On Wed, 7 May 2008, Shane Mage wrote:
>> Who was it exactly who decided that democracy = elections?
>
> Kleisthenes (c. 500 BCE).
Except for the Athenians, election was by lot, no? Which is a totally different idea. In modern terms, that would be considered the anarchist idea of democracy, not the liberal democratic one.
Not to mention that in the Athenian context, elections were only a small part of democracy, which was main identified with collective decision making by means of all the citizens getting together and deciding whatever policy needed to be adopted. The elected officials, who were elected for brief rotating periods, simply carried out the public's decision. And if they were elected to roles which required them to take action on their own (like generals battling in a distant land) they knew that everything they did was liable to judgment afterwards (where generals might, and did, get executed).
So in the modern sense of elections = democracy, I don't think we can blame it on Kleisthenes at all. We can't even blame it on Rousseau, who regarded electoral representation as inherently a form of aristocracy.
I think the locus classicus is probably the Federalist papers, which is the first thing I can think of that specifically argued that representative elections were superior to direct democracy. Hamilton and Madison had in mind a different system than we have now, one that is closer to our modern caucus system, except without any mandates: a system in which you elect representatives, who in turn meet and elect representives, and then that final group, which is small enough to deliberate, finally gets together in a big room and decides on someone. The system they originally envisioned was that people would elect their state representatives (their assemblymen and state senators), and state representatives would choose federal senators and representatives, and that final group would deliberate and make decisions. In the presidential election this process was made explicit: the people would elect electors, and the electors would gather and make a decision.
Hamilton thought this was a brilliant theoretical breakthough that would solve what was then considered the two insoluable problems of democracy: that it could only be instituted in very small states; and that it was inherently unstable and changeable in its opinions. (The Athenians famously executed several generals who didn't deserve it, and at crisis moments the collective mind often see-sawed absurdly between options.) He called this process of multiple elections a "creaming" or "distilling" process.
However, IIRC, he didn't actually call this democracy. He called this a republic, and by republic he meant Roman. IIRC, he basically agreed with Rousseau that electoral representation was a form of aristocracy -- but he thought this was a good thing.
What then happened over time was two things:
(1) all of these "creaming" processes were gradually dispensed with. The presidential electors gradually became bound, and in the early 20th century the progressive movement finally passed one of their central planks, an amendment requiring the direct election of senators.
and
(2) Hamilton's reasoning about why representation was a good thing was entirely forgotten. The idea that more direct elections -- removing the middlemen like electors and state assemblies -- made the system more democratic insensibly evolved into the idea that once you got rid of all those middlemen, what remained must be complete democracy.
The classical idea that representative election wasn't democracy at all somehow vanished -- in part, mostly likely, because there was still no solution to the original problem: if that's democracy, it was clearly impossible in a huge country. So that direct stuff must not be democracy, or rather, representative democracy must be the only form of democracy that is possible in the real world.
In other words, it looks more like it happened by the erosive process of collective cognitive dissonance than any explicit reformulation. When we threw out the solution, we forgot the problem it was designed to solve, and kind of assumed it was solved.
As for the reduction of democracy to elections alone, officially we don't believe it. We're taught in social studies that democracy includes lots of other things, all kinds of rights and freedoms and institutions. But somehow it's never quite made clear how that gives individuals what democracy was originally supposed to give them, i.e., power over their fate. It's sort of vaguely assumed that all this public yapping somehow corresponds to a the deliberative body of citizens in a city state. But of course it doesn't.
But of course we can't think that way because then they'd be no democratic government in the world, which would make our heads explode.
Michael