Democracy without Elected Representatives?

Democracy, meaning universal suffrage, is a new experiment. It may fail.  Many voters feel ignored or betrayed.  A big problem is reliance on unreliable elected representatives.

Alex Krainer - Alex (Sasha) Krainer on X – cites studies from a couple of decades ago revealing that US representatives do not take their voters’ preferences into account. Their actions are almost entirely determined by vested interests and donors. Even when 80% of the electorate supports a particular position, nothing will change unless there is also donor and/or deep state support for change. (Which, by the way, leads one to suppose that Trump’s successes reflect a recent split in elite vested interest opinion itself.)

This post attempts to explain how the West came to rely on electing representatives to make government act in accordance with the people’s wishes.  And why they don’t do their job.

Democracy Means Universal Suffrage – One Citizen One Vote

First things first.  Democracy means ‘Universal Suffrage’.  This means that every adult citizen has an equal voice in making decisions, regardless of their contribution, or lack of it, to the wellbeing of society or the state.  Society and State being not all the same thing.  

Democracy does not mean a regime of personal freedom and equality before the law.  Britain had such a regime from the 1688 Glorious Revolution to the outbreak of World War I in 1914.  It may have been the most successful society ever.  But it did not have universal suffrage and so was not a democracy.

The post-1688 Parliamentary regime protected individuals’ legal rights and freedoms effectively.  As Adam Smith said in ‘Wealth of Nations’ (1776) ‘easy (low) taxes and a tolerable administration of justice’ are the pre-conditions of prosperity.  Eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain created the right conditions for progress.  The Industrial Revolution became the greatest of so many British achievements, and the most globally beneficial development in history.  But it was not the result of democracy.

From 1688 until the Great Reform Act in 1832, voters were in a very small minority. Only in the late 19^th century did most Englishmen become able to vote.  But it was not a democracy until less than a hundred years ago when, finally, all men and women had the vote.

Why Have Elected Representatives?

How did the system of electing representatives come about?  Our democracy is incorrectly supposed to be a return to a successful Classical Greek or Roman model.  In practice there were never many democracies even in the classical world. 

Most countries in history have been monarchies. with no notion of, or legal protection for, individual property and personal freedom. With no personal or economic freedom, inevitably came no prosperity.  For thousands of years, monarchies presided precariously over the squalor of pre-industrial agrarian societies.

There have been many fewer republics, though republics have contributed disproportionately to the development of human knowledge and civilisation. I would suggest that this is because of the greater degree of freedom they made possible.  But almost all republics were not democracies - including the United States at independence.  Nearly all republics limited political power and voting rights to propertied men. 

Athens and Rome

The two important ancient (more or less) democracies were Athens and Rome. Both were established within a year or two of each over at the end of the sixth century BC (509BC in the case of the Roman Republic).  Many other short-lived democracies came into being at the same time.  But the claim of democracy to historical respectability is based on the example of the more durable regimes in Athens and Rome. 

But neither in Athens nor Rome were politicians elected to an assembly. In Classical Athens officials (other than generals) were chosen by lot - by a lottery in other words.  Decisions and laws were made by an assembly of all 40,000 or so Athenian men.  The Athenian electorate could be fitted into Wembley Stadium and still leave it half empty.

Law courts were staffed by citizen juries numbering in the hundreds. That was to make corrupting juries impossible, or at least very expensive.

The other 200,000 people in Athens’ territory were foreign men, free women and children, and slaves.  Foreigners and women naturally didn’t count politically.  Politics was about men facing grim slaughter to protect their own city, and loot and enslave other cities. Neither women nor slaves could play much of a role, except as victims.

Children typically accounted for getting on for half of pre-industrial populations.  Conditions in all such agrarian societies, far from being idyllic as many now imagine, were so bad that most children never reached adulthood.  Which meant there always had to be a lot of them.

In Rome, many offices were filled by elections, including the crucial consuls for each year, but there was no elected assembly.  All laws had to be voted on by the citizens in the voting booths outside the city.  All citizens had a vote, although votes of the upper classes counted for more.  The Roman Senate, just like the House of Lords in England, was not made up of representatives.  Roman senators, like English lords, attended in person.

Origin of Representative Assemblies

Representation began with medieval parliaments.  And it had absolutely nothing to do with democracy.  Medieval society in Europe was divided into three classes, churchmen, nobles and commoners (i.e. everybody else).  Bishops and nobles attended Parliament in person in the Lords.  And they did so at their own expense, as did all Members of Parliament (MPs in the British House of Commons) until the early 20^th century.  However, the small minority of commoners that could vote for MPs were still too numerous to attend Parliament in person. They needed to choose representatives.

Of course, nobody was at all interested in the views of the vast majority of the population, and so we can’t really know now what those views were. They were too poor to pay taxes, or to arm themselves.  Instead, selected chartered market towns and England’s fifty or so counties each sent two representatives to the lower house of Parliament, The Commons.

Parliaments were only summoned when the King needed their consent to levy taxes, usually to pay for war, and usually with France.  In return for granting taxes, they sought royal approval for Acts of Parliament, i.e. new statute law, which they wished to see implemented.

Only propertied people with a stake in the system were represented.  Few of them could afford to go to Parliament.  Most towns had a very limited franchise – usually property owners – sometimes only the owners of the original plots from when the town was chartered.  New industrial towns like Sheffield and, I believe, Manchester and Leeds, which were just villages in medieval times, had no MPs at all until 1832. 

This was not a democracy.  Only a small fraction of the population could vote.  The representatives in the Commons were part of a regime run by the landed aristocracy and churchmen in the Lords and their friends and relations in the City of London.

The landed interest was enlightened enough to keep taxes (including on themselves) low, and to insist that the legal system protect everyone’s personal and property rights – not just theirs.  The resulting economic and technological explosion catapulted the world to undreamt of affluence.  We are still adjusting to this remarkable, sudden change in the human condition. 

Since Britain was doing so well there was naturally a tendency to emulate Parliament, especially in the English-speaking world, including in the newly independent United States. The US Constitution set up a Congress with two houses modelled on the House of Lords and the House of Commons in England. 

The Senate was originally unelected, like the House of Lords.  Each state had two senators which were appointed by state legislatures rather than voted in.  This was to give states representation at the federal level, and to prevent smaller states being bullied in Congress by larger states.

But 435 representatives (‘Congressmen’) were to be elected to the lower house, the House of Representatives, every two years in proportion to each state’s population. 

Each state decided its own voting arrangements.  At first, states had traditional property qualifications to vote.  Neither slaves nor, of course, women could vote.  Both were property. 

Nevertheless, there were relatively many more voters than in England.  Over time, the Democratic Party managed to introduce democratic one (free) man, one vote franchises in all states (hence the name Democratic).  Black Americans were also enfranchised from 1864, at least in theory.  The United States became the first significant state based on elected representatives and male universal suffrage in history.

Effectiveness of Representation Declines as Voter Numbers Grow

Whether representatives actually represent the views of their voters rather than vested interests in the capital has a lot to do with how big and diverse the electorate is.

In a typical British market town in the eighteenth century there might be a few hundred voters.  They would know their two MPs personally.  Voters were in a position to make their views known in person.  And, as propertied men, voters had the same interest in maintaining stability and prosperity (i.e. low taxes and protection of property ownership).      

In America constituencies were little bigger.  In 1788 the United States had about 4 million inhabitants.  Representatives in Congress therefore represented districts which had fewer than 10,000 inhabitants on average.  Less than a quarter might be adult white men eligible to vote.  Each congressman could still know personally a high proportion of those who could vote, and would still identify with his local population.  Most voters would still be small farmers and tradesmen with a general interest in protecting property.   

In Britain, as late as the early 20^th Century, Winston Churchill could be elected for a seat with only around 5,000 voters.  Now the average population of a UK parliamentary constituency is around 100,000, the great majority of whom are voters.

Worse, the United States still only has 435 federal Congressmen.  Each district now averages about three quarters of a million inhabitants and well over half a million voters. It is simply not possible for a Representative to know his voters or for them to know him, still less hold him to account personally.  And the voters are diverse.  There are many more, often unpropertied interests - sometimes hostile to liberty and private ownership. 

If US districts still had 10,000 inhabitants, as they did in the late eighteenth century, there would be over 30,000 congressmen. That wouldn’t work.  No wonder Aristotle said popular government could only survive in small communities – ‘within range of a herald’s voice’.

With personal contact impracticable, elections came to be dominated by the dark arts of mass communication controlled by near monopoly newspaper, radio and TV channels.  These technologies came into their own long after the eighteenth century.  Would-be representatives are now loyal to national parties.  Their brands are better known to voters than the candidates can be, and they have access to funding and donors.  Representatives have become paid professionals, dependent on, and profiting from, behind-the-scenes funding.

Until recently the legacy media made it difficult for voters to understand how thoroughly representatives prioritised donors, party and lobbyists over them. The internet has changed everything.  It is much easier to pierce the veil of ignorance about what exactly our representatives get up to once elected.  Unlike newspaper and broadcast technologies, the internet also offers a way for people to vote directly rather than via unreliable representatives.

Growth of Government Undermines Democratic Representation

Effective voter control of elected representatives has become harder at the same time that Government has become much bigger.  It is a forgotten but key fact that until a little over a century ago Western governments were small.  The US Federal Government took less than about 5% of national resources.  It levied no direct taxes, living instead on tariffs.  The UK government took a bit more in tax, partly to pay interest on debt incurred fighting France.  Dissatisfaction with politics was much more muted when government didn’t cost much. 

Corruption of Elections, Representatives and Political Parties

Nowadays governments seize the lion’s share of the resources created by productive members of society. This is not just via taxation.  States also borrow continuously. They rely on low quality FIAT money to reduce the value of their debt, and of people’s savings and incomes.  They also ensure, through regulation, that society is dominated by state protected corporations and professions.  These pay to lobby for rules that serve their interests by eliminating competition and innovation.  The loser is the citizen.  He has few friends in the political class.

It is worthwhile for vested interests, private and official, to select and reward compliant representatives and officials, in terms of approving new rules favourable to them.  The most obvious case is the USA.  The upper house, the Senate now comprises just 100 elected representatives.  They have a controlling say in how trillions of dollars are raised and spent annually. It would be inhuman not to expect Senators to take the chance to accumulate acknowledged fortunes of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars (in reality perhaps a great deal more) in return for favours to donors. 

Big donors include Big Pharma and the Military Industrial Complex. Via money-laundering NGOs, cash from large scale fraud or trafficking may also enter the mix.  As reported by Alex Krainer mentioned above, studies show that senators, and indeed representatives more generally, actually take pretty much no account of voter preferences.  It is all about donors – those who pay them and support their election.

Election Fraud

The problem is not just the ease with which representatives can ignore voters in order to cosy up to corporate and official donors.  There is also election fraud.

Donald Trump won a big popular vote in 2024 (77 million votes).  This vote however didn’t translate into equivalent gains in Congress.  The suspicion has to be that results in states controlled by the Democrats, which typically do not check whether people are entitled to vote, do not reflect the legal votes actually cast.

The controversy over voting anomalies in the 2020 election is well known.  Democrat presidential candidates between 2008 and 2016 all got fewer than 70 million votes – except for Joe Biden who defeated Trump with a heroic 81 million votes in 2020.  And he didn’t even do any campaigning.

The use of voting machines highlights the risk of relying on digital solutions to count votes.  Many countries, and many Democrat-controlled states, use machines which turn out to be hackable at a distance, thus at least enabling fraudulent election results.  The defeat of president Bolsonaro in Brazil couple of years ago may also be linked to voting machines. 

Traditional vote counting systems may also be manipulated.  Florida used to be a ‘purple’ state.  In other words, a state where ‘red’ (Republican) and ‘blue’ (Democrat) voters were evenly matched.  However, a statewide effort to clean up election processes has revealed the state to be quite red.  Many US precincts are known to report implausibly or impossibly high (more than 100%) voter turnouts.  Maybe US elections have generally been 10% or more adrift of the actual tally of genuine votes cast. 

The all-important mid-term Congressional Elections are coming up in November 2026.  Whether enough states’ voter rolls can be tidied up in time may determine the outcome. 

Direct Democracy?

What can be done about the problems with corrupted representatives?  At the moment we are obliged at elections to choose between packages of policies put forward by the political parties.  Some parts of the package may not appeal to all the party’s supporters.  Of course, you can’t rely on the party to implement your favourite ideas if you vote for it. 

However, for the first time it is technically possible for citizens to bypass representatives by voting directly over the internet on specific laws, taxes and government officials. Taxes could also be voted on directly.  The Government might need a popular vote to borrow money, or to make war.  One could even link specific legislative proposals, perhaps in the form of referenda, with their cost in terms of, say, an increase or decrease in VAT or other taxes on consumption. 

So perhaps we should scrap elections for representatives.

Just like the Ancient Romans and Athenians, we could decide directly by votes of all eligible citizens.  There would have to be some system for developing legislative proposals. But we wouldn’t have to worry about being betrayed by elected representatives.  We could see the end of corrupt ‘pay to play’ governance on both sides of the Atlantic. The State would have to justify its demands on our pockets and our time.  Would that not put pressure on the state to provide value for money?  Or even to listen to us, for a change?