A. Mill

In his Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Mill supposes that a good government must provide order and progress. For this, a sine qua non is obedience (but not excessive obedience). The requisites of order and progress are much the same, because of the dynamism of the problems that human beings face (387).³⁴

Mill notes that it is historically commonplace to assert that the best form of government is benevolent dictatorship (chapter 3). He says on the contrary that, for example, the benevolent despotism of Augustus set up Romans for the “more odious” reign of Tiberius (403). Moreover, an autocratic government cannot know enough (399) to run the society well. Mill essentially presumes an Austrian social theory. He also anticipates Schumpeter's main point, that a voter's incentive is to be ignorant because, as Mill puts it, “a person must have a very unusual taste for intellectual exercise in and for itself who will put himself to the trouble of thought when it is to have no outward effect” (400). Mill holds an essentially pragmatic view of knowledge. He also reinforces this view when he says that no one will take an interest in government who cannot participate (469). This suggests that almost no one will take much interest in government, because almost no one can participate to any significant extent. But Mill's point in this passage seems to have been intended to suggest that people could be motivated to participate through education. Unfortunately, education might sooner lead one to understand just how massive are the obstacles to real participation most of the time. Mill himself concludes that there is very little opportunity for holding office in the central government (chapter 15). Local government, with its smaller scale and higher proportion of office holding, helps (535–36), but even local government in modern democracies is commonly carried out by representatives who have constituencies numbering in the thousands and even hundreds of thousands, so there cannot be very much participation even here.

In a continuation of his quasi-Austrian views, Mill says that what a legislative body is competent to do is quite limited (chapter 5). It can adopt not very precise legislation—for example, in our time, tax policy or environmental regulation. To do much more, it must delegate such things to expert advisers and to committees (430). Even then, laws will tend to become inconsistent over time because no one will have massive oversight of the whole body of law (a task performed by the Nomothetae in ancient Athens [431]). Hence, the proper function of a legislature is the very limited one of watching and controlling the administrative branches of government (432).

Mill famously claims that it is especially useful to engage in debate (433). This is not the “deliberative democracy” of current visions, although Mill's authority is often invoked in its support. His claim may partly suggest Schmitt's concern with deliberation as a device for finding the truth. Against Schmitt, however, Mill thinks that genuine representativeness is required, because it enables the legislature “to indicate wants, to be an organ for popular demands, and a place of adverse discussion for all opinions relating to public matters … ; and, along with this, to check by criticism, and eventually by withdrawing their support, those high public officers who really conduct the public business” (433).

Mill attributes the infirmities of representative government to two general causes (chapter 6). First, there is the quasi-Austrian general ignorance and incapacity of government and its agents; second, there is the danger of being under the influence of interests not identical to the general welfare of the community (436). He supposes that the main comparison to be made is between government by bureaucracy and government by representative democracy (438–39). Autocracy and aristocracy are too obviously flawed to merit consideration.

Against the danger of class legislation, Mill optimistically supposes that the few individuals who are public-spirited combined with those whose own interest happens to coincide with the public interest can collude in a majority to carry the day for the public interest (446–47). This is Panglossian. He should have read Madison more attentively. Indeed, he should have read himself more attentively.

In chapter 8 Mill discusses the extent of the suffrage and his view that it should generally be extended and should include women (479–81). Mill argues that fully representative democracy is the only true democracy (467). In keeping with his general view that citizens must be required to be intelligent enough to see their own interests if they are to gain the franchise, he proposes educational requirements on suffrage, because voters must be able to read, write, and do arithmetic if they are to vote intelligently on their own interests. For him this seems to be little more than a definitional implication of the idea of democracy: universal teaching must precede a universal franchise (470).

Mill especially worries about the fact that the large majority of citizens in his England are manual laborers. He supposes that they might abuse their power through their democratic majority to enact class legislation. He was largely wrong about this empirical point, because manual workers in his time were a diverse lot with conflicting interests. Manual laborers included farmers as the largest group, factory workers (who only became the bare majority of the English work force several decades after Mill wrote), and a miscellany of service workers, especially in urban areas. (In the United States in his time farmers were the overwhelming majority of all workers.) These quite diverse groups had little in common. Indeed, the only interest that they might have shared was in redistribution from the middle and upper classes, which in any case was not a viable political program in Mill's day. (Madison, too, worries about the possibility that the poor majority could combine to dispossess the wealthy of their property, a worry that made some sense empirically in his time, but not in ours, when evidence says it does not happen.)

Mill advocates universal but unequal suffrage (473–74). Uniquely among democratic theorists up to his time, he proposes intelligence, not property, as the qualification for extra weight (478). He grants, however, that unequal suffrage may not be a practical suggestion (476). He is also inclined to contrive devices that give greater weight to some voters over others, as through the use of gerrymanders to block workers from achieving a parliamentary majority by concentrating their votes in certain districts that they would win overwhelmingly while diluting their strength elsewhere (477). (This is what he calls a “fully representative democracy.”) He gives a not very convincing causal claim in support of such voter inequality. He says that the best incentive to the growth of intelligence is rising to power, not having achieved it (479). This claim is a pointless fallacy of composition: the class might rise to power but almost none of its members would. Thus, although the class of workers might rise to power, individual workers generally cannot. Mill thinks that a constitution should not declare ignorance to be entitled to as much political power as knowledge—as the U.S. Constitution virtually does declare (478). He therefore excoriates the American system.

B. Manin

In the first two chapters of his The Principles of Representative Government, Manin gives an account of the great transformation from direct to representative democracy.³⁶

Manin's main thesis on the development of representative government is that it inherently tends toward aristocracy of an odd and familiar kind. Membership in the class of aristocrats is determined by citizens through elections, and the characteristics that earn entry into this class have changed over time, from something like social distinction in Madison's time and earlier in colonial America and England, to something more nearly like celebrity today. This aristocratic tendency of elected representative government was already foreseen by the ancient Greeks, who preferred to select officeholders by lot, considering it more genuinely representative (27). By lot, even the lowliest citizen could be selected for a government position. Montesquieu famously observed that there is a close link between lot and democracy and between election and aristocracy (70). Manin says that rotation in office and selection by lot reflect deep distrust of the professionalism that would follow from specializing in holding office over a long period. Madison and Sieyes, however, want professionalism (32). They worry that democracy could entail putting power in the hands of amateurs (33). They believe that officeholders should be more distinguished than the ordinary run of citizens (94). In actual democracies, wealth, property, and the payment of taxes have often been employed as qualifications for running for office (97–98), and wealth in our time is often still very useful for gaining office by spending lavishly on one's campaign.

In the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and in the state ratifying conventions and the debates leading up to them, the Anti-Federalists held that representatives should fairly closely mirror their constituents (109). Representation was not a matter of giving representatives mandates but of having the diverse U.S. population represented by their own types (109). Anti-Federalist Samuel Chase pointed out that the great majority of the population—farmers and ordinary workers—could never be elected (112). Before early fascist or corporatist guilds, the Anti-Federalists were probably the only true advocates of genuinely representative democracy by station in life rather than by geographical location, and there has been no further debate on the aristocratic nature of election after the Anti-Federalist arguments of 1787–88 (132). Manin concludes that, for solid causal reasons, “election cannot, by its very nature, result in the selection of representatives who resemble their constituents” (149). In the end, however, power is not earned by distinctive traits or capacities but by agreement among the electorate about what traits constitute superiority (158). Apart from his being the son of a former president, one would be very hard pressed to account for the traits that put George W. Bush in the presidency, but one can give an account of how support coalesced around him at various stages in the 2000 election cycle. Still, Manin notes that the principles of distinction and salience that make for election do not violate norms of equality and political right, although the constraint of wealth does (159). Mill thought that American political leaders in his time were woefully undistinguished.³⁷

In the traditional view, members of the British Parliament represented the nation as a whole and not merely their constituencies (163), as in the views of Burke and, to some extent, Mill. This view has given way, first to party democracy, in which a party gains control of parliament and governs for its term (206–18), and then to what Manin calls “audience democracy” (218–32), which is substantially formed by the media and the capacity of individual candidates to appeal to the voters.

Against Schmitt's view that deliberation is valued for giving us access to truth, Manin concludes, “It is the collective and diverse character of the representative organ, and not any prior or independently established belief in the virtues of debate, that explains the role conferred on discussion” (187). What makes some resolution of legislative debate a law is some form of consent, not discussion of it or its truth value (189). Moreover, the requisite consent is typically merely majority agreement, whereas truth should command unanimous consent once it is established.

In keeping with Manin's thesis on audience democracy and “celebrity,” the great playwright Arthur Miller (1915–) analyzes the acting abilities of modern American presidents, going back to Franklin Roosevelt.³⁸

A. Functionally determined morality

The role morality of a doctor is to see to the patient's health because this is the function for which the doctor's services are sought; the role morality of a lawyer is, analogously, to see to winning the client's case or giving beneficial legal advice. If we wish to determine what the role morality of elected officials is—by analogy to professional ethics—we must first settle on what the function of an elected official is in relation to a constituent. This depends on our explanatory (not normative) theory of representation. Clearly, there cannot be a generally correct role morality for political representatives in the way that there is for doctors, because there are many theories of representation and these require different principles of action by elected officials.

We have at least three practical theories of representation that are quite distinct from one another. First, there is the quasi-Madisonian theory that focuses on individual legislators as agents of their constituencies. Second, there is the political party theory that makes elected officials the agents of their parties, and parties the agents of their partisan constituencies, which typically are broadly defined classes rather than geographical constituencies. Third, there is Manin's audience democracy, in which it is not clear that elected officials are agents of anyone other than themselves. The first two theories yield relatively straightforward principles of role morality for representatives. Historically, the role morality that seems most commonly stipulated by citizens in many democracies is that representatives be seen as agents of their constituents or as party loyalists. Given that representatives cannot know in detail what their constituents' wants are, representatives can knowledgeably only address their constituents' interests as fairly broadly conceived. Therefore, the role morality of an elected lawmaker is to see to the broadly defined interests of his or her constituents. We can call this the ‘Madisonian role morality’ of elected legislators, which had its greatest influence in the early United States. We can call it ‘party role morality’ in systems organized by parties, although in a party system, service to one's constituency is rendered indirectly through service to one's party, which serves all relevant constituencies.

If we consider the current stage of development of representation, Manin's audience democracy, we may wonder whether any role morality still applies to elected officials. One might assert a role morality, but the voters are unlikely to be concerned with it, except perhaps when a representative is grossly out of line. Suppose we do not elect our officials on the ground of how we expect them to handle their role in office, but primarily on the ground of who they are, including whether they happen to be celebrities. Then they would seem to have no mandate beyond continuing to be themselves. If media mastery is the route to election, then it might also be the route to renown while in office. It would be perverse for the electorate to complain that their officials are very good at precisely the skills that got them elected.

We might still think that the role morality of representatives is to represent, to work as agents for their constituents' interests, sometimes to seek the larger public good, and sometimes to defend civil liberties. But in America our moral expectations evidently do not explain or even correlate with how we vote to select our representatives. It was a happy fact of both Madisonian individual and later party systems that our interests coincided with our moral expectations for our representatives. In audience democracy, they do not correlate well.

Voters sometimes do hold candidates accountable for lack of media appeal, as in the case of Al Gore and George Bush in 2000, or for loss of it, as in the case of Gary Condit in 2002. Gore was often ridiculed for his stiff, dull manner (with at least one popular comedian comparing him to a wooden cigar store Indian). Bush, who barely won a close election over Gore, had likewise been satirized for his frequent verbal clumsiness. Prior to 2002, Condit had been reelected several times, even though his legislative impact was nil throughout his time in office. When he became the furtive man who refused to speak to the press about his reputed affair with his murdered former intern, his career was doomed, even if it could have been shown that he had played no role in her murder, and even though mere revelation of his affair, had the woman not been murdered, might not have blocked his continued reelection. By appearing indifferent, if not sinister, he simply lost much of the personal appeal that had repeatedly won him reelection.

If personality and media success are the grounds for election, then the electorate is likely to be divided on most politicians just because different personalities are likely to appeal to different voters. It seems probable, for example, that the astonishing divergence of views on Bill Clinton had much to do with divergent responses to his personal style. Even as he shifted the Democratic Party toward the center of American politics, he was detested by the American Right as perhaps no one since Franklin Roosevelt. In keeping with Manin's thesis on the evolution from Madisonian to audience democracy, Roosevelt seems to have been despised for his political positions, Clinton for being Clinton.

The development of audience democracy raises the question of whether personality might correlate with political positions to a sufficient degree as to yield the cues that Popkin and others need for their argument that voters base their votes on low-information rationality. There are two interlocking sets of correlations: first, on the side of the candidates and, then, on the side of the voters. Candidate personality must correlate with candidate position, and, given this correlation, candidate appeal must correlate with the voters' positions on issues. These correlations are tenuous reeds for us to hold onto in the hope for rational politics, if we have indeed entered an era of audience democracy. Against even such a slim hope for rationality, it seems likely that audience democracy is a response to the combination of voter ignorance of policy and government and of politicians' ignorance of voters' interests other than in broad terms. If we put the Schumpeterian vision of the limited capacities of voters together with the Austrian vision of the limited capacities of the state, we have representatives who cannot know much about their constituents trying to represent constituents who do not even know their interests in many areas and who, in any case, know very little about their government, its policies, and its officials.

B. Conventionally determined morality

Beyond any role morality that is functionally determined by our theory of representation, we might insist on several other “moral constraints” (that derive from conventional morality) on what our representatives do in office. There is one fairly broad, general concern that representatives are commonly expected to address: the political equality of citizens. This is a concern that seems to follow from the nature and purpose of democracy. We might fundamentally disagree about the extent to which economic inequality is good (as in the theory of justice of John Rawls, who allows inequalities—which might be extreme—that redound to the benefit of the worst off), but we do not generally argue in public that political inequality is good, although some, including Mill and Texas oilman H. L. Hunt, are notable exceptions. Exactly what it takes to make individuals politically equal is not easily determined, but some elements seem clear enough.⁴⁰

As noted earlier, Mill supposes that two of the most important tasks of government are to promote the virtue and intelligence of citizens, and to organize what virtue and intelligence already exist.⁴¹

One might contrive an argument that, say, broader education would redound not only to the benefit of those educated by this new policy, but also to the benefit of more or less all citizens through the creation of a more productive or otherwise more appealing society. But in general, it seems likely that a representative who works for such an egalitarian policy for the whole society will risk harming the interests of his or her constituents, who may not directly benefit from, but may directly pay for, the programs that enhance educational equality. Some things that a representative might seek for his constituents can most readily be attained if they are provided for all those in the relevant class. For example, the best way to guarantee a minimum wage for my constituents might be to legislate it for the entire nation. Hence, I might act in a way that is similar to the actions of a Burkean or Millian representative concerned with the general welfare and not merely with the welfare of my own constituents.

We could stipulate other “moral constraints” on representatives, such as seeing to the constituents' moral development or their religious beliefs. These two purposes were ruled out by the American constitutionalists, although they have been stipulated to be a large part of the mandate of government by many other regimes. In American politics there have been major movements that advocate the use of government for other purposes, for example, the social-agenda crowd that wants regulation of values, the mercantilist-statist Right that wants government to protect business interests, or the socialist-statist Left that wants government to restructure society to achieve greater economic equality.

Additionally, we can probably claim that part of the role morality of some government officials in the United States is to defend individual liberties, such as those defined in the Bill of Rights. For many officials, such as legislators, the defense of liberties requires merely refraining from infringing them, although, on occasion, legislators might be called upon to devise new protections, and other officials, especially those in the justice system, might be expected to defend liberties against official abuse. It is primarily the judiciary that has the function and, therefore, the role morality to defend civil liberties. Elected officials and appointed officials, such as the U.S. Attorney General, frequently find civil liberties an annoyance.

Finally, we might wish to press upon legislators as part of their role morality the more general purpose of working for the interest of the entire public, and not merely for their constituents. In a variant on my example of education, many legislators who represent districts in which education meets reasonably high standards might be expected, nevertheless, to vote for legislation mandating such standards for the entire nation, not in order to enhance political competence (as in my original example), but to enrich the life prospects of those who would benefit from the new programs. The votes of these legislators would serve not the interests of their own constituents, but only, in some sense, the broader public good or even only the interests of other citizens outside their constituency, possibly even at a substantial cost to their own constituents. If the policy were seen as a public good, then support for it could easily be justified on Burkean or Millian grounds, but it might sometimes also be argued on the ground of concern for political equality, in which case it would be an outgrowth of a conventional morality.

Clearly, none of these conventional moral principles for legislators is strongly backed by the electorates of many democratic nations. These are in many cases idiosyncratic views endorsed by activists of various stripes, not views inferred from the logic or nature of representation. Some of them might be backed by particular moral theories, such as utilitarianism, which might also back the institutions of representative government, but the principles are still not inherent in the nature of representation.

C. Conflicts of interest

Finally, we ought to consider one aspect of the role morality of anyone who acts as an agent for anyone else. All agents must avoid conflicts of interest that could lead them to benefit themselves at the expense of their principals. If our elected officials are our agents, then they must adhere to this constraint. The problem of conflicts of interest raises what is apparently the most striking difference between traditional professional ethics and any plausible ethics for elected officials: both the traditional professional and the elected official are agents on our behalf, and we want them to act in our interests, but the politician's position is far more complex than that of the traditional professional. For example, every doctor to whom I go as a patient should be my agent. But a representative can be seen as my agent and not yours in a meaningful and important sense if I voted for this representative while you voted against her. You cannot claim that she should work for your interests in the same way that I can, because she should act for the majority who elected her, including me, more than for those who opposed that majority.

Moreover, you might want to have her removed from office if she engages in practices that seem to benefit herself at public expense. I might not want her to be removed because I suspect that any replacement would be less committed to serving my interests. Consider the complications that might factor into opposition or support for a politician aside from the merits of any charges against him. As a real-world example, consider the positions of those who supported or opposed the impeachment of President Clinton and his removal from office. (The concern in his case was not over any abuse of office for his own interest.) Obviously, there was a substantial correlation between one's position on these moves and one's interest in having Clinton continue in office. Similarly, supporters of Berlusconi and his Northern League have argued that court actions to try him for bribery are politically motivated and opportunistic and, as I previously noted, they support legislation that would protect him from prosecution.⁴³

If we are legislating in advance, when there is no political valence to corruption, then we might all agree that acting from certain classes of conflict of interest should be punished by removal from office. When there is an actual case, you might favor removal while I do not, because your interests are served by removal and mine are not. The role morality for the officeholder will then be whatever we have stipulated by law and will not be colored by our own interests in removal or retention of a particular person in office. We could sensibly say that there is a public interest in blocking certain classes of conflict of interest.