Knowledge And Decisions

The question here is not whether voters have a right to choose whatever they want. Voters can only choose process characteristics and hope for results. Consumers buy results and leave the process to those with specialized knowledge of such things. There is no argument here for denying voters their democratic choices. The point is merely to claim that the terms of the choice are readily misstated politically. The prevalence of inflation among the most diverse kinds of governments and across thousands of years of history, suggest that no small part of the political art consists in misstating options and in trying to give the appearance of simultaneously satisfying competing claims when they cannot be satisfied in reality.

A more extreme version of the democratic fallacy goes beyond the idea that a majority can or should have whatever it votes for, to claim the same right for particular minority subsets of the population. It is regarded as a “failure” of a democratic system — or as showing that the system is not “really” democratic — when determined, conscientious people cannot get what they want through legitimate channels. Justifications for law breaking (extending in principle all the way to terrorism) by frustrated insurgents are based on this premise. In this version of the democratic fallacy, the ignoring of inherent constraints within which all decision-making processes function is simply extended to ignoring all other people’s desires as an obvious (and valid) reason why a particular subset’s desires were not achieved.

Sometimes the subset is presumed to know the majority’s “real” interests better than the majority itself, and so is acting democratically in some “larger” sense. This confuses the characteristics of a hoped-for result with the characteristics of a decision-making process. Numerous subsets’ hoped-for results are preferable to the majority’s perception of things, in the view of those subsets. Democracy is simply one decision-making process for resolving such conflicts among disparate perceptions. To resolve the conflicts by other processes — including violence — is to trade off democracy for something else. To conceal that trade-off by calling that something else “democracy” too is to ignore the fact that virtually all political systems or movements are ostensibly for the benefit of the people. The hoped for results of kings, emperors, military juntas, and various dictators would thus all have to be called “democratic” in some “larger” sense.

Like other trade-offs, the trade-offs involving democracy are frequently denied or misstated by including other things in a wider ranging and more vague definition of democracy. “Participatory” democracy has arisen in this way, as another concept defined by hoped for results rather than by characteristics of the process itself. In principle, participatory democracy is distinguished from, and complementary with, representative democracy. In a representative democracy when the voters choose surrogates who actually make the decisions, the surrogates may either be or become part of a small set of people with interests and perspectives different from those of the public at large. The theory behind “participatory” democracy is that more decisions should be made by the public itself directly rather than through representatives. To this end, numerous local boards, commissions, councils, or advisory participants of one sort or another are to have “input” into the decision-making process. The implicit assumption of the theory is that there will be not merely more numerous decision makers but more representative ones. But, turning from hopes to institutional mechanics, there is usually nothing to lead institutionally toward that result, and much to lead in the opposite direction. Those individuals who have the leisure, the education, and the inclination to “participate” may be very unrepresentative of the public. In practice, participatory democracy means that broadly elected representatives are to share power with self-selected representatives of narrow vocal constituencies. From the standpoint of the institutional transmission and authentication of knowledge, it means that instead of having insiders judge processes and outsiders judge results, some outsiders are to judge and change processes on the basis of their part-time experience on the inside and their unrepresentative interests on the outside. It is essentially an incremental trade-off of the public’s right to decide by elected representatives for a self-selected constituencies’ opportunity to be insiders.

Whatever the substantive merits or demerits of particular trade-offs involving freedom, force, or participation, the crucial point is to see the trade-offs as trade-offs, rather than as they are sometimes depicted, as simply “more” freedom or democracy as conveniently redefined.

RIGHTS