American Democracy

On 6/13/17 I made some significant changes to some of this.

First, let me address something. I know sometimes when people talk about making America more democratic, some people, either because they're anal, or because they oppose making America more democratic, respond by pointing out that America is a Republic, not a Democracy. Although I consider myself some kind of amateur political scientist (about 1/5-1/4 of my degree, Ethnic Studies, could be taught in a PSCI course and I took 4 PSCI courses outside ETHN) I struggle a little with this. When I looked at it recently and asked several very political people I know, I found different definitions for “republic” and different definitions for “democracy.” It was so mixed that I am not sure which definitions are right. I lean a bit towards defining a republic as a democratic or undemocratic state which, critically, has no monarch. Also, I’m tempted to tell the “we’re a republic not a democracy” people I’ll take them seriously about it when they convince more than 1% of America’s elected politicians to stop calling it a democracy. You can label my writing below a call for a more democratic republic, or a call to strengthen our democracy, or something like that. I think most people will see that the problems I’m briefly addressing in this post are in conflict with democratic and/or republican values. If I could remember what my PSCI professors had said 20 years ago about this, I might just go with that, but I can’t remember what they said, so I’m just going to go with what I have written above.

(I'm talking about POLITICAL democracy- don't get me started about America's democratic deficit economically (capitalism) or sociologically (i.e. white cops getting away with it when they murder unarmed Black men) which is much worse than the problems with our democracy in a political sense)

How do we make America more democratic? There are several ways. To varying degrees I’ll describe them below. And I'll be honest- although I'd support greater democracy anyway, there's reason to believe that what I'm proposing would benefit the liberal/progressive/left side of politics.


1. Proportional Representation. Although I prefer the form where there are many districts with something like 3-5 members elected from each, and I also prefer Single Transferable Vote (you rank the candidates based on your preference and your vote is transferred depending on how each candidate does at each stage of the counting), it'd be great to see some kind of PR for one part of the Congress.

2. Let felons vote. Although there's probably tons of people in correctional institutions who shouldn't be there, I'm willing to concede that some small majority of them probably should. But their punishment is that they lose their freedom, they don't lose their citizenship. Also, it's not insignificant that felons barred from voting are disproportionately people of color. At the same time, they're counted in census counts that shape congressional districts. Under slavery, slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person for this purpose. Now it's 100% and they still can't vote. Also, to some small degree, since a lot of these institutions are in rural areas, it may mean more mostly rural ( and probably conservative) districts.

3. Instant run-off voting for President. I wouldn't say this is the most important. I kind of feel that 3rd parties like the Greens should just ignore the Presidential race and focus on races they have some chance of winning (I might later on post my thoughts on progressive 3rd party electoral stuff), but the fact is they aren't going to ignore it and will continue to act as potential or actual spoilers. IRV will allow them to vote their conscience without throwing away their vote.

4. Statehood for DC. The residents of Washington DC, a mostly non-white city don't have a voting member of the House and have no one at all in the Senate. The population of DC is bigger than that of Wyoming. They should have a voting member of the House and two senators. It’s basically “taxation without representation.”


5. There's probably a bunch of things relevant to this that I'm going to skip (i.e. shortening the work week so people have more time for activism/civic involvement, taking money out of politics, etc.); The last item, and in fact the one that prompted me to write this in the first place, is about the Senate.

(UPDATE 6/10/09 The stuff about how the process of amending the constitution works, and the general population and racial demographic figures come from Wikipedia)

Our Senate is ridiculously undemocratic. Each state has the same representation regardless of how big or small they are (population-wise). To look at the extremes, Wyoming and California, if you take 2 and divide it by the number of either eligible voters or the number of citizens in each state, it means that the tiny fraction of a vote that you could say each Californian has in the Senate is MUCH tinier than the one that you could say people in Wyoming have. This is wrong. Also however you define "small" (as long as they have less than 10 congressional districts) the small states are mostly conservative. Even if that changes, it would still be undemocratic, and it's not likely to change.

The reform should be that each Senator gets a number of votes based on how many seats in the House their state is entitled to.

I have had some trouble coming up with a perfect way of convincing even the least willing to concede defeat when it comes to how undemocratic the current set up is. What I wrote above about CA and WY might work, and another possibility is to describe a hypothetical situation where the American President is directly elected by the people, but the people in Wyoming get something like 60 votes and the people in California get 1 vote. It's not a solid analogy, but the Senate is roughly as powerful as the President, which strengthens this argument. Lastly, it might make sense to say that if you take the population of Wyoming and divide by two you get a certain number and if you do the same thing with CA, you get a number about 55-60 times bigger- then ask what they would think if in one state, there was a congressional district for every X # of people and in another state, there was one for every 55X # of people (for some reason I can’t be sure, but I believe that could described as one state having more representation per capita). Also, it occurred to me that, not only are the people in the smaller states likely to be conservative, they're VERY likely to be white (depending on how you look at it it’s kind of close, but when considering this, if you give a lot of weight to CA with it's huge population, and also to the really small, really white states, this is a significant problem)..


On a related note, something should be done about the Electoral College. I'm not sure if we should get rid of it, but at the very least it should be reformed so that it eliminates the 2 votes each state gets from having two senators. UPDATE 10/13/20 I just did a post about the EC. It's here.

 

UPDATE 3/6/21 I am going to offer some ideas for how to accomplish this. Obviously getting Senators and representatives from small states to vote in favor of it will be difficult, and then the same sort of thing will happen getting 3/4 of the states to ratify it. I think you start by creating a coalition at the national level with state and local sub-groups. As you’re building the coalition, you start talking about the unfairness of the current set-up and then you start doing polls about the subject in CA, NY, TX and many of the other states that have at least 10 congressional districts. You release the results of these polls, you demonstrate support through marches and rallies, etc. At that point you have the appropriate documents for a constitutional amendment submitted in the House and the Senate. At some point you need to internationalize the campaign and explain to the world how unfair the current set up is. In order to get politicians from and in small states to vote in favor of this, you’ll have to get NGOs in other countries to pressure corporations based in those countries to threaten to boycott any state and/or congressional district whose politicians vote against the amendment. To a lesser degree you could probably put enough pressure on some AMERICAN companies to do the same thing. 

 

UPDATE 5/25/21 The person behind the site I link to below thinks that we should just abolish the Senate. Although I think we need to reform and keep it (the House can't take on the extra work of confirming presidential appointees (i.e. cabinet members, etc.) considering that there's a lot of them and they all want some time speaking for the cameras and it's part of the checks and balances) abolishing it is preferable to the status quo. 

UPDATE 6/1/21 I just thought of something that makes reforming the Senate a better idea than abolishing it. For the foreseeable future the odds are very high that a reformed senate will have a Dem majority (a majority of the votes will be controlled by Dems) and that can block legislation from the House when it's occassionally controlled by the GOP.

UPDATE 6/24/22 I just thought of another good point to make in favor of reforming or abolishing the Senate to address the undemocratic way it works. State Senates (that is the upper chamber of every American state legislature with the exception of Nebraska which is unicameral) don't use counties the way the US Senate uses the states- State Senate districts aren't two for each county, and they don't give each county the same number of seats in the State Senate. Why do that sort of thing at the national level when we don't do it at the state level? No one says that the less populous counties need protection from the more populous counties (some State Senate districts are made up of multiple counties and some counties have more than one State Senate district). Why is it seen as important for democracy to protect the less populous STATES from being out-voted by the more populous STATES?

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UPDATE 5/25/21 There's a large site with some good stuff about this issue- making America more democratic here. I don't agree with all of it completely.