Review of Let the People Rule by John G. Matsusaka

John G. Matsusaka is a professor at USC and in his book Let the People Rule he offers a series of arguments for direct democracy, specifically the claim that the expanded use of referenda is a powerful solution to the problems of representative democracy and elite dominance. Since this overlaps heavily with arguments that I and others have made it is worth taking a closer look at Matsusaka’s claims.

Let the People Rule focuses primarily on the US and Europe. This is understandable, as many longstanding democracies in these areas did experience various populist shocks and developments from 2016-2020 (when his book was published). Their underlying causes and developments may be related to one another but also fairly different from that seen in Latin America, for instance.

Matsusaka identifies two main explanations for the rise of populism in the older representative democracies of the world, what he calls the economic view and the cultural view. He argues that economic and cultural explanations each have some support but that decline in trust in government is a long running trend which can’t be explained just by appealing to recent economic problems or surges in immigration. True, but recent developments may have accelerated, or supercharged, these slow, long-term trends. For instance, the normalization of trade relations with China and China’s entry to the WTO led to the loss of many good US jobs, particularly in manufacturing. This, combined with the Great Recession, may have been the (big) needle that finally broke the camel’s back. (I make an argument along these lines in What Time Is It?, my newest book).

How can we respond to this loss of legitimacy? Matsusaka claims that we should take the populist claim itself seriously: government has become less responsive to citizens and more responsive to elites. This is caused in part by the growth of a large, complex administrative state. The best solution? Let citizens directly vote on policies via referenda.

In his words, “referendum voters are more thoughtful and sophisticated than most people realize,” (10).  Yes, a thousand times yes! Mainstream critiques of referenda found in the media, among politicians, and within academia, are frequently shallow and unconvincing. In so far as Matsusaka is pro-referenda, he doesn’t have to work hard to convince me. I’m less certain that referenda will have all the other salutary impacts that he hopes for. But I strongly support them nevertheless.

Problems with his account of the administrative state

One problem is that while Matsusaka recognizes that the administrative state has become more complex, he doesn’t grapple with the impact of decades of neoliberalism on American communities and industries. Thus, in Chapter One the story about American history that Matsusaka tells sounds fairly right wing. The chapter opens with an Alito quote and its story resembles that told by famous free market thinkers like Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. No one denies that the American state grew dramatically during the 20th century—but his tone at times suggests that this hurt American democracy. This claim is much less persuasive to me. The many government agencies he envisions were created by acts of Congress. They were standard fair for a representative democracy. They weren’t enacted by some distant tyranny. We might also ask how referenda would apply or help here? Would you hold referenda on whether to create an EPA? On specific regulations? Matsusaka needs more details on the how and why.

In his words, “we have come to call this immense government bureaucracy with lawmaking power the administrative state. It is the central feature of modern government in every advanced democracy.” (18). This is not how I would frame things but I strongly agree with Matsusaka’s lament that Congress has delegated much formal and informal decision-making authority to the executive branch and its agencies. I share much of this concern, regarding trade policy, war-making, and foreign policy in general. (I am currently reading Why Congress by Philip Wallach, which makes this important point in great detail. Wallach, Matsusaka, and I all prefer a powerful representative congress to a strong executive. Where we differ is that Matsusaka and I also prefer the people acting directly to a representative assembly. Wallach has the opposite view.) The challenge for those of us who would like to see Congress reclaim much of its power, institutional identity and prestige, not to mention its spine, is that this multi-decades long development was in effect a deliberate abdication of power by Congress. They gave it away and ultimately they will need to take some of it back. (see p. 25). On a related note, Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler, in their Partisan Nation, explain how the incentives for national political behavior have changed dramatically in recent decades, making such a congressional reclamation project that much more difficult. 

Page 22 points out that executive branch enforcement of policy can change dramatically after a change in office, without any corresponding change in public opinion. This is true but strikes me as an unavoidable feature of electoral politics. People run for office on platforms and then attempt to enact them when in office. Small changes in voter turnout lead to big changes in policy, depending on whether the right or left is elected. How is this avoided? It is here that referenda could offer a better alternative: by directly reflecting the desire of citizens on specific issues, referenda could ensure durable policy that doesn’t whiplash between left and right as the parties see-saw in and out of power.

Some key points to summarize Matsusaka: the executive branch is defined by big, distant, faceless agencies; the presidency often acts without consulting with Congress or the people; the courts increasingly make policy; and Congress increasingly either delegates power to the executive branch or votes on policy without consideration for what constituents want. There is plenty of truth to each of these charges.

In summary, Matsusaka’s critique of the administrative state at times sounds more like Sowell, Buchanan, or Alito than a centrist, let alone leftist, critique. There are leftist critiques of bureaucracy, however, from political theorists like Wolin, Brown, and Pateman, as well as other feminists, anarchists, and those concerned with racism or mass incarceration. So, is Matsusaka a right-wing or conservative critic of big government arguing that we should turn to direct democracy as an alternative? It is not at all clear that he is a conservative, let alone a market evangelist. This is because his critique doesn’t really gel with Sowell et al. due to the fact that they want to take key decisions out of the people’s hands and give them to the market, whereas Matsusaka wants to let people directly decide, through the political process, on key issues of governance. He wants to take power out of the federal and state government’s hands and give it to the people. I would argue he’s kind of doing his own thing ideologically, borrowing from both left and right. It makes for an interesting combination.

Why Referenda

Let’s delve more fully into his positive case for direct democracy via referenda. Chapter Five presents evidence that American voters want to participate in referenda. Chapters Seven and Eight then cover the history and use of referenda in various US states and in countries around the world. They are a common, and often salutary, piece in the democratic toolkit. Matsusaka offers as an example the country Uruguay and suggests that part of Uruguay’s success as a thriving democracy is its use of referenda and the connection between popular opinion and government policy.

This last point is important, because although I support referenda in principle and am happy to see their use worldwide, up to this point the book has provided relatively little evidence that referenda will help address the author’s concerns. So, what positive arguments for increased use of referenda does Matsusaka make?

He suggests that, first, we could introduce advisory national referenda in the US. This would not require a constitutional amendment. Binding referenda, transferring lawmaking power to ordinary citizens at the national level, would. So the binding option might be desirable but it would be much harder to achieve. The challenge, of course, is that we don’t know what impact, if any, advisory referenda would have on American politics, laws, and populist sentiments. 

Matsusaka argues that “if the people have more control over decisions, they will not feel that policy is controlled by elites.” (136). I’m sure this is broadly speaking true but what impact will advisory referenda have in giving people control? This part is less clear. As purely advisory mechanisms, they will not directly empower people. The broader cultural impact they could have is less certain. It might be big, it might not, depending on how it impacts the relation between citizens and elected officials. Thus, the case for merely advisory referenda feels weak.

Matsusaka is at pains to demonstrate that the use of referenda is not worse than policy-making by conventional elected representatives. He is correct. For instance, he recognizes that, while referenda may not foster or be preceded by good public deliberation, neither is legislation passed by conventional representative bodies. Similar claims that referenda are captured, or at least unduly influenced by money, are also unpersuasive. The standard process of electing representatives is horribly riven with the monetary influence of oligarchs. There is no evidence that referenda would be worse. 

In his words, “the bottom line: although voters appear to operate with limited substantive information about government, politics, and policy, this does not necessarily prevent them from voting in a way that reflects their values and interests.” (175). I generally agree with his chapter Fourteen summary on the competence of voters and the value of direct participation. Hélène Landemore offers a similar argument in Politics Without Politicians, discussed below in my previous review. I also make a case for the competence and collective intelligence of the citizenry in Democratic Knowledge: Why There Are No Political Experts and Does Democracy Have a Future?

The biggest strength of Let the People Rule is that Matsusaka demonstrates that the standard arguments against direct democracy, both empirical and theoretical, are deeply flawed. He also provides substantial evidence that, at least in California, referenda are generally much more harmful to corporate interests than laws passed by the legislature. All the empirical evidence suggests that special interests, especially big business, exercise more power over the standard legislative process than over the referenda and initiative process. (Chapter Fifteen). So this standard critique of direct democracy, which I would hear all the time while living in California, is exposed as shallow and ungrounded.

The final chapter presents a nice summary of Let the People Rule: “direct democracy promises to bring policies into greater alignment with majority preferences, to diminish the influence of special interest groups, and to reduce political polarization by allowing the centrist majority to override the partisan extremes.” (236-237). This is, in brief, his case for the positive value of referenda.

Matsusaka concludes by saying that populism is not a passing fad but a response to a real loss of political power among ordinary people. (I generally agree). We must address it rather than hoping it will blow over or clinging to flawed past practices. Th best answer is to give ordinary people more power. Agreed, again. Matsusaka shows how dramatically expanding the use of referenda, where citizens vote directly on proposed legislation, is one way to do this.

Review of Politics Without Politicians by Hélène Landemore

Hélène Landemore, a political theorist who writes frequently on democracy, has a new book titled Politics Without Politicians. It is in many ways the culmination and popularization of her previous work on democratic theory and practice, all of which argues in favor of the wisdom and capability of ordinary citizens. In this new book she forcefully makes the case that the problems facing many representative democracies of the world would best be addressed through giving power to randomly selected groups of citizens. That is the main thesis of the book, which I will expand on below.

But first, why does she think this? Right away, Landemore says that, after thinking about democracy and resisting this conclusion for a decade, she has finally admitted “electoral politics is beyond repair. But democracy isn’t.” (1). Her book thus begins by listing common problems facing government in America and other wealthy democracies—most specifically, the continued dominance by discredited elites and the persistent unpopularity of our elected leaders.

Some commentators claim that the people are the source of these current problems and that the solution is less democracy. On this score, she mentions Jason Brennan’s Against Democracy and Garett Jones’ 10% Less Democracy. (Other books advocating this perspective include Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter and, less radically, Democracy for Realists by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, I would add).

Landemore, correctly, goes in the other direction. If the problem is economic and political elites, the solution is more democracy, not less. So what would it mean to have politics without politicians? Won’t anyone who gets involved in a leadership or decision-making role become a politician (with all the negative connotations this entails—out of touch, elitist, corrupt) over time?

To answer this question, how should we define these two categories? For Landemore, “ordinary citizens are those who are not professionally involved in politics.” On the other hand,“politicians, by definition, hold professional political responsibilities that set them apart from the rest of us.” (33).

How can we get ordinary citizens involved in politics without turning them into politicians? Again, as will be detailed below, the answer for Landemore is bringing citizens into political decision-making through temporary bodies of randomly selected citizens. But first let’s step back and ask again why we might want this.

William F. Buckley Jr. famously said “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty.” While Buckley was a conservative, there is nothing inherently conservative or liberal, right or left, in this particular quote. What it embodies, rather, is a democratic attitude and this is why Landemore mentions it. As she says, “a large, random sample of the population might not be such a bad mix of people. In fact, it could be both more democratic and more effective to be governed by them than by a group of Harvard academics.” (5).

(It is also a litmus test for your political gut. Do you instinctively agree with the Buckley quote, as Landemore and I both do? Or do you recoil and feel the opposite way? Answers to this question also cut across conventional political cleavages.)

A random selection of citizens would be more democratic, sure. But why might it be more effective? First, Landemore points to the “problems with existing representative systems. Ordinary citizens are peripheral to them, convened now and again for the purpose of selecting representatives but kept at bay most of the time.” (8). Landemore’s alternative, citizen-led approach, “consists…of a vision of politics centering deliberative processes—ordinary people talking to one another with the goal of coming to a joint decision that works for most.” (9).

She thus envisions a form of democracy where “politics is neither a job nor a chore. It is instead a civic duty…” (11). Her vision also “centers on deliberative assemblies of citizens appointed through civic lotteries.” (11). Below I will consider some of the strengths and weaknesses of lottery versus a self-selection approach to participatory politics. For now note that her approach avoids the creation of a new political class because people will be randomly selected to deliberate and decide on certain issues before returning to their day-to-day lives. In the world of citizen lotteries there would be no professional class of politicians just as there is no professional class of jurors in the United States.

Another piece of evidence for widespread democratic discontent lies in the many protests in democratic countries around the world in the past decade-plus, especially in the oldest representative democracies. “The common thread seemed to be widespread discontent with a political system seen as detached, incompetent, corrupt, and fundamentally unjust.” (29). Again, the defining feature in many of the longstanding representative democracies of the world is “profound dissatisfaction with the economic and political system, and distrust of ruling elites.” (30). This connects with my claim, in Does Democracy Have a Future?, that the 21st century will be defined not by emerging democracies and how they consolidate, but by systemic problems facing the longstanding, consolidated democracies of the world.

Landmore argues that our biggest problem is “how we select our ruling class. The issue isn’t just governance—it’s electoral representation and the professional class of politicians it perpetuates.” (30). The problem with politicians lies not with who they are as individuals but instead with their existence as a group that, by running for elections, fundraising, and holding office for a long time, “stay in power so long that they become a class of their own.” (23).

Drawing on Bernard Manin, Landemore argues that elections are oligarchic, not fundamentally democratic. They lead to the selection of a distinct class of people, politicians, who have political power and get to make the laws that bind us all. The truly democratic mechanism, going back to Ancient Athens, is to either have everyone directly vote on the laws (what we now call direct democracy) or to randomly select a subset of citizens (often called sortition or lot), as we do for jury duty.

This would be the most effective way to reverse the depressing currently reality documented by scholars like Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, whose “empirical studies suggest that true power lies with the smaller, wealthier part of the population, and that electoral democracies are, indeed, plutocracies.” (57).

The Virtues of Lottery

Landemore runs through various reasons why electoral politics haven’t been working very well. Ultimately, she argues, it is due to how we select our leaders. Her basic suggestion seems to be that we can revitalize democracy through a combination of direct referenda votes on some issues and jury-style randomly selected mini-publics to decide others.

“…what we can learn, or relearn, from the Greeks is that political expertise is also acquired on the job. The less we give people an opportunity to participate the less capable they are. The more we ask of them, the more they learn.” (86). Landemore is here articulating one of the basic principles of participatory democracy. I couldn’t agree more.

What happened to selecting citizens by lottery? In Ancient Athens, while key policies were decided in an open vote among all citizens, key offices were filled via random selection, aka lottery. They also filled their large juries with a lottery of random citizens, as we still do today. However, using lot outside of jury duty disappeared “sometime between the middle of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century” (89). This is deeply disappointing, because lot is the best embodiment of political equality: “random selection has the merit of giving everyone the exact same mathematical chance of occupying a position of power.” (104).

Landmore also cites the diversity trumps ability theorem. This is the idea that, at least where there are correct answers, a diverse group of people will perform better than a homogenous group of highly capable people. Why? Because, with greater diversity, “everyone contributes a different perspective, piece of information, or argument to the political question of the common good, whereas even the smartest few are likely to miss elements of the big picture.” (112). 

In other words, groups of highly trained elites tend to be similar—they have the same prejudices, the same experiences, and the same blindspots. For a real world example think of the brilliant yet clueless people in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who dragged us into the Vietnam War. Whereas lot, by using random selection, best embodies the promise of diversity. “Lot’s instrumental value for collective intelligence comes from its ability to reproduce at small scale the cognitive diversity present in the larger group.” (113). A lot, in other words, produces a microcosm of the wisdom embodied in the millions of ordinary citizens that populate a democracy.

A key part of Landemore’s argument for the power of random citizens lies in the evidence she marshals concerning the positive impact of deliberative polls and other mini-publics. There are multiple examples to draw from, including the Irish citizens council on abortion as well as a French council on climate change.

Consider the French Citizen’s Convention for Climate, which ran from 2019 to 2020. President Macron’s proposed fuel tax (to address climate change) spurred the Yellow Vest movement, a widespread set of protests that crossed conventional political lines. In turn, the government set up this convention on climate, composed of 150 randomly selected citizens, with the goal of producing a better policy to address climate change. It was a 9 month process over seven weekends with a $6 million budget. Over the course of this time the citizens produced more than 100 proposals for addressing climate change, none of which involved a fuel tax. This convention revealed that ordinary citizens could come up with a range of proposals for addressing climate change that were far more popular (and innovative) than what conventional politicians could think of.

Landemore says that when given the power to initiate and formulate laws (or sufficiently law-like proposals) these random citizen participants are “citizen legislators.” They aren’t just offering recommendations like an advisory committee. Rather, citizen legislators are a “specific subset of citizen representatives: their function is to formulate legislative proposals and to draft laws. The term “citizen” signals that these actors are laypeople—not professional politicians or members of a demographically distinct elite.” (133).

Furthermore, Landemore reports on the openness, new connections, and even “civic love” that were forged during these extended sessions of citizen participation. As she says, “somewhere between the first and third sessions, the participants had clearly bonded, forming a genuine connection.” (156). Something similar can happen among jurors if they find themselves with the civic privilege and responsibility of serving on a multi-day trial.

Such citizen assemblies demonstrate that citizens can be effective deliberators and decision-makers. “And one of the reasons why they succeed in solving problems, often precisely where politicians fail, is because they bond and learn to care for one another, and even to love one another.” (171). Her account offers considerable detail on what worked and didn’t work in the assemblies where she was involved as an observer but I won’t cover more of that here.

What are some concerns with Landemore’s account?

Will participation in these citizen assemblies be a waste of time? As Landemore rightly notes, “there is no point in convening a citizens’ assembly if its recommendations will only be ignored.” Agreed. She goes on to say “at the very least, there should be a credible commitment up front to seriously consider the conclusions of the citizens’ assembly—and, ideally, a clear and convincing explanation afterward of how the commissioning body plans to respond to them.” (198).

To be blunt, this simply isn’t good enough. This is where we need a dose of participatory democracy as defined by Carole Pateman, where people have the right to make binding decisions in government.

However, at later points in the book, Landemore strikes a more radical tone, suggesting that legally empowered random assemblies should be combined with legal referenda to create a politics without politicians. Doing so would, if institutionalized, move far beyond the sort of citizens’ advisory boards that she gestured at in the previous quote. To be meaningfully democratic, face-to-face groups of citizens, whether self-selected as in participatory budgeting or randomly selected by lot as in Landemore’s examples, must be empowered to make binding decisions. Take again the example of a jury—the jury listens, then deliberates, then makes a binding decision on the defendant’s guilt. To do less would be undemocratic and a waste of time.

As Landemore rightly asks, “what should legitimacy—and specifically democratic legitimacy—mean and require in the twenty-first century?” (250). Would randomly selected assemblies, and their resulting decisions, have legitimacy? Unlike direct and participatory democracy, where every citizen can, if they wish, vote on a policy, or representative democracy, where every citizen can vote on who to represent them, assemblies selected by lot would not involve everyone. Every citizen would be eligible, as with jury duty. And, as with jury duty, only a small subset would actually be randomly selected to serve on any given issue. First, this entails a predictive question: would people see these bodies as legitimate? If not, why not? Second, a normative question: should we consider them so? 

The virtues of randomly selected bodies of citizens are that, like juries, they are made up of a representative sample of ordinary people, not elites. They embody, as Landemore points out, political equality in a manner that elections do not. Is this enough to overcome the concern that not everyone gets to participate? Maybe. Perhaps their legitimacy rests firmly enough on the fact that all are eligible to participate, i.e. we are all in the random lottery selection.

There are tough trade offs here. The kind of face-to-face, participatory democracy envisioned by Pateman is open to all but faces self-selection issues: will the people who show up be similar to, or care about, the issues that a majority does? When participatory budgeting works well the answer has been “yes.” But there are plenty of examples of local government, especially concerning housing, where a small coterie of wealthy activists dominate the proceedings. I personally feel the pull of both types of face-to-face democracy.

The fact that selecting assemblies by lot (whatever their specific power) makes them a true cross-section of citizens is a strong argument in their favor. I’ll leave Landemore with the last words: “Randomly selected citizens’ assemblies produce ideas and proposals that are more aligned with the preferences of the larger population and draw on a more diverse pool of views and information than those of elected assemblies. As a result, their proposals are likely to be better and more likely to be accepted by the public than those of elected assemblies.” (255).

For further reading I can heartily recommend Landemore’s Open Democracy, a more academic but still accessible presentation of these issues as well as her co-authored book Debating Democracy, in which she debates libertarian philosopher Jason Brennan on the strengths and weaknesses of democracy.