Why is democracy useful, if it is? By Publius
Why is democracy useful, if it is?
In 1992 the political scientist Francis Fukuyama published a provocative book entitled The End of History and the Last Man. Much celebrated at the time, it argued that Western Liberal Democracy might have achieved a permanent ascendancy over other political systems, auguring that the future might be… well… boring, but in a good way. Thirty years later, and with Russia’s armed forces bombarding Ukrainian cities as I write, it seems history may have continued after all.
In the intervening decades, much work has been done seeking to describe and classify the no-longer-so-ascendant ‘institutions’ of liberal democracy. Different authors have emphasised the rule of law, the separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary, private property rights, freedom of speech, freedom of contract, competition and last of all, democracy: the institution that provides for a national vote periodically on who should run the country.
What stands out from much of this work is that no-one seems to think democracy is the pre-eminently crucial liberal institution. A good argument in favour of this general view is that while enduring economic and political success appears to be highly correlated with liberal institutions, democracy on its own appears neither necessary nor sufficient.
Not necessary, because many vibrant countries achieved their success with many of these institutions but were not yet democracies at the time of their first enduringly great triumphs. For example, the United Kingdom achieved world domination without democracy in any sense we would now recognise, but was already equipped with most of the other liberal attributes.
Not sufficient, because many democracies lacking the other checks and balances have collapsed back into a less successful state very quickly. (A democracy put Hitler in power in Germany in 1932, for example). In general, the emphasis has been on the liberal bits rather than the democratic bit.
One doesn’t have to be a fascist or a communist to see the drawbacks of democracy. Every few years, a democracy decides whether to eject its current government and replace it. The decision is collectively taken by ordinary citizens, very few of whom are experts in anything to do with wise government. The result is instability in policy and in personnel: America can’t credibly commit to a consistent foreign policy more than two years ahead of time and fires its head of the coastguard nearly as often. What’s more, vast resources are wasted in the associated campaigns. (CNBC reckoned the last US Presidential election cost $14 billion, or just over 0.06% of US GDP. A few election cycles and pretty soon you’re talking real money.)
So why bother with democracy? Why not for example delegate all business of government to a large, open-from-below oligarchy whose wealth inclines them to involve themselves in government and whose interests incline them to pursue the common interest, as seems to have been the case in, the 18th century UK? Is democracy just another expensive, woke luxury?
I think the crucial benefit of democracy is that it enables nations to get rid of their incumbent government. If democracy can’t perform this one basic task, democracies underperform. (One thinks of 1970s and 1980s Italy when endless elections kept producing the same governments. The country stagnated, to put it mildly.)
A new study by Marx, Pons and Rollet supports my thinking. (Here’s a link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18dYZU3SCmzF9iDU8fp2qaKK4JMtPuDCx/view . Warning: It’s an academic paper.)
The authors do something very clever. It’s impossible to tell in general if getting rid of an incumbent government causes good things to happen more often. Maybe the better things caused the incumbent to fall or maybe some third factor both drove better times and the fall of the incumbent. Neither scenario would validate my view. What we’d really like to do is toss a coin and sometimes allow an incumbent to stay on (Heads) and sometimes replace them (Tails).
We can’t run experiments like that in the real world. But modern social science research has developed Ninja techniques for looking for such coin-tosses run by history itself. The authors focus in on elections that were really close, where the result truly was random in every important sense. Their results show, for every ejection of incumbents versus allowing them to stay on that were virtually random, that kicking out the incumbents is a good day’s work for a nation. Tails beats heads, for a nation’s economy but also on other measures such as the prevalence of corruption and the perception of corruption. The results are stronger for developing countries than developed countries, but they hold everywhere. Sometimes, you should just kick the bastards out, just for fun. It will help.
Why? We don’t know, but we can guess. A politician who knows they’re liable to be fired if they do badly or do wrong may just possibly behave better. Or maybe political agendas get tired and irrelevant much more quickly than incumbent politicians think they do (The navel-gazing woke discussions in the US before the Ukraine invasion look increasingly beside the point). Maybe politicians are inherently corrupt, and get worse with time in office, so they just need to be moved on regularly, like trains. No doubt we will learn more from studies like the one above. In the meantime, much as I loved P.J. O’Rourke, for once I disagree with him. Vote! It keeps the elite working for you.