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Designing Attentive Democracy: Political Interest and Electoral Institutions

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Designing Attentive Democracy: Political Interest and Electoral Institutions Kevin Elliott Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 © 2015 Kevin Elliott All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT DESIGNING ATTENTIVE DEMOCRACY: POLITICAL INTEREST AND ELECTORAL INSTITUTIONS Kevin Elliott This dissertation investigates the question: what do we want from our democratic institutions and how should we design them to get it? I argue that we want our democratic institutions to promote cognitive political engagement among all citizens and that accomplishing this task requires focusing reform efforts on electoral institutions like mandatory voting rather than small-scale deliberative forums. Democratic theory has been dominated by deliberative theories of democracy for at least two decades. As this literature turned to the question of how to institutionalize deliberative democracy, the inherently limited scale of deliberative institutions like deliberative polling or participatory budgeting has made scholars like Simone Chambers and Jane Mansbridge worry that deliberation abandons mass democracy, and with it meaningful democratic legitimacy. I argue that such worries are well founded because the effective inclusion of all citizens, not deliberation, constitutes the most important democratic value and that as a result, participatory institutions should be arranged so as to promote inclusion, even at the cost of values like deliberation. The first part of the project advances a novel conception of inclusion based on reflective cognitive engagement with democratic politics and demonstrates the central importance of inclusion within democratic theory. The second half of the project examines different institutions for their ability to promote inclusion and finds that, in the American context, most deliberative forums as currently designed are too small and feeble to do so but that adequately reformed electoral institutions like mandatory voting can promote inclusion and reflection well. One important implication is that in a world of limited activist resources and public taste for reform, democratic reformers in the United States should focus their attention on electoral organization and institutions rather than small-scale experiments if they hope to affect mass democracy. This project sits at the nexus of empirical research on political participation, comparative institutional design, and the ethics of democratic citizenship. It considers questions like: when the resources of democratic reformers are finite, what is the most important goal for them to pursue? How demanding of the time, attention, and resources of its citizens must a flourishing democracy be? May citizens opt out of such demands? What specific reforms are most efficient at achieving the proper priorities of democratic theory? Answering these questions requires combining empirical insights about political behavior and the performance of different institutional arrangements with normative and ethical arguments regarding the priorities of democratic theory and the nature of democratic citizenship. Table of Contents List of Tables, Graphs, and Illustrations ..................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................................... iii Chapter 1: Introduction: The Priority of Inclusion in the Design of Democratic Institutions ........... 1 Part I: Theory ............................................................................................................................................. 25 Chapter 2: What is Cognitive Inclusion? .............................................................................................. 26 Chapter 3: The Priority of Inclusion in Democratic Theory ............................................................... 64 Chapter 4: Epistemic Worries Allayed ............................................................................................... 111 Part II: Institutions .................................................................................................................................. 160 Chapter 5: Measuring Cognitive Inclusion ......................................................................................... 161 Chapter 6: The Dangers of Deliberative Mini-publics ....................................................................... 183 Chapter 7: Electoral Paths to Cognitive Inclusion: Mandatory Turnout .......................................... 231 Chapter 8: Conclusion: The Ethics of Institutional Design ............................................................... 290 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................................. 302 i List of Tables, Graphs, and Illustrations Figure 5.1: A Right Skewed Distribution...........................................................................................173 Figure 5.2: Right Skewed, Left Skewed, and Normal (No Skew) Distributions...............................179 Table 6.1: Ideal Types of Deliberative Mini-publics and characteristics along five dimensions.....192 Table 6.2: Turnout in Canadian Federal Elections in Provinces with and without Citizen Assemblies...............................................................................................................................219 Table 6.3: Mean Political Interest by Year in Canadian Provinces with and without Citizen Assemblies...............................................................................................................................220 Figure 7.1: Austrian Presidential Turnout 1951-1998 by State MV Status......................................237 Figure 7.2: Austrian Parliamentary Turnout 1949-2013 by State MV Status..................................239 Figure 7.3: Dutch Turnout 1918-2012................................................................................................240 Figure 7.4: Turnout by State in Australian national elections 1914-22............................................241 Figure 7.5: Australian Parliamentary Turnout 1901-2010................................................................241 Figure 7.6: Americans agreeing or disagreeing that ‘I have a duty to always vote’ 1987-2012.......262 Figure 7.7: Americans agreeing or disagreeing that ‘I have a duty to always vote’ 1987-2012 (combining completely/mostly).............................................................................................263 ii Acknowledgements It’s a difficult thing, completing a dissertation, and it’s not one I could have done without the help and support of many people. First in this list has to be Melissa Schwartzberg, whom I thank for tireless mentorship, personal support, and for being critical enough to demolish poor ideas while shepherding my spirit to make them anew. David Johnston is a constant presence in the development of my thinking and has always pushed it toward clarity and greater persuasiveness. This has been a great help, as well as his unflagging support from my earliest days at Columbia. To Bob Shapiro I owe my foundational commitment to integrate the empirical insights of political science with the normative and theoretical thinking that mostly characterizes political theory. His work stands as a shining example of what theoretically-motivated empirical political science can be. I want to thank Jon Elster for many long discussions and much thoughtful feedback on my work and also Andy Sabl for being a gentle shepherd of my ideas and donating so many excellent phrases for them. I also want to recognize the network of friends and colleagues whose feedback or even just casual conversations helped me through the project and through the years it took to write it. This group includes Justin Phillips, Andy Guess, Steven White, Ben Schupmann, Luke MacInnis, Brett Meyer, Luise Papcke, Bjorn Gomes, Jon Blake, Ashraf Ahmed, Jean Cohen, Nadia Urbinati, Liya Yu, Yao Lin and Maria Paula Saffon. I owe Andy Guess special recognition for his timely assistance in helping me depict skewness. I also want to acknowledge the support of the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship program run by the US Department of Education. Four years of support as a Javits Fellow freed me from teaching obligations and allowed this project to grow and be deepened in ways it couldn’t otherwise have been. iii None of what follows could have been written without my love and partner, Katie Axt, and her forbearance at my working nights, weekends, and holidays, as well as her participation in endless hours of discussion about this or that problem. My daughter, Iris, was born around the same time as the project, and so has had to share my time with her scholarly twin. Yet they were not created equal, and I must thank Iris for all the hugs and laughs that remind me of that fact. iv Chapter 1 Introduction: The Priority of Inclusion in the Design of Democratic Institutions Democracy depends on those subject to it in ways that other forms of government do not. Perhaps the most important manifestation of this dependence is found in the fact that on all accounts, democracy is a form of government in which at least some consequential collective decisions are made by the people. But how does the democratic state come to learn the people’s
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