Democracy Is Meaningless

All Men are Liars:
Is Democracy Meaningless?
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by Gerry Mackie
St. John's College
University of Oxford
Oxford OX1 3JP
United Kingdom gerry.mackie@sjc.ox.ac.uk April 18, 1997
Forthcoming in Jon Elster, ed.,
Deliberative Democracy
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I. Introdu ction. One current of thought within the rational choice approach to the study of politics asserts that democratic voting and democratic discussion are each, generally, inaccurate and meaningless.
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I will call an emphasis on these descriptive assertions against democracy "the
Rochester current," because its exemplar, the late William Riker, was long a professor of political science at the University of Rochester, and his work on social choice and democracy influenced many of his students and colleagues th ere.
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The Rochester current is heir to a tradition of skepticism against the possibility of democratic politics, most respectably expressed earlier in this century by the economists Pareto and Schumpeter.
In America the skeptical view of democracy is often accompanied by a family of arguments to the effect that "most public sector programs . . . are inappropriate, or are carried on at an inappropriate level, or are executed in an inappropriate manner."
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The normative recommendation that is supposed to follow from these descriptive assertions is that we are best protected from the absurdities of democracy by liberal institutions that, to the maximum extent feasible, shunt decisions from the incoherent democratic forum to the coherent economic market, an d that fragment political power so that ambitious elites circulate and contest in perpetual futility; in other words, that the U.S. Constitution, especially as it was interpreted before the New
Deal to prevent political interference in the economy, is one of the best of all possible political arrangements.
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The descriptive assertions against democracy and that normative recommendation are not necessarily linked, however. There are those who grant some credence to the descriptive assertions, yet would pres umably recommend institutions more social
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democratic than conservative in content.
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Others could plausibly argue that
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if voting and discussion are inaccurate and meaningless, then coercive paternalism is necessarily better than any liberalism for coherent ly shaping and satisfying people's needs.
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In his
Liberalism against Populism
, an interpretation of the results of social choice theory, Riker makes an apparently powerful case against the very intelligibility of majoritarian democracy.
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Because differen t voting systems yield different outcomes from the same profile of individual voters' preferences, he argues, democracy is inaccurate . For a simple example, consider that if a group of people is voting for one among three or more candidates for an office, then a voting system that on one ballot selected the candidate with a plurality (the most votes, but not necessarily a majority) might select a different candidate than a system that held a second ballot for a majority runoff between the two top vote
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gett ers from a first ballot.
Different methods of aggregating individuals' fixed choices may yield different group choices.
Next, Riker continues, given a fixed voting system, then democracy is meaningless
: the outcome of voting is manipulable, and it is n ot possible to distinguish manipulated from unmanipulated outcomes because of the unknowability of private intentions underlying public actions. The spirit of the argument is best conveyed by presenting Condorcet's paradox of voting.
Suppose that there a re three persons named
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,
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, and
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, deciding by majority vote among three alternatives a , b , and c, and that individual preference orders are equivalent to what follows.
Table 1
Voters
Preferences
(left > right)
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a b c