ABSTRACT
As was noted in Chapter 3, social choice theory and theories of deliberative discourse have had a large impact on how political scientists understand the dynamics of democratic politics and decisionmaking. Such theorists ask us to imagine a procedure in which all have equal opportunities to raise and object to issues and amendments, where there is no powerful agenda-setting agent, where there is equal access to debate and where all votes count the same. What is likely to result from such a highly democratic setting? We saw that some of the theoretical findings that stem from the social choice research agenda in answer to this question have been disturbing to supporters of the democratic process. On top of the results already mentioned from Arrow, Riker, Condorcet and McKelvey, work by Plott (1967), Davis and Hinich (1968) and Schofield (1978) added further weight to the arguments that inconsistency would run rampant in IF settings. McKelvey (1976) and Plott and Levine (1978) were also able to demonstrate that control of the agenda was crucial for affecting the final outcome of choice mechanisms. Riker (1982) pushed the argument to its limits by claiming that institutions themselves are only ‘congealed preferences’ that are open to the same patterns of instability. One response to these assertions that might give sustenance to delib-
erative democrats is the claim, obviously true, that voting cycles seem rare to non-existent. Mackie has gone to great lengths to debunk Riker’s examples of cycles and Tullock (1981) asked the important question of why there is so much stability in politics? This led to the second string of social choice theorizing that tries to understand the dynamics of SIE. Shepsle and Weingast claim that ‘the rules employed by legislatures significantly restrict the potential outcomes
of the legislative process’ by placing ‘constraints on the completeness of the majority rule relation by restricting social comparisons’ (1981a, 515). This line of work has suggested that institutions have evolved in such a way as to negate the instability that would ensue in a pure majority-rule setting. Hence, the arguments that stem from Arrow’s findings are seen as
theoretically interesting but not unduly worrisome because they do not affect the workings of highly intricate, contemporary legislative bodies. SIE theorists do not deny the potential for chaos in a purely democratic setting but they tell us that in real legislatures there are inevitably mechanisms that create stability. A social choice theorist might respond that this line of thought does not offer a helping hand to those with a deliberative bent because the rules and procedures that create stability favour some participants rather than others; stable outcomes are inherently biased in a way that does not treat all participants as free and equal. Even if we allow for stable preferences among participants, we can still arrive at different collective decisions depending on the aggregating procedure (e.g. first past the post, cardinal utility, plurality, or Nash’s calibrations). As already noted, Arrow simply provided a logical deduction that is sound given the parameters he sets. Demonstrating that Riker’s empirical work is flawed does not refute Arrow, because Riker’s examples are very weak, as Mackie has so amply demonstrated, and the institutions he examined do not fit with Arrow’s conditions. But the arguments of social choice and deliberative democracy are
open to empirical scrutiny. We should expect more instability the closer we get to an IF setting if the social choice argument is correct, and we should get more consensus if Habermas and his supporters are right. The task is to find an institution satisfying the relevant criteria of no agenda setter, each person participating, weak Pareto efficiency, etc. There is a growing body of empirical research on how deliberation
affects preferences and attitudes. Most of this research is small group experimental work that is not applicable to politics on a large scale, which is what I am concerned with in this book. The results of these experiments are mixed, with some showing greater cooperation after discourse (Sulkin and Simon 2001) and much of the social psychology literature sounding a pessimistic note (Mendelberg 2002; Rosenberg 2003). There is some evidence from small study groups suggesting a convergence to unanimity, but Weale questions this by noting the pressures to conform in such situations. The drive to consensus might be placing undue pressure on some people to conform to the wishes of the
rest and, hence of conceding too much in terms of their own interests. This type of argument stretches back at least to John Stuart Mill who argued that consensus was stultifying because it bred mass conformity and Ian Shapiro (2003) argues in a similar vein that bi-partisan agreement is damaging to democratic vibrancy. He claims that America has very little competitive democracy because of the similarity between the two major parties, something that consensus theorists would presumably see as a good thing. Lucio Baccaro expanded the study of deliberation to factory workers
in Italy and found that discourse seemed to produce a different outcome than if participants simply voted on an issue. However, as Steiner et al. point out, his meaning of deliberation is not the same as Habermas’s, and it is difficult to draw firm conclusions simply from the fact that people talk to one another. A similar complaint can be made against Fishkin’s (1997) results. I do not think anyone would deny that talking to one another is a good thing and can help people become more informed, but the Habermasian model demands more than this. Simone Chambers (1999) has conducted research on discourse during the referendum on Quebec in Canada. She found that during the conference stage of the process, discourse was of a high quality and there was wide-scale agreement such that ‘[a]dvocates even of quite extreme positions were willing to sign on to ‘consensual’ documents that reflected the general tenor of the weekend-long debates’ (quoted in Steiner et al. 2004, 48). But in the nitty-gritty of competitive politics ‘the referendum campaign appeared to harden positions. Furthermore, leaders and spokespersons began to talk in zero-sum terms, to the effect that any concession to other interests would be a loss for their side’ (quoted in Steiner et al. 2004, 48). Chambers concluded that the quality of discourse erodes as the decision-making time approaches. Jurg Steiner et al. (2004) have provided an interesting attempt to
study the effects of deliberation in large-scale democracies. Their aim ‘is not to defend the Habermasian model but rather to establish in an empirical way the preconditions of a high-quality discourse and its consequences for policy outcomes’ (2004, 5). They note that real world democracies are a long way from the Habermasian discursive ideal but they do accept the argument that the ISS should count as a benchmark by which to judge actual democracies: ‘the ideal type of deliberation must be seen as the end point of a continuum that will never be fully reached’ (2004, 18). The assumption being made here is that the closer we get to the ideal, the better off we will be. Some discourse is good but more is better. The authors of the
study test a number of hypothesis such as, ‘[c]onsensus democracies are characterized by a higher level of parliamentary deliberation than competitive ones’ (2004, 82) and ‘[t]he quality of parliamentary deliberation is higher in second chambers than in first chambers’ (2004, 87). They found that
favorable institutional antecedents include consensus institutions, the presence of veto players, debate in second chambers, and debate in non-public arenas. Debilitating factors include competitive settings, the absence of veto-players, debate in first chambers, and debate in public arenas. (2004, 135)
I agree with the general conclusion arrived at by Steiner et al. ‘that institutions matter for political discourse Changes in the institutional parameters can have a profound effect’ (2004, 114). These results say nothing as yet about the quality of outcomes, but they continue by studying ‘the implications of discourse (for outcomes) in one institutional setting: the German Mediation Committee’ (2004, 138). They test the hypothesis that ‘a genuine consensus or a reasoned compromise, are more likely when there is a high level of parliamentary deliberation’ and conclude that ‘there appears to be a strong relationship between outcomes and discourse quality’ (2004, 150). These findings are very interesting and do suggest that discourse can help to resolve conflict and move people closer to one another on specific issues. The key problem with this research, and with all of the empir-
ical work to date, is that it is measuring discourse and outcomes in institutions that undermine some of the conditions Arrow and Habermas place on decision-making and deliberation, particularly condition U. Modern legislative bodies are full of rules, regulations and norms that create an environment a long way from the ‘ideal’ of an IF setting. Agenda setters decide on what will be discussed, the order in which it will be debated and how long it will be talked about. Studies of these institutions can show that it is better to talk than not to talk, but few would question this. They do not show us that deliberation on the Habermasian end of the continuum is a good thing. If we really want to know what will happen in an IF environment, we need to find and IF institution. Steiner et al. recognize these problems and ‘do not claim that the findings with respect to the German Mediation Committee generalize to other contexts’ (2004, 139). The major empirical problem we face is that examples of pure IF
decision-making institutions are extremely rare. If we can unearth
such institutions, they might go a long way to answering our questions about the likely outcomes of free and equal democratic procedures. When we look at contemporary institutions we see that Shepsle is correct about SIE, and it is not surprising that most empirical work is aimed at understanding how institutional structures shape the collective decision-making process. Consequently, the arguments of IF theorists are usually treated as abstract hypotheses that are largely untestable. In social choice theory, an open agenda process is often regarded as a highly specialized and arbitrary concept with little relevance to actual political behaviour. According to Shepsle, ‘Institutions by their very structure induce an element of stability in policy outcomes that does not emerge in the more atomistic world of pure majority rule’ (1986, 76). The suggestion here is that institutions as we know them and pure majority rule (PMR), of the type discussed by Arrow and Habermas, cannot coexist. We need only accept this argument, however, if we also accept that institutions always resemble something approximating modern legislative bodies and if we assume, as Shepsle does, that rules always constrain actors. Fortunately, history provides us with a legislative body that is simple
enough in its structure to allow us to examine it as a whole, without having to remove and ignore essential components of ‘real politics’ and without having to add some of the counter-intuitive assumptions from social choice, such as gate-keeping powers, ex-post vetoes, perfect information, dimension-by-dimension decision-making and calculations of the relative ‘sincerity’ of voting behaviour. In other words, I will examine a simplified institutional arrangement but it is a real legislature rather than a stylized creation. In this manner, we can engage in the crucial enterprise of testing theories against the backdrop of a firm empirical base and move a step beyond the usual approach of theorizing on a purely abstract level. The legislative body to which I refer is the American Continental Congress, 1774-1789. I will show in a later section that the Continental Congress was organized around norms and practices that fit well with the assumptions made by deliberative democrats and social choice advocates. The Continental Congress was an open, egalitarian and democratic
legislature and fully reflected the preferences of its members. I intend to use the Congress as an example of what happens when institutional norms and procedures are weak, and where institutional power is dispersed. In essence, I am responding to the still largely unheeded call by Cooper and Brady (1981a,b) and Green and Shapiro (1994) to use history as a laboratory for investigating the role and place of contemporary concepts in political science. As they correctly note, ‘one cannot
but be impressed by the paucity of sustainable empirical analysis flowing from rational choice theory’ (1994, 244). In responding to the call, I utilize the early Congress as a simple, though real and historically important, legislative setting within which assertions of modern democratic theory concerning the dynamics of IF procedural politics can be explored. I will attempt to show that there was an earlier world in which some of the theoretical claims of Arrow, Riker and Habermas played out in political practice. From the description of the institutional structure of the Contin-
ental Congress and the results that flowed from it, I will draw certain implications regarding the dynamics that underlie the operations of open, democratic legislatures. The focus of my analysis, given the task of highlighting the IF nature of Congress, will be on the powerlessness of the President (as speaker, leader, or agenda setter), the organization, or lack thereof, of committees, and, in particular, the openness of the floor. I conclude the chapter with an assessment of the theoretical claims of IF theorists in the light of the empirical evidence. The evidence suggests that cycles did not occur but that instability was rife.
It would require a lot more space than is available to me here to outline the workings of the Congress. What I intend to do is to look briefly at some of the prime stability-inducing institutional mechanisms that have been identified by political scientists. My aim is to demonstrate that such features in the Congress did not interfere with its deeply democratic nature. In particular, I draw on the work of Jillson and Wilson (1994) to flesh out the structural dynamic of the institution, and I recommend this work to anyone interested in a more detailed discussion of the Congress. A theme that animated most of those who attended the Congress
was a fear of abuses that could stem from an exuberant political body with too much power (Bowling, 1990). The result was that the delegates arrived in Philadelphia with a wary eye on republic building, which was reinforced by similar feelings of those left back at home in the colonies. To make sure that the predominance of the states was clear, Article 2 of the Confederation provided that each state would retain ‘its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated’ to the Congress (Journals, 9:908). Members of the Congress also wanted power to be widely diffused
within the body itself and took considerable pains to make each
member the equal of all others. This even extended to the powers allocated to the President of Congress who was elected to be a figurehead of the body rather than as the seat of institutional power. Most of the colonies had sent along their political elite and such men were not about to allow one amongst them to take a dominant role. Out of the 56 men who attended in the Spring of 1774, 12 of them had been the Speaker in their own colonial legislative body. Jillson and Wilson note that ‘delegates deliberately chose to constrain and weaken leadership positions within the Congress – especially the presidency it is important to recognize that the choice was quite deliberate and was confirmed and maintained throughout the life of the institution’ (1994, 71). Randolph was the first person to be elected President and his main
function was to preside in a judicious manner over the floor debates; by the end of the Congress, the role of the President was still largely the same. He certainly had none of the agenda-setting powers that Shepsle identifies as mechanisms of equilibrium. Shortly after the opening of the first Congress, a delegate from Connecticut wrote that ‘our president, thought a gentleman of great worth, and one who fills and supports the dignity of his station to universal acceptance, yet cannot urge forward matters to an issue with that dispatch, which he might in a different assembly,’ and President Henry Laurens said of himself that he was ‘a silent auditor and spectator with no will of my own The reasonings in Congress and Conscience, were my oracles. I neither consulted, nor received advice out of doors, directly or indirectly, from any man’ (Burnett, Letters, 3: 221, 227, 272; 4: 147). If we cannot find the source of equilibrium-inducing power in the
President it is worth taking a look at the committee system. Here we find that the creation of, and appointment to, committees was a very democratic matter. A committee was appointed whenever a majority of the states voted in favour of a motion to form a committee. If the vote was in favour, then nominations for members of the committee came from the floor and each member of Congress voted secretly for one of the nominees. The ones gaining the most votes were duly elected and the most popular was chosen as the Chair. The dominant form of dealing with business was through the formation of ad hoc committees. Although there were standing committees, these were not very successful; the same can also be said for the appointment of independent boards and the election of single executives who were not members of Congress (Jillson and Wilson 1994, 93). The history of the organizational strategies of members of Congress
is too complicated to detail here, but it is safe to say that the bulk of
the activity from 1774 to 1789 was carried out by ad hoc committees; by the demise of the institution, 3249 committees had been formed. Shepsle has noted that one way of creating stability is to provide a committee with exclusive control over a policy issue. This never happened in the Continental Congress because jurisdictional boundaries never formed and most committees had a narrow agenda that was issued directly from the floor. The turnover of members also negated the formation of a strong power base for any particular member. The usual length of term was one year, which precluded incentives to specialize in particular policy issues. As President Jay wrote,
