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Over at EconLog Arnold Kling ponders the wonders of democracy.

2. In spite of the fact that Congressional approval ratings are down near single-digit levels, all of the current committee chairmen will be restored to power, and in fact they will be strengthened.

[...]

4. After the election, the new President will be viewed as having a “mandate” to enact policies (including policies that were never proposed during the campaign). Meanwhile, the vast majority of voters are expressing their identity, not their policy preferences.

These things, and the others Kling points to, are indeed problematic, but are they undermining the democratic system? My view is that they do not, especially given the viable options. Certainly democracy is not the protector of liberty we would like it to be, but it does work as a significant obstacle to tyranny. That seems to be all we can hope for, institutionally.

Democracy will not lead to policies reflecting the will of the people, because the precision of a vote every four years is nowhere near precise enough. What it does allow us is to put some constraints on the people in power. If they want to remain there, they have to avoid offending us so much that we oust them. However the system itself has a different problem in this regard, namely that it affects what the will of the people is (if such an aggregate term can be understood in a meaningful way). By making the decisions collective, and in particular by making the financing of policies collective, it becomes cheap for voting individuals to prefer policies that they would not prefer if they were carrying the full cost. This opens the door for “special interests”, with the most obvious ones being agriculture and those advocating protectionism.

So, while working fairly well there are things that we would benefit from improving upon. How those improvements should look, however, is far from obvious — especially since they have to be adapted through the very system we wish to improve.

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