A popular check on the Commons (2)

The nature of the popular assembly

How might one establish an assembly whose members represented public opinion, as distinguished from the interests of political parties? The basic problem here is that the usual kind of election will almost certainly elicit candidates who run on a party label. If the assembly has the power to remove the government, those who support the government at the time of the assembly election will vote for candidates pledged to keep the government in power, while opponents of the government will vote for candidates pledged to remove the government whenever possible. If the winning candidates keep these pledges (which is guaranteed by party organizations), the assembly will be made up of members committed to support or oppose the government regardless of what it does. It will essentially be a redundant copy of the Commons—though it is true that party ties may be somewhat weakened by the inability of party leaders to offer cabinet positions to their loyal followers in the new assembly.

I am working on the theory that the popular assembly should be able to remove the executive, as well as veto legislation. However, even if the assembly is limited to a legislative checking function, as under an American-style presidential system, we observe that there is a strong tendency to elect representatives belonging to parties. The parties may here remain more loosely organized, partly because the executive no longer has the need of assured legislative support in order to remain in office, and partly because, as just mentioned, the executive lacks patronage power over the legislators. Even so, voters whose main political concern is to put an executive candidate from a certain party into power will be inclined to vote for legislative representatives who are pledged to support the legislative program of that party or its leader. As a result, the representatives' careers will depend on the fate of their parties, and there will again be a tendency for the representatives to represent the overriding interest which their party has in gaining and holding on to power, rather than the interests of their constituents. Probably if a presidential system were to be introduced in a polity that had already produced cohesive political parties, those parties would remain more cohesive than in the United States. For example, they might well preserve campaign finance laws that centralized the control of campaign funds in the hands of party leaders, rather than allow representatives to become independent fundraisers, as in the U.S.

Now, there are very few options for constituting a popular assembly other than the familiar "representative democracy", in which the members are first elected by some kind of secret ballot, and thereafter kept accountable to their constituents by the prospect of having to face re-election once their term is up. But representative democracy (as defined this way) is, as we have just seen, almost certain to produce an assembly controlled by political parties. Consequently, there are quite limited options for constituting a popular assembly free from party domination. Actually it seems that such an assembly must have one of two fairly specific forms.

(a) The single-term elected assembly

One approach to freeing representatives from party control would be to make them unaccountable, by giving them either life tenure or a single term in office, of fixed length, after which they would be required to return to private life, regardless of how popular or unpopular they were at that point. Not having to concern themselves with their reelection prospects, the representatives would then be free to ignore any pressure which parties attempted to apply to them.

Now, there may well be a place in the political system for respected and experienced "senators" enjoying security of office and free to devote their energies to the public welfare; a popular assembly, however, is obviously not that place. What of a comparatively short, single-term limit? This is highly democratic in character, since it will bring to the fore representatives who do not expect to have political careers, do not identify themselves with their social roles outside the assembly, and do not have enough time as politicians to become cut off from popular opinion. Such representatives will be relatively inexperienced, and probably not of particularly high calibre either, in view of the lowly nature of the temporary representative office; but this seems inevitable in an assembly that seeks to be genuinely popularly representative. One can argue that according to the Burkean principle mentioned earlier, the low calibre of the popular branch should be addressed by giving a greater role to aristocratic or monarchical branches, not by vitiating the popular character of the popular branch.

One should be aware here of the possibility that the more ambitious members of such an assembly might still regard it as a potential stepping-stone to higher political office—to the Commons, for instance—rather than a political interlude in an otherwise private career. Such a development would give parties the power to reward their loyalists in the assembly, much as though they were eligible for re-election to it. In order to prevent this, it may be necessary to insist that former members of the assembly be permanently ineligible for any other elected office, or other position within the patronage powers of the government or of parties. (In practice this rule could perhaps be relaxed some years after the representative had returned to private life.) This also means that the members of the government will have to be recruited from outside the pool of former members of the popular assembly. Thus, there has to be a more or less strict separation, under this approach, between the governors and the popular representatives who check the government. Such strictness, not envisaged by the framers of the American constitution in their design for a separation of powers, seems necessary because modern parties otherwise have a strong tendency to subject all nominally separate political institutions to their own centralized control.

The most problematic aspect of the term-limit approach is not the resulting amateurishness of the assembly (provided that this is somehow compensated for by the existence of less democratic branches of the government), but the fact that it is still not clear how independent the representatives would be of party control, especially where the election of the executive is at issue.

Under a single-term system, there is no longer any way of compelling a representative to abide by a pledge to support the leader of a certain party; yet, even supposing that he has no personal commitment to any party's leadership, he will ordinarily consider himself to be morally bound to honor such a pledge, at least for some time after he is elected. If he blatantly violates a pledge of affiliation to a particular party, he stands to be condemned by his constituents, among whom he is likely to have to live and work in future years. One can compare the situation here with that of a delegate to a political party convention, pledged to support a certain leadership candidate. There is ordinarily no question of such pledges being broken by a significant number of delegates—even if the leadership ballot is a secret one, so that there would be no way of telling who had reneged on his pledge.

On the other hand, there is a basic difference between the partisan character of the single-term assembly (whose members expect to return to private life) and that of a conventional assembly, with its re-electable members. Party loyalties in the former case come from feelings of obligation to one's constituents; in the latter, from the need to conform to one's party for the sake of one's political career. If the representative's sense of obligation to uphold his pledge to his constituents weakens for any reason, his party loyalty will fall by the wayside. Now, we can expect just this to occur if a sufficiently large majority of the constituents change their minds about what party they support. It is difficult to predict the size of the majority needed for this to happen; but it seems clear that by the time the vast majority of constituents who formerly supported party A had transferred their allegiance to party B, most of the constituents and their representative would both regard his pre-election promise to support party A as void. It would have been nullified by "changed conditions"—by the failure of the party to live up to popular expectations—which meant that the original "contract" between the electors and the representative was no longer of benefit to either side. The situation here is more complicated than in an ordinary bilateral contract, because a small proportion of the electors will still support party A, and these may still feel betrayed by the representative's change of allegiance. But this does not seem a legitimate reaction, because we are (or should be) dealing here not with conflicting private interests, but with differing opinions of the common good. To most people there would seem no reason why a tiny minority of A-supporters should continue to dictate how that common good was to be interpreted.

In light of accumulating experience with such changes of party allegiance by the single-term representatives, it seems likely that the candidates for the popular assembly would cease to make firm commitments to continue to support a specific party throughout their term. Perhaps, for example, they would reserve the right to change their party allegiance with the consent of a majority or supermajority of their constituents; or perhaps the essential independence of representatives of this kind would encourage the voters to choose representatives whose personal judgement they respected, and who were regarded as free to support or oppose the government without reference to popular opinion. It is difficult to tell exactly what would happen here. One way or another, however, it does seem that a popular assembly made up of such representatives would not continue to support a generally discredited government.