Problems with the one-person-one-vote Principle

Transcription

1 Problems with the one-person-one-vote Principle [Please note this is a very rough draft. A polished and complete draft will be uploaded closer to the Congress date]. In this paper, I highlight some normative issues with granting equal voting powers to all members of the demos regardless of the issue at hand. I contend that, if we are committed to treating all members of the demos with due respect, then we should accommodate for cases where some citizens have more voting power than others over a certain issue. This is because citizens often have different stakes in the electoral outcome, and the votes of those whose interests will be more deeply affected should be allowed more weight in the decision-making process. A commitment to equal respect should then imply proportionality rather than equality in voting powers. Specifically, I offer a principled defence of plural voting during referenda. 1. Arguments in favour of democracy are generally framed in either instrumental or noninstrumental terms (or both). From the instrumental perspective, a decision-making procedure involving all members of the demos (however the latter is defined) is deemed to lead to better outcomes, in terms of the quality of the elected government, than other kinds of decisionmaking procedures. The non-instrumental view, on the other hand, claims that a decisionmaking procedure involving all members of the demos (however defined) is more just than other kinds of decisions. Granting voting rights to all members of the demos fulfils a commitment to respecting their equal value as autonomous agents. The instrumental view has faced one major objection (among many), first formulated in 380 B.C. by Plato: granting the right to vote to each and all members of the mass is akin to giving each passenger of a ship the right to sit at the helm, that is, it will lead to disaster. Without a politically competent electorate, the claim that universal suffrage will produce good governance appears to be an empty slogan. The Marquis de Condorcet, whose famous theorem is often invoked to support the epistemic capacities of democracy as a decisionmaking procedure, did also claim that when citizens are less than 50% likely to vote for X (where X represents the best candidate or policy), the probability of X winning the elections

2 is inversely proportional to the size of the electorate: the larger the franchise, the less likely that the decision will lead to good governance. Where the demos is not politically competent, democracy will misfire. This has led some philosophers to defend a renewed version of Plato s argument against democracy, by claiming that political decision-making should be the business of a restricted elite of knowledgeable individuals, who would be much better place to identify the policies and candidates that would best promote the common good. The right to vote should be granted only to those citizens who fulfil certain epistemic requirements: mere membership to the demos should not be deemed a sufficient condition for being included in the suffrage. It may be possible to reply to this objection via Winston Churchill, claiming that democracy is indeed the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried from time to time. On the one hand, a system that grants voting rights only to competent citizens (namely, an epistocracy) would be hardly feasible, given the probably insuperableempirical difficulties its implementation would encounter. On the other, existing nondemocratic regimes hardly constitute a palatable alternative to democratic ones. From this standpoint, democracy represents a necessary condition for the implementation of other basic rights: without democracy, it may be impossible to implement other human rights. We should not carelessly obliterate the number of lives sacrificed in recent history in the fight against totalitarian regimes. A third way to reply to the objection to the instrumental value of democracy is to bite the bullet, and to focus instead on a non-instrumental defence of including the entire demos in the franchise. From this latter perspective, the reason to uphold universal suffrage is that the latter embodies a fundamental value, namely, equal respect for all citizens. The argument can be summarised as follows: 1. Every citizen s life is equally morally important (or is of equal moral worth) 2. Consequently fully legitimate political institutions, including institutions that distribute political standing, must show equal regard for all citizens 3. Political institutions that do not distribute political standing equally to all citizens fail to show equal regard for all citizens 4. Only democratic governments distribute political standing equally to all citizens

3 C. Therefore only democratic governments are fully legitimate (Wall, 2007, p. 417). So presented, this view justifies a democratic government by appeal to the ideal of political equality. And it purports to show that the ideal of political equality has (noninstrumental) justificatory force because it follows from a deeper egalitarian idea, namely, that everyone s life is equally important. This argument requires, however, more details concerning the notion of equal political standing, for different interpretation of the latter may lead to different (and even conflicting) versions of the argument. In the relevant literature, theorists have explained the notion of equal political standing in terms of having an equal say, an equal share of political power, equal political influence, equal political liberties and even equal political status. Following Steven Wall, we can group these interpretations into to broad families: resourcecentred and status-centred. The former view political power in terms of a resource to which citizens have an equal claim; the latter interpret it in terms of the relations between citizens that it establishes. To what kind of resources do citizens of democratic societies have an equal claim? Those that allow them to influence political outcomes. From this standpoint, the right to vote seems to be the ideal candidate, and the argument above can be read as claiming that democracy shows equal regards for all citizens by granting them equal voting rights. One of the reasons to resist this view, however, is that political equality seems to require much more than equal voting rights. That equal votes are not sufficient for political equality has been widely noted. Citizens with more money or greater access to public forums can exercise greater control over political outcomes than those with less money or less access to such forums. Equality of votes is compatible with great inequalities in political power. Political equality requires more than the enfranchisement of all the members of the demos for the mere fact that everyone can cast his or her ballot does not imply that people are politically equal. 2. The focus then shifts onto the status-centred idea of equality, namely, that a legitimate political institution must respect each individual s intrinsic worth. The latter is usually explained in terms of autonomy, by reference to a person s right to choose and pursue his or

4 her own conception of the good. Each individual is sovereign over his or her own life, and a legitimate political system must respect this basic right to autonomy. The unconditional enfranchisement of all citizens plays an important expressive element by signalling a commitment to precisely this form of respect. Democracy, from this standpoint, is seen as the only political system that can treat people with the due respect owed to their equal status as autonomous agents: it is in this sense that democracy distributes political standing equally. [Insert discussion of Christiano] The above discussion suggests that a decision-making procedure that does not afford equal voting power to all citizens would fail, for that very reason, to treat them with the appropriate respect owed to autonomous agents. This view is often cast in terms of justice, based on the so-called All-Affected-Principle (AAP): everyone who is affected by the decisions of a government should have the right to participate in that government (Dahl, After the Revolution, p. 64; Goodin, 2007). This principle is usually invoked with reference to the boundary problem, namely, the question of defining who is and who is not a member of the demos, hence a legitimate recipient of the right to vote. It plays a role in this discussion however, for it captures the important idea that democratic decisions do affect people to (possibly) a very serious degree, and this requires ensuring that the interests of those affected by these decision are duly accounted for. It is not my interest to put this principle under scrutiny in this paper. For the purposes of this discussion, I will assume that it correctly captures a crucial element of a just decisionmaking procedure. I want to highlight, however, that the AAP does not entail the notion of equal voting power, since it may be compatible, for example, with a system that grants more votes to some citizens and less to others (while still granting some votes to all the affected members). If it could be showed that this departure from an equal distribution of voting power among citizens is warranted by a need to promote justice, then a system of plural voting may be deemed compatible with the ideals that ground a democratic system. I am gesturing towards the claim that to fully promote the value that grounds a commitment to equality, namely, the equal status of agents as autonomous, at least in some cases we should distribute power unequally among the members of the demos. A commitment to respecting the interest of all those affected by a decision may require not equality but proportionality: based on this latter view, justice may demand that votes be granted to citizens in proportion

5 to their stakes in a certain decision, rather than equally. The one-person-one-vote principle may not be the best candidate to realise the values that ground a democratic society. To set the stage for my claim, consider two examples. During a strata meeting, residents are debating whether to install solar panels on the property s roof. The installation will attract a series of costs, which will require an extra contribution from each unit owner of around $2000 per year. Among the participants in the decision there is the Smith family, who are advertising their unit for sale and will move out of their property in a few weeks. As members of the strata meeting, they are entitled to influence the decision as to whether to install solar power, with the costs it implies, to the same degree of all other members. As a second example, consider the plan to build a mining site at the border between Queensland and New South Wales. It is argued that this project will benefit the national economy. However, the mining site will also involve the dumping of large amounts of toxic waste on Queensland territory, where an ad hoc dumping site will be built. Given the sensitive nature of the issue, the decision is left to a referendum. All Australian citizens, Queenslanders and not, will be allowed to cast their vote as t whether the project should go ahead. It is my contention that, in both cases, an aggregative procedure is unjust, despite the fact it grants all members the same voting power. In one sense, ths procedure does acknowledge the equal standing of all members, since they all have a right to a say in decisions that affect their interests. However, we should not stop at the fact that those who are included in the franchise have interests at stake in the decision: we also need to consider how those interest are affected. Hence, in the case of the strata meeting, it may be objected that the Smith family will not have to face the costs the other members will, assuming they will keep residing in that property for years to come. As they are due to leave their home soon, the Smiths have no significant stake in the outcome of the decision. They have a duty either to abstain, or to have less power to influence the decision than the other participants. The same reasoning applies to the second scenario. The Queenslanders may justifiably complain that they will bear the brunt of the new mining site, and that this should be accounted for in the decision-making procedure. While the interests of all Australians may be affected by the outcome, in one sense the Queenslanders interests will be affected more. The asymmetry in the individual stakes weighs against equal voting powers to all

6 individuals: considerations of fairness, involving a just distribution of benefits and costs may warrant granting extra votes to the citizens of Queensland vis-à-vis their compatriots from the rest of the country. Political elections are much more complex than the imaginary cases described above. On the one hand, they do not involve a yes or no question on one specific issue, but rather require evaluating a series of policy and a set of candidates. Second, even where citizens have different stakes in a certain electoral outcome, the fact that the decision may be reversible (i.e. at the end of the term, a new government may be installed, one with a significantly different political agenda) weakens the case for changing the distribution of political powers among the affected members. All elections have winners and losers, and as long as there are avenues for political change, citizens may have to accept an outcome that negatively affects their interests. This is not the end of the story, however. On the one hand, it is a fact that not everyone is equally affected by the same electoral outcome. A government that promises to cut on social welfare and to favour big company, by providing them with further tax cuts while resisting increases in employees salary, is seriously affecting some citizens more than others. For those whose very subsistence depends on social welfare, those cuts will have momentous consequences, while they will go unnoticed to the wealthier members of society. Although it may seem odd to consider giving more power to the poor, recall that in the ancient voting systems people without property had no voting right, and this did more or less rely on some rule of proportionality, because it was considered that only taxpayers were concerned with political decisions (having property was also a criterion for moral competence). Therefore, making political weight depend on wealth or income is not exactly a new idea. Let us not dwell on these further complications here. What I want to press, rather, is that notwithstanding the above, there are indeed cases where citizens are called to vote on a single issue, namely, during referenda. Furthermore, the change implemented through a referendum cannot easily be reversed. Referenda strike me as clearer cases where the asymmetry in citizens interests calls for an unequal distribution in voting powers among the demos. Specifically, in the interest of justice, referenda should be based on a system of plural voting, that can track the asymmetry in the affected interests. In most cases, this might imply

7 sheer considerations he different exposure to the decision s consequences: as constitutional changes tend to be long lasting, and affect various layers of society, it seems plausible to argue that younger voters should be allowed more votes than older ones. Other cases might be less clear cut, for example a referendum on legalising same-sex marriages. First, as the recent Australian case showed, it may be objected that such referendum would be in itself objectionable since, to put it bluntly, it asks voters to decide whether citizens should be discriminated against based on sexual orientation. Second, it would involve granting more votes to gay citizens, those whose lives would be affected in a significantly more serious way by the referendum s outcome than non-gay people. Working out exactly how to draw the line among these groups would be no easy task: however, the alternative of leaving things as they are, and simply granting one vote to each member of the demos would fail the requirements of equal respect for all members of the demos. Those who have more at stake in a certain would be disrespected by receiving the same chance to influence the decision than those whose interests would be less affected by the outcome.