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Should Secret Voting Be Mandatory?
James Johnson
Susan Orr
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © James Johnson and Susan Orr 2020
The right of James Johnson and Susan Orr to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3815-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3816-4 (pb)
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Dedication
This book is for Esme Lavinia Maureen Orr Johnson in the hope that she enjoys a democratic future and in memory of her beloved Nana, Maureen Carol Orr (1943–2020).
Introduction
The future of democracy seems dire. Freedom House, an organization that assesses governments around the world, recently proclaimed “Democracy is in retreat.”1 They base this gloomy proclamation on persistent decline in expert assessments of the functioning of democratic institutions and the extent of democratic freedoms across both “new” democracies, such as Hungary and Venezuela, and “consolidated” democracies, such as the United States and United Kingdom. The Freedom House assessment parallels the appraisals of democratic citizens. A “mega-study” of public opinion on democracy that combines more than four million observations from 3,500 country surveys documented a 25-year high of 58 percent of respondents expressing dissatisfaction with democracy in 2020.2 The rise of right-wing populism in Hungary, Poland, Brazil, and India, the Brexit campaign, and the election of Donald Trump further serve to heighten concerns about democratic governance. These political events and trends have prompted academic assessments with alarming titles such as How Democracies Die (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018), Crises of Democracy (Przeworski 2019), and How Democracy Ends (Runciman 2018).
Such sweeping concerns about the fate of democracy may seem distantly related to the question we pose in our title – “Should Secret Voting Be Mandatory?” However, when we examine extant systems of representative democracy, it becomes clear that they rest on a scaffolding of small-scale institutions – and that the mechanics of voting are a crucial example. As Robert Dahl (1998) notes, “free and fair” elections are integral to democratic politics. He insists we assess democratic arrangements in terms of their responsiveness to popular demands and interests while noting that elections are the most important mechanism for gauging those demands and interests. The caveat, of course, is that elections must facilitate inclusion and contestation – meaning that they must foster wide-ranging and equal participation so that an encompassing range of perspectives is considered.
All of that may seem a commonplace. If so, that is troubling because, as Freedom House also reports, confidence in elections has declined even more precipitously – indeed, twice as fast – than confidence in democracy more generally. Two broad responses, each theoretical and political at the same time, suggest themselves here. We might retrench and scale back our aspirations for democracy and adopt instead a more technocratic mode of politics. Alternatively, we might seek to expand and enhance popular participation.
Those who advocate the first response advise investing authority for political decision making in experts or elites who are insulated in various ways from seemingly hazardous popular pressures. They advise that we rely more completely on rulemaking in bureaucratic agencies, commissions staffed by ‘apolitical’ experts, constitutional courts beholden to narrow interpretive doctrines, central banks constrained by strict rules and automatic triggers, and so forth. They take advantage of popular dissatisfaction with democratic arrangements to propose an alternative that, they believe, will deliver both sounder policy and political stability. Their argument presumes that we can best operate politically by minimizing the scale and scope of popular participation.
Advocates of the second response are eager to revive democratic politics by promoting both participation and inclusiveness. Scholarship in this area was sparked by the publication of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000), which documented a decline in civic engagement. In response to Putnam’s work, democratic theorists and policy makers launched studies to explore whether participation was
