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Introduction

We select our governments through elections. Parties propose policies and present candidates, we vote, someone is declared winner according to pre-established rules, the winner moves into the government office and the loser goes home. Glitches do sometimes occur but mostly the process works smoothly. We are governed for a few years and then have a chance to decide whether to retain the incumbents or throw the rascals out. All of this is so routine that we take it for granted.

As familiar as this experience is, elections are a perplexing phenomenon. In a typical election about one in two voters ends up on the losing side. In presidential systems the winner rarely receives much more than 50 percent of the vote and in parliamentary multi-party systems the largest share is rarely higher than 40 percent. Moreover, many people who voted for the winners are dismayed with their performance in office. So most of us are left disappointed, either with the outcome or with the performance of the winner. Yet, election after election, most of us hope that our favorite candidate will win the next time around and will not disappoint. Hope and disappointment, disappointment and hope: something is strange. The only analogy I can think of is sport: my soccer team, Arsenal, has not won the championship in many years but every new season I still hope it will. After all, in other realms of life we adjust our expectations on the basis of past experience. But not in elections. The siren song of elections is just irresistible. Is it irrational?

Questions concerning the value of elections as a mechanism by which we collectively choose who will govern us and how they will do it have become particularly urgent in the last few years. In many democracies large numbers of people feel that elections only perpetuate the rule of “establishment,” “elites,” or even “caste” (“casta” in the language of the Spanish Podemos party), while at the other extreme many are alarmed by the rise of “populist,” xenophobic, repressive, and often racist, parties. These attitudes are intensely held on both sides, generating deep divisions, “polarization,” and are interpreted by various pundits as a “crisis of democracy” or at least as a sign of dissatisfaction with the very institution of elections. Survey results show that people in general and young people in particular now consider it less “essential” than in the past to live in a country that is governed democratically – all of which supports the claim that democracy is in crisis (Foa and Mounk 2016).

Yet there is nothing “undemocratic” about the electoral victory of Donald Trump or the rise of anti-establishment parties in Europe. It is even more paradoxical to claim the same about results of various referendums, whether about Brexit or about constitutional reform (but implicitly Europe) in Italy: referendums are supposed to be an instrument of “direct democracy,” regarded by some as superior to representative democracy. Moreover, while the label of “fascist” is carelessly brandished to stigmatize these political forces, such parties, unlike those of the 1930s, do not advocate replacing elections by some other way of selecting rulers. They may be seen as ugly – most people view racism and xenophobia as ugly – but these parties do campaign under the slogan of returning to “the people” the power usurped by elites, which they see as strengthening democracy. In the words of a Trump advertisement: “Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American people” (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vST61W4bGm8>). Marine Le Pen promised to call for a referendum on Europe, in which “you, the people, will decide.” They are not anti-democratic. Moreover, there is nothing anti-democratic about people wanting to have a “strong” or “competent and effective” government – responses to survey questions, which have increased in frequency during recent years and which some commentators interpret as a symptom of declining support for democracy. Schumpeter (1942) certainly wanted governments to be able to govern and to govern competently, and I do not see why other democrats would not.

Dissatisfaction with the results of elections is not the same as dissatisfactions with elections as a mechanism of collective decision-making. True, finding oneself on the losing side is disagreeable. Surveys do show that satisfaction with democracy is higher among those who voted for the winners rather than the losers. Moreover, having been offered a choice, the fact that parties presented distinct platforms in the electoral campaign is valued by the winners more than by the losers. But what people value most in elections is just being able to vote for a party that represents their views, even when they end up on the losing side (based on Harding’s 2011 study of 40 surveys in 38 countries between 2001 and 2006). When people react against “the establishment,” they often just mean either that no party represents their views or that governments change without an effect on their lives, indicating that elections do not generate change. But we can, and a large majority does, value the mechanism of elections even when we do not like their outcomes.

Why should and why do we value elections as a method for selecting by whom and how we wish to be be governed? What are their virtues, their weaknesses, and their limitations? My purpose is to examine such questions, taking elections as they realistically are, with all their blemishes and warts, and to distill their effects on various aspects of our collective wellbeing. I argue below that some popular criticisms of elections – specifically that they offer no choice and that individual electoral participation is ineffective – are mistaken, based on an incorrect understanding of elections as a mechanism by which we decide as a collectivity. I contend that, in societies in which people have different interests and divergent values, looking for rationality (or “justice”) is futile, but that elections provide an instruction to governments to minimize the dissatisfaction with how we are governed. Whether governments follow these instructions (“responsiveness”) and whether elections serve to remove governments that do not (“accountability”) is more questionable: governments that are egregious are subject to electoral sanctions but their margin to escape responsibility is large. I fear that the perennial expectation for elections to have the effect of reducing economic inequality is tenuous in societies in which productive property is held only by a few and in which markets unequally distribute incomes – “capitalism.” The greatest value of elections, for me by itself sufficient to cherish them, is that at least under some conditions they allow us to process in relative liberty and civic peace whatever conflicts arise in society, that they prevent violence.

This is a minimalist, “Churchillian,” perspective, a view that admits that elections are not pretty, that they are never quite “fair,” that they are impotent against some barriers they face in particular societies, and that they are far from realizing the ideals that led to their emergence and are still held by some people as the criteria to evaluate them. But no other method of selecting our rulers, I believe, can do better. No political system can make everyone’s political participation individually effective. No political system can make governments perfect agents of citizens. No political system can generate and maintain in modern societies the degree of economic equality that many people in these societies would like to prevail. And while maintaining civic order and non-interference in private lives never cohere easily, no other political system comes even close. Politics, in any form or fashion, has limits in shaping and transforming societies. This is just a fact of life. I believe that it is important to know these limits, so as not to criticize elections for not achieving what no political arrangements can achieve. But this is not a call for complacency. Recognizing limits serves to direct our efforts toward these limits, elucidates directions for reforms that are feasible. Although I am far from certain to have correctly identified what the limits are, and although I realize that many reforms are not undertaken because they threaten interests, I believe that knowing both the limits and the possibilities is a useful guide to political action. For, in the end, elections are but a framework within which somewhat equal, somewhat effective, and somewhat free people can struggle peacefully to improve the world according to their different visions, values, and interests.

Obviously, when examining what is good, bad, or inconsequential about elections, a natural question is “compared to what?” Rulers were traditionally selected by the rules of heredity, in contemporary China they are selected by the incumbents, and in many places around the world they still impose themselves by only thinly veiled force. Different methods of selecting rulers occur under different conditions, so if we were to consider just the observed world we would not be able to distinguish effects of the historical conditions from the effects of these methods. To make comparisons, we would...