The Promise and Peril of Single-issue Legislatures

The Promise and Peril of Single-Issue Legislatures

ALEXANDER A. GUERRERO*

ABSTRACT

Here is a familiar story about electoral democracy. Modern policymaking is

incredibly complicated. Voters are rationally ignorant. This ignorance has

many potential bad consequences. If elected off‌icials are closely responsive to

the ignorant voters, they will make bad decisions, resulting in bad outcomes.

More plausibly, this ignorance will simply serve to insulate elected off‌icials

from voter scrutiny, making them easy targets for capture and manipulation—

which will also lead to bad outcomes.

There are different responses to this cluster of concerns. One response is to

restrict who participates in elections or to distribute electoral power on the ba-

sis of education, so as to improve the epistemic quality of the decision-making.

A second response is to restrict the scale of government, so that ordinary people

will be comparatively better informed about what the problems are, what might

constitute solutions, and whether those solutions are being implemented.

This article brief‌ly discusses these options, but it focuses on a completely

neglected alternative: the use of single-issue legislative bodies, as opposed to

generalist legislatures that cover a wide range of policy issues. The article con-

siders how existing political structures—particularly administrative agencies

and legislative subcommittees—already introduce single-issue elements and

considers why extant legislatures have been generalist legislatures. The article

then offers moral, epistemic, and anti-capture reasons for thinking that single-

issue bodies would be comparatively normatively attractive and introduces

several possible forms that single-issue legislatures might take. Some of the

potential advantages include that they allow more time to be spent on particular

issues, they shift focus from discussion of elected individuals to discussion of

issues, they prevent issues from receding into the background (and thus prevent

policy that is made largely in shadows), they allow people to focus on the issues

that matter most to them, they help make efforts to achieve capture more trans-

parent, they block cynical attempts to prevent action through fostering dissent

and disagreement on unrelated issues, and they allow the suplegislature to de-

velop expertise. The article concludes by discussing several concerns about

single-issue legislatures: diachronic and synchronic policy coherence, budget-

ing and funding, the impediment to log-rolling and other cross-area legislative

bargaining, and the impossibility of appropriate taxonomic division. These are

* Alexander Guerrero, JD, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University –

New Brunswick. © 2021, Alexander A. Guerrero.

I would like to thank the participants at the “Ethics of Democracy” conference organized by the

Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics for their comments on this paper. I would

particularly like to thank William English for his extended written feedback on the paper and the larger

project of which it is a part.

837

worries, but I argue that we should take single-issue legislative bodies seriously

as a way of expanding our institutional design options and that concerns about

them plausibly have institutional design solutions.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. THE IGNORANCE AND COMPLEXITY PROBLEM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 840

II. SOLUTIONS TO THE IGNORANCE AND COMPLEXITY PROBLEM . . . . . 845

A. Limiting and Selecting. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 846

B. General Improvement of Citizen-based Input . . . . . . . . . . . . . 847

C. Reducing the Epistemic Burden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 849

III. SINGLE-ISSUE LEGISLATURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 852

A. Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 852

B. Elections and Single-issue Legislatures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 853

C. Random-Selection and Single-issue Legislatures . . . . . . . . . . 854

IV. GENERALIST LEGISLATURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 858

V. THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF SINGLE-ISSUE LEGISLATURES . . . . . . . 862

A. Addressing Ignorance and Complexity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 862

B. Avoiding Policymaking in Shadows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 864

C. Making Attempts at Capture Transparent. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 864

D. Issues, Not Personalities; Cooperation, Not Conf‌lict . . . . . . . 866

E. Productive and Revitalized Citizen Participation. . . . . . . . . . 867

F. Single-Issue Perils?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 869

CONCLUSION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 870

Here is a familiar story about electoral democracy. Modern policymaking is

incredibly complicated. Addressing the problems of our world through political

institutions is very diff‌icult. Voters are rationally ignorant with respect to prob-

lems, solutions, what their representatives say they will do, what their representa-

tives are doing, and whether what their representatives are doing is a good thing

for them, their political community, or the world. This ignorance has many

838 THE GEORGETOWN JOURNAL OF LAW & PUBLIC POLICY [Vol. 18:837

potential bad consequences. If elected off‌icials are closely responsive to the igno-

rant voters, they will make bad decisions, resulting in bad outcomes. More plausi-

bly, under many empirical conditions, this ignorance will simply serve to insulate

elected off‌icials from voter scrutiny, making them easy targets for capture and

manipulation—which will also lead to bad outcomes.

There are different responses to this cluster of concerns. One response is to

restrict who participates in elections or to distribute electoral power on the basis

of education, so as to improve the epistemic quality of the decisionmaking. A sec-

ond response is to restrict the scale of government, so that ordinary people will be

comparatively better informed about what the problems are, what might consti-

tute solutions, and whether those solutions are being implemented. I will brief‌ly

discuss these options, but I want to focus on what I believe to be a completely

neglected alternative: single-issue (or area-specif‌ic or topical) legislative bodies,

as opposed to generalist legislatures that cover a wide range of policy issues.

I begin by considering how existing political structures—particularly adminis-

trative agencies and legislative subcommittees—already introduce single-issue

elements and area-specif‌ic decisionmaking, even within generalist legislative

contexts. I then consider moral, epistemic, and anti-capture reasons for thinking

that single-issue bodies would be comparatively normatively attractive. Some of

the potential advantages include that they allow more time to be spent on particu-

lar issues, they shift focus from discussion of elected individuals to discussion of

issues, they prevent issues from receding into the background (and thus prevent

policy that is made largely in shadows), they allow people to focus on the issues

that matter most to them, they help make efforts to achieve capture more transpar-

ent, they block cynical attempts to prevent action through fostering dissent and

disagreement on unrelated issues, and they allow the legislature to develop

expertise.

I then consider the question: why are extant legislatures generalist legislatures?

Given the concerns raised above about voter competence, we might think that a

central reason is that the burden on voters would rise dramatically if, instead of

electing one representative, they have to elect—say—thirty representatives. This

would seem to just intensify the epistemic burden and the resulting epistemic dis-

aster. We see this already with “down-ballot” elections for off‌ices like school

board off‌icials, judges, and sheriffs. I argue that there are electoral and lottocratic

variants of single-issue legislative systems that would help to avoid this concern.

I consider different forms they might take and advantages they might have over

generalist legislatures. I then discuss several concerns about single-issue legisla-

tures: diachronic and synchronic policy coherence, budgeting and funding, the

impediment to log-rolling and other cross-area legislative bargaining, and the

impossibility of appropriate taxonomic division. I concede that there are serious

worries, but argue that we should take single-issue legislative bodies seriously as

a way of expanding our institutional design options, and that concerns about them

plausibly have institutional design solutions. I also suggest that single-issue,

lottery-selected legislative bodies might help us reconceptualize and revitalize

2020] THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF SINGLE-ISSUE LEGISLATURES 839