Another concern with unlimited democracy, according to Tocqueville, is its tendency to put the powers of government in the hands of people who are likely not to be the best and brightest. “The pursuit of wealth generally diverts men of great talents and of great passions from the pursuit of power, and it very frequently happens that a man does not undertake to direct the fortune of the State until he has discovered his incompetence to conduct his own affairs (p. 240)”. Who can’t think of a couple of politicians off the top of their heads to whom this applies! Sad, but true. If you’re capable of running a Fortune 500 company, why would you be an MLA? Also, the people building companies and participating in great endeavours generally can’t just take a four or eight year break from their efforts to engage in public service and expect to go back to what they were doing with the same success. Where would Microsoft or Apple be if Gates or Jobs decided to pursue politics part way through their careers? With Jobs’ forced exile part way through his run with Apple, we actually know where it was… in the dumps. Much longer and it could have gone bankrupt and Jobs would have had nothing to return to.

 

Tocqueville considers a couple of options to remedy this situation, such as educating the general populace better. Echoing Plato, however, he rejects this idea: “It is impossible, notwithstanding the most strenuous exertions, to raise the intelligence of the people above a certain level (p.229)”. Yet there is still hope. Tocqueville points to the American Senate, where he notices a much higher calibre of politician. Why? He says it is the way in which they are elected. Rather than the general public voting for senators, they are selected by the votes of the legislators only. That is, the people who have already been elected, the legislators, are the only people who get to vote on who becomes a senator (the Americans have subsequently changed this due to corruption). Given that the general character of the legislators is a little more educated than the general population, they choose more wisely when voting for senators, which means the quality of the senators is higher than it would otherwise be. Also, it is likely, as Tocqueville points out, that people of quality are more likely to run for the senate if they know they are being assessed by people already elected rather than the general population. So you may have a better pool to pull from.

 

I wonder, also, if there isn’t something to the fact that there are so few senators compared to legislators. This makes the status of these individuals greater, among other things. Given the voting system was changed, but the number has remained the same, I wonder if we see any difference in the senate today in America. If so, it may just be the status of the position which draws higher quality candidates than the fact of who does the voting. Something to explore.

 

If it turns out that you do get better candidates by having a body elected only by other elected people, it would be interesting to see if there were some applications we could make with this system today (of course we’d also have to keep in mind that America ultimately rejected this system because it led to corruption). I believe that in Canada, cabinet ministers had to be approved by Parliament. In a sense, this was like an election of cabinet ministers by the MPs who were elected. Did we get better cabinets back then?

 

I wonder how party politics plays into this though, for wouldn’t the party with the majority be able to elect its own party candidates exclusively? I suppose in America, some states would have been one party, some another, so that the mix of parties in the senate would have reflected the mix of parties in the states. This would be like MLAs electing MPs. If half the provinces were conservative, you would expect to see half the MPs conservative.

 

Perhaps to get around the corruption problem, the people could elect a number of potential MPs as a first step. Then, the MLAs immediately vote on the list of people elected to decide who ends up as an MP. This should help prevent corruption as you would reduce the ability of people to bribe the MLAs because they wouldn’t know if they were going to win the popular vote. Although, I suppose you could still have a person who says, “I’m going to run. If I make it through the popular vote, I will give you a porsche if you select me from there to be an MP”. Hmmm. How do we get around this? I think you’d need to elect a group of people specifically for electing others at the same time as people are running to be selected.

 

For example, let’s imagine we want to elect some MLAs. People who want to run for MLA put their names forth. At the same time, people who want to run for being part of the group to vote for the MLAs puts their names forth. On election day, you first run an election to get people for your selection body. Then, that group chooses from amongst the candidates running for MLA. They vote and a certain number of people become MLAs. This could lead to that problem of an entire legislature being one party. Also, as soon as the people running for the election body are known, the MLA potentials could start bribing them.

 

You almost need to have a group of people (a very large group) that we have voted to be selectors. Then, you randomly select a smaller group from the larger group to be the ones who actually vote, say 10%. This way, even if your MLA candidate has managed to bribe 30% of the selectors, it will only result in 3% of the final group being bought, which is likely not enough to swing the vote. Hold on. I think your smaller group would still contain 30% bribed people. Perhaps the only advantage, then, is just that it would be harder to bribe such a large number of people.

 

A larger problem, however, might be in voting for the selectors. What criteria would we use to judge who should be a selector? What would a debate look like? Would people run on their political affiliation, their values, their work/business history, their reputation? It would be interesting to see what would result. How can we try this on a small scale to test it?

 

“…the human mind can never be instructed and educated without devoting a considerable space of time to those objects (p. 230)”.

 

“The time may be already anticipated at which the American Republics will be obliged to introduce the plan of election by an elected body more frequently into their system of representation, or they will incur no small risk of perishing miserably amongst the shoals of democracy (p. 235)”. This is interesting because America actually went the opposite way and got rid of this method of election, I think because of politicians being bought, etc.
“Although a democratic government is founded upon a very simple and natural principle, it always presupposes the existence of a high degree of culture and enlightenment in society (p.244)”. Interesting to think of Iraq and other places the West has tried to start democracies. How about India, though?