Does 'Democracy' Mean that Outcomes Should Track Voter Preferences? Why Empirical Political Scientists Assume the Answer is Yes and Political Theorists Assume it's No

Abstract

Empirical political scientists who specialize in American politics - “Americanists” for short - very commonly regard as the hallmark or criterion of democracy that policy outcomes ought, at least most of the time, to track voter preferences. (This criterion goes by many names, e.g. democratic responsiveness, policy responsiveness, substantive democracy, policy congruence, and correspondence; this paper uses the last.) I speculate that they use this criterion out of normative diffidence. While they seek a measure of democratic quality that will add significance to the distortions or abuses of democracy that they document, they seek to avoid controversial value judgments. Correspondence seems to square the circle by being (Americanists think) uncontroversial among normative theorists and modest about value in assessing democracy by how well it reflects not the scholar’s preferences but those of ordinary citizens. In fact, the paper argues, correspondence is a ridiculous criterion - conclusively rejected by almost all normative theorists, for excellent reasons, as well as by all Americanists when they think about it clearly. Americanists who think they need such a criterion should reconsider: their stories often stand on their own, in fact stand more securely, without a dubious normative account; and if normative criteria are necessary, the comparativists’ method (multiple measures, and a weighting rule that is explicitly named and defended) is superior to correspondence. Theorists, on the other hand, should interrogate our own contempt for correspondence. Though we are right to reject it in its crude forms, we go too far when we stop studying mass democracy altogether (in favor of participatory or deliberative “mini-publics”) out of indifference towards the project of letting ordinary citizens control their government and get what they want and need from it. This neglect can reflect a culpable lack of sympathy for ordinary, relatively passive citizens and their private projects. We often practice a “civic snobbery” that rejects a mass democracy of ordinary citizens in favor of an aristocracy of activists. Theorists should find ways of caring about ordinary voters and their rough control over government without embracing correspondence. In particular, we might embrace the role of advisers to democratic princes, who counsel ordinary citizens on the ways in which their political goals may be frustrated by strategic complexity, collective action problems, and a level of diversity in citizen opinions that most citizens fail to appreciate. Instead of pretending that we know better than ordinary citizens how they should live their everyday lives, we should limit ourselves to being experts on politics.

Keywords: Democracy, political theory, empirical political science, correspondence, policy congruence, linkage, policy responsiveness, democratic responsiveness