Designing Justice: Representative Democracy

This is the second blog post in an ongoing series where I will be analyzing how public policy may be used to build a more equitable society. This time I’m going to be diving deeper, on how we structure representative democracy. Notably, I want to compare what I call Generalist Representation vs Policy-Based Representation.

Generalist Representation

When we elect a representative, we assume that this person must be well-versed in all issues of their constituency. While the design of our legislative branch does not necessarily require this, it is true that each representative may have a hand in crafting legislation regarding any topic.

Once a congressional candidate enters either the House of Representatives or Senate, they will inevitably join committees for which they are most interested or knowledgable. Congressional committees have greater ability to affect legislation for a particular segment of policy (e.g. Agriculture, Budget, Ethics, Education, etc). What committee(s) a given legislator intends on joining is paramount to understanding what that legislator will be spending their time doing and how effective they will be.

Unfortunately, this can’t completely inform your decision when voting for them because that legislator can still vote for, or against, any bill. They can even add amendments to bills from committees they are not part of (Once that bill is reported).

Because our current electoral system elects representatives through this lens of “generalist representation”, several problems arise:

• It tends to strengthen a “personality over policy” culture in politics. If a given candidate may represent you on any issue, it’s tempting to take shortcuts when studying their stances or record — skipping over specific policy stances and focusing on whether you find that candidate’s personality or ideology palatable. To maintain some semblance of substance, policy stances end up being reduced to buzzwords. This way they can be more easily consumed by the public as the combinatorics of candidates and policy can easily overwhelm even the most intellectually studious voter.
• Furthermore, we often end up voting out representatives based on wedge issues, causing a potential loss in talent and perspective that may have been unique to the person currently elected. The result is a democracy that provides suboptimal representation with respect to the intellectual capital of the constituency.

“Yes, Elizabeth Warren is the most powerful ally for financial regulation and consumer protection — but what about her foreign policy?”

• Because people are generally placed into office as the result of their stance on hot button issues, less sexy committees tend to be adopted by representatives who have no business running them. This is particularly harmful for crafting bills that require a high degree of technical knowledge.
• Due to the varying degree of aptitude in representation, it’s been suggested that random-selection of legislators may even be preferred over a democratic election.

It is fairly trivial to illustrate that structuring our democratic representation around generalists provides suboptimal results for the public. This brings me to an alternative form of representation.

Policy-Based Representation

I propose an alternative to our current system, which I will call “Policy-Based Representation”.

Instead of electing representatives who can operate legislatively on any given topic, the public would vote for a congressional candidate to operate solely within the confines of a specific committee. They would not be able to vote on or amend bills from other committees. This now provides us with several benefits:

• Voters have less policy stances to worry about. Being informed becomes a much easier task for the average voter. Then the challenge shifts from basic stances to specific details and trade-offs.
• Substance is now a first-class citizen. This may even change the nature of voting. Voters may skip elections for committees they are less interested or knowledgable in. The result could be that our elections are driven by more informed voters.
• We can elect people based on what they’re best at, without fearing a lack of qualifications on some wedge issue. This maximizes the quality of our representation for each policy.
• This also minimizes talent loss when you replace your elected officials. The assumption here is that an incumbent is only ousted if the challenging candidate is considered to be “more qualified” for that specific role. And within a Policy-Based framework, it is much easier to ascertain what “qualified” means. Thus, if voters’ estimations of a candidate’s qualifications are accurate, there will be a net zero loss of talent under this system.
• Legislative efficiency increases by at least a factor of 2. This is because we have effectively removed 50% of the votes a bill has to go through before passing (floor votes). Bills that require passage from multiple committees will still be difficult to coordinate, as they are now.

If we expect 1 person per committee per district and state, we will end up with many orders of magnitude more representatives. In order to accommodate this system, we would probably need to either stagger voting, or re-calibrate the number of representatives we have per region of a state.

It’s a simple idea, but it could result in a radical change of our political landscape.