Understanding populism via the institutional vs accountability tradeoff
Liberal democracy, when functioning well, imposes constraints on what policy outcomes are possible, via checks and balances. The rule of law, the emphasis on the rights of the individual over the tyranny of the majority (as codified in a constitution), and the separation of powers, all serve to impose this explicitly. Guaranteed rights, such as freedom of speech and the press, facilitate this via preventing a scenario whereby the government can unilaterally impose its preferences via eradicating the opposition. Shared, uncodified norms (some examples of which I discuss in a previous post) impose this implicitly. In extreme cases, such as the notorious “cordon sanitaires” of Europe that deliberately exclude right-wing populists from power, the annulment of Georgescu’s victory in Romania by the courts, and the sentencing of Bolsonaro in Brazil, there are constraints imposed on electoral outcomes. I will refer to this prioritisation of checks and balances over majoritarian preferences as the ‘institutional approach to democracy’.
Contrast this with the Rousseauean ‘accountability approach to democracy’. Under this view, democracies should impose the preferences of the majority on all citizens [1], regardless of the potential erosion of individual liberties. Checks and balances, far from facilitating the effective functioning of democracy, are regarded as antidemocratic. By imposing limits on possible policy or electoral outcomes, liberal checks and balances obstruct the “will of the people”.
I posit that there is a tradeoff between these two conceptions of democracy. The “establishment” or “elites” represent the institutional approach, whilst “populists” represent the accountability approach. These conflicting approaches to democracy help explain why populists act in a manner that many regard as autocratic. Indeed, in my view, a defining feature of populism is that it actively ignores or attempts to erode checks and balances, in order to implement what populists regard as the majority will. There is evidence that “elites” neglect the preferences of the median voter on social and cultural issues, relative to “populists”. Of course, it is well-documented that this is a primary driver of voting patterns, political debate, and affective polarisation today, and in order not to repeat analysis that has already been written extensively, I will delve no further here.
Obviously, the Rousseauean accountabiity approach is a threat to democracy. If implementating the preferences of the majority requires dismantling any opposition, or vehicles of opposition (for instance: free speech, the free press, or the rule of law), then the logical consequence of this approach is to circumvent the checks and balances protecting our individual freedoms. At best, the likely result, if populists are not voted out soon enough, is a “winner takes all” anocracy. At worst, we have an autocracy, that justifies its mandate to govern via representing the majority. We already have natural experiments on the results of the Rousseauean approach. Communists believed that they were advocating for the masses, and look at the fate of democracy under communist regimes…
Of course, Arrow’s impossibility theorem and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem both falsify the notion that a perfect aggregation rule actually exists (in other words, we cannot neatly translate the preferences of the majority into single policy outcomes, even if this was desirable). Nonetheless, those espousing the accountability view ignore this (probably because populism is negatively correlated with education, hence IQ), so this is not relevant to the post.