How might democratic institutions be improved to give citizens more control over their governments? Rule by Multiple Majorities by Sean Ingham and Smarter Ballots by J. S. Maloy offer complementary approaches to answering this question. Rule by Multiple Majorities explores the concept of popular control. The goal of this conceptual exploration is to articulate a coherent and attractive account of popular control that can be used for assessing political institutions (including, but not limited to, elections). Smarter Ballots, in contrast, largely brackets theoretical questions that Ingham addresses. Instead it examines specific types of electoral reforms we might adopt in the hope of further empowering voters. Together these two books expand the conceptual toolkit for assessing and improving democratic institutions. Scholars and reform advocates alike should take note.

Maloy argues in Smarter Ballots that researchers and reformers should focus less attention on contest structure reforms and more on ballot structure reforms. Contest structure refers to the way that electoral outcomes translate into political or policy outcomes. Single-member district systems and proportional representation systems differ in their contest structure. Ballot structure, by contrast, refers to the kind of information that voters are able to provide on a ballot and how votes translate into electoral outcomes. Ranked choice voting and plurality rule voting differ in their ballot structure.

Maloy aims to persuade readers that multi-mark ballots (MMBs), especially those that allow voters to rank or grade options, do a better job of empowering voters than single-mark ballots (SMBs). SMBs create a familiar “dilemma of disempowerment” for voters. They force many voters to choose between increasing the chances of victory for their most preferred candidate (or party), on the one hand, or increasing the chances of defeat for their least preferred candidate, on the other hand.

The dilemma of disempowerment hampers voters’ ability to elect superior candidates and weakens electoral accountability. Corrupt and incompetent incumbents often benefit from vote splitting among their opposition or from lesser evil choices. The 2002 French presidential election offers one colorful illustration: bumper stickers exhorted voters to support the incumbent Chirac, with this slogan: “Vote for the crook, not the fascist” (p. 67).

According to Maloy, multi-mark ballots can free voters from the dilemma of disempowerment. Much of Smarter Ballots is devoted to evaluating different types of MMBs. Maloy argues that the most promising types are ranking ballots and grading ballots. Ranking ballots are used in many elections around the world and have some momentum in conversations about US electoral reform. Ballots that allow voters to grade candidates (where winners receive the highest mean or median grade) have not been widely used outside of experimental settings. Maloy argues, however, that given their potential benefits, grading ballots deserve more attention in electoral reform conversations.

Smarter Ballots largely brackets conceptual questions about what it means to empower an electorate with disparate preferences. Instead, its discussion of potential reforms begins by identifying three forms of voter empowerment we plausibly care about: the power to select future officeholders from an adequate set of alternatives, the power to use electoral outcomes to effectively sanction incumbents for their performance in office, and the power to express judgments over ballot options (p. 18). Maloy assesses how different reforms might contribute to each of these forms of empowerment, with a heavy focus on the third. This practical approach allows Maloy to devote substantial time to examining the details of concrete reform proposals.

Still, a complete defense of Maloy’s preferred ballot structure reforms requires a deeper theory of how these different forms of voter empowerment interact, and how they contribute to the realization of democratic values. Such a theory is needed to navigate trade-offs among the three forms of voter empowerment whenever they arise. A deeper theory is also essential for understanding what it means for a diverse citizenry to have powers of selecting and sanctioning officials, because these are powers that voters must exercise collectively.

Ingham’s Rule by Multiple Majorities, which articulates and defends an important new account of popular control, offers just such a theory. According to this account, popular control exists when all majorities within a polity have control simultaneously. Ingham shows that we can coherently describe all majorities as having simultaneous control over a particular choice, even in situations where any outcome is bound to frustrate the preferences of some majority.

Rule by Multiple Majorities addresses an important challenge to theories of democracy as majority rule. Modern democratic polities are composed of many different potential majorities. Unless citizens’ preferences align in improbable ways, some of these majorities are bound to have their preferences frustrated. Democratic theorists have struggled to identify a generally defensible way of determining which potential majorities prevail and which are frustrated. Ingham’s conception of popular control offers a coherent answer to this question. This conception of popular control also aligns with ordinary intuitions about what it means to have control, and it performs well at the evaluative tasks we might want to use it for.

To understand Ingham’s intervention, it will be useful to start by fixing some terms. When Ingham speaks of majorities, he means numerical majorities; that is, any subset of the members of a polity that make up a majority. Any individual citizen will be a member of many different majorities at the same time. For any decision that a polity faces, it is unlikely that there will be any majority whose members share the same first preference among the entire set of feasible alternatives. However there will still be many majorities with shared preferences between pairs of alternatives. When Ingham speaks of majorities having “preferences,” he is referring to these pairwise comparisons. If a majority prefers x to y, then the majority’s preference is frustrated whenever y is chosen. Ingham convincingly argues that in democratic decision making, it is often impossible to avoid frustrating the preferences of some majority.

Majorities may still have control over a choice (or, more formally, a variable) even when their preferences are frustrated. Ingham argues that we should understand control in the following sense: “if each member of the group preferred one possible value of the variable to another, then the variable would not assume the less preferred value, provided the group’s members all cared enough about the variable” (p. 61). Under this definition, control is something that comes in degrees, and it varies along two dimensions: (1) the range of potential values of a variable over which the group has control and (2) how much the group must care about something to have their preferences realized. Moreover, multiple groups can be in control of the same variable at the same time, even if only some will have their preferences realized.

Using this definition of control, we can define democratic popular control, then, both in terms of which groups have control and the degree of their control. One of the virtues of Ingham’s theory of popular control is its versatility. Ingham demonstrates that this theory offers a clear account of what distinguishes minimally democratic regimes from authoritarian regimes, while also forming the basis for a more aspirational ideal of democracy. Minimally democratic regimes afford majorities adequate control. Majorities have adequate control “if the members of the majority do not need to be willing to jeopardize their physical safety or personal liberties, as the price for securing influence, in order for their shared preferences to have constraining effects” (p. 106). Fully democratic systems, however, entail not only an adequate but also an equal degree of control for all majorities of equal size.

Rule by Multiple Majorities showcases what normative democratic theory can gain from formal theoretical models, and it should be required reading for theorists of modern democracy. It also refines practical approaches to electoral reform like Maloy’s with a fuller account of what voter empowerment is for. If we think that a primary purpose of voter empowerment is to ensure that popular preferences constrain public decision making, then reformers must consider how different forms of voter empowerment together contribute to popular control. This sort of assessment is essential in situations where expanding one form of voter empowerment diminishes another. Increasing the power of voters to express judgments over alternatives, for example, might exacerbate coordination problems, thereby diminishing voters’ collective power to sanction officials. Ingham’s theory of popular control would assess conflicts between these two powers based on how each affects the circumstances under which majority preferences constrain decision making.

Rule by Multiple Majorities does not offer a comprehensive theory of democracy (nor is it meant to). Integrating Ingham’s account of popular control into such a comprehensive theory would require, primarily, understanding how it might fit with concerns about preference formation. Ingham’s concept of popular control begins once citizens’ preferences have been formed. Citizens’ preferences do not preexist politics, however. As Maloy observes in Smarter Ballots, the same institutions that enable popular control may also affect how citizens form their preferences. Different ballot structures might affect the kinds of signals that incumbents send to voters or the psychological pressures that shape partisan identities. A comprehensive assessment of democratic institutions, then, calls for yet a deeper theory of how popular control fits with accounts of democratic preference formation.

Together, Rule by Multiple Majorities and Smarter Ballots illustrate the power of combining theoretical and pragmatic approaches to democratic reform. They also point to important empirical and theoretical questions about democracy that demand more scholarly attention. Anyone interested in the prospects for improving modern democracies will benefit from reading these two books.