A Brief Note on Reforming Republican Democracies

A basic problem in modern Republican Democracies is a lack of connection between investment in society and the franchise. I’ve been concerned about this issue for years, posting on my blog now because it may get attention at this time (and, as I write this on the eve of the U.S. presidential election, it’s perhaps less likely to be taken as just commentary on the specific election than if I initially posted during the aftermath). Two problems that flow from modern western franchise practices are the lack of a stable mechanism to bond the electorate into a sufficiently common political culture, and the lack of connection to the common defense. I’ll discuss both of these issues here and offer some suggested solutions. Though I don’t expect the proposals here to be adopted easily under present circumstances, I hope suggesting them may help to alert some to the problem, and also move people who have already noticed the problem away from some possible reactions that are unhealthy, non-constructive, or sub-optimal.

With some narrow exceptions (children of embassy staff), anyone born in the U.S. who has attained the age of 18 is automatically allowed to vote. Many other countries (particularly outside of the Western Hemisphere), are not this open, but there is a pattern in western liberal democracies of awarding the franchise without any particular investment in society, provided some minimum connection to the country exists. The current U.S. practice is at the liberal end of the spectrum (giving automatic citizenship to children of people in the country illegally so long as the children are born in the U.S., which many other countries would not do), but still, if someone above a certain minimum age has citizen parents in a liberal democracy, we can generally assume the person is allowed to vote there.

To many, this seems very tolerant. However, when we think about what voting is, it becomes apparent that this approach may actually undermine trust between citizens and increase the political temperature on a variety of issues. Starship Troopers is one bit of pop culture where an alternative system is envisioned (both in an interesting novel and in low quality film), and hits upon one crucial point–voting is an exercise of force (stated more mildly, when electing, say, a legislator, one is giving another sanction for determining how society will use force).

Given that voting is connected to society’s use of force, we should consider the franchise very seriously. Under the current system, there is very little to keep voters from becoming ever more fractured unless bound together via a restrictive immigration system and or a government program of education.

The universal franchise adds to the political fraught-ness of immigration. One party can attempt to keep people out when it perceives they will shift the political balance against it, another may attempt to let them in–or parties may attempt to tailor the immigrants coming in to who will support them electorally.

Public education, if done as a centralized program, is potentially a very unstable means of binding a country together. If a political group takes over the educational bureaucracy that was expected to be a force drawing citizens together, it could potentially shift educational policy to support its own ideology regardless of whether that ideology has much consistency with the original mission of the centralized educational structure. The point here is that mere centralization of education does not do much to ensure continuity and indeed could undermine it more quickly than decentralized education.

Universal suffrage is thus left relying on an institution likely to be fought over–centralized education, or a policy of immigration restrictionism that some party will likely see it in its interest to oppose.

A problem with universal suffrage more directly resulting from the nature of voting as force is a free rider problem. Someone can claim to be morally opposed to all use of force, and still vote. Someone can live an unhealthy lifestyle that leaves them completely unfit to, in an emergency, either aid the police in enforcing laws or the military in defending the realm, and still vote. Such voters may chose policies in line with their unsustainable ideologies and lifestyles, all without having to give any evidence that they are willing to sacrifice for the common defense.

The free rider problem is more dangerous than people realize. It perhaps makes society more likely to enter into situations which are dangerous (say, recklessly entering into foreign wars at the behest of voters who never gave due consideration to possibly having to fight in them). It also makes it possible for people who are not personally capable of contributing to the common defense to disproportionately cluster into some voting blocks and not others, with a resulting potential for a mismatch between electoral power and defense capabilities which would provide circumstances likely to result in a civil war or other major internal conflict. This problem might be remedied with several levels of rigor. One would be requiring some civil defense training as a requirement for the franchise (perhaps this could include some public goods likely to be undersupplied in an emergency such as first aid, as well as basic defense requirements like the ability to shoot). Another would be going the route made famous in some circles by Starship Troopers and requiring military service as a prerequisite for the franchise. My preferred route is a combination–civil defense training for the lower house and military service as a prerequisite to vote in senatorial elections.

The issue of cultural fragmentation is in some respects more difficult. The solution I propose could, when stated at a high level of generality, be used to promote harmful things, and would be difficult to implement properly: Require tests in order to get the right to vote. In the contemporary U.S. the easiest and more politically plausible route would be to require all voters to take the exam naturalized citizens must take. I would prefer a more rigorous series of literature tests, as well as several math tests (at least an algebra and a geometry test, and probably one more). Math tests would be included to make the literature tests more palatable to people with a STEM aptitude as well as to help the testing system serve to incentivize the education of the citizenry. With this sort of system, political groups would be incentivized to fund schools; different political parties might be incentivized to go out of their way to provide funding to schools for different disadvantaged groups, but on a society-wide level this would incentivize charitable support for education for everyone.

As far as the actual literature tests, I suggest a series of 100 question multiple choice tests on different sets of literature. Multiple choice so as to as much as possible remove the political biases of the graders from being an issue. This is where the system gets politically difficult to implement, because people would have wildly different views of which works to include, and to avoid it being a constant issue of contention the sets would need to be put into a given realm’s Constitution (in order to assist in forming and giving direction to a polity, the tests would need to have some degree or other of insulation from the political winds of the day, so some sort of supermajority and concurrent majority requirements for changes are needed).

This system seems better than tying the franchise to property or wealth because basic civic institutions can allow someone who has not invested much in the health of a polity to become wealthy by living within it. Not that making money is bad, but it is not the best measure of investment in the political culture or defense of a polity.

Realistically, even if a system like the one I have outlined becomes popularized, it is unlikely that the U.S. would be the first place to adopt such. I think, with the prospect of colonies on Mars and other celestial bodies within the lifetimes of people alive today, some such colony is likely to adopt a system like this before the U.S. does. It provides a ready solution to determine who should govern a colony in which a number of people are going in or out for economic purposes–the colony would be governed by those willing to invest the time into passing its chosen test system.

In the context of the U.S. and many western democracies, it might take a major social crisis for such a system to be adopted. But, given benefits like making immigration less contentious, some country might want to experiment with some variant of this. I say it could make immigration less contentious because the system requires effort to join in–any immigrant that made it through the system would have at least been exposed to some books which might familiarize him or her with the culture of the new country. Together with the civil defense or military service requirement this might help to encourage purely economic migrants to remain in the country without seeking to govern it. Building a signal that one isn’t merely an economic migrant into the franchise system might improve the perception of citizens of immigrant background (with all having passed the same tests and volunteered or at least taken time to train to protect the realm in the event of emergency). With these requirements, economic migrants might be allowed to move more freely with less of a worry of their effects on the local political system.

It would be difficult to get the U.S. to pass constitutional amendments to adopt a rigorous version of this system. The burden might be (very slightly) eased by having the amendments impose a de minimis national test involving some works closely connected to or very influential on the U.S. in its early founding history, and authorize the states to devise and require a certain number of additional tests for the franchise in each state. This seems unlikely in the short term.

As I write this, I early voted and I anticipate that several of the candidates I voted in favor of for key offices in the coming election will win. The concerns here are not focused on specific contemporary elections–though I do think they are relevant to this election. Imagine that a system like the one I’ve described had been in place the last several election cycles–it is not just that different candidates would have won, but the sets of candidates produced and making it through to the final vote would likely be different. There are serious problems of fragmentation in modern liberal democracies, and serious problems of lack of investment in the polity, and this is a proposal for addressing these issues.