3 - All Men Are Liars: Is Democracy Meaningless?

Summary

Introduction

One current of thought within the rational choice approach to the study of politics asserts that democratic voting and democratic discussion are each, generally, inaccurate and meaningless. I will call an emphasis on these descriptive assertions against democracy “the Rochester current,” because its exemplar, the late William Riker, was long a professor of political science at the University of Rochester, and his work on social choice and democracy influenced many of his students and colleagues there. The Rochester current is heir to a tradition of skepticism about the possibility of democratic politics, most respectably expressed earlier in this century by the economists Pareto and Schumpeter.

In the United States the skeptical view of democracy is often accompanied by a family of arguments to the effect that “most public sector programs … are inappropriate, or are carried on at an inappropriate level, or are executed in an inappropriate manner.” The normative recommendation that is supposed to follow from these descriptive assertions is that we are best protected from the absurdities of democracy by liberal institutions that, to the maximum extent feasible, shunt decisions from the incoherent democratic forum to the coherent economic market and that fragment political power so that ambitious elites circulate and contest in perpetual futility – in other words, that the U.S. Constitution, especially as it was interpreted before the New Deal to prevent political interference in the economy, is one of the best of all possible political arrangements.