Democracy as a meaningful conversation.

• Author: Bennett, Robert W.

Much discussion of democracy in the United States, popular as well as scholarly, employs simple, descriptive models of that democracy. The most commonly encountered of these is what I call the "vote-centered" model of democracy. Under this vote-centered model the public policy outcomes produced by legislatures are traceable to equally weighted voter inputs. Another model that makes frequent appearance in the literature about democracy is an "interest group" model, under which democratic outcomes are depicted as "equilibrium" states in struggles among competing powerful, organized groups. For a variety of reasons, I do not think that either of these models(1) does a very satisfactory job of integrating the phenomena of American democracy. I will have something to say later about the interest group model, but the deficiencies in the dominant vote-centered model are particularly glaring and, because of its dominance, particularly important. The vote-centered model will be my principal foil in this Comment, as I advance another possibility, what I call "democracy as meaningful conversation," under which the citizenry is engaged by ongoing public conversation about public policy, and it is this engagement that is the stabilizing force in the system.

The existing descriptive models are not typically referred to as "models." They are not in any sense formal models. Indeed, they are usually implicit in discussions of democracy, rather than explicit. Even if implicit, however, they are models in the sense that they encapsulate American democracy by reference to certain central features. And they are simple models by virtue of the fact that the features they employ are few in number. As these simple models are made explicit, certain difficulties in the modeling process come into focus that are probably best highlighted from the outset.

Models can be descriptive or normative, or even both at once. While the line between the two is in principle tolerably clear, it is also difficult to heed. Descriptive models describe what is, frequently ascribing causal connections among parts of what is modeled, and even predicting results to be expected if changes are made.(2) In contrast, normative models provide an ideal to be strived for, or perhaps only dreamt of, but that need not now exist, or even be attainable. Still, models advanced as description are often likely at least to insinuate normative judgments. For all descriptive models are selective. They choose some features of the system they purport to model to the exclusion of others. The simpler the model, the more selective it will be. And if what a model identifies as encapsulating the modeled system is seen as a desirable feature rather than an undesirable or a normatively neutral one, then the model perforce has a normative twist.

Holding the line between descriptive and normative models is additionally complicated by the fact that models consciously designed as normative are seldom greatly divorced from the reality they seek to instruct. If the distance is too great, the task of bridging it will likely seem too substantial to justify the bother. For this reason there will typically be a high degree of correspondence between normative models and the portion of the real world in view, so that even normative models may easily be mistaken for description--by the consumers of commentary based on models, but also on occasion by the commentators.

The difficulty of holding the line between description and prescription is especially acute when modeling democracy,(3) probably because the appeal of democracy in the modern day is at once so great and so badly in need of explanation. Whatever the reasons, the descriptive and the normative are thoroughly intermixed in existing uses of the vote-centered model. My criticisms will largely be on a descriptive plane, but it may occasionally be that the criticisms unjustifiably mistake for description what was intended as prescription. And while the inspiration for the conversational model is description, the prescriptive pull has proved irresistible for me as well. What democracy as meaningful conversation purports above all to describe and explain is stability in the system, which it traces to widespread conversational involvement of the citizenry. Stability is usually viewed as a desirable feature of political systems, especially when, as with the conversational model, it is not the product of coercion. For that reason I will often ascribe virtue to conversational phenomena. But I want to be clear that any normativity in the conversational model is decidedly limited. Stability is surely not the only, or even necessarily the highest, virtue in systems of government, nor do I claim that the conversational model identifies the only source of stability in democracies.

Even on a descriptive level, simple models of complex things can easily mislead, for they will inevitably fail to account for a good deal of the complexity. For large scale social phenomena like democracy in the United States, controlled experimentation is unavailable, so that ascribing causal connections must always be done cautiously and tentatively. If two models describe and explain different things, moreover, there will be no common metric by which to judge one more "accurate" than the other, and also no objectively verifiable basis for saying that the one rather than the other has described the "right" thing. Despite these difficulties--or perhaps because of them--the more complex a phenomenon of interest, the more inevitable and useful simple models will be. They break the complexity down into a more useable form, one that can facilitate understanding and discussion. In such a setting the appeal of a model will necessarily rest not on some systematic basis for choice, but on informed intuition about whether the model identifies important things and provides a measure of coherence in its account of diverse phenomena. It is on this basis that I believe that democracy as meaningful conversation succeeds. The description it provides is by no means comprehensive, but the model does point the way to connections among important features of American democracy that the vote-centered model, its most prominent competitor, misses or muddles.

I begin in Section II with some sounds of silence that got me thinking about deficiencies in the vote-centered model and about alternatives to it. I begin with the almost unquestioning acceptance of the apportionment of the United States Senate.

II

The absence of controversy over the apportionment of the Senate is striking. In the Great Compromise of 1787 that opened the way for agreement on the Constitution, the House of Representatives was apportioned among the states by population (with the significant qualification that each state is entitled to at least one representative), while the Senate, was apportioned by states, with each entitled to two Senators. This equal Senate representation of the states is declared by the Constitution to be unalterable without a state's consent.(4) The obvious consequence is that populous states have less representation per capita in the Senate than thinly populated ones (while citizens in territories and the District of Columbia have none at all). In 1787 the disparity in population between the more and less populous states was already significant(5)--that is what necessitated the compromise--and it has grown over the years. Today the ten most populous states have more than fifty percent of the nation's population. California alone has more than sixty-five times the population of Wyoming, while each has the constitutionally prescribed two Senators.(6) Suggestions are occasionally advanced with apparent seriousness that California be split into two states, but to the best of my knowledge the focus of concern is exclusively intrastate, asserted antagonisms or incompatibilities of north and south, and not at all dissatisfaction with the state's apportionment in the United States Senate.(7)

This seems all the more remarkable given the reapportionment decisions of the United States Supreme Court, especially the 1964 decision in Reynolds v. Sims.(8) In Reynolds the Court decided that both houses of bicameral state legislatures were required to be apportioned by population. In doing so the Court was naturally called upon to explain how it was that the national legislature--most importantly the Senate--is not only allowed but required to deviate from that pattern. There is, of course, specific constitutional language governing the apportionment of the Senate, while the Constitution is basically silent on the structure of state government, save that the states are guaranteed a "Republican Form of Government"(9)--the framers' term for what we would be more likely to call "representative democracy."(10) The Court based its decision not on that "guarantee," which had long been held non-justiciable,(11) but on the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. And the Court in Reynolds provided an explanation for the difference in constitutional treatment of the Congress and state legislatures that on its own terms seems persuasive enough:

The system of representation in the two Houses of the Federal

Congress is one ingrained in our Constitution . . . conceived

out of compromise and concession indispensable to the

establishment of our federal republic.

Political subdivisions of States--counties, cities [on which

legislative districts were often based], or whatever--never were and

never have been considered as sovereign entities.... [T]hese

governmental units are "created as convenient agencies for

exercising such of the governmental powers of the State as may be

entrusted to them," and the "number, nature and duration of the

powers conferred upon [them] ... and the territory over which they

shall be exercised rests in the absolute discretion of the State." The

relationship of the States to the...