The Consumer Choice Analogy

If democracy is about consent, as in the liberal view, then the expectation that parties should earn our votes fits with how we think about most consensual choices.

The quintessential consensual choice is that of the consumer. For example, consumers looking for coffee can expect to find dozens of cafés competing to offer good coffee at low prices in nice shops, maybe even innovating. No cafe can count on unconditional profit: we can always go elsewhere, make coffee at home, switch to tea, or go without caffeine. If cafés want our dollars, they have to earn them.

Businesses’ dependency on these consensual choices gives consumers a lot of leverage. If our favorite café raises prices, we’ll go less often; if staff are rude, we’ll stop going; if the owner donates to an unethical charity, we may organize a boycott. If enough other consumers join us in withholding their dollars, the café will either have to improve or go out of business. Collectively, these individual choices constitute the “invisible hand” of the market: the system of market incentives that exploit the café’s desire for profit to drive competition and ensure a wide selection of good cafés.

This consumer choice analogy was influentially applied to politics in 1942 by the economist and political theorist Joseph Schumpeter. Schumpeter described democracy as a method whereby “individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.” He saw electoral competition as analogous to market competition: parties (companies) offer policies (products) to voters (consumers), whose individual votes (purchases) combine to create incentives that exploit parties’ desire for power (profit), thereby driving competition and ensuring good governance (efficient production). This “competitive” theory of democracy (and other economic models of politics) greatly influenced twentieth-century liberalism and still informs today’s commonsense view of democracy.

If asked, “Should parties earn our votes?” Schumpeter (and most liberal political theorists) would say yes. This expectation is essential to the operation of the invisible hand of the political market, meaning good governance depends on voters insisting that parties earn their votes. If we kept buying from bad cafés, they would have no incentive to make good coffee. Likewise, if we keep voting for bad parties, they’ll have no incentive to offer popular policies.

This may seem like an efficient model of politics. Parties offer competing policies, voters choose the party they prefer, and the winner governs until they’re judged on their performance at the next election. If a party has bad ideas or governs poorly, they won’t earn enough votes and will either have to change course or be replaced. This competition will ensure good governance, and voters will only need to do basic research and weigh in periodically, leaving them free to focus on their private lives.

Clearly, real politics doesn’t work like this. Markets may be decent for delivering coffee, but how many political parties enjoy the approval ratings of even the worst cafés? How often do parties “go out of business” and get replaced? If we accept the competitive theory, then maybe we just need to increase competition through better regulation of the political market or more insistence that parties earn our votes. But before doubling down on this market-based model of politics, we should consider its full implications.

The Premises of Competitive Democracy

First, the competitive theory is highly inegalitarian, hence its alternate name: the “elite theory of democracy.” It holds that elected politicians will and should “make policy and law with little regard for the fickle and diffuse demands made by ordinary citizens” (Schumpeter also thought politicians should be drawn from a hereditary aristocracy). Electoral competition occurs entirely among this small elite, exploiting their desire for power to incentivize them to govern well.

By contrast, most people are denied any role in politics beyond choosing their leaders (Schumpeter also thought it was perfectly legitimate to restrict the franchise based on sex, race, wealth, or religion). Just as consumers leave decisions about how coffee is made to cafés, voters leave decisions about what’s on the ballot to parties.

The exclusion of most people from political decision-making is not a side effect of the competitive theory but one of its primary goals. Schumpeter believed that “the electoral mass is incapable of action other than a stampede,” and thus argued that political institutions must ensure voters “do not control their political leaders in any way except by refusing to elect them.”

In order to prevent any “spontaneous revulsions” that may enforce the people’s will on government, Schumpeter also urged political elites to “manufacture” public will by means “exactly analogous to the ways of commercial advertising.” Ideally, political argument should be “the attempt to twist existing volitional premises into a particular shape and not merely the attempt to implement them or to help the citizen to make up his mind.”

Second, the competitive theory implies a hyperprivatized vision of society. When democracy is treated as merely a means for aggregating private choices, society is reduced to merely an instrument for advancing private ends. Just as market society turns “people” into “consumers,” competitive democracy turns “citizens” into “voters” (or combines both degraded forms into “taxpayers”).

This is the starkest difference between liberal and republican models of politics. The liberal privatization of political participation degrades the character of citizenship and destroys the social solidarity that used to be called patriotism. The liberal voter is denied the ability to participate in public affairs, once thought to be the essence of freedom; denied the opportunity to excel in public life, once thought to be the purpose of politics; and denied the public happiness and public freedom that was once pursued by the republican citizen.

The disconnection of democracy from most people’s participation in public life also leaves liberal theory blind to the civic corrosion caused by extreme inequality, workplace domination, the collapse of active political engagement, and the denial of republican safety to undocumented immigrants. This erasure of those who lack formal legal status denies them the rights and responsibilities of citizenship altogether, further underscoring how the liberal model abandons both solidarity and justice.

In the end, the competitive theory produces the society it envisions. Broad public deliberation is replaced with elite electoral competition; pursuit of collective purpose is replaced with pursuit of economic growth; and concern for the common good is replaced with the balancing of private interests.

Why Parties Shouldn’t Earn Your Vote

The expectation that parties should earn our votes originates from and reproduces this marketized, elitist, and privatized model of politics. When we expect businesses to earn our dollars, we accept that our only role is to pay, while they decide how to produce. To speak of parties earning our votes is to apply this same idea to politics: it means accepting that our only role is to vote, while political elites decide how to rule.

However, the consent involved in competitive democracy is even more limited than consumer choice. The exclusion of the people from any role in decision-making means their consent is not sought for whether or how elites will govern, only which elites will govern — voters don’t choose the product, only the producer. Since our only role is to vote, not to decide, once it’s determined that we have consented to government (even tacitly), all decisions about what we have consented to are no longer up to us.

Ultimately, this disempowering model of politics stems from the heart of liberal political philosophy: the idea that democracy is consent to government. We can’t consent to our own actions, only what is done to us by others, so all discussions of consent presuppose that one side acts and the other is acted upon. Thus, the liberal idea of consent to government rules out the republican idea of self-government by the people and implies instead that a passive people is governed by an active elite.

Expecting parties to earn our votes accepts and reinforces our degradation from self-governing citizens, who participate in public life, to consenting voters, who authorize elite rule. Dropping this expectation is the first step toward ensuring that political parties serve their only legitimate function in a democratic society: as institutions for people to develop, discuss, and advocate their own ideas and thereby shape their society.

A New Democratic Citizenship

While the liberal voter’s passivity grants the hollow luxury of a narrow focus on private life, the republican citizen’s right to self-government brings both the power and the responsibility of active participation in public life. Political parties, flawed as they may be, are the primary vehicles for such participation. As such, self-government today requires joining a party; and since democratic politics requires broad engagement, it’s most effective to join a large, diverse, and popular party.

If no party reflects your values, this isn’t a failure by elites to earn your vote but a sign that you aren’t sufficiently included in public decision-making. The solution isn’t to launch a vote boycott until the invisible hand of electoral competition delivers better options but to seek a redistribution of power. Achieving this will require democratizing our parties, but such reforms won’t be paternalistically granted from above: member control must be enacted by members.

Not long ago, efforts at democratization were faced with difficult trade-offs between participation and fairness: maximizing member control risked empowering those with the free time to participate while sidelining those with onerous work or family responsibilities. However, new and emerging e-democracy tools, natural language processing techniques, and other computational methods allow for deliberation to occur at massive scales without becoming prohibitively time-consuming, allowing people with limited free time to meaningfully participate. Today’s democrats are better equipped than at any point in at least 250 years to replace the antiquated social technology of electoral representation with true self-government.

Genuinely democratic parties aren’t brands, businesses, or elite factions seeking to earn votes but institutions through which members cooperate to shape their society. Some difficult compromises will still be necessary — democratic participation only guarantees a fair hearing and an equal part in collective decision-making — but the character of these compromises will be fundamentally altered. While liberal parties offer compromises that they hope members will accept, democratic parties reach compromises through members’ deliberation — members of democratic parties don’t support policies, but decide them.

Democratization begins by no longer speaking of “the party” earning our votes but of “our party” enacting our joint decisions. The view of the democratic citizen-member is “This is my party, along with my friends and allies, which we use to govern our society; its staff are our employees, its elected members are our spokespeople, its policies are our decisions, and its victories are our victories.” To the extent that this is not yet true, the work of democratization is not yet finished.

All of this requires a new understanding of democracy. When we expect parties to earn our votes, we preemptively surrender our right to participate in self-government. Dropping that expectation, joining a party, and taking our share of power and responsibility is the first step toward new democracy and true freedom.