Democracy or Republic?

Wednesday, April 18, 2001

By Lawrence W. Reed

The following is a response by Mackinac Center for Public Policy President Lawrence Reed to a high-school debate student's questions about the Electoral College and the nature of American government.  Students regularly use the Mackinac Center's Ask the Debate Coach web feature for help developing powerful cases based on sound principles of economics and political science.

If we are a democracy, why does a person from Wyoming's vote count almost three times more than someone from California? If small states like Wyoming think they wouldn't have any weight in a popular vote election, why was the popular vote split by a number very close to that of Wyoming's population?

I've written several articles on the Electoral College, and I am happy to answer your questions one at a time. Your first question: If we are a democracy, why does a person from Wyoming's vote count almost three times more than the vote of someone from California?

Answer: The premise is incorrect. We are not a democracy. We are a republic--which is a representative form of government that captures the best elements of democracy while jettisoning its worst. Too many people throw around that term "democracy" without understanding what it means. If they understood it, they would realize that they're probably not advocates of its purest form, which would mean that we decide every matter by majority vote. Perhaps ancient Athens for a brief time came closest to this, but no society of any size and complexity can practice this form of governance for very long. It's unwieldy and unworkable, endlessly contentious, and disrespectful of certain inalienable rights of individuals who may find themselves in the minority.

People like the sound of "democracy" because it implies that all of us have equal say in our government and that a simple majority is somehow inherently fair in deciding all or virtually all issues. Upon closer examination, it should become very apparent that subjecting every decision of governance to a vote of the people is utterly impossible. Many decisions have to be made quickly; many decisions require knowledge of the issue that few people possess or have the time to become expert on; and many decisions don't belong in the hands of any government at all.

An example of the last point: Suppose someone says, "I just don't like people with red hair. I think we should confiscate their property. Let's have a vote on that." A democratic purist would have to reply, "All in favor say aye." A person interested in securing and protecting individual rights would have to say, "That's not a proper function of government, and even if 99 percent of the citizens vote for that, it's still wrong and illegitimate. There's nothing about mob rule that makes such a decision legitimate. There is never, anywhere or any time, any justification for any government to take someone's property just because he has red hair, and no pile of votes or dimpled chads can change that. Is that anti-democratic? Yes, it is. Some things, like individual rights, are infinitely more important than the notion that Jim and Sally Taxeater want to stick their grubby little fingers into Joe Taxpayer's pockets."

So if I were in a debate on this subject, I'd be tempted to say, "We're not a democracy any more than we're a divine right monarchy. Period. Next question?"

A republican form of government modifies pure democracy considerably. It provides a mechanism whereby almost anyone can have some say in some matters of government. We can run for office. We can support candidates and causes of our choosing. We can speak out in public forums. And, indeed, a few matters are actually decided by majority vote. But a sound republic founded on principles that are more important than voting (like individual rights) will put strong limits on all this. In its Bill of Rights, our Constitution clearly states, "Congress shall make no law . . ." It doesn't say, "Congress can pass anything it wants so long as 50 percent plus 1 support it even if none of the voters know a thing about the issue." How brainless and destructive that would be! If some debater wants to say "We're a democracy" then you could fire back, "Then explain why there's a laundry list of things our Constitution says not even Congress can make a law about."

Bottom line: We are not Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves. We are not a pack of wolves and a handful of sheep voting on what to have for lunch. We're a republic with certain limitations on what the mob can do to others who are not members of the same mob.

The Electoral College, for all the reasons expressed in my previous article that you can certainly feel free to use, was one way the Founders reined in the democratic mob rule impulse. It's the rules of the game. The reasons the Founders created it are sound ones: to protect states' rights and our system of federalism, so crucial to keeping the national government in check; and to prevent a presidential campaign in which the candidates simply cater to a handful of vote-rich populous states and ignore everybody else, which would be tremendously divisive and destructive of national unity and any sense on the part of all the people that the election winner is indeed "legitimate."

Your second question: If small states like Wyoming think they wouldn't have any weight in a popular vote election, why was the popular vote split by a number very close to that of Wyoming's population?

The Founders did not so micromanage the Electoral College process as to deny a state the right to make its own selection of a presidential winner more "democratic" if they choose to. If a state wants to adopt a process whereby electoral votes are parceled out according to the winner by congressional district, instead of a statewide winner-take-all approach, then it can do so. A few states have indeed adopted that approach and it has much merit to it. I personally would favor that modification in winner-take-all states, including my own of Michigan, but not by national decree. It should be left, as the Constitution provides, for each state to decide. Rather than open up the presidential selection process to the potentially disastrous and confusing direct popular vote everywhere (with all the attendant problems I wrote about in my article), advocates of abolishing the Electoral College would be better advised to focus their energies on this slight modification. Doing away with the College altogether and substituting a national popular vote determination is extreme, unwise, and unnecessary.

Good luck in your debate!

Lawrence W. Reed is President of the Foundation for Economic Education, headquartered in Irvington, New York.

After serving as President of the Mackinac Center for its first two decades, Reed became president emeritus of the Center upon assuming his duties as president of FEE.

Reed holds a B.A. degree in Economics from Grove City College (1975) and an M.A. degree in History from Slippery Rock State University (1978), both in Pennsylvania. He taught economics at Midland?s Northwood University from 1977 to 1984 and chaired the Department of Economics from 1982 to 1984. He designed the university?s unique dual major in Economics and Business Management and founded its annual, highly-acclaimed ?Freedom Seminar.? In 1982, he was a major party candidate in the general election for the U. S. House of Representatives from Michigan?s 4th district. He moved to Boise, Idaho in 1984 to direct a policy institute there before moving back to Michigan to head up the Mackinac Center in December 1987.

Under his leadership, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy emerged as the largest and one of the most effective and prolific of over 40 state-based ?free market? think tanks in America. He served a term as president and 15 years as a member of the board of directors of the State Policy Network, a national organization whose membership consists of those state-based groups. vIn 1994, Reed was invited to give the Commencement address to the graduating class of the Colleges of Education, Health, and Human Services and Extended Learning at Central Michigan University (CMU) before an audience of 6,000. CMU conferred upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Public Administration. In 1998, Grove City College (his undergraduate alma mater) bestowed upon him its ?Distinguished Alumni Award.? vIn the past twenty years, he has authored over 1,000 newspaper columns and articles, 200 radio commentaries, dozens of articles in magazines and journals in the U. S. and abroad, as well as five books. His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, Baltimore Sun, Detroit News and Detroit Free Press, among many others. Reed?s most recent book is Striking the Root: Essays on Liberty. Since 1978, he has delivered more than 1,000 speeches in 40 states and 15 foreign countries, including one at People?s University in Beijing, China.

Reed?s interests in political and economic affairs have taken him as a freelance journalist to 69 countries on six continents since 1985, including five visits to Russia, five to China, four to Nicaragua, three to Poland, five to Kenya, and others to such places as Cambodia, East Germany, Mozambique, Haiti, Japan, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Honduras, Greece, Italy, Australia, Slovenia, Croatia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Singapore, Israel, Egypt, Malaysia, Vietnam, Iceland and New Zealand.

From firsthand experience, he has reported on hyperinflation in South America, voodoo in Haiti, black markets behind the Iron Curtain, reforms and repression in China and Cambodia, the recent stunning developments in Eastern Europe, and civil war inside Nicaragua and Mozambique. Among many foreign adventures, Reed visited the ravaged nation of Cambodia in 1989 with his late friend, Academy Award winner Dr. Haing S. Ngor; recorded an authentic native voodoo ceremony in a remote region of Haiti in 1987; traveled with the Polish anti-communist underground for which he was arrested and detained by border police in 1986; interviewed presidents and cabinet officials in half a dozen nations; spent time with the contra rebels during the Nicaraguan civil war; and lived for two weeks with the rebels of Mozambique at their bush headquarters in 1991, at the height of that country?s devastating civil war.

Reed was first elected in 1994 to the Board of Trustees of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in Irvington, New York?one of the oldest and most respected economics institutes in America and publisher of the journal, The Freeman, for which he writes a column entitled ?Ideas and Consequences.? In 1998, he was elected chairman of FEE?s board of Trustees and reelected chairman in 1999 and 2000.

His spare-time interests include reading, travel, flyfishing, hiking, skydiving, and animals of just about any kind.

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