IS THERE A DEMOCRACY "OVERLOAD"?
Bennett, Douglas C. & Sharpe, Kenneth E.
A principal feature of recent neoconservative thought has been the scapegoating of democracy for a host of political and economic ills—from declining governmental competence to budget deficits...
...But the market also erodes civic virtue: Through its emphasis on transactions it has eroded some of the sources of sociocentrism...
...The egoist in the political marketplace does best when other people restrain their demands and he does not...
...Hirsch stresses this, we must note for the future course of our argument, because he is concerned about the dangers posed by the erosion of such a "supporting social morality...
...Other citizens, often from economically more powerful classes, have come to see the government as responsible for market outcomes in a different sense: democratic government is expected to manage the economy to insure steady, noninflationary growth so as to enable capital accumulation and profit...
...The current problems with our capitalist political economy and the way these are dealt with by the government may be perceived as unfair or unjust, thus undermining the moral justification for selfrestraint...
...Mere self-interest (we saw earlier) was not enough, and this was especially true when contradictions emerged between capitalist accumulation and democratic social reform...
...Closely akin are arguments postulating a "political business cycle...
...Fortune, September 22,1980, pp...
...Most of those that have adopted his conception of democracy, however, put little emphasis on shared values...
...At intervals, competing sets of elites present themselves to the electorate—"the masses...
...The overload-crisis theorists, however, overlook the deeper roots of the problems and fail to see that citizens may be making these demands because they perceive the political economy—capitalism, and not 323 just democracy—as dishing out results that are unfair and unjust...
...The anti-Vietnam War protests and current protests against increased militarization can be seen as demands that government spend less: here increased demand could produce less overload...
...THE OVERLOAD-CRISIS THEORISTS use impressionistic data and a bold example or two to demonstrate the excessive nature of demands, but their thesis has not stood up well to systematic empirical tests...
...And thereby they risk expecting far too much of a mere method...
...Public-spiritedness, respect for others' virtues, a sense of responsibility, a sense of justice, and the proper self-restraint that follows—in short, a democratic character— all these are being developed by participation, though they may be something that already exists...
...if there is some other reasonable means of disseminating opposing viewpoints, the union may argue, it must be used instead of publication in the journal...
...Despite these ambiguities, we cannot simply dismiss the overload thesis...
...Perhaps because they share the doctrine of the subjectivity of values, the theorists of participatory democracy also tend to be silent about the kind of public morality that ought to be encouraged...
...Hirsch, for example, argues that the precapitalist and preindustrial social morality that served to contain economic individualism within permissible limits "has diminished with time and with the corrosive contact of the active capitalist values— and more generally with the greater anonymity and greater mobility of industrial society...
...Even such cursory attention to shared values reveals a crucial, hidden assumption in the economic theory of democracy: if equilibrium is to be maintained between demand and supply, self-interest must be internally tempered by a public morality...
...In the past, not only religion and other traditional bases of morality but the functioning of democracy itself helped sustain capitalism as well as democracy...
...One relatively mild prescription urges constitutional amendments to limit government spending...
...discovered "overload...
...Moreover, rarely is the allocation of supply questioned...
...It rejected the notion that a union may lawfully restrict expression because of its message...
...and C. B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977...
...In frustration, people clamor for the government to do something...
...If self-restraint is rational because democracy is valued, but democracy is valued merely because it generally serves one's self-interest, then the value of democracy, and of self-restraint, can be displaced by something of more immediate value to oneself...
...It has increased self-reliance and cognitive complexity, and it has taught "a version of justice where work or contribution to the economy is rewarded...
...John Stuart Mill argued that there was a certain natural sympathy in all of us that, if nurtured by education, would provide reliable "internal sanctions" restraining greed...
...These critics are attacking not democracy but the economic model of democracy...
...If we employ a market metaphor to describe democracy, there certainly is some meaning to "demand" and "supply," so that there indeed can be an excess of demand over supply—an "overload...
...Because the overload theorists see demands as a problem for democracy they miss seeing the source of these demands in the injustice of the larger political economy...
...Aaron Wildaysky, How to Limit Government Spending (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978...
...The very conception of "overload" itself is hazy...
...Drawing on a variety of data, Robert Lane has argued that the market has definite consequences for the shaping of personality...
...A political act, to be done only once in a few years, and for which nothing in the daily habits of the citizen has prepared him," John Stuart Mill argued, "leaves his intellect and his moral dispositions very much as it found them...
...Capitalism, as Schumpeter suspected, cannot be relied on to reproduce even the minimal shared values that it nevertheless needs...
...Schumpeter recognized that the national character and habits necessary for democratic self-control could not be produced by the democratic method itself, but he did not elaborate on these difficulties...
...Huntington's cure is greater reliance on nondemocratic sources of authority (expertise, seniority, experience, special talents) to place necessary limits on democracy...
...But a political market has no equivalent mechanism...
...The social virtues learned through participatory democracy must be grounded in the justness of the political economy...
...Overload" will then seem to be the problem, "excess of democracy" its cause, and authoritarian institutions a solution waiting in the wings...
...On the contrary, the court said, the democratic process cannot function if, on a matter as important as contract ratification, there is no debate...
...For a formalization of the economic theory of democracy, see Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1957...
...Insofar as they are successful, they may bring about a measure of unemployment, since some goods are being offered at a price above the market equilibrium...
...But how...
...The local and several members sued the NRLCA claiming that the Union was stifling communication in violation of their Title 1 right of free speech...
...He saw a widening gulf between expectation and institutional capacity, which led him to worry about the viability of democracy...
...As the political system becomes more closely entwined with the economic system, the outcome of the political economy must be seen as moral and just, if the value of self-restraint is to be maintained...
...7 Robert E. Lane, "Markets and Politics: The Human Product," British Journal of Political Science 11 (1981), p. 15...
...By selective examples, the overload theory implies that all popular demands—and democracy itself—lead to excess...
...When originally propounded, the economic theory of democracy contained no such worry 320 about overload, for it was assumed that the citizenry would be politically active only sporadically...
...Changing historical conditions may be forcing a clash between these tasks...
...Unless the question of the justness of the political economy is squarely faced, participatory democracy will be as inadequate as market democracy...
...Unless the economic theory of democracy is swept away, we risk being caught in its dangerous web...
...All that varies in later versions of this idea are the alleged symptoms of political and economic ill health...
...The masses are seen as consumers who spend their votes in the political marketplace to purchase programs and their sponsoring decision-makers...
...Prone: Can Our Political System Tame the Monster It Helped To Create...
...For critical discussions, see Peter Bachrach, The Theory of Democratic Elitism, A Critique (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967...
...Without it there will be conflict and anarchy, and it will be impossible for you to have any security in the pursuit of your interests...
...Only recently, when the overload theorists concluded that the current "crisis" was the result of a lack of restraint, has some attention been given to civic virtue...
...Democracy is seen to "work" insofar as government can accomplish these twin tasks of reform and accumulation...
...Surveying the available evidence for the 1970s, Hugh Heclo concludes that . almost nowhere could political parties be found trying to outbid each other in promises to continue rapid expansion in social policy spending...
...If democracy fails to cope with inflation, the system itself may be in danger," Lubar concludes...
...It is possible that rational, self-interested individuals who continue to value democracy and know that excessive demands can undermine democracy will still find it irrational to exercise self-restraint...
...There must be a promise of relatively equal life chances for all citizens and a social definition of life that encourages the development of character, not merely the satisfaction of ever-increasing material desires...
...Simply put, what the overload theorists have discovered is a corollary of the economic theory of democracy: democracy conceived as a political market lacks the built-in equilibrating mechanism of the economic market...
...Democracy thus encourages these rising group demands...
...Equality cannot simply be the equal weight of each citizen's demands as expressed through the vote...
...Yet, like other public goods, these social norms cannot be provided through the market...
...As soon as compelling arguments can be made that one's private goals are best pursued by violating democratic processes, it is irrational for the self-interested individual either to support democracy or restrain his pursuit of private goals...
...Social cooperation is in your interest...
...The theorists of participatory 324 democracy, on the other hand, argue for transforming democracy...
...Capitalism as much as democracy requires a broad sharing of certain values—for example, trust and honesty...
...Brittan, for example, mentions the importance of "the moral heritage of the feudal system" as a source of democratic self-restraint...
...Perhaps the most ominous prescrip319 tion comes from Robert Lubar, an editor of Fortune...
...Instead, it gives its citizens a choice among various politicians who rarely speak for a party with a coherent program, offering instead discrete, piecemeal proposals...
...Democracy must be conceived not just as a method but as a kind of society with a set of moral ends...
...EDS...
...The effective operation of a democratic political system requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals or groups...
...Forgetting that theirs is but one model of democracy, they claimed the problem to be inherent in democracy itself...
...But exactly how far it does go may be determined by the next court that is asked to decide, under different circumstances, whether the members of some other union can force their publication to print their message on union policy...
...By its destruction of sources of humane values, its instrumentalism, it has made identity hard to achieve and its amoral ism has made difficult the identification with moral values.' (3) SHARED VALUES (social morality, civic virtue) cannot be reconstructed through a market method...
...But can the economic theory of democracy provide a satisfactory basis for self-restraint, or must it rely on undemocratic methods...
...It conceives of no basic part of human character or psychology—such as John Stuart Mill's "sympathy"—which could serve as a foundation for such civic virtue...
...New York: Basic Books, 1978...
...Our political system, the argument goes, has become "overloaded" by demands from the citizenry, and democracy itself is to blame for stimulating these excessive demands...
...There is, however, one important assumption these theories of more participatory democracy share with the economic theory, and the pitfall to which this leads warrants exploration...
...was comprised of 125 letter carriers, could not afford a mailing to the 64,000 members covered by the new contract and looked for other means of communicating opposition to the agreement...
...1) AN IMPORTANT FOUNDATION for the shared values enabling self-restraint is the morality of the political system itself...
...He argued that one condition for the success of a democratic society was a "social stratum" (such as the English aristocracy) with high "moral character" from which politicians would be chosen by the electorate...
...Rousseau argued that 321 democracy would cease to function as soon as individual self-interest rather than the common good guided citizens...
...Richard Rose and Guy Peters, Can Government Go Bankrupt...
...another, that it might be founded in shared values...
...The journal's editor refused the ad because, in his words, it "would just create internal strife...
...It may even subtly undermine them...
...Since the New Deal, our government has gradually come to be seen as responsible for welfare measures that would ameliorate economic inequalities and lessen the risks to the normal routines of life posed by the market...
...This doctrine will not make it possible to say which values ought to be encouraged...
...The theorists of overload crisis have a difficult time understanding that the foundation for self-restraint is the larger morality of the political economy itself...
...THERE IS A CONCEPTUAL FUZZINESS to the overload theory that makes it difficult to criticize it...
...Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975), p. 113...
...3 Samuel Britian, "The Economic Tensions of British Democracy," in R. Emmett Tyrell, ed., The Future That Doesn't Work (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1977), p. 129...
...The men and women participating in the democratic market, like the economic market itself, are simply selfinterested pursuers of private goals...
...If rising demands overload the federal budget and create deficits, then publicsector borrowing and the resultant expansion of the money supply cause, or at least aggravate, the inflation we have been experiencing for the last decade...
...3 If all this is true, what are we to do...
...While its advocates claim that government is being "overloaded" by demands that it spend (or do) more, what often appears (or feels) to them as "overloaded" are private corporations—as with demands for more government regulation of occupational safety or the environment...
...4) Finally, the economic theory of democracy is taken to be a factual description of what democracy "really is," not a moral or prescriptive theory of what it "should be...
...This possibility, however, presents two serious problems...
...It conceives of democracy merely as a political mechanism, modeled on the market, "in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for people's votes...
...The market makes it rational for individuals to decide each of these matters on the basis of individual self-interest, despite any unintended consequences...
...Let's now talk of a worse problem...
...A principal feature of recent neoconservative thought has been the scapegoating of democracy for a host of political and economic ills—from declining governmental competence to budget deficits and inflation...
...Demands on government for more transfer payments to the elderly and unemployed might strain limited budgets...
...But such belated recognition of civic virtue also reveals an important limitation in the whole theory...
...Truth, trust, acceptance, restraint, obligation—these are among the social virtues grounded in religious beliefs which are also now seen to play a central role in the functioning of an individualistic, contractual economy...
...The economic model of democracy, as we have been arguing, is blind to the relationship between its market method and social morality...
...CAN SHARED VALUES be a source of self-restraint...
...Such an individual will be a free rider, carried along on the self-restraint of others...
...The ideal of equality," he argues, "has done immense damage to my country...
...Anyone committed to democracy would prefer the first alternative...
...Unions may try to argue that the Letter Carriers' decision applies only where the union officers advocate one side of an issue in a publication that routinely accepts advertisements or member statements...
...Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has held that members of the National Rural Letter Carriers Association (NRLCA) have a right of access to their union's newspaper...
...6 Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp...
...q 326...
...Alternately, the more general workings of the market itself may be encouraging unrestrained self-interest and discouraging civic virtue...
...However, in the landmark Letter Carriers' decision, the court says much more...
...78-84...
...It assumes, for example, that taxes cannot be raised, even though the U.S...
...More participation will not itself automatiArthur L. Fox Dissenters Win Right to Space in Union Papers I n a precedent-making case, the U.S...
...Particularly when accompanied by huge military expenditures, the continued financing of these reforms has called forth fiscal and monetary policies that interfere with growth and accumulation...
...By refusing to allow [dissident members] access to its union-wide publication, the NRLCA foreclosed the only reasonable avenue for the effective communication of opposition to the new agreement...
...If people are to be educated to a sense of civic duty, they must perceive the system itself to be just and moral...
...The overload theory also tends to take "supply" as a given...
...5 An important distinction is drawn between elites and masses, though both are assumed to be motivated by the same calculus of benefit and loss...
...2) Political participation is essentially the making of demands upon government...
...The more people are shaped in the image of the model, the less well, ironically, the model will work...
...Postal Service...
...SELF-INTEREST AS A SOURCE OF RESTRAINT...
...Inasmuch as the Rural Letter Carrier regularly carried commercial advertisements, the Knox County members hired an ad agency to prepare and submit camera-ready copy of their message, together with the cost of a fullpage ad...
...Theorists who make this criticism—such as C. B. Macpherson—deny that human beings are essentially and unchangeably self-interested utility maximizers...
...They argue instead that the social order and particularly its political and economic institutions deeply affect human personality...
...People foreswear certain kinds of self-interested actions in the name of justice...
...Another condition was at least a minimum of democratic self-control—a high enough moral as well as intellectual level among both electorate and politicians...
...Such participation should take place at the local and national level, as well as in the workplace...
...Democratic theorists must therefore also argue for a public morality, a conception of social and economic justice that can deal with such issues as the proper distribution of sacrifice and gain, especially in a time of recession or slowed growth...
...Rational individuals will then see no reason to restrain their own excessive demands since doing so as individuals is not sufficient (or even necessary) to sustain democracy...
...Elites are seen as political entrepreneurs who seek to gain power and its rewards by offering programs (products) more attractive than those of their competitors...
...The economic theory divides facts from values, and it insists that values are merely a matter of individual taste...
...To avoid "overload," he urged moderation in the level of demands...
...Yet such a sense of justice cannot simply be tacked on to self-interest...
...James Buchanan and Richard Wagner, Democracy in Deficit (New York: Academic Press, 1977...
...The shared values that undergird self-restraint and allow a democracy to function are, like public goods, things that benefit the whole society...
...The ad appealed to the membership to reject the 1981 contract negotiated by the NRLCA leadership with the U.S...
...tax rate is relatively low compared to many of our major capitalist competitors...
...4 Robert Lubar, "Making Democracy Less Inflation has shown itself to have a distinct intuitive appeal, perhaps because of the extent to which market imagery has permeated our national consciousness...
...In the continuous pull and haul between sellers and buyers, and even in very imperfect markets, economic wants have a mechanism that pushes toward balance between supply and demand...
...The following argument maintains that this self-interest could also encourage individuals to restrain their demands on government...
...Samuel Brittan implores the intelligentsia to give up their infatuation with egalitarianism...
...But if this is true, why has democracy seemed so stable in the United States...
...Democracy simply is a mechanism for aggregating individual demands...
...For the first time, the right of union members to express dissenting views in their own union newspaper has been recognized in federal court...
...See, for example, Edward Tufte, Political Control of the Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978...
...Before the 19th century, political theorists emphasized the importance of such civic virtue...
...The theorists of economic democracy erroneously reduce human beings to rational egoists, call that egoism human nature, and then describe (or justify) a market method for aggregating these interests without ever realizing that the method itself discourages anything but the development of such utility maximizers...
...But as religion and other supports for morality eroded, a conscious, rational basis became necessary...
...5 Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London: Unwin University Books, 2nd edition, 1974...
...Is it not possible, perhaps, that the citizenry does not mainly consist of the rational egoists assumed to be its mainstay by adherents of the economic theory of democracy...
...The series has been made possible by a grant from the Joyce Mertz-Robert Gilmore Foundation, to which we express our gratitude...
...4 This style of thought is founded upon an intellectual conception of democracy that prevailed over the last half-century: the economic theory of democracy, which was most lucidly formulated by Joseph Schumpeter in the 1930s...
...The court observed that free and enlightened self-government can exist only where there is "a rational interchange of ideas on issues of great moment—the very goal envisioned by the framers of the First Amendment...
...There is also a more subtle way in which the market may help undermine shared values: by encouraging the pursuit of self-interest and discouraging action based on virtue...
...The Knox County Local...
...The possibility that the kind and level of demands made would be shaped by a view of the morality of the market system itself cannot be accommodated within the economic theory of democracy...
...The notion that personal success was firmly connected with "duty performed" helped limit "the demands on the sharing-out functions of the state...
...If participation were nothing more than occasional trips to the polls, the citizenry would never learn the public morality needed for the survival of democracy...
...The case arose when the NRLCA leadership refused to run a paid advertisement in the Rural Letter Carrier submitted by the Knox County (Tenn...
...This in turn raises two other closely related problems: the market itself may actually promote the disappearance of the shared values upon which it rests, and it may be unable to reconstruct the necessary shared values once these are threatened...
...Because, given the assumptions of the economic theory of democracy, the individual (with his own wants and interests) is conceived of as apart from and unaffected by the democratic system...
...2) THE MARKET ITSELF may help to undermine the shared values upon which it rests in two rather distinct ways...
...There are distinct dangers in viewing both a society's economic and political arrangements through the lens of the market...
...Samuel Huntington provided the first influential formulation of this argument in the Trilateral Commission's Report on the Governability of Democracies.' A "democratic surge" in the 1960s had raised the level of popular expectations and group demands on the government, he argued, and this had resulted in both an expansion of governmental activity and a decline in governmental authority...
...Local...
...A democracy is the best political form for such cooperation because it is more likely than any other political system to control the rulers and thereby allow your interests to be represented and protected...
...Drawing on such earlier theorists as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, and G. D. H. Cole, they argue for the educative importance of participation in making political decisions, not just the election of—or pressure on—decisionmakers...
...he also counsels "self-restraint...
...3) Democracy, because it is reduced to a mere marketlike mechanism, cannot affect the character of the citizenry or the content of these demands...
...The rational, self-interested individuals assumed to inhabit the marketplace thus provide fragile building blocks for the self-restraint needed to support democracy...
...That depends...
...These and other groups then clamor for government relief from this unemployment...
...Perhaps, in the past, the actions of most citizens were informed by shared values of trust, compassion, social responsibility, public-mindedness, and national community, which did restrain them in the pursuit of private or selfish goals...
...This managed economy goes hand-in-hand with the welfare state: growth is considered essential to finance income-maintenance programs, and government management of the economy ensures such growth...
...Organized interest groups, especially "union monopolies," insist upon larger shares of the national product...
...statements that see economic illness as the consequence of rising individual and group demands...
...But when political participation increased in the late 1960s and early 1970s and Western democracies found themselves with economic ills, Huntington et al...
...Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970...
...The only remaining prop for internal restraint of self-interest is a conscious sense of civic duty, the recognition that certain actions are just and moral because they support a just and moral society...
...The other difficulty here is the free-rider problem...
...One possibility is that self-restraint could be founded in selfinterest...
...for the democratic character, discouraged by the market method, is no longer there to support it...
...Relying upon decisions upholding the First Amendment freedom of the press, the district court refused to order the NRLCA to print the ad and dismissed the action...
...And since these individuals are taken to exist prior to any social institutions, it is impossible for the theory to recognize a historical process by which human nature is shaped...
...Meanwhile, the Letter Carriers' decision is an encouraging breakthrough for union democracy...
...Technically, the Sixth Circuit opinion prohibits only discrimination based upon the content of members' speech...
...They do not see the connection between the citizens' view of the market system and the citizens' willingness to restrain demands...
...Less democracy is the proposed remedy...
...Such basic assumptions thus make it difficult for overload theorists to move beyond an ad hoc recognition of shared values and toward an explanation of the conditions under which these values are maintained or eroded...
...Members of other unions will undoubtedly want to know whether they, too, can now force their union publications to print their messages on union policy matters...
...6 The significance of such shared values was not lost even on Schumpeter when he formulated his market model of democracy...
...In many situations each person finds it rational to pursue private interests even though everyone acting this way would threaten a shared goal...
...Drawing together the work of these overload theorists, he assigns democracy "a large share of the blame for the economic troubles that afflict the advanced nations...
...hegemony in the international economy, rising energy costs, declining industries, and persistent stagflation all are making it harder for the democratic welfare state to finance the social reforms needed to lessen the inequalities of the economic market...
...183-208...
...2 For various formulations of the overload crisis perspective, see: James Sundquist, "Crisis of Competence in Our National Government," Political Science Quarterly 95 (1980), pp...
...So long as shared values had a traditional basis in custom or religion, there was a built-in, almost 322 unconscious check on the pursuit of self-interest: lying, cheating, deceiving, and harming another to benefit yourself were just plain wrong...
...Either the citizenry must exercise self-restraint in its demands upon government, or there must be some kind of external restraint—in milder form, corporatism or depoliticization...
...The masses are taken to be involved in politics only marginally and intermittently, with their main objective that government satisfy their demands...
...Analyses rarely specify what kinds of demands cause overload through their excess...
...Union Democracy Review, January 1984 q cally create democratic character...
...The first contention is based on the link citizens see between the "political market" and the economic market: they no longer judge democracy (as perhaps they once did) as a "working" or "just" system in narrow political terms but rather by wider political-economic criteria...
...More recently, Fred Hirsch has emphasized the importance of such shared values for the continued functioning of even the economic market...
...383-406...
...If so, the attempt to deprive democracy of an independent moral foundation and justify it instead by a market model aggravates the problem...
...While Huntington is concerned with the sapping of governmental authority, far more numerous and influential are This article is part of a series, appearing intermittently in our pages, on the general theme of problems of democracy in advanced industrial countries...
...The distribution of sacrifices and benefits must be perceived as fair, if selfrestraint is to be thought of as moral...
...When "demand" is greater than "supply," and supply cannot easily be increased (as in the current climate of stagnation), demand must be limited...
...Otherwise a desperate nation may well reach for ways that imperil our liberty...
...but other demands do not...
...So long as the Western democracies functioned smoothly in the years after World War II, overload was only a theoretical possibility...
...But "the feudal legacy was bound to be extinguished by the torchlight of secular and rationalistic inquiry, which was itself so closely associated with the rise of capitalism...
...Finally, there must be institutional mechanisms for debate and decision that not only accord citizens power over the terms of their lives but teach civic virtue and educate citizens to their responsibilities...
...Democracy helped put us in our present fix and it has to get us out...
...They argued that there could be no democratic referendum over the new contract if members voting on it were not exposed to competing viewpoints...
...In insisting on more active participation as a necessary condition for democracy, they argue for replacing one method with an alternate, better method...
...Moreover,] survey information for the United States and Western Europe shows a considerable willingness in the general public to act sensibly and lower expectations in response to (and in anticipation of) unfavorable events.' Nevertheless, the overload-crisis argument Notes ' Samuel P Huntington, "The United States," in Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy...
...A central element in the critique of the economic theory of democracy is that this conception fails to provide for the inculcation of democratic values through participation...
...And here electoral competition works its mischief: "Politicians," writes Brittan, "compete in the marketplace for the votes of an extensive electorate in the same way that oilmen bid for oil or salesmen bid for customers...
...Everyone may know that self-restraint is something that would benefit the entire society, but the democratic marketplace never offers people the choice between a disorderly society ruled by excessive demands and an orderly society ruled by reasonable, self-restraining people...
...The ebbing of U.S...
...in more coercive form, authoritarianism...
...The court of appeals reversed...
...g Hugh Heclo, "Toward a New Welfare State," in Peter Flora and Arnold Heidenheimer, eds., The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1981), pp...
...124,141...
...Even then, unions may contend that members can force journals to print their viewpoint only where the paper is the exclusive forum of communication on a particular subject...
...All the overload theorists share four major assumptions of the economic theory of democracy: (1) Men and women are conceived as atomistic, self-interested, rational individuals who seek to maximize pleasure through accumulating material goods...
...They saw individuals who were ruthless in behalf of private goals as a corrupting force that invited despotism...
...If it remains within its own assumptions, the theory is unable to give an account of shared values...
...SELF-RESTRAINT: Solution for Overload...
...According to the economic theory of democracy, people enter the political market as rational, self-interested individuals who seek to maximize fulfillment of their largely material desires...
...2 The strongest indictment of democracy for our economic woes comes from Samuel Brittan, who blames it for "the English sickness"— inflation, unemployment, lack of productivity, and balance-of-payment troubles...
...We cannot dismiss it without scrapping altogether the economic theory of democracy from which it so easily derives...
...Given the basic assumptions of the economic theory of democracy, there is nothing surprising about the solutions propounded by its theorists...
Vol. 31 • July 1984 • No. 3
