Great post. I've gotten into arguments with people who have not believed me when I stated that we did not live in a pure democracy. These are, of course, the same people who have a hard time going out once a year to vote for their representatives. Could you imagine if we had a more direct democracy?

As to your question, I'll have to think about that one. It's a big question. But you might be interested in my last post where I ask Congress to stop by the grocery store, and they stupidly use their own judgment.
MJ

I think the true power of CSPAN and real time polling data isn't their ability to allow voters to immediately affect the direction of government, but instead increasing the degree of transparency of that government. Representative government is a necessity. Bureaucracy and the civil service are a necessity. Governments do too much for too many for any one voter to comprehend it all. Government by referendum would be too prone to crowd mentality and too irregular. Representation moderates that crowd impulse.

But 24 hour media has made representatives far more accountable for their actions. This means that the new face of representation isn't a change in the role of representatives but rather a change in the level of public understanding of what's going on "under the hood" of a representative democracy.

I look at something like the stimulus bill (or as Jason Linkins dubbed it, Stimpy) and see that happening right now. 100 years ago, voters wouldn't have been able to scrutinize a pending bill unless they were a member of a small politically connected elite. Now, anyone can dig in and look for things of interest to them. This enables experts on the myriad number of things affected by that bill to give their opinion and they can do so instantaneously over the internet. This means that while no one voter can know everything, he or she can get informed on a new issue quickly and easily. Representative democracy isn't going anywhere, but it's going to be a lot more transparent.

And knowing what government is doing means we can resist any attempt at tyranny. I think we've seen that in the big exposes of the Bush administration. Guantanamo and Abu Gharaib showed that transparency is the best defense against tyranny. They also showed that representative government is still operating perfectly well even 250 years down the line.

see what bourke had to say, before he lost his seat in parliament.

read '1984', and learn what 'newspeak' is. defining what you have as democracy is a popular ploy, often used by dictators as well as oligarchs. actual democracy is seldom seen, currently only switzerland qualifies.

america is an (elective) oligarchy. not because democracy is impossible, or even difficult, but because the people who wrote the american constitution were determined that the nation would be run by men of property.

Government for Grownups. Wow. What a concept.

I can imagine an entire subgenre of appealing conspiracy theory posts where we're all fooled into believing we govern ourselves while marching to the drum of a cabal.

I'll do my best to contribute and to follow the S.S. threads...

“What is the role of the representative in American democracy?”

I think the question needs further clarification: are we addressing the supposed role or the actual role; I don’t think they’re the same.

Supposedly, the representatives are to investigate the needs and opinions of their constituents and then represent those in congress.

In actuality, that is not what happens. And that has never been clearer than over the past 28 years or so.

Regarding the concept of oligarchy to which al loomis refers, I think that version of government really came to fruition as a result of industrialization when government really began to reveal a strong bias in favor of “owners”.

Love it. I think I'll keep this up on my laptop while I listen to the Rs and Ds fight in some committee meetings today. I'll feel like the smartest person in the room.

BTW - the health bill just got very interesting. I got an email yesterday that PhRMA's coming to town for the fight!

Great post. I agree we don't have a true democracy especially when you consider the electoral college.

But, I have a burning question about the format. How did you get the indented block quote and the blue box?

Thanks, Saturn for enlightening us about our government.

Terrific post, and I'm thrilled that it's in a series. Although, no guacamole? That seems wrong. I think we need tequila too for this discussion.

I think it's funny that the press, for example, uses the word 'democracy' wildly but appears to have little understanding of what it means. I could be wrong, of course.

thanks for this. I look forward to the next part.

Great post! In my experience, there are two "governments," the one we see, such as the words in the Constitution and on television, and the invisible government, which takes place in private places regular people have no access to, such as executive dining rooms, cocktail parties, private golf courses, you get the idea. Then there is the "power" on public view as in "The Congress shall have the power to declare war," and the relationships in organizational charts. Inside the Beltway (and other power centers), one will quickly discern that direct access to the decision makers is more important than a person's location on a chart or in a document. Secretaries often have more influence on decision making than many realize. Too bad I can't rate this post five times. OS needs a Star rating system to separate the wheat from the chaff. cy

National representatives essentially have to take a sort of running-average of the public's basic direction, in a low-to-high order of Representative, Senator and President. We often see this in the rough and tumble of the House, the more staid Senate and the sometimes maddening above it all attitude taken by the President.

Also, these sets of officials have access to information, including strategic plans, that the lesser officials do not have access to. Perhaps more importantly, Presidents especially have personal relationships with world leaders and the consequences of a leader losing face if a deal is cast aside is massive. Most of the big picture information is not available to the average citizen and may not be released in their lifetime.

More than anything, however, is that our public servants are incredibly ambitious people who have clawed their way into the halls of power. Their most critical goal is to get reelected, or move into a more powerful position. These are sausage makers who give their constituents fed, but in no way do they want tours of the factory.

Regarding "governance" (however it's structured) as it pertains to a "free market," something I wrote recently in my "Tranche Warfare" post at bgladd.blogspot.com:
______

"Assuming you do not favor a might-makes-right / oligarchic / gated community / tribal warlord social structure, you have a choice:

1. proactive, coherent, commonsensical law and regulation, or;

2. reactive (and mostly problematic) post-hoc attempts to secure remediative justice via a court system.

I take it as a given that the difficult work of a free, self-regulating society is never done -- Eternal Vigilance being the ongoing price of liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We have much work to do.

One question we would do well to clarify in political consensus: What, indeed, is the proper ethical function of a "market"? Simply that of an end to itself, a bare-knuckles arena inexorably favoring the rapaciously fleet of mind in winner-take-all, zero sum game acquisitive fashion? Or, is it properly simply a means to the end of economic and social justice (however imperfectly and transiently defined) for all, to the extent practicable? I find it unreflectively naive in the extreme that so many self-described "law-and-order conservatives" reflexively rail against ordinary street crime and call for the most draconian punishments while in the next breath decrying all manner of commercial regulation. We have by now seen in the most glaring detail what mutual "enlightened self-interest" has gotten us in the past decade's overwhelmingly unregulated financial markets. Envision the likely upshot of similarly deregulated food, pharmaceutical, transportation, and product safety. Can you really argue with a straight face that the mere threat of post hoc judicial sanction will suffice to rein in negligence and outright venal criminality?

The very notion is absurd a priori."

This is great, Saturn. Wonderful of you to do this. I can't believe how many people in this country don't seem to understand even the basics of how our gov't works, what principles the US was founded on, etc. -- and there are many that are fuzzy to me since it's been decades since I studied them in school and who paid attention back then anyway? It would be great if there was more public education of all adults on these matters. Good on you for taking this on!

Excellent suggestion for a topic.

The U.S. is a representative democracy based on the model of a republic, which is also an important aspect of the way the constitution organizes government.

What is the role of the representative in American democracy?

1.Should Representatives, Senators, and the President be more concerned with the real-time opinions of the public they represent?

NO. e.g., see Madison & Jefferson et al, keyword/phrase "factitious majorities." Moreover (and relatedly), it's "American Government," not "American Idol."

2. or are they empowered by that same public to exercise their judgment?

A qualified YES. "Qualified" in the sense that their cardinal contextual judgmental obligation is to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution" (however admittedly difficult the task).

We hire others for the lesser tasks.

"""What is the role of the representative in American democracy? Should Representatives, Senators, and the President be more concerned with the real-time opinions of the public they represent, or are they empowered by that same public to exercise their judgment?"""


I can try with the second part of the question, but the first part? I'd have to study for a year! I have a bad habit of going beyond the basic job description and would get very bogged down.

My student report answer is both, but never with an expectation that constituent opinion overrides responsibility to the general good.

Given the tools that exist these days which include very sophisticated and current polling mechanisms and internet contact, the representative can be easily informed about the general, broad opinions of constituents.

For the constituent: These days, the representative's voting record and conduct are readily available in the daily local news, or at any number of websites. The ability to become informed about an issue (except for stinkin' economics and classified issues) is amazing.

As a result: Yes, in part, the representative should know the broad and general opinion of his or her constituents and let them be one of the guides in exercising judgment, but never the sole, constant, overriding guide.

(The recent polarization of Congress makes me wonder if party affiliation and obedience to the dictates of political party and lobbyist operatives may not be institutionalized as an external, overwhelming, and corrupting influence on issues of judgment and responsibility. )

The representative has enormous power to exercise independent judgment, in some cases with no oversight by the people. An example of enormous power that can't be overseen by the people: classified security issues. We just aren't going to get the factoids necessary to judge performance in those situations. Ditto for stinkin' economics. We just can't get a handle on the complexities of that mess.

In summary: The representative holds an enormous and powerful public trust that his or her independent exercises of judgment will be correct, honorable, and in the best interests of their constituents and the nation, ahead of any personal, political, financial, foreign, or other interests. (If I missed anything, please let me know).

Whew. Do we get grades? Chocolate?

Excellent. I wish my senior government teacher in high school could have been this concise.

Ok, I've got today's vocabulary down. Ready now for the big questions.

"What is the role of the representative in American democracy?"

IMHO: I believe that in a true democracy, the small "r" representatives have a duty to represent the majority of their constituents. If they have 60% for or against an issue in their region, and let's use the mayor of a city of 100,000, that would mean they have a vast majority, 60,000 people for or against a hypothetical issue. The must, again IMHO, listen to the majority.
If they don't, they are not acting as a "representative", by the truest sense. That would be what one would call bi-partisan politics. It barely (if at all) exists anymore.

Representatives have to, to an extent, be reflective of their constituent's opinions or lose their position. That extent is too often defined by the inattention of the voters, or a combination of that and being uninformed/misinformed.
At best our legislators can only express the will of their winning coalitions, but not the general will, that only being expressed by a majority of all Americans. The only time we are assured of the general will is when we elect a president.
Greg Thomas makes a point about how true the word "representative" can be if the will of those who vote isn't followed. Rousseau, one of those philosophers our Founders were reading, took that point even further, saying:

"Sovereignty, for the same reason as makes it inalienable, cannot be represented; it lies essentially in the general will, and will does not admit of representation: it is either the same, or other; there is no intermediate possibility. The deputies of the people, therefore, are not and cannot be its representatives: they are merely its stewards, and can carry through no definitive acts. Every law the people has not ratified in person is null and void — is, in fact, not a law."
Interesting, but is it practical? Could all vote on every law? That is technically possible. Should we? There is that idea that the legislative process and representative democracy avoids ill advised laws passed in the passion of a moment.
Rousseau finishes his thought with this:
"The people of England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing. The use it makes of the short moments of liberty it enjoys shows indeed that it deserves to lose them."

I'd at least take this as strong advice to pay attention to what your representatives do in your name.

Saturn - I'm terribly late getting here. Read this earlier today, while mobile and couldn't rate or comment. Now rated!

Great way to start off the series. My personal thorn in the side is the widely assumed notion that democracy necessarily requires capitalism, as though all the European social democracies are fraudulent. Some of the comments have touched on that, but I'm still formulating ideas around that for a post to add to your series.

Lisa

Hey, all, I'm catching up on reading the thorough and thoughtful replies, which come at this from many different angles. In fact, I'll probably end up doing a post that serves as a reply, but I wanted to say I've read everything and wow, appreciate your thoughtful responses. (And Joan K. -- everything in formatting I owe to Kent Pitman's fantastic CSS Tutorial. I just changed the color from "gray" to "lavender").

I'm interested, for those like Greg who lean toward the follow-the-majority response: can you think of any situation where this isn't true? Also, does this qualify for presidents as well as individual representatives?

Zuma, I wish I had chocolates to distribute! Or guacamole. But not together, because that'd be terrible.

Thanks for the thoughts so far, folks!

Saturn,

“…for those like Greg who lean toward the follow-the-majority response: can you think of any situation where this isn't true?”

Without getting into specifics, keeping in a more general approach to your question, an instance where the majority view is un-Constitutional would be an example; for example, passing laws based on religious beliefs.

There are probably places where a majority exists that would "legislate religious beliefs" if allowed to do so.

As a political science teacher, thank you for having this discussion. Great job. Rated. A few thoughts for your consideration; as a teacher, I apologize if I go long, but this is for you to use.
The Consitution was established so that we live in a Republic, not a Democracy. That is very clear and very fundamental. The Constitution was written per Charles Beard to protect property, although he carried that too far, like al Marxists, and in particular in response to the will of the Many/People as exercised in Shay's rebellion in abridging private property rights.
This distinction between Democracy and Republic goes far beyond the question of voting versus representation in character. It also goes beyond the related question of every law being voted on by the People, henceforward referred to as the Demos and the Many.
The Constitution clearly envisions the reality of a power elite: the Few. The power elite I refer to as the Few and/or the Oligarchy in terms of Aristotle's regime typology, the One, the Few the Many, as to who rules.
The people who wrote the Constitution looked at the experience of the direct democracy of Athens, and found it to be a nightmare of instability, a hint of the Condorcet Paradox that majority rule is intrinsically unstable, and wanted brakes put on the will of the Demos by having non directly elected Presidents, Senators and most especially judges.
Only the House was to be directly elected by the Demos.
Madison, Adams and Hamilton thought the Demos untrustworthy fundamentally beyond a limited check on the Few, although Jefferson and Paine disagreed on this point with them from the get go, which has actually been a core tension of American history and politics ever since the Revolution, as to the question of how much of a Revolution we were to have.
In other words, the Founders wanted government mainly by the Few, an oligarchy, not the Many, the Demos, and hence a Republic of limited government under law as in England, but not what they would come to later see as a Democracy as was intitially generated in France, which they correctly predicted when it occurred would end in a tryant like Napoleon: the Rule of the One, a form of government that they above all wished to avoid.
As to their reasoning about the Few, Civilization always generates an Oligarchy, the rule of the Few, to a Point, because of the division of labor intrinsic in Civilization, in which the Few allocate resources, and the Many are allocated thereby, the Few create ideas, the Many consume them, the Few mak, enforce and judge the laws, and the Many obey them absent civil war.
That is true everywhere. There are layers within the Oligarchy to be sure, decreasing subsets if you will, but the key feature viz Banks and Austen Postive Political Theory is that the definition of the Few is that subset of society that under the cosntitutional order, i.e. absent outright violence, have an effective veto on some ranges of choices, like abolishing say private property especially, see Madison Fed. 10 for the problems of Republics and class conflict well before Marx.
Where the Founding Fathers may have been wrong, I have concluded, and Thucydides, no fan of Democracy, came to this conclusion at the end of his life, is that managing the Oligarchy that is inevitable, see Pareto, Mosca and Michels and other elite theorists on this point, is actually not trivial, and is actually the real Problem of Government, the latter to be defined in a moment, because unless you can force turnover among the oligarchic element, the Few won't give up power usually, often rule in their own narrow interests, and then in terms of Pentagon and military strategist John Boyd's Theory of Revolution (his article Destruction and Creation and especially his slide show are incredible, Lenin said the same thing What is to be Done) in which basically, like right now, the Oligarchy has been super selfish and is asking to get offed in a Revolution.
This is the case all around the world now, and the Few have a bad habit historically speaking of pitting each one of their Many's against one another, like "mad at me, go get that guy," and that while it is certainly useful to think in terms of whether or not the Few should lead or follow, and I say they always lead on some things especially foreign affairs they always lead and probably on everything else too, another point of discussion you might like to consider is how to force turnover in elites at a pace that avoids society running down by the Second Law of Thermodynamics a la Boyd, and then having to have economic collapse, and world and civil war to get what needs to be done, done, see Lenin to a point on that one, although I would just prefer to use lotteries and space colonization to get rid of the Few that needs to go instead of killing them all, and especially the rest of the Many with them.
The other thing is that governments, over which by definiton the Few wield their control can per Max Weber be defined in a very general sense as entities that have a monopoly or near monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a given territory and/or identity (feudalism). The existence of multiple such instuments of legitmated (you know cannot legitimately hit the traffic cop, even if he is asking for it) violence generating entities generates the Hobbesian/Realist Theory of international politics in which violence, i.e. war is the ultimate dispute resolution mechanism as opposed to the domestic legal system, and I think that is actually another of the Grave Defects of the Constitution is that it is too ambiguous on the nature of who controls the use of force, the One (President) who could become a tryant, especially after a nuclear war, or the Few (the Senate), how do you control the use of force by the Few at the expense of the Many, and how do you make sure that the existence of rivals, like Russia and China, and Frenemies, does not make the existence of the Cosntitution a moot point in a Great Power War. Thank you, and sorry to be so long.

Hear hear, Saturn.

The role of elected representatives in a constitutional, representative democracy is to exercise their judgment--THEIR judgment--on behalf of their constituents. See Edmund S. Morgan's bio "Benjamin Franklin" (Yale U. Press, 2002) about Franklin's view of "opinion" (i.e. public opinion, in its all its fleeting, reactive, ephemeral forms) in any governmental regime. Even absolute monarchs disregard public opinion at their peril; it is the duty of elected representatives in a democracy to keep informed of all strains of public opinion while abdicating to it none of their own responsibility for decision making. So representative governing is a balancing act involving the public will and the representative's own interpretation and discernment. Checks and balances are there because this never works out perfectly in practice.

This is why the ballot initiatives that have proliferated at the state level wreak such havoc with our government at all levels: they represent an abdication of the legislative function of our representatives, who love punting unpopular, illegal, or unworkable proposals over to the ballot box, where the lobbyocracy and PACs can effectively do the legislating.

Daniel Ellsberg was interviewed by Salon a few years ago and mentioned how bogus the "character issue" is as regards politicians. The Founding 'Rents, Ellsberg pointed out, ASSUMED human corruptibility and imperfection when they built the elegant Enlightenment Clockwork that we know as the U.S. Constitution. The modern preoccupation with electing those with the squeaky-cleanest character credentials distracts us from servicing the machinery that is supposed to keep the crooks we elect as honest as possible.

As to that Clockwork, right about now I'd say that our Federal and state machinery is overdue for its 225-year tune up and oil change. We're supposed to be the mechanics, and there are so darned few of us who even know how to use a wrench. The Constitution undeniably needs some updating (if the 2000 election didn't make us re-think the Electoral College, nothing will), but the current American populace is too damned biddable to do the job. The solution is education, education, education.

I am interested in a little known or discussed angle to free speech, what ever that means. We all know or think we know that we can say whatever we want to, if we aren't afraid of the consequences. But what about any affirmative responsibility, if any, of others to transmit our speech? Is a newspaper required to publish our words, a radio station to broadcast them, a blog site like OS to include every word every member chooses to write? I don't believe there is such a responsibility, but I could be mistaken. Thanks. cy

...and then I had an unexpected day off from the Internet.

Great question, Cy. I will include it in the growing list of great questions.

Don, never apologize for reply length. You have great theoretical points and clearly a background in them. I'm interested in the tensions that you see continuing between Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian concepts of American government (Adams -- his strength was in composition and political pull during the construction of the Constitution, but I don't think he's had much lasting impact on theory of government, and Madison eventually moved staunchly into the Jeffersonian Democrat-Republican camp, right?). Federalism versus Republicanism was certainly tense for a while, and maybe still has some liveliness in the judiciary from time to time, but it seems like most of those major tensions, at least as far as having to do with the dissolution of government, were worked out with the Jefferson reconstruction of the early 1800s. I'm a little rusty on this, though -- and am too out of practice on my theoretical models to engage with most of your points, I will admit.

Hi, Saturn. I enjoyed the analysis as usual, and the history, since my knowledge of history is quite spotty and is forever missing important things.

I don't really disagree with anything you say, but can you elaborate on why you choose to address the representational democracy issue in the same post as talking about rights? The two seem unrelated to me. Rights are about making sure the individual cannot be overrun by the tyranny of whichever kind of majority (direct or indirect) might seek to overrun it. Am I missing some additional message about the relation of these two things, or were you just doubling up on things you wanted to address in a single post?

Hmm, I'm not sure if this will answer your question exactly, Kent, but I'll try. I agree that in general discussions of any form of government or in a greater philosophical discussion of rights, the two would be kept separate when the focus is on definition of meaning. But in American Democracy, which is my project and broadest limit, the form of our government is intertwined with how individuals receive rights -- and the function of government is largely concerned with individual and collective rights, or individual versus collective rights.

I think we have the constitution we have because the founders focused on the balance of individual versus state rights; and it's the constitution we have that defines us as a constitutional (liberal) democracy under the representative umbrella. So the two become part of the same for me.

Saturn, Kent,

Kent asks of Saturn, “why you choose to address the representational democracy issue in the same post as talking about rights?”

I thought the two went together in this post because of the title:
“What We Talk About When We Talk About American Democracy”

People, in my experience, often confuse “democracy” with rights and freedom.