California’s recall circus – this round of it at least – is coming to a close. I have no idea how the next few days will play out, but that matters less to me than what the overall process has revealed – namely, the entire process is severely screwed up. Not just the recall, but the method of citizen involvement in government that it exemplifies.
This may seem like a surprising position for me to take. This site has at its heart John Dewey’s ideal of a participatory democracy, a society where everyday citizens have a much greater degree of control over their government than selecting representatives at pre-selected intervals. And as far back as I can remember, measures like the recall and the public initiative/referendum system have been hailed as major achievements by progressive reformers that helped citizens take back some of that control. At first glance, it seems like I should at least support the principle, even if I’m dissatisfied at how it’s playing out in a particular instance. Instead, I think these measures exacerbate the problem, and illustrate exactly how difficult it is going to be to really implement Dewey’s vision for a real democracy. Their solution to a world where voters have to make decisions with insufficient discourse and deliberation is to make voters make more decisions with insufficient discourse and deliberation, and that’s not helping anyone.
Let’s look at the California recall in particular, since that’s what’s in the news right now. To force a recall, one needs to get one percent of the number of people that voted in the last election to sign a petition in favor. Now, it may be that once upon a time a petition drive required a grass roots effort to go forth among the population and try to persuade others of the rightness of the cause in question. Today, petitions are a joke, and not just in California. One of the little sideshows of the Philadelphia mayoral election this year was the failed attempt of a third party candidate to get on the ballot; this candidate apparently got some amount of help from established petition gatherers, whose methods include hiring folks from homeless shelters to try and get people to sign. (They also included getting a whole bunch of people to sign who weren’t eligible to do so, as well as folks who decided to use joke names when they signed.)
Even if petitions weren’t useless, look at that threshold. One percent of the voters? (A little over a million Californians attached valid signatures to the recall petitions.) If we had that standard for, say, presidential elections, I think it’s safe to say we’d be entering our 12th straight year of recalls. Is that really the kind of government we want? One where elected officials would have to fear that any momentarily-unpopular decision could be used to force them into a recall election? Where they would have to be constantly fundraising to prepare themselves for such an eventuality? For Deweyan democracy to work, people need to carefully examine their options, not make decisions on the spur of the moment But the latter is what a recall scenario encourages. I’m all for an impeachment procedure where a corrupt official can be thrown out of office early – I disagreed with the impeachment of Bill Clinton, but I never had a problem with the procedure being used. Now, I have no real opinion on the recall of Gray Davis, but I know that the procedure stinks. If the official hasn’t broken the law, then he or she deserves the benefit of a full term to do the job he or she was elected to do.
Of course, the recall isn’t the only peculiarity of California politics. The state’s proposition system has gotten a fair degree of press over the years. At first glance, a system where individuals can work to get specific policy initiatives put on the ballot seems like a good idea, a way to bypass the special interests that surround any legislative body. But once again, without the proper nurturing environment, the system breaks down. Potential propositions get thrown on the ballot with insufficient explanation or context, which opens the way for hideously expensive ad campaigns designed to sway the vote. Just what democracy needs – more political advertising. (Sorry, my cynicism’s shining through today.) Plus, many of those propositions are designed to block the government from doing something – capping property taxes, requiring a supermajority for tax hikes, that sort of thing. Creating iron clad rules like this only reduces the flexibility that a society needs to deal with a problem, as Schwarzenegger advisor Warren Buffett pointed out at the beginning of the campaign before Schwarzenegger threatened Buffett with a few rounds of pushups if he ever mentioned it again.
Participatory democracy requires more than giving people more things to vote on. If some of these propositions and measures had to be discussed in community civic organizations and town meetings, for example, that would be big step up, especially if those organizations had access to experts who could help lay out the fine points and future implications of a particular decision. If you have to put propositions on the ballot, don’t make the qualifying test a meaningless hunt for signatures. Officially charter local deliberative bodies. Require a majority of them to approve a measure before it can show up on the ballot. In an ideal world, I’d go a step further and require voters to participate in these local groups before they’d be eligible to vote on the measure, although that would raise a host of other issues that need to be dealt with before such hands-on democracy is really practical, not the least of which is the question of whether there are minimum standards and obligations for participation in the process. In the end, I suppose that’s my biggest problem with recalls and propositions – they’re a piecemeal solution to a problem that demands a far more holistic treatment, and they provide the illusion of a more thorough democracy while in reality they work against it.