It seems to me that the ideal purpose of a politician in a democracy is to represent the people in the piece of the country that they are elected from, whether that be an entire state or a single county or city. That means that whether you are Republican or Democrat, if your district is split 49-51%, your voting should reflect more middle of the road trends. If your district is 90% your party, then you should vote with your party almost all of the time.
But that is not what happens in the US today because we have, as a nation, consistently valued party over people. I'm not sure when it happened, maybe its always been that way. However, this leads to massive misrepresentation, in my opinion. Today if your district is split 49-51% then nearly half of the people in your district are misrepresented because most politicians vote party line on most issues.
Now, the argument for the way a party system like this works is that you vote for the party that most represents your views. Then the party that has the majority of the votes in a district will be the party that most accurately represents the people and therefore maximum representation is achieved. But there are only two parties today, and most people do not fall solidly within a given party on every vote. It is my opinion that most people would vote in a range across the middle of the political spectrum if they could vote on every issue. Instead we mostly get votes polarized on both ends of the spectrum and there is never a middle of the road victory.
The motivation behind electing a candidate and not a party is that a candidate from a given district will know the people of that district and be able to accurately represent them. If a politician is only going to vote party line then there is no reason to have him around at all. We need only to establish the bounds of what a party stands for and the vote for the party that will represent your district. Apparently this was not the intent when our system was created because we do, in fact, vote for candidates.
When a great deal of districts in recent elections have been split by less than 10% but most votes by politicians fall squarely along party lines, accurate representation is not happening. It is my opinion that this was not the intent of those creating the system when it was set up, and it is not the ideal situation. If it were a better system I would be willing to forgo the "founders" intent for one that we have found to be better. However, I do not believe that this misrepresentation is better. Rather I believe that it will be beneficial and right for us to encourage a move within our system so that politicians vote to represent their whole district, not just the small majority who elected them, if that is the case. I'm not sure what practical steps we can take, but I know that one thing that will help is getting more people informed and interested during the primaries, because if more people vote in the primary then a more representative candidate will emerge as a contender in the general election. I'd like to hear any practical ways we can move towards more accurate representation in our government today, or any reasons why we ought not to.
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4 comments:
A few thoughts on this:
* What do you want the elected official to do instead? On each issue, the elected representative has only one vote. Regardless of how his people are distributed, he can't split his vote between the two of them.
* I don't think officials should vote in a way that represents the views of the entire population necessarily. We elect them, ostensibly, because we believe their judgement is the best in taking care of our interests out of the canidates we're given. I want them using their best judgement and political acumen to take care of me - not do what I want. Otherwise we could just force the population to vote on everything.
* We have a representative democracy, but it's not and was never intended to be as democratic as you're assuming. The founders were far more interested in founding an aristocratic democracy, based on the democratic model of Sparta, than a fully representative democracy, like the one in Athens. To put it another way, if 50% of the population is stupid, and I think that's about right, we don't want our elected officials purposefully making dumb decisions half of the time, ignoring the irony that in reality it seems much higher sometimes.
So...that's just a few ideas on what you've said. I agree that having representatives that don't represent you well is a bad thing, but I think perhaps what's needed is a bigger return to the founders' system, rather than some new departure from it.
"if 50% of the population is stupid, and I think that's about right"
If 50% of the people are stupid then shouldn't they be making stupid decisions about who to vote for? Maybe that's part of the problem...
Obviously I wouldn't suggest an elected official could somehow split his votes. But what I am suggesting is that his stances should mirror his constiuents'. If he is from a very conservative area then he should generally take the conservative stance on issues. If he is from an area that is pretty evenly split then he should take a more centrist approach. Even if it doesn't end up changing his voting patterns it will change the dynamic in the body he is part of during debate and any kind of compromises that need to be made. An example that comes to mind: Democrat Senators should not use the veto the way they have if they are from a middle-of-the-road district in which the majority of the people are against such an action. If he is from a very liberal district then maybe its okay, although the correctness of this particular issue is in question in all cases, I think it serves to illustrate the point. You should not behave in a way that pisses off 49% of the people in your district just because it doesn't piss of the 51% who will reelect you. Instead you should try to piss of the least people in your district. If that means you please 100% from one side and 2% from the other then that's better than only the one side. But if you can please 80% of the people from your side and 30% of the people from the other, that's even better.
Ok, I understand your point I think, but it's totally unrealistic. What motivation does a politician have to represent the people who don't want him in power? He's got to keep the people who voted him in happier (which is generally a majority), and the way to do that is not to screw them 1/3 to 2/5 of the time...
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