Democracy and the Electoral College
This week, I’ve been thinking about how many features of the American political system are, or at least appear, “anti-democratic.” Admittedly, “democracy” is a loaded term outside the political science academy, and often a political football. Even among academics, there are many variations of the definition.
If I were to attempt to define it myself, it would be as a system of government in which:
The will of the majority is broadly respected and has a substantive impact on government decision-making
There are safeguards to protect the rights of citizens of that government,
There are well-defined procedural guardrails to ensure (1) and (2).
Many conservatives object to the idea of democracy, instead reminding us that the United States is a “constitutional republic”. But they define democracy as pure majoritarian rule as allegedly existed in Ancient Athens (it did not, but that is its own piece). Majority-rule is indeed a foundational principle for democracy, but pure majority rule is self-defeating. Democracy has many more components than this crude definition.
A majority could theoretically vote to enslave a minority, which concentrates power in one class of people and makes “majority rule” irrelevant. There is no way to truly define the majority preference if a significant portion of the population can’t even provide input. This creates an unstable situation where a large group of people ruled by the government have no stake in it.
To sustain itself, a democracy must impose limitations on majorities that prevent them from imposing their will freely. This can be in the form of procedural limitations on the government or defined rights and privileges of all citizens. A few countries leave these two things undefined and operate from precedent, such as the United Kingdom. The United States defines these explicitly in its written Constitution, which is the oldest and arguably most successful democratic constitution in the world.
Defining limitations for governments and rights of citizens is helpful but does little in practice. There need to be procedures in place to balance different power centers and to prevent one power center from overwhelming the others. In the United Kingdom, this takes the form of parliamentary elections that provide accountability for the government. The United States has a more diffuse system, with explicit checks and balances.
A country with just majority rule may seem democratic on the surface, but in practice is unsustainable. A country with nominal protections of rights but where citizens have no say is not democratic. Finally, a government with checks and balances but no protections for or input from citizens is not a democracy either. All three elements must be present.
This thought experiment on the definition of democracy was the product of an opening assignment in a graduate international relations seminar class I’m currently enrolled in. The seminar is focused on democratic transitions, or the process of how a nation changes from a non-democratic system for a more democratic one.
For those who (understandably) found better things to do than go to grad school, a seminar class is essentially a large reading and discussion group. We are assigned a long list of readings this week and must come to each class with a writeup based on engagement questions provided by the instructor. And then one of us leads the discussion on one of the readings and we are all expected to participate.
The first few classes involved considering this definition of democracy. At one point, we discussed anti-democratic features of democracies and how democracy is a sliding scale. In Iran, for instance, the people vote for the president, but their choices in the election are decided by a religious council with no outside input. The people have a voice, but it is only a choice between pre-selected outcomes.
I mentioned how the United States has a similar anti-democratic aspect with the electoral college. Though the electoral vote is now based on the popular vote result in each state, it was originally designed as an elected council who independently deliberately and made a choice for president. The people had a voice in selecting the electors, but the selection of the president was ultimately made for them.
The teaching assistant pushed back on this assessment of the electoral college. Consider, he asked, the other side; how did the design of the electoral college actually support “democracy”. There are essentially two answers:
It increases representation for parts of the country outside the major population centers, who otherwise would have little influence on the presidency.
It functions the same as electing representatives to pass laws instead of having citizens vote individually for each one. The electoral college is, in practice, a temporary congress that decides the presidency.
However, this is largely academic because the Electoral College operates very differently than originally intended. It is no longer an independent vote by independent electors, rather it is a procedural vote taken by constrained electors. Each state has a number of electors equal to its total representation in Congress, but these electors are bound to vote for the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote in their state.
Most states use a winner-take-all system, where the candidate who wins the popular vote in the state receives all its electoral votes. However, Maine and Nebraska allocate electoral votes proportionally. This system allows a candidate to win the presidency without the national popular vote, which has happened five times, including in the 2000 and 2016 elections.
Critics argue that the system is undemocratic, over-represents smaller states, and can result in millions of votes being effectively ignored. Proposals for reform include the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would allocate electoral votes to the national popular vote winner if enough states join. While the Electoral College continues to play a crucial role in the U.S. federal system, its future remains a subject of ongoing debate, with calls for more direct democratic representation gaining momentum.
The current system, though, is much more “democratic” in character than originally designed. Whether it is truly anti-democratic, or the embodiment of checks on majoritarian rule, is an ongoing debate that has occurred since the founding of this nation. The debate over the definition of “democracy” itself will likely carry on for much longer.