits the right of the people to alter or abolish the established Constitution, whenever they find it inconsistent with their happiness. [But] until the people have, by some solemn and authoritative act, annulled or changed the established form, it is binding. . . .[21] 

Had Hamilton lived long enough, he would also have explained that sustained majorities that continuously elect presidents with their overall constitutional point of view can count on those presidents appointing enough new justices to the Supreme Court who might redefine the views of the Court on the constitutionality of some burning issues. The voters who oppose constitutional freedom of choice on having abortions, prohibition of schoolchildren being required to recite the pledge of allegiance or say prayers, and due process in criminal trials that is highly protective of accused criminals have not been large enough to impose their definition of what is constitutionally permissible.

What Should We Try to Change?  

            The preceding discussion argues that the American democracy is certainly a democracy by virtue of the citizenry electing their rulers in free elections and the citizenry having some influence on policy, albeit indirectly and mostly retrospectively. It could, however, do better. What follows is my list of prescriptions, conceding immediately that some might be politically impossible to bring about in the short run, but arguing that they should nevertheless be thought about. 

·                 Through education, the behavior of candidates, and the way the media cover elections, we should strengthen party organization and party-line thinking.  It is important to change the frame of reference for presidential and congressional elections from what nominee is winning or losing as a sort of spectator sport, to what will be the nature of the government produced by voting in a certain way. As part of that new outlook, we should strengthen party cohesion, party joint position taking, and party voting—restoring, for example, the party lever on voting machines—so that it is rival would-be governments contending in elections, instead of almost a thousand individual entrepreneurs. And we, and especially we political scientists, should try to educate voters that party-line voting can be good because it leads to accountable governments. We should encourage the presidential nominees and the chairs or ranking minority members of the different standing committees of Congress to run as a team so that they have a stake in each other's success. This prescription requires no constitutional or legislative change; what it does require is that senior members of Congress be willing to run some electoral risk by being closely identified with their party's presidential nominee.

In order for voters to have more cues on the quality of the proposed government and of the judgment of the presidential nominee, presidential nominees should be induced to announce before election day the names of their proposed appointees for such key positions as secretary of state, defense, treasury, chief of the White House staff, etc.  A single nominee doing this would put great pressure on his opponent to do likewise.

We should change party rules still again to strengthen the role of senior public officials and of party officials in choosing the presidential nominee and reduce the proportion of delegates with no governmental experience who are chosen in primary elections just because they were pledged to a particular candidate. A corollary to this is to reduce the proportion of delegates chosen by primaries all together, by having fewer primaries and by having the so-called superdelegates chosen before the primary season is over and has already indicated who has a first-ballot convention majority. A more extreme step would be sharply to reduce the number of state primaries to what they were in 1968 as a means of choosing delegates to the national nominating conventions. We could then provide for a national challenge primary a short interval after the convention.  The primary would be held if any loser who had at least 20 or 30 percent of the delegates on the last ballot called for it to challenge the convention winner. The outcome of the primary would then be controlling.  Similar systems exist in Connecticut and New York for state-wide party nominations and prevent candidates with strong popular support from being denied nominations by small cliques in smoke-filled rooms.

Senior members of a party who hold national and state public and party offices should stop conceding to the presidential nominee such absolutely dictatorial power as he now exercises in directing his campaign. This should be especially so in choosing a vice-presidential running mate who, as we all can recite in our sleep by now, is “one heartbeat away from the presidency.”  A presidential nominee's success or failure will affect not only him.  It may also affect some members of Congress from close districts and states running for Congress, and in the extreme case of a disastrous presidential campaign, affect which party will control Congress. This would determine who will be the chairs rather than just ranking minority members of congressional committees.

A particular presidential campaign will also have a longer-term impact on what voters perceive the two parties to stand for. The presidential nominee uses the symbols of the party, in part because they automatically produce a base of electoral support from strong party identifiers. Other party leaders who will also want to use those symbols should have some say in how they are used.

How do we inculcate in voters the idea that they should want to use their vote instrumentally to influence policy, and to do so, they should vote for best party slate or for the best governing coalition and not just for best” or warmest or most likable individual as president? Even though a president by himself can do a lot—with his appointments and the veto—history shows that presidents cannot produce a continuous stream of positive achievements without the cooperation of a party majority in Congress.

In Britain, no one can vote for a particular person as prime minister per se. Only a resident of her or his constituency can vote for that person at all. Everywhere else in Britain, to have a particular person as Prime Minister, voters must choose their constituency's candidate as Conservative or Labor members of Parliament, with the hope that a majority of constituencies will elect Conservative of Labor  MPs who will then choose their favorite. With these rules of the game, there is no possibility of a prime minister being elected without majority support in Parliament and having, as is now common in the U.S., constant stalemates between the executive and legislative branches.

Do we dare experiment with the one slate for president, vice president, representative, and senator? Congress could legislate the single-slate ballot for what legally would be presidential and vice-presidential electors, representatives, and senators under its Article I Section 4 powers to “by law make or alter” regulation of the “times, places, and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives. . . .”  A single-slate election would give the strongest incentives for the presidential candidate and the congressional candidates of the same party to work as a team. No more would incumbent members of Congress pay only scant attention to the presidential campaign when continuation of their congressional careers would require that the candidate of their party carry their district or state. Also members of Congress would have strong incentive to find and encourage to run for the presidency the most competent and electable leaders of their party.  And if elected, members would work with them to produce important legislative accomplishments. Madisionian ambition, under these conditions, would stimulate cooperation and team playing, not individual entrepreneurship and careerism in Congress. 

·                 We must somehow reduce the current role of television and huge campaign contributions of money to pay for TV advertising in election campaigns and expand a different kind of role.  It should be simply unacceptable to all who believe in democratic governance, that literally only a handful of invisible and unanswerable network television news editors and producers have the power to determine what hundreds of millions of potential voters will see as the most relevant aspect of the election campaign for that day.  It should similarly be unacceptable in a system that purports “one man, one vote” and that “all men are created equal” to allow greatly increased influence for individuals and groups that can donate hundreds of thousands of soft money to campaigns. It’s hard to see how such huge contributions don’t operate, in effect, as legal bribes. Why can't we have major networks, as a condition of having licenses from the Federal Communications Commission, be required to contribute fifteen or thirty minutes a night to presidential candidates and other party spokespersons who will organize their own presentations of what issues are important and what their party's position on them is? Such presentations might be more interesting to the general public if the spokespersons were asked questions by panels of substantive experts and knowledgeable politicians of the other party. 

Television has great potential for educating the voters. The small minority of voters who watch the public television-sponsored Lehrer program every weekday night and some of the Sunday morning and the C-Span interview and talk shows probably now has better information than it ever had. And even the television debates, while far from perfect, do force candidates to expose themselves without prepared texts and teleprompters to questions, at least some of which they and their handlers hadn't predicted. But the majority of the voters get their information in ten-second bites from television’s so-called straight news coverage; for the good of this majority, we should not allow to continue a situation where if television network news doesn't cover an event, it simply hasn't happened. 

·                 We as voters should choose candidates with different value systems. Somehow—I don't know exactly how—we should encourage the public to support presidential nominees who show an obligation during the campaign not just to use strategies and tactics for maximizing their chances of winning, but who try realistically to educate the nation when it is not paying attention to the difficult problems that it will have to face. Such a commitment to being honest with the voters is also in the candidates' own self-interest.  If they are not honest, presidential nominees will have developed no support, and they will not be able to claim a mandate from the voters, for their solutions on difficult issues. Consider if Franklin Roosevelt had campaigned in 1936 on increasing the size of the Supreme Court to make it more sympathetic to New Deal legislation or if Lyndon Johnson in 1964 had campaigned on the issue of massively escalating the ground force commitment in Vietnam? If they had done that, perhaps they would still not have been able to generate enough public and congressional support to have made their policies stick. But given that these plans were left as only silent intentions, the public not only wasn't prepared for a sympathetic consideration of these radical or hard measures, but also felt tricked by not having had them discussed in advance.

Ronald Reagan was right in 1980 when he explicitly campaigned on reducing taxes and increasing military expenditures. When he won the presidency he claimed he had a popular mandate for such changes, and Congress during his first year in office gave him almost all of what he wanted. When the Republicans lost twenty-six seats in the 1982 House elections, it became clear the mandate for further sharp changes had been used up.  From then to 1989 when his term ended, there was pretty much a policy stalemate between the president and Congress.

In this context George Bush's  1988 “read-my-lips-no-new-taxes” pledge, though a great campaign ploy, was irresponsible at best. That ploy reduced his ability to deal with the budget deficit through increasing revenues without losing credibility, a loss of credibility that played a major role in his 1992 defeat to Bill Clinton. To generalize, presidential nominees should not make, especially as central parts of their campaign, seemingly ironclad promises that anyone with some contact with reality must know stand a high probability of being broken.

Voters must learn not to support candidates for national office and especially for the presidency, who run negative campaigns. Not only do negative campaigns try to manipulate voters by avoiding issues, but they also increase the public's cynicism about politicians and government in general and thus weaken support for our democratic political system as a whole.

Finally—and this is my most utopian prescription—we should convince candidates for the presidency and other offices that their supreme value should not be winning the election.  It should be to clarify the issues as best they can. John McCain and Bill Bradley, though not perfect, tried to follow this course in the 2000 primary campaigns. All candidates may of course be permitted to hope that majorities of the voters will find their positions on the issues better than those of their opponents. 

* * * *

         To sum up my argument, if presidential elections became more contests between rival executive-legislative governing coalitions, if major network television directed its coverage of elections more to educating than to entertaining its audience, and if voters would begin to reject candidates who refuses to tell them in some detail how they would confront the truly central issues facing the nation and also reject those who accepted huge campaign contributions—if these changes took place, the outcome of elections could be seen as great collective decisions not only on who would hold office but also in broad terms, on what the winners would do once they were elected.  True, this is more than the Founders thought the broad populace was capable of. But with the additional experience of 200 years, we may presume to differ with them on this point.