Presidents and elective monarchs
ALEXANDER HAMILTON, one of the “Founding Fathers” of the USA, had called the U.S. president “elective monarch”. The exact day was June 18, 1787, Philadelphia Convention. Washington wasn’t yet elected and even the system was undecided at that time because the new constitution was being debated. However, the phrase “elective monarch would be used against Hamilton after some years. It is also reported that George Washington himself had once said “well, maybe in 20 years we will again select a king ”. In the 1780s and 1790s democracy, republican values, the presidential system –with checks & balances- were all seen as tentative, new, and hazardous. Yet the U.S. constitution still stands. But even there, democracy was at peril time and again.
ELECTIONS, PIÈGE À CONS !
Jean-Paul Sartre had penned that radical slogan in 1973 before the presidential elections. Elections would be a “trap for fools”. Radical youth often claim that should elections change anything substantive they wouldn’t be held in the first place. This is wrong because elections have to be seen as a sequence displaying –and causing- dynamic stability. Elections, both before and after, change political alliances, narrow or widen the set of policy options, have a bearing on institutional change. Elections change the way various social and economic preferences are represented both because as time passes even the least partisan weakly ideological party transforms its clientele and peoples’ preferences also change. In the presence of strongly ideological parties and/ or charismatic leaders’ intent on changing the status quo, both the way people are represented changes and people’s preferences are modified faster than in ordinary times. There may be large swings, both within party and intraparty competition intensify, and coalition formation & bargaining gains a new momentum –both within and intraparty-ahead of elections. Did elections – the first round- change anything in Turkey?
REPRESENTATION AND PARTICIPATION
Representation and participation are different but not distinct concepts. Democracy can be reduced to neither of them, but at least representation is a must for democracy whereas too much or too frequent a participation could undermine it. Leftists had approved participation in the 1960s but mocked with liberal representative democracies by labelling them “bourgeois democracy”, “Philippine democracy” and such. College students joked about democracy: “should elections change anything, they wouldn’t be held in the first place”. Jean-Paul Sartre had written in 1973 that elections were “a trap for fools”: « Elections, piège à cons ». « Voter, c’est abdiquer » shouted protesters in May-June 1968: the very act of voting meant giving up every desire to come to power. All of them look so surreal these days. These days a return to the democracies, however fragile, of the 1960s would be a huge progress. Democracies weaken everywhere.
ELECTIONS AND PARTICIPATION
Maybe it’s true: elections and representation don’t change the essence of things. Maybe voting is only approval voting no matter what you do. Anyway, this is so because Erdoğan is being approved repeatedly. Maybe all candidates and parties are alike and we just don’t see that. However, this is a very risky position because direct participation as opposed to representative democracy can cause undesirable results. Consider a continuous stream of elections that are held in real time: you can choose a candidate or a policy every second by touching your cell phone. Let’s call this the universalization of participation. In the other limiting case no choices will ever be made, and no elections will be held. Is there an observational equivalence between these two cases? Is a popularity contest that takes place every second conducive to democracy any more than a no choice autocracy? The TV series Black Mirror is a case in point. In the third season the episode called Nosedive depicts exactly this kind of dystopia where people get or lose –political or otherwise- credit via a continuum of cell phone messages. Maybe AI will function this way, and in the 2030s there will be no rallies, no street demonstrations, no paper votes etc.
REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY
The ideal focal point still lies in European style representative parliamentary democracy. However, such democracies decline both in number and in terms of the populations that live under democratic conditions. Autocracies are once again on the rise. There have been waves of democratization and trends to the contrary since 1848. Societies that could build strong and persistent democratic institutions thrived. This involves low frequency elections and limited participation. Here participation
is something that doesn’t involve much religion, ethics, customs and traditions. To the extent choices are based on economic interests, and are directly political, democratic institutions get entrenched, become secular, and rational. Rational choice combined with law is the key. Common Law has served this purpose well both in the UK and in the U.S. At the same time institutions need to give credit to a culture of bargaining and compromise. Otherwise, the British Premier Liz Truss couldn’t be dethroned by her own party so swiftly. The time isn’t ripe for a new Thatcherism and the Brits understood that quickly.
SHIFTING ALLIANCES
Consider the U.S. between 1890s and 2000s. There have been very large swings in the way states vote to such an extent that the 1896 Republican turnout can be seen now as a predictor of Democratic turnout. Perhaps the two-dimensional political/electoral space didn’t vary, but certainly party positions moved so many times that now they are the ‘mirror image’, the exact opposite of what they were back in the 1890s. This is true of a polity of a two-party system predicated on first-past-the-post, single member legislative districts along with the presidential system –which is under constitutional and Common Law-based checks & -balances control. In other systems, such as Europe and Turkey, many political parties are needed to represent such a variety of positions. Whereas in the U.S. coalitions are being formed and dissolved within parties to reflect that –itself changing- diversity, in European polities different political parties are being formed and dissolved instead.
Elections and the formation of new political parties may go hand in hand here too. This is what is about to happen –or so it seems now. Sartre was completely wrong: elections have very serious societal consequences when they matter. The next elections will constitute such an important event precisely because the country may begin to politically realign based on shifting alliances.
PRESIDENTS
I will enumerate a few takeaways from the presidential election games literature. They also apply to coalition-building and to forming blocs in order to solve constitutional quandaries. William Riker had proposed a “size principle” back in 1962. Accordingly, coalitions that are overstretched, i.e. that become oversized, disappear. This was the case with Bush in 2000 and 2004 or with Reagan in the 1980s. Contrary to the median voter theorem (MTV), candidates can be compelled either in the primaries or if this doesn’t apply, in the pre-play negotiations game to occupy relatively extreme positions. This is so especially if there are strong ideologies involved or if there are different core beliefs in the society. To be or appear to be extremely nationalistic can help a candidate to have an edge, for instance. Only after a coalition around a strong belief is forged the candidates shift towards the median voter in order to appease discontent at the political centre. This way she can shift the centre towards a new, more radical centre. This is important because whether the opposition bloc is already overstretched can be debated, and I don’t just mean the Table of Six. Now, the incumbent bloc could also become overstretched with the participation of two extreme right parties. That both alliances reach to the tails of the political-cum-ideological distribution imply either that the median voter may not be happy and turnout could fall or that the respective centres of the two blocs shift toward extremes. In the end it is the incumbent bloc’s alliance decision that paid off. The opposition bloc became overstretched and couldn’t deliver the support it promised to Kılıçdaroğlu.
IS CHARISMA DECISIVE?
There are two sorts of charismatic leaders. “Distant” charismatic leaders as opposed to “close” charismatic leaders display excellent oratory performance and their behaviour is outspokenly expressive. They bring forth controversial opinions first, and then only after the first stage of the game do they lean towards a moderate articulation of the said opinions without ever losing their grasp on core beliefs. Charismatic leadership is also seen as an evolving complex social structure. If so, the emergence of charismatic leaders shouldn’t be explained by psychological mechanisms alone. After all, Max Weber had ruled that charisma was a system-wide social process, not just a function of rhetorical prowess. The resulting social structure and political institutions that derive from it are to be seen as the vector of incessantly revolving societal dynamics that encompasses much more than leadership. There is much more to constitutional games than the dynamics of leadership, gaming and coalition-building. For a lasting constitution to be articulated there should be a genuine societal need for it. So, which bloc represents a societal need today? Clearly both do but it is the incumbent bloc that remains strong after all these years.