There is continuous debate on whether representative democracy, the system applied in nearly all modern democracies, is the best form of government. This debate gets even more interesting when the case being studied concerns one of the oldest representative democracies in the world: the United States of America.
For a representative democracy to exist and be effective, the following principles should be respected:
1. People have the right to vote freely
2. Those votes are counted in a manner that makes them representative of the overall population
3. Elected representatives make decisions reflecting the will of those who elected them
There is an argument to be made that none of these principles are respected in the U.S.
Starting with the first principle, it is no secret that voter suppression is a reality in the U.S and comes in different forms. Many states do not allow people with a criminal record to vote, even if they have already served their sentences. Others have very strict rules in terms of their identifications requirements leading to specific groups of the population being disenfranchised. Additionally, certain states put extra limitations on early and absentee voting affecting mainly those who have less flexibility in terms of leaving their work on election day to cast their vote.
Studies have shown that the overall impact of these systemic disenfranchisement techniques is estimated to have stripped voting rights from 10 to 20% of eligible African-American males in the country.
Additionally, the ease of voting is not consistent across the country. Researchers have found that those who tried to vote in black neighborhoods waited significantly longer than those who tried to vote in white neighborhoods, potentially leading to many of those voters not casting their vote despite intending to.
Similarly, it is quite straight forward to demonstrate how the second principle of representative democracy is not respected either. Through the years, electoral districts boundaries have been redrawn in a partisan fashion to dilute the voting power of Latinos and African-Americans. This practice is known as gerrymandering.
Moreover, those votes are not valued equally. The presidency is decided based on the Electoral College, the most aggressive first-past-the-post system in existence. A candidate wins all the votes assigned to a state even if they win that state by a few hundreds votes. This broken system has led to Republicans running the country in 12 out of the last 20 years despite winning the majority of the national vote in one single election out of five.
And to make things worse, the Senate, which holds tremendous power, consists of 100 Senators equally distributed across the 50 states. For that reason, 30 Republican senators represent 15 states with a total population of 38 million people. That is less than the total population of California, which has just two Democratic senators representing it.
As a result, those two institutions do not end up accurately representing the population at large, while holding power that impact it for a few generations, such as the selection of a Supreme Court justice.
This leads us to the third and last principle which determines whether the will of the people is expressed via those elected to represent them. The failure of the first two principles is enough of a reason for the third principle to subsequently fail as well. But it doesn’t stop there. The U.S has almost no rules that limit campaign financing thanks to the landmark decision of the Supreme Court in 2010 (Citizen United v. Federal Election Commission). The court ruled that the government cannot restrict corporate expenses on elections as it considered it a form of free speech and hence must be protected by the First Amendment. The latter leads to the powerful and the rich being able to lobby elected institutions to make decisions that goes against the will of their constituents. Nothing demonstrates this better then the existing laws around gun control. Poll after poll show the majority of Americans (60%) favouring stricter gun control laws but Congress failing to act on the matter.
With all that in mind, it’s arguable that the U.S is not a representative democracy and was never one in the first place. And no matter who holds power on the night of November 3rd, 2020, they shall think twice before using the word “democracy” to define the country and start acknowledging that they have a lot of work to do to get there.
