David S. Broder.
Democracy Derailed: Initiative Campaigns and the Power of Money.
Harcourt. 256 pages. $26.00
David S. Broder is justifiably viewed as the dean of Washington political journalists. He is a reporter who consistently looks behind the headlines and identifies important trends in American politics that go beyond narrow partisan divisions. Almost uniquely among journalists, he canvasses the political science literature to put new phenomena in the perspective of history and social science. After assembling a mass of data, he then delivers elegant and balanced judgments that are always deliberate and thoughtful, even if not invariably on target.
All these skills are impressively on display in his new book, Democracy Derailed: Initiative Campaigns and the Power of Money. Broder shines his searching spotlight on the growing importance of state initiatives — referenda in which the voters directly decide issues of fundamental political importance from affirmative action to term limits, from the appropriate use of labor union dues to the appropriate treatment of animals. These are exercises in direct democracy, bypassing the legislative process. Broder provides a detailed and colorful picture of several of these campaigns, showing that they involve not only civic-minded citizens but organized interest groups. The campaigns have also created cottage industries, generating a market for lawyers who are expert in drafting the text of initiatives and for companies that go from door to door getting voters to sign the initiative petitions.
Above all, Broder highlights the role money plays. The direct democracy of old New England towns required only a hall for communication among citizens, but the vastness of California necessitates far more resources for the exchange of views. Campaign contributions therefore inevitably influence the course of referenda, as they influence the rest of our politics. Both organized groups and wealthy individuals bankroll initiatives in the hope of vindicating either group interests or their own personal ideology.
Usefully, Broder situates this new issue in American political history. He observes that at the turn of the century Progressives were the first to celebrate initiatives, touting more populist procedures as a way of avoiding legislatures ensnared by the monied interests. This pedigree, in Broder’s view, underscores the irony that modern initiatives are mostly run by political professionals. He also uses these populist roots to suggest that enthusiasm for initiatives represents the antithesis of the Founders’ view that democracy must be representative rather than direct and be subject to checks and balances if it is to reach informed judgments and avoid trampling the rights of minorities.
At the end of the book, Broder goes to school and canvasses academic opinion on the current initiative process. While he is scrupulous in recording scholarship both favorable and unfavorable to initiatives, his own judgment is distinctly negative. He argues that the Framers were wise to prefer legislative rule to unmediated popular judgment, because, on balance, deliberative democracy leads to more informed, expert, and dispassionate decision making than direct democracy. He also contends that the initiative process has been subverted by moneyed interests and wealthy individuals. Thus, as the subtitle of the book suggests, Broder’s discontent with referenda substantially rests on his general dissatisfaction with the role money plays in politics.
Democracy derailed is well reported and well written. Its framework of analysis, however, is flawed. First, Broder’s praise of the original Federalist system of representative democracy for protecting against tyranny of the majority fails to recognize that modern representative government now faces more substantial dangers of rule by special interests. As Mancur Olson has shown, concentrated interest groups have substantially greater power than the diffuse citizenry in the legislative process. At the time of the Founding, special interest leverage mattered somewhat less because governments, both state and federal, engaged in far less spending and regulation than they do today. There was simply less government action from which special interests could extract resources and opportunities for themselves at the expense of the public. Moreover, the Framers created a constitutionally limited commercial republic along with deliberative democracy. In particular, the primacy of property rights made it difficult for special interests to engage in redistribution through spending and regulation. Therefore, under our original system, with its relatively low potential for interest group capture, legislative sovereignty may well have had a comparative advantage over popular sovereignty because it reduced the dangers of popular tyranny.
Even at the time of the Founding, however, the Antifederalists warned of important dangers other than majority tyranny. They predicted that as government became more distant from the people, interest groups and elites (in their era they were mostly the same) would enlarge the scope of government to their advantage at the expense of the general public. Their fears have been richly vindicated through the course of the history of the United States, as the constitutional structures that restrained government, like property rights — and more general societal norms against regulation and redistribution — have receded. With the rise of the special interest state, legislative sovereignty may no longer enjoy the same comparative advantage over popular sovereignty because the principal danger of republican government has shifted from majority tyranny to special interest rent-seeking. Thus, even if one agreed with the Federalist system in the era of the Framers, support for initiatives may now be warranted to compensate for other large changes in the scope of government.
To be sure, Broder also is concerned that special interests will exercise disproportionate influence even over initiatives. But another problem with his analysis is that he does not ask whether the special interest influence over the initiative process is greater or less than the special interest influence over the legislature. If it is less, then initiatives can play a useful role in curbing special interests. Indeed, the initiative mechanism would then itself reduce special interest influence over legislatures, because special interests would have fewer incentives to lobby the legislature when their gains could be wiped out by the general citizenry in a referendum.
Both political theory and Broder’s own reporting in fact suggest that special interests have less leverage over initiatives than in the legislature. One of the principal advantages that special interests enjoy over the diffuse citizenry is their greater knowledge of the legislative process and the details of legislative proposals, because special interests have greater incentives to monitor the legislature and citizens are ignorant of most of what goes on there. In contrast, initiatives disseminate the proposals at issue to every voter in the state, thus reducing the information gap between special interests and citizens. Broder himself suggests that most voters come to understand the essence of most important initiatives, at least if they are relatively simple. Moreover, complex initiatives are generally defeated by their very complexity, thus providing a natural brake on the substitution of popular judgment for detailed matters best left to legislatures.
Broder’s reporting also shows that initiatives do help the majority work their will against special interests. Take the case of racial and ethnic preferences. As Nelson Lund of George Mason Law School has observed, legislative or administrative action establishing such preferences can be viewed as a case of rent-seeking by special interests. Like subsidies to sugar producers, preferences create a few clear winners (the preferred students or employees) but relatively diffuse losses, since it is hard for those who are not preferred to ascertain whether they actually lost an opportunity because of a preference. Legislators are inclined to favor bills with clear winners and unclear losers, because they gain intense support from the former without greatly annoying the latter. Legislators and special interests can also increase their joint benefits by making the content of special legislation more opaque to the average voter. For instance, by its very vagueness, the term "affirmative action" obscures the effects of a system of preferences.
As Broder shows, the initiatives in California and Washington against racial, ethnic, and gender preferences gave the average voter the information and power to overturn the government establishment’s support of preferences. Begin with the text of the initiatives themselves. They were written to prohibit "preferences" and thus gave voters a clear sense of the actual mechanisms of these programs. Because they clearly outlined what was at stake, they also generated information about the extent of the preferences at leading state universities and in government contracting. As a result of this unmasking, voters by substantial majorities in both California and Washington approved a prohibition on preferences.
These initiatives were successful despite a huge advantage of opponents in terms of official support and campaign spending. The figures in Washington state are particularly striking. Opponents outspent proponents by more than 3-1 and had the support of the governor, all major newspapers in the states, and its major businesses, including Microsoft and Boeing. Proponents of a color-blind government would never have won against this power hierarchy in the absence of the initiative mechanism. Thus, Broder himself provides substantial evidence that the initiative process can roll back special interest legislation and provide a mechanism for popular control of elites.
The success of initiatives to ban preferences despite the large monetary imbalance between proponents and opponents raises a third analytic flaw in Broder’s discussion — his unjustifiable fear of the role of money in politics. Even if one were to share his anxiety, Broder has not shown that money influences the initiative process more than the legislative process. Much of his anecdotal evidence suggests that money has less influence on referenda, as the votes on preferences suggest. This accords with what political theory would predict. Because voters are so much more numerous than legislators and have a broader range of concerns (reelection, for instance, not being so important a focus), it is harder for campaign resources to change their minds on issues of fundamental importance.
Broder not only fails to make the case that money is more corrupting of initiatives than of legislatures, he also fails to make the case that money is a worse influence than the influences that would replace money were campaign contributions to initiatives curtailed. Like many advocates of campaign finance reform, Broder believes that money gives some groups disproportionate power in politics. But restricting money in politics would further increase the already disproportionate power of those who influence politics for a living — journalists, social scientists, and political pundits of all kinds. Increasing this differential influence would entrench a group of political gatekeepers with huge power to set the agenda for American politics.
Moreover, the class that makes its living by manipulating symbols represents a narrower interest than those with money. Relatively few individuals have what we might call the "scribal capital" to engage in such direct political influence. Moreover, those with such capital are politically rather homogeneous. Journalists, academics, and the arts and entertainment community stand on the left of the American political spectrum. For instance, legal academics vote 6-1 Democratic, and national journalists are even more lopsidedly liberal. In contrast, money is more broadly dispersed among citizens engaged in a huge variety of enterprises. Not surprisingly, the wealthy are also far less politically homogeneous than the scribes. Therefore money is a relatively more encompassing interest in American politics than its most likely replacement.
Once again, Broder’s reporting itself suggests that our democracy benefits from the wealth of individuals. Wealthy people have sponsored initiatives on a very diverse range of matters, from the environment to bilingual education — issues on which they had no direct interest and which would not otherwise have received such intense political attention. In any event, initiatives have the advantage of allowing the wealthy to put their innovative ideas for governance before the public without endangering the republic by inflicting their often quirky personalities on elective office.
A final problem with Broder’s analytic scheme is that it fails to recognize the salience of the fact that only states and localities and not the federal government have an initiative process. States and localities compete for effective structures of government. If states with initiative processes consistently produce worse laws than states without those processes, the free movement of people and capital guaranteed by the federal government should allow citizens and businesses to exit those jurisdictions. While such movement happens only at the margins, the loss of revenue should exert some discipline on truly outlandish initiatives.
On the evidence of Broder’s own rich reporting, however, the federal government’s tendency to squelch political innovation is far more of a danger than runaway referenda. Already the opponents of term limits have succeeded in striking down a state term limits referendum for members of Congress despite the Tenth Amendment’s protection for state autonomy. The Antifederalists would not have been surprised that special interests, particularly elites, would impel the federal government to restrain popular sovereignty because special interests have particular leverage on a distant and unitary state. The virtue of the initiative process, so long as it survives, is precisely that it provides a way to counteract this baleful influence by allowing the diffuse citizenry in diverse jurisdictions to raise its own voice in discrete moments of self-governance.
