A Democratic Primer: Direct Election of Party Leaders

Yesterday I had a long chat with my dear, sweet, lovely Misha and the recent elections naturally came up. My significant other is an American. (I hope she will soon be immigrating to live with me in Guelph.) As such, she was puzzled about why such a progressive place like Ontario could elect a Trump clone as premier. This, of course, got me thinking about a core issue in democratic governance: how parties pick their leaders.

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Alcibiades, the politician that
destroyed Athenian democracy.
Public Domain c/o Wiki Commons

People talk about "Athenian democracy" and often put it forward as some sort of idyllic society. In actual fact, in the more than 2,000 years since it went under, most philosophers have used it as an example of why democracies are not a good thing. The problem is "demagoguery", or, "mob rule". Historically, the figure they focus on is Alcibiades, who convinced Athenian voters into sending out a disastrous invasion of Sicily. After the cream of the Athenian fleet was massacred, the downward spiral and eventual defeat by Sparta and it's allies was inevitable. (To a great degree, Socrates was executed by Athens because he was a teacher of Alcibiades.)

The fundamental problem that these classic thinkers identified was allowing people to choose only makes sense if they are capable of making an informed choice. Consider the following hypothetical situation. A person is presented with a room with three unlabeled doors. He is told that one of the doors will open soon and a hungry polar bear will come out of it to kill him. Behind another door his family is trapped and he will be able set them free. If he doesn't free them they are the next meal for the bear. Another door has a large amount of money and if he goes through that door, he can keep it and go free (good for him, not so good for the wife and kids.) And, of course, the polar bear is behind the last door---very bad things will happen to both him and his family if he chooses it.

The key issue in this scenario is that the doors aren't labeled. It's true that the hypothetical person I mentioned above gets to choose which door to open, but it's not really much of a choice at all until she learns what is behind each door. The implication for democratic governance is that the ability to vote is worthless unless it is coupled with the information necessary to make an informed choice. 

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Now let's make things a little more confusing. Suppose that the fellow who has to choose the door has three people talking to him through a computer monitor. One of them says "choose the door on the right"---that's where your family is. Another says "don't listen to him, you need to choose the door in the middle----that's where your family is". The third guy says "they're both wrong, you want the door on the left because that's really where they are". This changes the situation from one of random chance to one of having to make a psychological assessment:  "who do you trust?" They can't all be right. In fact, you know that two of them are at worst lying or at best too arrogant to admit that they don't really know what is behind any of the doors.

The problem with having to make a psychological assessment is that contrary to what you might think, it is impossible to tell if someone is or is not lying to you simply by looking at them. The only real way to make an informed prediction is by knowing something of the history of the person who is talking to you. And that can be really hard to know if you don't live in a small town where everyone carries their own personal history on their shoulders for all to see. If you do really know the history of all of the three people talking to you, you might be able to do a quick assessment like this. "Fred is a slime bag who's always wanted my farm, if my family and I get eaten by a polar bear he will be able to buy it cheap. I don't trust him." "Jack confabulates and really can't tell the difference between fact and fantasy. He wouldn't set out to hurt anyone, but his advice is worthless. I can't trust him." "Loraine, on the other hand, is very honest, really cares about other people, and, has very good judgement. If I have to choose who to believe, it has to be her. I will choose the door she suggests."

But what if you really don't know anything at all about either Fred, Jack, or, Loraine? Moreover, what if they each hire public relations firms and advertising to constantly "bang the drum" about how honest, trustworthy, and, decent each of them is---and also hire lawyers to sue into the dirt anyone who tries to inform the public about anything bad in their past? 

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In my little story the voter is the person who has to choose the door and the future of the country is what lies behind the doors. (Think of the polar bear as climate change.) And the guys trying to get her to choose one door over the other are the political parties and their leaders. This is a very important problem in democratic practice.

Democratic systems have devised ways to get around this problem by recreating the "small town feel" inside political parties. They traditionally do this by limiting the number of people who can nominate candidates or elect leaders. The old model was that the sitting MPs and MPPs for a particular party would be the only people who got to vote for the leader. (This still happens in Australia, which is why they have recently seemed to have gone through an inordinate number of Prime Ministers.) The key advantage for selecting the party leader, Prime Minister, and, Premier this way is that the people with the best knowledge of a person's ability are the only ones involved. This means that all the votes cast are informed votes.

There are some problems with this system however. For example, it means that the only party members who are allowed to run for the leadership are people who've already been elected to Parliament. While it's true that a leader needs to be sitting to be effective, it also means that new parties or ones with few seats can't elect a leader. Mike Schreiner---Guelph's MMP---could never have been chosen leader of the party until he was elected.

As a result, another system was created where local Riding Associations would elect delegates to a convention and they would choose the party leader. The value of this system was that the sorts of people who would get elected as delegates would be people that were "known quantities" to the other members of the local riding association: they "carried their personal histories on their shoulders". And as part of being experienced members, they would also have a good understanding of the party outside of the local association. This meant that when it was time to go to a convention and choose a leader, these individuals have a good chance of telling the difference between Fred "the slime bag", Jack "the confabulator", and, Loraine "the good egg", and vote accordingly. This was the system that all the political parties---both in Canada and the US---used until only a few decades ago. 

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Doug Ford, the modern Alcibiades?
Public Domain c/o Wiki Commons

Unfortunately, this system has been declared "old-fashioned" and "undemocratic" by many people (who I suspect have never really considered the issues I've raised above.) As a result, it has been replaced with a system whereby each member of the party gets to vote in an internal election. Moreover, it isn't just the old, established members of the party who get to vote. Candidates are encouraged to go out and sell as many memberships as possible to new people. The benefit that comes from this is to increase the membership base, but the huge problem is that none of these people have any understanding at all about the internal culture of the party. Indeed, the only real connection that they have is to the individual candidate who sold them their membership. This puts these new members in the position of the person in the room facing three doors and having three different people that they know very little about trying to convince them to choose one unlabeled door over another.

This makes a political party prone to the "mob rule" or "demagoguery" that classical philosophers were so worried about. And, to be totally frank, people like Donald Trump and Doug Ford would never, ever get elected to lead the Republican and Conservative parties if the only people allowed to choose were folks who had had a long history in the party and really had a feel for the merits of the individual candidates.

Personally, I'd like to go back to the old way of doing things. How about you?

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I'm busy grinding away at future stories beyond these "op eds", so if you are champing at the bit for some more investigative journalism, you just need to be patient---it is coming. Having said that, I am surprised by the positive feedback that I've gotten over these opinion pieces. They are less work, but they still are time consuming none-the-less. 

One of the things that used to infuriate me about the opinion pages of mainstream newspapers was that a lot of the pieces were "freebies" that had been sent to the paper by subsidized "think tanks" like the Fraser Institute. In effect, people like the Koch brothers were able to transform a newspaper opinion page into paid advertising against doing anything about climate change simply by giving some suit an honourarium to write some nonsense and then send it out to any paper that had a hole next to the cartoon and didn't want to pay someone like me to fill it.

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