Accountability vs. Consensus

The biggest tradeoff

There are two different models of how democracy works that are in constant conflict. The first is the consensus model, where all government action is based on public approval. You want to make sure policy is good - or rather, as the best approximation we have, popular - before it is implemented. More radical shifts should require greater consensus. In this model, people’s preferences are fairly constant, so they don’t change their mind much after seeing policy take effect.

The second is the accountability model, where people vote for a party (or person) who gets all the power, and then vote them out if they don’t do a good job. In this model, voters can’t accurately form an opinion about policy until it is adopted, so it’s all about trying things and seeing if they work.

I’d like to further divide consensus democracy. In cases where there is no overwhelming consensus on an issue, there are two options. One option is to take the median position on this issue - eg, for abortion, legal abortion for a certain period at the beginning of the term, with exceptions for late-term abortion in the cases of rape, incest or life of the mother. Call this median consensus democracy. The other option is to go with the status quo - eg, pre-2022, this was Roe v. Wade. Some of this is the left-winger in me talking, but I usually prefer median consensus democracy to status quo consensus democracy. In issues of an emerging technology, status quo consensus democracy means no regulation. In issues of changing social norms, status quo means the old social norms, which are ~always worse. Status quo consensus democracy also leads to arcane bureaucracy that everyone hates and inadequate law that must be interpreted by courts using, uhh, questionable logic. I just don’t see the status quo meaningfully as the “neutral” option.

Assumptions

The consensus model of democracy is dependent on people voting based on political views and this notion of “collective intelligence”. How exactly collective intelligence works is somewhat of a mystery, but I’ll give the version of it that I buy the most. Broadly speaking, people value many different things - liberty, equality, justice, security, faith, etc. Everyone values each one a different amount. Whether voter A agrees with policy choice X is a function of the values that this issue touches on (abortion might be faith vs. liberty, for example) and how much the voter values these different issues (a religious voter prioritizes faith over liberty and thus supports abortion restrictions; a secular voter the opposite). A more complex version of this model could include the role of elites and the media.

The accountability model, on the other hand, is dependent on people voting based on personal incentives, or - to a lesser extent - easily measurable or observable data like the strength of the economy, crime rates or how a war is going. Voters can try to assess how good a job the party in power is doing in different respects (like “protecting the environment”) through the media, but their ability to do so accurately is always going to be limited due to how difficult unbiased reasoning is. Often they will end up approving of policy that matches their pre-existing political views, at which point you’re back to the consensus model. What voters can gauge fairly well is how well they in particular are doing, or usually some other fairly indisputable outcomes. Emphasis on usually for that last point - people hated the economy for much of 2023 despite all statistics being really positive, and right-wing voters incorrectly think NYC is a crime-ridden hellhole.

Though even when voters can accurately assess how well things are going, the media can still have a big effect because of the expectations that people are comparing the economy or their financials to. For example, if a voter is doing better than they were a year ago but worse than they were before a recession, do they punish or reward the party in power?

As you can tell, I think consensus democracy is the more compelling viewpoint. I can see merit in both visions however, and throughout this series my primary objective will be to discuss how this tradeoff manifests in design choices rather than to state which design choices are necessarily optimal. Speaking of which…

How this affects design choices

Every single constitutional mechanism that restrains the party or person currently in power pushes democracy away from the accountability model and toward the consensus model. These restraints make unpopular actions less likely at the cost of limiting the ability of those in power to experiment and limiting voters’ ability to pinpoint who is responsible for outcomes.

Decisions over constraints are made even harder by the many other concerns hidden in the choice between accountability and consensus. Constraints usually lead to more stability in policy, which might be good (it allows people to work around policy) or might be bad (it allows people to discover and abuse loopholes; also less data informing policymakers on what good policy looks like). Constraints can limit the ability of the people in power to destroy democracy. Constraints give the opposition party the incentive to intentionally sabotage the country so that people vote out the party in power. Lastly, even if you think voters are terrible at implementing accountability successfully, there is a very blunt way of looking at this - if you think the bad party does more bad than the good party does good (relative to whatever the middle point is) you should lean toward consensus (because neither side will ever truly be in charge), while if you think the opposite you should lean toward accountability (because power will alternate between the two sides).

The exact constraints affect all of these concerns, and I think the details can be quite important. I hope throughout this series to highlight cases where accountability and consensus would seem to work particularly well. Join me!