Notes on Democracy
1
A few years ago, I was giving some talks in a nondemocratic country. My topic was behavioral economics (with an emphasis on health and safety). It was all pretty formal.
My hosts, whom I liked a lot, worked for the government, and while our discussions were excellent, they were not exactly unguarded or free-floating.
But one afternoon, things suddenly got relaxed. Over a late lunch, we began to speak as friends. One of my hosts said, lightly and with curiosity, “We just don’t know how democracy can work. I mean, you can’t plan. It’s one president, then another, then another. There are too many shifts. Our system is a lot more stable. We can plan. You can’t.”
I was pretty amazed, both by the candor and by the substance. I didn’t want to get into a fight, so I responded, also lightly, “Here’s a big advantage of democracy. If things are not going well, the people can change things. Public officials know that they are vulnerable in advance - and that’s good. And if people are hurting, they can demand new leaders. That’s also good.”
I expected that my hosts would acknowledge the point and perhaps rethink a little bit. But they didn’t miss a beat. One of them said, “Oh, consultation! We do that a lot. We do that regularly. If people are hurting, we know it - and we change our policies.”
2
Winston Churchill did not invent the quotation, but he famously used it: “Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
I don’t like that statement at all. It’s applauding itself. Actually it’s full of itself. It has a hint of a sneer. It’s not a democratic statement.
Better to say, “Democracy is the best form of government,” full stop.
3
This is not a Hayek Substack, I promise, but as you may have noticed, I am a bit focused on the guy, with a book about him en route.
I am going to use him as a kind of foil here. So:
4
For Hayek, liberty and liberalism, as he understood them, had priority. They were the foundation for everything he liked: markets, innovation, tradition, development. But what about democracy? Hayek was much more ambivalent about that idea, as we can see from his discussion in his magisterial book, The Constitution of Liberty.
Hayek seemed to understand democracy in terms of “majority rule.” He was for it, but he didn’t write about it with anything like rapture, and he offered a host of cautionary points. “A democracy may well wield totalitarian powers, and it is conceivable that an authoritarian government may act on liberal principles.”
Since liberal principles are what Hayek cared most about, this is a crucial sentence. It seems pretty clear that Hayek would have preferred an authoritarian government, committed to liberalism principles, to a democracy, wielding totalitarian powers.
Liberalism, as he understood it, “is a doctrine about what the law ought to be.” Democracy, by contrast, “is a doctrine about the manner of determining what the law ought to be.” If we keep that distinction in mind, Hayek urged, we will not follow “the doctrinaire democrat,” who believes that “the fact that the majority wants something is sufficient ground for regarding it as good.”
To say the least, Hayek did not agree with that. Indeed, the liberal and the doctrinaire democrat live in different normative universes. Among other things, the liberal believes that the scope of democratic decision should be sharply limited. Democracy is not unlimited government, and a democratic government is not “any less in need of built-in safeguards of individual liberty than any other.”
Without those safeguards, “democracy degenerates into demagoguery.”
Why, then, was Hayek a democrat?
5
He offered three arguments. The first is that it is better to resolve disagreements by voting than by fighting. “Democracy is the only method of peaceful change that man has yet discovered.” Hayek did not have a whole lot to say about that, and rightly so. There are a lot of ways to produce the right amount of continuity and (peaceful) change. Democracy might be the best way to do that, and I tend to agree that it is; but that is not self-evident.
The second argument, to which Hayek was evidently drawn, is that “democracy is an important safeguard of individual liberty.”
On this view, democracy is not itself liberty. But power “is less likely to be abused if the power entrusted to the few can always be revoked by those who have to submit to it.” It follows that “the prospects of individual liberty are better in a democracy than under other forms of government.” Still, there are no guarantees. Everything depends on whether the majority really cares about liberty. Hayek feared that it might not.
Hayek was not at his best here. Democracy is about the protection of liberty, to be sure. But it is about plenty of other things as well. It is about human welfare, very broadly speaking. If you can throw the bums out, you have a crucial safeguard.
6
In the end, Hayek found the third argument on behalf of democracy to be the most powerful. It was his favorite.
In short: Even if “government by some educated elite” would be better (and Hayek clearly thought that it might be), “democracy is the only effective method of educating the majority.” Following Tocqueville, Hayek argued that democracy is a process of forming opinion, and it has dynamic, rather than static, advantages. It improves “the understanding of the issues by the people.” To Hayek, that is an important gain.
7
Hayek soars when he speaks of liberty, liberalism, and justice as he understood them. He struggles and hedges, and stays close to the ground, when he speaks of democracy and majority rule.
True, he was for them, in the end. But he endorsed them with qualifications, and perhaps with fear and trembling. He saw democracy as a bet, and as a contingent good: “If it is to survive, democracy must recognize that it is not the fountainhead of justice and that it needs to acknowledge a conception of justice which does not necessarily manifest itself in the popular view on every particular issue. The danger is that we mistake a means of securing justice for justice itself.”
8
It is genuinely puzzling that in a very long book, Hayek had so little to say about democracy. But it is also revealing. Liberty was his focus, not self-government. When he thought of the Road to Serfdom, he thought of the obliteration of liberty.
A different direction comes from Amartya Sen, who famously found that famines do not occur in nations with a functioning democracy (including elections) and an independent press. (Some people have quibbled with the finding, to be sure.)
The mechanism is pretty clear. Whether a famine occurs depends on what government knows, and on what its incentives are. In a democracy, government has a strong incentive to prevent mass starvation, and in a democracy with a free and independent press, government is likely to know when a famine might occur. So voila: it takes steps to prevent it.
You can think of the famine case as an extreme example of a much broader phenomenon, which is that in a democracy, public officials have better incentives, and a lot of information is flowing freely.
That supports the generalization of Hayek’s second argument. Liberty, sure; but plenty of other things too.
9
There are lots of qualifications. There are democracies, and there are democracies. Some democracies are more democratic than others. Whether democracies will do what democracy is supposed to do depends on what kind of democracy they are.
vernment, and while our discussions were excellent, they were not exactly unguarded or free-floating.
But one afternoon, things suddenly got relaxed. Over a late lunch, we began to speak as friends. One of my hosts said, lightly and with curiosity, “We just don’t know how democracy can work. I mean, you can’t plan. It’s one president, then another, then another. There are too many shifts. Our system is a lot more stable. We can plan. You can’t.”
I was pretty amazed, both by the candor and by the substance. I didn’t want to get into a fight, so I responded, also lightly, “Here’s a big advantage of democracy. If things are not going well, the people can change things. Public officials know that they are vulnerable in advance - and that’s good. And if people are hurting, they can demand new leaders. That’s also good.”
I expected that my hosts would acknowledge the point and perhaps rethink a little bit. But they didn’t miss a beat. One of them said, “Oh, consultation! We do that a lot. We do that regularly. If people are hurting, we know it - and we change our policies.”
2
Winston Churchill did not invent the quotation, but he famously used it: “Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
I don’t like that statement at all. It’s applauding itself. Actually it’s full of itself. It has a hint of a sneer. It’s not a democratic statement.
Better to say, “Democracy is the best form of government,” full stop.
3
This is not a Hayek Substack, I promise, but as you may have noticed, I am a bit focused on the guy, with a book about him en route.
I am going to use him as a kind of foil here. So:
4
For Hayek, liberty and liberalism, as he understood them, had priority. They were the foundation for everything he liked: markets, innovation, tradition, development. But what about democracy? Hayek was much more ambivalent about that idea, as we can see from his discussion in his magisterial book, The Constitution of Liberty.
Hayek seemed to understand democracy in terms of “majority rule.” He was for it, but he didn’t write about it with anything like rapture, and he offered a host of cautionary points. “A democracy may well wield totalitarian powers, and it is conceivable that an authoritarian government may act on liberal principles.”
Since liberal principles are what Hayek cared most about, this is a crucial sentence. It seems pretty clear that Hayek would have preferred an authoritarian government, committed to liberalism principles, to a democracy, wielding totalitarian powers.
Liberalism, as he understood it, “is a doctrine about what the law ought to be.” Democracy, by contrast, “is a doctrine about the manner of determining what the law ought to be.” If we keep that distinction in mind, Hayek urged, we will not follow “the doctrinaire democrat,” who believes that “the fact that the majority wants something is sufficient ground for regarding it as good.”
To say the least, Hayek did not agree with that. Indeed, the liberal and the doctrinaire democrat live in different normative universes. Among other things, the liberal believes that the scope of democratic decision should be sharply limited. Democracy is not unlimited government, and a democratic government is not “any less in need of built-in safeguards of individual liberty than any other.”
Without those safeguards, “democracy degenerates into demagoguery.”
Why, then, was Hayek a democrat?
5
He offered three arguments. The first is that it is better to resolve disagreements by voting than by fighting. “Democracy is the only method of peaceful change that man has yet discovered.” Hayek did not have a whole lot to say about that, and rightly so. There are a lot of ways to produce the right amount of continuity and (peaceful) change. Democracy might be the best way to do that, and I tend to agree that it is; but that is not self-evident.
The second argument, to which Hayek was evidently drawn, is that “democracy is an important safeguard of individual liberty.”
On this view, democracy is not itself liberty. But power “is less likely to be abused if the power entrusted to the few can always be revoked by those who have to submit to it.” It follows that “the prospects of individual liberty are better in a democracy than under other forms of government.” Still, there are no guarantees. Everything depends on whether the majority really cares about liberty. Hayek feared that it might not.
Hayek was not at his best here. Democracy is about the protection of liberty, to be sure. But it is about plenty of other things as well. It is about human welfare, very broadly speaking. If you can throw the bums out, you have a crucial safeguard.
6
In the end, Hayek found the third argument on behalf of democracy to be the most powerful. It was his favorite.
In short: Even if “government by some educated elite” would be better (and Hayek clearly thought that it might be), “democracy is the only effective method of educating the majority.” Following Tocqueville, Hayek argued that democracy is a process of forming opinion, and it has dynamic, rather than static, advantages. It improves “the understanding of the issues by the people.” To Hayek, that is an important gain.
7
Hayek soars when he speaks of liberty, liberalism, and justice as he understood them. He struggles and hedges, and stays close to the ground, when he speaks of democracy and majority rule.
True, he was for them, in the end. But he endorsed them with qualifications, and perhaps with fear and trembling. He saw democracy as a bet, and as a contingent good: “If it is to survive, democracy must recognize that it is not the fountainhead of justice and that it needs to acknowledge a conception of justice which does not necessarily manifest itself in the popular view on every particular issue. The danger is that we mistake a means of securing justice for justice itself.”
8
It is genuinely puzzling that in a very long book, Hayek had so little to say about democracy. But it is also revealing. Liberty was his focus, not self-government. When he thought of the Road to Serfdom, he thought of the obliteration of liberty.
A different direction comes from Amartya Sen, who famously found that famines do not occur in nations with a functioning democracy (including elections) and an independent press. (Some people have quibbled with the finding, to be sure.)
The mechanism is pretty clear. Whether a famine occurs depends on what government knows, and on what its incentives are. In a democracy, government has a strong incentive to prevent mass starvation, and in a democracy with a free and independent press, government is likely to know when a famine might occur. So voila: it takes steps to prevent it.
You can think of the famine case as an extreme example of a much broader phenomenon, which is that in a democracy, public officials have better incentives, and a lot of information is flowing freely.
That supports the generalization of Hayek’s second argument. Liberty, sure; but plenty of other things too.
9
There are lots of qualifications. There are democracies, and there are democracies. Some democracies are more democratic than others. Whether democracies will do what democracy is supposed to do depends on what kind of democracy they are.
Is the U.S.a democracy? The framers, as Madison explained, did not think they were creating a democracy. How much popular control is necessary for democracy? If democracy is good, is more democracy always better? Should the U.S. as a whole have a referendum system like California? How do you reconcile the election of Donald Trump (and of Joe Biden) with your enthusiasm for democracy? Doesn't Mencken's observation that "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard" have a certain resonance? I for one look forward to turning governance over to AI and depoliticizing society. I am quite confident that Claude would already do a better job than typical large city elected officials.
One way I have always thought about democracy is that it is something like an individual right in principle. I'm not, I think, the first to view it this way. Article 21, sections 1 and 3, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document I like a whole lot, nicely articulates the idea:
Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
...
The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.
I admit to some attraction to the Churchillian "sneer" (and to even the more acid Menckenite one). One does not necessarily walk around with a tremendous amount of faith in the judgment of one's fellow citizens. One is not, I'd say, necessarily wrong to have this thought (or suspicion or anxiety), whether as an empirical matter or as a moral one (though one can certainly overdo it and one should be open to the very real possibility that the people will surprise you, maybe even systematically so).
At the same time, a list of libertarian rights, where Hayek "soars," could just as plausibly be framed in that sneering mode. Free speech is the worst rule except for all the others. After all, an awful lot of human expression is crap or worse. And yet, the principle feels so salient that it overwhelms that sneering sense of begrudging adherence.
To my mind, the arguments on behalf of free speech that focus on social benefit -- a free marketplace of ideas produces the best ideas; a restricted marketplace stifles them -- are worthy and important but insufficient to capture that individual salience.
The same insight, I suggest, applies to democracy. As Dierdre McCloskey has put it, the motto of what she calls "primary liberalism" is "no involuntary masters." She's a secondary liberalism, i.e., FDR/LBJ liberalism, skeptic as I am not, but I find that formulation compelling. I'm guessing Hayek would like it too. Doesn't it have the most bite when considering how government leaders, literal masters in a sense, are chosen?
The question of the moment seems to be, What if some other large and wealthy and powerful country -- let's call it "China" -- is capable of producing gobs of social benefit with little dissent, while at the same time systematically stifling the free exchange of ideas and eschewing competitive processes for choosing masters. There's "consultation," sure. And it's true that no government, not even "China's," is immune from popular discontent. Even the ancient dynastic model worked on that principle -- when it all went south, the rulers had, it seemed, lost the "mandate of heaven" and thus the right to continue ruling.
But a system that relies on revolution to change course is insufficiently respectful of the people's right to participate in their own government. I feel that in my bones.