Saturday post on “Public Opinion” in MODERN DEMOCRACIES (by James Bryce)

Ackshually, says Bryce, Athens was a republic not a democracy

Here is a long Saturday thread. Feel free to read and comment with any reactions.

I was at a small book store in Detroit, Michigan last year when I found a copy of James Bryce’s Modern Democracies from 1921. I bought it because I knew who Bryce was, but didn’t know this book and because it still smelled brand new, which I thought was weird because the binding was falling off. See here:

As a quick aside: For those of you who do not know him, James Bryce was a British statesman and early scholar of democracy who wrote a lot of good things but also popularized the term “the negro problem.” I talk about this in my book. Bryce is often heralded as the philosophical inspiration for public opinion pollsters, but there is a deep tension in how he thought governments should react to the people and who, exactly, counted as a person.

Anyway, he is an important guy, so his books are worth talking about.

Modern Democracies vol 1 is a weird book. It contains 150 pages of “general considerations” on what democratic government means and then follows with 350 pages covering democracies in France, Switzerland, and Canada. There are some remarks on the republics in Greek, chiefly on Athens, and in Spanish America.

Here I think it is important no note that Bryce, way back in 1921, called Athens a republic. We hear so often from opponents of popular government today that America is only the first, not the latter, but this is a misdirection — the official early history of modern democracies even rejects that either nation lies on opposite ends of some spectrum of participation. In the way we define both today, republics are types of democracies.

Also, Athens was at least in part a republic, not exclusively a direct democracy with “mob rule” or whatever as they used a lottery system to assign offices to two branches of government in charge of courts and the administrative state. More on that in Strength in Numbers, too.

To be clear, I did not write this post to call out the “we’re a republic not a democracy!!” people. I just wanted to send you a few paragraphs from the chapter of the book on public opinion. But the subject of who counts and how we listen to them are inextricably linked. Anyway, let’s get on with it now:

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“ALL power springs from the People,” Bryce begins this chapter. And how do they confer their power? Through voting. But Bryce views voting as unsatisfactory to answer all the questions of political life. He writes:

The purposes of the people cannot be adequately expressed through persons chosen to represent them, for these persons may innocently misconceive or dishonestly misrepresent the wishes of the people, nor can any instructions given by the people remove this danger. Moreover, any election of representatives is an imperfect expression of the views of the public policy of the voters, because it turns largely on the personal merits of the candidates, not on the doctrines they profess.

This is an argument for incorporating the views of the people more in the democratic process, allowing them to confer power between elections and on specific questions. Bryce argues there are some dangers to this. Not everyone is interested in government, so their opinions ought to weigh less in determining the course of the state. Voters may be bribed or their opinions otherwise corrupted, such as by propaganda on the part of governments and businesses. And binding all matters of state to referendums and initiatives could lead to undue influence by bad actors who control masses of votes through otherwise nefarious means.

Bryce then asks:

Is there then no other way in which the people can express their mind and exert their power? Can any means be found of supplying that which elections fail to give? Is the judgment delivered by polling, ie the counting of heads, the same thing as public opinion? Polling is the only explicit and palpable mode yet devised of expressing the peoples’ will. But does a judgment so delivered necessarily convey the opinion of the thoughtful element among those who vote, and may not that opinion be able to exert a moral authority at times when no legal opportunity is provided for the delivery of that judgment at the polls?

Now, wait a minute. Is Bryce talking about public opinion polls, or elections — often called “polls?”

I think it is the latter. At the time Bryce was writing the only “polls” aka surveys that existed were what we now call “straw polls” — informal and unweighted interviews of people with no strict methods or rules. They were usually conducted on the street or via mailed ballots, usually on questions of who would win elections, and usually published in newspapers. Accounts of straw polls go back to 1824, though more systematic approaches arrived only around the turn of the 20th century.

On the other hand, Bryce also says that “polling” expresses a “judgment” on the “opinion of the thoughtful element among those who vote,” and that such expression lacks a legal opportunity to be incorporated into the various structures of government. Elections surely have such a legal opportunity. So I am at a bit of a loss on exactly what he means here. But we do know he’s not talking about “public opinion polls” as we know them today.

Bryce goes on:

Difficult as it often is to determine the relative strength of the different streams of opinion — one cannot measure their strength as electric power is measured by volts — every one admits that when one stream is distinctly stronger than any other, ie when it would evidently prevail if the people were called upon to vote, it ought to be obeyed. Til there is a voting, its power, being open to doubt, has no legal claim to obedience. But impalpable though it may be, no sensible man disputes that power, and such governing authoritative as ministries and legislatures are obliged to take account of it and shape their course accordingly. In this sense, therefore, the People are always ruling, because their will is recognized as supreme whenever it is known, and though it is formally and legally expressed only by the process of counting votes, it is frequently known for practical purposes without that process.

How is the drift of Public Opinion to be ascertained? … The best way in which the tendencies at work in any community can be discovered and estimated is by moving freely about among all sorts and conditions of men and noting how they are affected by the news or the arguments brought from day to day to their knowledge. In every neighborhood there are unbised persons with good opportunities for observing, and plenty of skill in “sizing up” the attitude and proclivities of their fellow-citizens. Such men are invaluable guides. Talk is the is the best way of reaching the truth, because in talk one gets directly at the facts, whereas reading gives not so much the facts as what the writer believes, or wishes to have others believe. Whoever, having himself a considerable experience of politics, takes the trouble to investigate in this way will seldom go astray.

See, this sure sounds like a form of polling today. A primitive form, to be sure, but a survey of sorts nonetheless.

Bryce then spends a few paragons talking about how Public Opinion arises organically out of a populace, revisits why elections are not adequate at capturing it, and gives one example:

The result of an election may be determined by the action of an insignificant knot of voters specially interested in a question of slight importance. Anti-vaccination it’s, or a few dozen of government employees demanding higher wages, have thus turned elections in English boroughs where parties were of nearly equal strength.

Anti-vaccinations versus people who want the minimum wage to increase! In England in 1921! Time is a flat circle. We have truly come full circle.

Bryce finishes off with some recommendations:

As the excellence of public opinion — its good sense, its tolerance, its pervasive activity — is the real test of a nation’s fitness for self-government, so the power it exerts, being constantly felt as the supreme arbiter irrespective of electoral machinery, is the best guarantee for the smooth and successful working of popular government, and the best safeguard against revolutionary violence.

What doe s a nation need to secure that excellence and to enable Opinion to exert its power as supreme? Besides the conditions already enumerated [fair elections, a free press, freedom from propaganda, and universal suffrage], the things to be chiefly desires are:

1. The presence in the nation of many vigorous minds, constructive and critical constantly occupied in the public discussion of the current problems of statesmanship’s. These are the minds already referred to as constituting that first and relatively small class which makes Opinion.

2. The preponderance in the rest of the nation of men of the second, as compared with men of the third, of the three classes aforesaid, ie persons whose sense of civic duty makes them give steady attention to public affairs, and who bring their consideration a fair judgment and an insight into character which, unseduced by the demagogue, respects uprightness and capacity in the leader who has given proof of these qualities.

But there is a final caveat:

In countries like France, the United States, and Britain, men of the first class are never wanting. But a nation needs something more than the intellectual guidance which such men can give. Among them there must also be leaders of a firmness which will face opprobrium and defend causes for the moment unpopular. The chief defect of public opinion is its tendency in times of excitement to overhear opposition and silence the voices it does not wish to hear.

Courage is the highest and perhaps the rarest quality among politicians. It is specially needed in democratic countries.

Where does this leave us?

I will quote Bryce one final time, this text from earlier in the chapter.

[Public opinion] is commonly used to denote the aggregate of the views men hold regarding matter that affect or interest the community. Thus understood, it is a congeries of all sorts of discrepancy notions, beliefs, fancies, prejudices, aspiration. It is confused, incoherent, amorphous, varying from day to day and week to week. But in the midst of this diversity and confusion every question is rises into importance is subject to a process of consolidation and clarification until there emerge and take definite shape certain views, or sets of interconnected views, each held and advocated in common by bodies of citizens.

“It is to the power exerted by any such view, or set of views, when held by an apparent majority of citizens, that we refer when we talk of Public Opinion.”

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That is a lot. Feel free to react to any of it.

Here’s one silly way to wrap this up. If you do not want the political course of America to be reasonably bound to the majority currents of opinion, that does not mean you get to declare that we are “not a democracy.” That is not correct, and even as early as 1921, scholars acknowledged that “democracy” did not mean the narrow direct democracy of the Athenian assembly, but a system of government where the people are sovereign. As Bryce says (and Ice-T stole): Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Modern Democracies volume 2 covers the US, Australia, and New Zealand. I probably won’t write about it.