INTRODUCTION

The discussion of the rational foundations of democratic politics includes at least two senses in which democracy can be seen as binding individual agents, and these two senses pick out two aspects of democracy: an institutional aspect and a more human aspect. The institutional aspect focuses on the procedures, rules, and institutions that in one sense constitute democratic politics and which might be seen as binding, constraining, or otherwise structuring the political activity of individuals. The more human aspect focuses on the individuals who live in democratic societies, are bound together into a polity, and must make democracy work. Furthermore, the institutional aspect of democracy highlights one view of economic analysis, by emphasizing the analysis of rational individual responses to democratic institutions and rules, in much the same way as we might analyze individual responses to relative prices. However, the more human aspect of democracy highlights a different economic perspective, by emphasizing the analysis of individuals committing to a common enterprise that offers both intrinsic and instrumental rewards. Very often the former, institutional aspect dominates the economic discussion of democracy to the exclusion of the latter, human aspect – so much so that we often focus on the analysis of narrowly self-interested individuals in democratic settings without asking ourselves whether individuals of that sort have the resources to operate a fully democratic society.

Representation and political agency

Ideas of representation in political theory are notoriously diffuse and recalcitrant. We shall not here be concerned with the full array of these ideas. Our attention in this chapter will be focused on the issue of political agency – on the simple fact of representation, rather than its detailed form. The essential feature of representation, as we shall understand it, is that a mediating assembly of some kind is set between the citizenry and political decision making.

A simple model

In this chapter we take up the question – first broached in chapter 4 – of the relationship between the operation of institutions that seek to economise on virtue in use or in allocation, and the dispositional choices of individuals. The basic question is whether – or in what circumstances – institutions that economise on virtue in either of these senses may undermine or erode the virtue that they economise on. We will begin by sketching what we consider to be the simplest possible version of a model that is capable of capturing the feedback effect from institutions to dispositions; that is, a model that incorporates both dispositional choice and a structure of political institutions that operate as both sanctioning and screening mechanisms. In this context we will investigate the question of the conditions under which such an institutional structure has virtue producing properties, and the conditions under which the institutional structure may act to destroy virtue. Some of the limitations of this simple model will be addressed in the following section, where we will also outline some generalisations.

The basic model is organised around the choice between dispositions in the face of an imperfect screening device and an imperfect sanctioning device.

Motivation in politics

It seems self-evident that any account of the operation of democratic political institutions must depend on assumptions made about human nature – and specifically about human motivation. After all, within the analytic tradition that we will be working in – the rational actor tradition – human behaviour is understood as the outcome of rational choices, and rational choice is understood in terms of agents' beliefs and desires. The rational option, in the standard Humean/Davidsonian account, is just that option that maximises the agent's desire satisfaction, given the agent's beliefs (beliefs, say, about the consequences of alternative actions). Economists may, in most settings, talk about preferences rather than desires, but the Humean story – or something very like it – underlies virtually all modern economics and correspondingly all rational actor political theory.

Not all scholars admire the rational actor approach to politics. Their criticisms are varied and we will not try to address them all in this book.

Political parties in public choice and political theory

Any satisfactory analysis of the practice of Western democracy – and any discussion of how it might be made to work better – must recognise and account for the role of political parties. That much seems self-evident. Indeed, for many people, to be political is to be party political. So, for example, much of the discussion, both popular and academic, of matters like alternative voting procedures – proportional representation, preferential (transferable) voting, compulsory voting and so on – is preoccupied with an investigation of how existing and potential political parties would fare under the various procedures. On this general view, to conceive of politics without parties is rather like conceiving of football without teams. Whatever such an activity would be exactly, it would certainly not be politics (or football) as we know it.

Yet parties as such have not received much attention in public choice analysis. It is generally noted that electoral candidates will have a party affiliation; and often, as in the early work by Downs, parties are identified as the contestants in the electoral process.

This book has its origins in a number of joint papers written over an extensive period. The first of the relevant papers to appear was published in 1992, and since then there have been around eight further papers, all connected in one way or another to the questions of institutional design with which this book is also concerned. Traces of this earlier work can be found in various places in the text that follows, but the current book is much more than a refiguring of the earlier papers. Indeed, it is much less a refiguring than we had originally imagined it would be. Books often have a way of taking on a life of their own and this was certainly so in the present case. As we indicate in the initial chapter, the basic intention of the book changed shape as the enterprise developed. The intellectual scheme laid out originally in the paper ‘Economising on virtue’ (Constitutional Political Economy, 1995) took on a larger and larger place in our thinking and rendered much of our earlier treatment of topics like the separation of powers (Journal of Theoretical Politics, 1994) and bicameralism (Public Choice, 1992) seriously incomplete. Thus, what was to have been a book on ‘devices’ became much more a book on ‘desires’ and on the connection between devices and desires.

Separations and divisions of power

In the last three chapters we have been concerned with what might be termed the basic structure of modern representative democracy – popular elections, the idea of representation itself, and political parties as the major vehicles of representation. In this chapter and the next, we turn our attention to a rather different class of constitutional and institutional structures that have as their shared theme the idea of the separation or division of powers – the idea, that is, that structuring the political process in a manner that divides and separates political power will serve the interests of citizens. The doctrine of the separation of powers is, of course, both old and almost universally supported. But what exactly does it entail? What does the separation of powers require at the operational level, and how exactly are the benefits to citizens generated? And does the argument for the separation of powers depend upon a particular model of politics? These are the key questions we wish to engage in this chapter and the next. Our first objective, then, is to nterrogate the definition of the separation of powers in an attempt to ease out its key ingredients.

This book is an exercise in rational actor political theory or ‘public choice’ theory. (We shall use the two terms without discriminating.) However, the discussion is unusual in two respects. First, it focuses attention on a range of institutional devices that, although common enough in democratic practice and in constitutional analysis in other traditions, have been somewhat under-analysed within the rational actor tradition. Second, it adopts a more moralised conception of agent desires than rational actor analysis normally assumes. In this initial chapter, we want to say something about what the devices in question are, and speculate as to why they have been relatively ignored within the rational actor tradition. We shall then briefly discuss our picture of desires and agent motivation, and indicate how that picture differs from the standard, more determinedly egoistic one. Because devices and desires are not independent, we also want to direct attention to some aspects of their interconnectedness. Finally, we will offer some guidance to the reader on the organisation and structure of the remainder of the book.

But before any of this, a preliminary comment on our title, and on our use of ‘devices’ and ‘desires’ is in order.

Introduction

In the chapters that make up part II of this book we turn our attention to the democratic devices of our title – the institutional structures that constitute democratic politics. Of course, institutional arrangements differ between democracies, but these relatively fine-grained differences will not be our primary concern. Rather we wish to discuss the broad institutional structures that we take to lie at the heart of almost all modern conceptions of democratic politics: voting and popular elections, representative elections, political parties, and variations on the themes of separating and dividing political powers.

Our aim in these chapters is to provide a discussion of each of these institutional devices in turn, drawing on the analysis of democratic desires provided in part I. Thus the bulk of this chapter will present an account of voting and elections that departs from the standard economic model of these topics precisely because it starts from our more moral and more expressive model of motivation and therefore allows discussion of a wider range of political mechanisms.