The Principal-Agent Problem: The Economic Elite
“When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.” - P. J. O'Rourke
We live in an oligarchy.
The lone tool to declare our will to Congress (elections) is the very structure that empowers the economic elite. Elections demand money. A successful campaign needs to disperse information persuading the electorate to vote for that candidate. TV and internet ads, billboards, pamphlets, and signs all take money. And that money creates opportunities for influence by businesses and billionaires—either through obtaining agreements about policy outcomes or by financing candidates that support their ideology.
Thus marches the system in an inevitable decline toward rule by the rich. Even assuming that a candidate first seeks election for altruistic reasons, he can’t enact what he believes to be in the country’s best interest if he doesn’t win. So his first priority is to get elected—and once elected, it’s to keep his job. He can’t do that without campaign funds.
The result: a legislator whose priorities are not aligned with the people whom he is supposed to represent—a classic principal-agent problem. Compounding this problem is the electorate’s lack of institutional control over legislators. Elections only weakly cabin legislators’ choices. In the aftermath of the Seventeenth Amendment, which transferred the power of selecting Senators from state legislatures to the people through elections, the voting patterns of Senators from the same state diverged. With elections as their constraint, Senators were able to pursue their own agenda.
Under this independence, legislators succumb to other pressures that crowd out the electorate’s will. They facilitate corporate welfare and other favorable policies to attract deep corporate pockets for campaign funds. And corporations happily oblige. Many companies, like Blue Cross/Blue Shield, AT&T, and Disney, donate to both major parties, and even multiple presidential candidates. As Trump explained during the 2016 election: “I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that's a broken system.”
What happens when the source of funds demands policy the electorate opposes? It should come as little surprise who wins. One study, analyzing nearly 1800 policies over a 20-year span, found that the policy outcome didn’t depend at all on the average voter’s preference but instead depended on the preference of wealthy citizens and business interest groups. Worse still, the economic elite’s preference often conflicted with the average voter’s preference. “When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose.”
Whatever we want to call this, it isn’t democracy.
And it is a problem many at the Founding foresaw. While some, like Thomas Paine in Common Sense, opined elections should be held often “that the elected might never form to themselves an interest separate from the electors,” Anti-federalists scoffed at the notion that elections would keep legislators in line. Patrick Henry lamented that “[t]he only semblance of a check” against legislators “is the negative power of not reelecting them”—“a feeble barrier, when their personal interest, their ambition and avarice, come to be put in contrast with the happiness of the people."
The only solution to this principal-agent problem is to end elections. Elections, despite being our only tool to correct the misalignment of priorities between us and our legislators, are the driving force behind that misalignment.
We must fundamentally change the way we select our legislators. By appointing legislators through a lottery of the public—a process called sortition—we eliminate elections, freeing legislators from the corrupting confines of campaigns. We eliminate the legislator’s primary objective of keeping his job, and with that the need to appease the economic elite. Instead of putting in place people whose priorities don’t match the majority will, sortition would appoint people who lack ulterior motives in how they vote on policy.
This is not a new concept. In fact, it’s a rather old one. Many civilizations throughout history used sortition to combat corruption, from Ancient Athens to Venice. Aristotle posited long ago that “the appointment of magistrates by lot is thought to be democratical, and the election of them oligarchical.” Our experiment with elections confirms this truth. It’s time for something else.
Sources:
Sean Gailmard and Jeffery A. Jenkins, Agency Problems, the 17th Amendment, and Representation in the Senate, 53 Am J Pol Sci 324 (2009).
Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, 12 Perspectives on Politics 564 (2014).
The Principal-Agent Problem: The Economic Elite
Great post. I hope you join Democracy Without Elections--and/or one of the several other sortition groups that have arisen. People are working hard to move this idea forward. What seems to be needed is several "proof of concept" CAs operating in various places in the US so people get the idea, see it work.