Representation

Today's post will be a little different. It isn't motivated by a specific policy issue or current event. Instead I would like to examine a piece of common political rhetoric. Even more than in most election years, 2016 was overflowing with rhetoic about "the people," their "will," and "the national interest." Returning power to the people from the shadowy elite was a running campaign theme on both sides. Implicit in that theme is that the government is no longer representative, in some sense, of the governed. But what do we really mean when we say that?

The immediately obvious way to answer that is to say that the government is not making policy in the national interest or according to the will of the public (these are not necessarily equivalent, but nevermind that for now). But how can we measure or understand what those admirable phrases mean? Is the general interest simply the sum of individual interests, or does it have a unique character? How are we to decide between policies that directly hurt some people and benefit others, as essentially every policy must? How do we know what public opinion is about a specific policy, when branding and question formulation can change poll results so reliably?

I could, and many have, dispose of reams of paper and decades of effort trying determine a method of defining the general interest. Personally, I have concluded that there can be no such measure that does not obscure more than it illuminates. The "general interest," unless it is accompanied by a very specific ethical system to decide among competing interests - and which like all ethical systems is subject to vigorous debate - is meaningless. I think it is both simpler and more accurate to say that there are competing interests in society and leave it at that.

That answer, though, doesn't seem to be much of an answer at all. A more interesting way of stating it is that evaluating how "representative" a government is through the policy it creates is not possible. There are simply too many uncertainties in measurement, too many logical problems, and too many conceptual ambiguities.

I would suggest instead that the best way to "measure" representation is to focus less on policy and more on how representatives are chosen. As more people are permitted to vote, as casting that vote becomes easier, as leisure time for voters increases, as the difficulty of mounting a successful challenge for elected office decreases, or as the number of people a given representative must represent is smaller, the odds of the person chosen as a representative being more "like" the people of the district in habit, temperament, and worldview increase.* There is no need to evaluate any specific policy position with polling in this case, because on average the sort of decision such a representative makes will be the sort of decision their consitutents would make, given the chance.

In short, true representation is accomplished procedurally. The remedy for lack of confidence in government and disdain for the political establishment - to the extent that they are not due to external shocks or circumstances - ought then to be sought by making representatives "closer" to the people represented in one or several of the above senses. Representation is not achieved by listening to this or that group of particularly vocal citizens, but by involving people in general much more intimately in the process of selecting representatives.

The reason there is so much discontent with our politics, in my view, is because as the population has changed, our representatives haven't. They are all much wealthier, much whiter, much more protestant (and religious in general), than the populations they represent. That combination has sufficed to alienate nearly everyone. Certainly bad policy decisions have been taken, but calling that the problem is to mistake the symptom for the disease. Across the country, voter ID laws, gerrymandering, and the obscene expense of running for office have taken representatives farther from, not closer to, their people in recent years. If we want to have a truly representative goverment and one worthy of the trust of its people, those trends will have to be reversed.

*I am sure that this list is not exhaustive, but it serves to demonstrate the point.