Power by Proxy
– Anusuya Amsa Avadhanam, SY B.Sc. (2023-27)
-Gautham Antarvedi, TY B.Sc. (2022-2025)
Estimated Reading time: 10 minutes
The vogue misdirection of our time is insecurity: a fear bred, birthed and nurtured by politicians to protect their interests by diverting a citizen’s attention away from their own.
Every human being is equal to another, with freedom to pursue life, liberty and happiness. To pursue these rights, individuals constitute governments, deriving legitimacy from the consent of the governed. A democratic system relies on both ends of the spectrum: voluntary compliance and legitimate enforcement. The legitimacy of the democratic system comes from the consent of the governed, not an imposition of a set of values by the ruling elite. The foundations of democracy rely on individual freedom and the protection of natural rights to prevent arbitrary use of force or violence. Thus, the people confer the right to enforce laws to the government. Other forms of government such as autocracy or dictatorship, illegitimate in this conception of a social contract, naturally halt social progress and interests of individuals. But in secure democracies under common law, the enforcement of individual rights and interests isn’t as short-lived.
Democracy becomes an epistemic device for citizens to discover justice via deliberations. When an individual’s preference of what the common law should be doesn’t align with the law chosen by people, it essentially builds scope for more deliberations, strengthening the core of what constitutes a democracy in the first place. It is paramount that deliberations aren’t proxies in the name of groups, rather an account of every individual’s will that translates into the process of systemic voting. The possibility of general will as a confluence of individual wills doesn’t always translate into reality. As long as an individual’s pursuit of self interest goals goes hand in hand with the general will, the laws chosen by the public through deliberations will mirror the general will.
Deliberations become foundational, representing the natural rights of individuals as citizens, providing scope for negotiations of self-interest coupled with equality and justice. To consider the manifestation of the general will into the political forums, there is a need for a lack of factions and the promotion of self-interest based voting systems where interests precede ideas and the existence of free flow of information from the political enactors to the stakeholders.
Ideally, deliberations should account for an individual’s participation in the democratic system as a law abiding citizen, exercising their right to represent their own interest rather than choosing to be a member of a faction that may only partially align with their personal interests. Reflections via deliberations don’t often meet this idealistic presentation of participation by all citizens in society. Incentives for active participation may be superseded by ideals produced not by citizens but by sources that know better than one knows of themselves. Deliberations tend to lose their purpose if such processes are carried forth as motivated discussions among individuals as members of factions rather than individuals as members of society as a whole. The blurring of lines between individual self-interest and collective well-being leads to a morally ambiguous terrain, establishing a speculative consent amongst citizens; a pseudo general will. This leaves space for exploitation of deliberation platforms as forums for ideology based political disclosure.
Voting systems remain paralysed even before the logistical integrity of it is compromised. The elections would then be reflections of dominant narratives rather than rewards for active participation by individual citizens. This removes incentives for those not in alignment with the majority representation, disrupting the system of universal civic engagement. Hence, it is not only the need for proper systemic deliberations but the precondition before such deliberations reach fruition that determines the legitimacy of representation of individual interests and ensures that elections reflect the substantive interests rather than symbolic alignment.
The limits to democratically derived agreements are demonstrably flawed. Majority consensus is naturally an imposition upon a minority. But even so, the achievement of a majority consensus is a farce, a disillusionment protected by the status quo. Representative democracy masquerades as a system that reflects the will of the people; that the representatives elected are a manifestation of the people in that electoral constituency. Formally, the Arrow Impossibility Theorem proves how majority rule pairwise voting does not produce this necessary agreement amongst the defined constituency to accurately reflect the “will of the people”. The majority “consensus” achieved through the system of electoral politics is itself a distortion of preferences.
These are the difficulties that arise in a system of politics where there is no corruption, the rule of law is followed and the representatives are good, benevolent people. A place where flowers bloom. However, this is not reality. Politics in reality is littered with crooks and cronies. The simple answer, the answer that politicians like is a few bad apples (on the other side, of course). Instead of assuming away the problem with a fantastical and consistent coincidence of these bad apples finding their way to power, let us analyze what the political structure awards for the pursuit of interests that are in opposition to the interests of people.
Ideally, democracy should produce benevolent leaders. After all, we are electing them out of conscious choice. Every part of that last sentence can be contended and has been by public choice theorists. And yet, the fallibility of the electoral system is not the only reason for the failure of producing benevolent leaders to shepherd our democracies. Without a price system to guide the leaders and only the flawed electoral system to reveal preference, any planning performed by a democratic statesman is going to be an imposition not only over the minority that has not elected them into place but also the majority whose interests are not being accurately represented. Additionally, the lack of information available to the citizens also means that they will evaluate the basket of goods offered by the politician organizing them against other baskets and other politicians. The citizen, as a consumer, will be unable to evaluate the goods relative to each other; face true opportunity cost and let the basket emerge. Instead, the evaluation of baskets relative to price is really only done by the supposed experts and the politicians, while the consumers end up evaluating politicians.
Hence, even the most benevolent of leaders will be unable to perform leadership without bastardizing the spirit of democracy. Any leader would have to impose preferences upon the constituency to manufacture consent. Ideology is cultivated and proliferated by politicians to better organize the people not for their own good but to maintain the purview of their own power. The inability of electoral politics to reveal preferences confers discretionary powers to the politician to plan and assume action on behalf of their electorate. Resulting is a structure of politics wherein the politician is allowed leeway in assuming the needs of the people only (barely) constrained by the ideology under which they’ve organized their constituency. The inevitable failure of this mode of planning is coupled with a politician’s vested interest in cultivating ideology to organize their constituency and to manufacture their consent- a cycle that reduces individuals to votes.
The deliberation taking place in a democracy is therefore not really a deliberation of the people, it is a deliberation of the politician planner whose supposed benevolence can only amount to an error in leadership. The system does not result in the discovery of the general will where persons discover justice through its consideration by deliberation of the people. Instead, voting systems result in the selection of politicians who supposedly share identities and worldviews of the constituency that voted them in. Those identities and worldviews are cultivated by politicians themselves. The implication is an imposition of values only constrained by the desperation of the people. This result is a natural consequence as the politician’s accountability is not rooted in the success of the people or their success in the provision of the necessary goods and services. Rather, accountability is only in staving off a constructed fear. The vogue misdirection of our time is insecurity: a fear bred, birthed and nurtured by politicians to protect their interests by diverting a citizen’s attention away from their own.
Ideology and political rhetoric are necessary organizational tools under the electoral system of representative democracy. Optimistically, they can produce agreements and consensus by inspiring citizens to think beyond themselves. Critically, they distort preferences and the ambiguity surrounding the success of ideology allows for exploitation of this information asymmetry between a people and their elected representative. Politicians have a vested interest in cultivating this ideology and sustaining the necessary informational asymmetry. Information asymmetry is just a necessarily sterile term for dishonesty in this analysis, begging the question- at what scale, with which intention or severity of consequence can political dishonesty be called propaganda?
This result is nevertheless non-trivial in the miniaturization of electoral constituencies. Whether a direct democracy or a representative one, a smaller network does improve the quality of information necessary for deliberation and collective action. Still, the political entrepreneurship involved in the process is still not geared towards the provision of goods and services. Instead entrepreneurship is in the discovery of information asymmetry by the politician to exploit and obtain political rent. The severity of this distortion can be reduced by minimizing the size of the necessary constituency to take collective action. But without the tools to determine the success and failure of the provision of goods and services, accountability can only go so far. The incentive structure of the political sphere inevitably produces politicians whose interests cannot be in the provision of goods and services to the people. Instead, politicians are those whose interests are in the discretionary power that allows them to obtain political and economic rent. Subsequently, political entrepreneurship is an activity of exploitation of information asymmetry rather than information discovery of the success and failure in innovation and inventions of technology and administration demanded by the political constituents.