Treat the Government as a Black Box and Measure the Distance to the Public

Arguments about representative government usually get lost inside it. Is the problem the lobbyists, the party system, the electoral formula, the civil service, the courts, the press? Each has its defenders and its reform programme, and the argument about which part is broken can go on indefinitely, because every part is a little broken and none of them is the whole story.

I want to suggest a different way of looking at it. Close the box. Take the entire governing apparatus, with every check and balance, every court and every committee, and treat it as one object with one property that interests us: the distance between what it wants and what the public wants.

The Measurement

The distance is not a metaphor. It is visible in the laws that never get passed.

Consider the laws that large majorities of the public would pass tomorrow if asked, and that the box has never produced and will never produce. A ceiling on the number of terms anyone may serve. A ban on legislators taking paid positions in the industries they regulated. Publication of every meeting between an official and a lobbyist. A requirement that a war be approved by a vote of the population that will fight it. The removal of an unpopular institution that has finished its work.

None of these is exotic. Every one of them polls well, has done so for decades, and stays exactly where it is. When a settled majority wants X for a generation and the outcome remains not-X, the distance between the box and the public is not small, and no amount of internal detail changes that measurement.

I have made a version of this argument about institutions that outlive the public's wish to abolish them. Here the point is broader: the whole governing box, not any one institution inside it, produces outcomes that track the public's preferences only loosely and in the wrong direction on exactly the questions that concern its own power.

Why the Cause Does Not Matter

The natural next question is why. Is it the personal selfishness of the people in office? Group pressure inside the parties? The general tendency of hierarchies to serve their upper levels? Capture by the people who fund campaigns?

Here I want to refuse the question, or rather to postpone it. The honest answer is that the mix is very hard to evaluate, that it certainly varies from country to country and from decade to decade, and that in one place the funders dominate while in another it is the civil service and in a third the parties. Anyone who tells you it is one thing has picked the one thing they already disliked.

But the difficulty of apportioning the cause is not evidence against the effect. A patient with a fever does not need the doctor to have finished the differential diagnosis before the thermometer is believed. The distance is the reading. The etiology is a separate and much harder problem, and confusing the two is how the discussion gets lost inside the box again.

The Invariant

Here is the claim that I think matters, and it is stronger than the observation that this or that government is unresponsive.

There has never been a representative regime in which this distance was small. Not the Athenian version with its chosen officials, not the Roman republic, not the Venetian, not any of the modern ones on any continent. The composition of the distance differs. Its existence does not. Wherever a minority governs on behalf of a majority, the minority's interests and the majority's separate, and the separation is large enough to show up in the laws that do not get passed.

If a phenomenon appears in every instance of a system regardless of culture, wealth, era, or constitutional design, the sensible conclusion is that it belongs to the system, not to the instances. The reformers who want to close the distance by adjusting the parts are treating a property of the design as a defect of the implementation.

What Follows

If the distance is structural, the only intervention that addresses it is one that changes the structure: that stops routing every decision through a minority and lets the majority decide the questions on which the minority's interests diverge from its own.

That is the case for direct democracy stated at its most abstract, and I prefer it that way, because it does not depend on believing anything about the people in government. They can be honest or corrupt, brilliant or dull. The box has a distance to the public in every configuration we have tried, and the only way I know to shrink it is to open the box.