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A Theory of Standards for Intermediary Powers

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Abstract

There is a widespread sense that intermediary institutions which made representative democracy function ever since the nineteenth century—political parties and free media—are presently undergoing profound structural transformations. We partly have trouble judging those transformations—will they destroy or strengthen democracy?—because we lack a set of clear normative standards for intermediary powers. The article suggests such standards: institutions should be accessible, accurate, autonomous, assessable, and accountable. A precondition for these attributes to be realized is financial transparency and the empowerment of citizens other than the owners of concentrated wealth to influence intermediary powers. Accordingly, the article also endorses a scheme to put financing into the hands of citizens themselves via a voucher scheme for both political parties and media.

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Notes

  1. Urbinati (2015); Pickard (2020)

  2. One of the curious developments of our time is that self-declared antiliberals—who seek to fake democracy—are careful to construct intermediary powers, including carefully controlled opposition parties and media (alongside simulacra of civil society more broadly). Russia under Putin is the most glaring example. For an illuminating comparative account, see Dobson (2013).

  3. Landemore (2020) and Guerrero (2014)

  4. On basic, quite possibly irreplaceable, functions of parties, see Aldrich (2011).

  5. The idea of a party system will be familiar to political theorists, the concept of media system possibly less so. The best—both analytically and historically—account remains Hallin and Mancini (2004).

  6. Disch (2015)

  7. Arendt (1977)

  8. White and Ypi (2016)

  9. AS Thomas Rid points out in his masterful history of disinformation, “some of the most vicious and effective measures in the history of covert action were designed to deliver entirely accurate information.” Rid (2020), 10

  10. Callison and Slobodian (2021)

  11. Rehfeld (2017)

  12. The classic account of the constructive turn in theories of representation is Saward (2010).

  13. Przeworksi and Sprague (1986)

  14. “The people lose patience,” The Economist, 29 August 2020.

  15. “A new world: Real opposition politics beckons for the first time,” The Economist, 4 July 2020.

  16. See also Garsten (2009) and the chapter on political equality in Scanlon (2018).

  17. “No joke as Brazil clown tops votes for Congress”, at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-11465127.

  18. Perney (1993)

  19. Such a line of reasoning can also be deployed against an antitrust approach to political competition: a duopoly is acceptable, as long as it beneficial to voters as “consumers of politics” (in parallel to Robert Bork’s argument that monopolies are acceptable as long as they benefit consumers) (see Bork 1978).

  20. Issacharoff and Pildes (1998)

  21. Zuboff (2019)

  22. See https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/nearly-half-twitter-accounts-discussing-%E2%80%98reopening-america%E2%80%99-may-be-bots

  23. Cagé (2020), 239

  24. Garton Ash (2016), 204

  25. To be sure, the self-presentation of Fox News oscillates between objectivity (“we report, you decide”) and supposedly transparent partiality, as when Bill O’Reilly claimed to offer news and analysis from a distinct working class point of view (Peck 2019).

  26. Peck (2019), 69–70

  27. Van Biezen (2004) and Epstein (1986)

  28. I am indebted to Paul Starr for this point. The supervision of party and media systems should ideally be delegated to politically balanced or outright depoliticized boards. The task of such non-partisan bodies is not to reduce partisanship but to regulate political and professional rivalry. In practice, this will mean regulatory bodies staffed by figures associated with different political directions. Authoritarian populists like Poland’s PiS immediately moved to make the staffing of regulatory bodies a matter of simple parliamentary majorities.

  29. Katz and Mair (2018)

  30. Hansen (1999), 316

  31. In France and the UK, 10% of “megadonors” account for more than two thirds of the total of donations, according to Cagé’s study.

  32. Public funding is, not surprisingly, under attack from populists. M5S brought about a situation in which public funding of parties effectively stopped.

  33. Cagé (2020)

  34. Cagé (2020), 248

  35. Lessig (2011) as well as Ackerman and Ayres (2004)

  36. And, parties could still charge membership fees. These have never really sustained most parties, which is not to say that they don’t matter: laws about public funding can be tailored in such a way that they reward the ability to attract a large membership (Germany being an example).

  37. In New York City, 6 to 1 matching grants for small contributions encourage a similar attitude—except that contributions still tend to come from the top earners. In a better system, citizens wouldn’t feel their contribution has a real opportunity cost when money’s tight.

  38. Markovits (2019), 53. Zephyr Teachout claims that representatives spend between 30 and 70% of their time every week raising money, in Teachout (2014), 252.

  39. Sarah Kliff, “Seattle’s radical plan to fight big money in politics”, Vox, 5 November 2018, at: https://www.vox.com/2018/11/5/17058970/seattle-democracy-vouchers.

  40. To be sure, making perceptions of integrity a criterion is dangerous in contexts where integrity has been used as a weapon of exclusion of voters (Karlan 2016, 141–51).

  41. This proposal of a survey as a quasi-constitutional tool can be found in Ringen (2013), 202–3.

  42. As Bush put it at a fundraiser, surrounded entirely by elderly white men in tuxedos: “Some people call you the elite. I call you my base.” To be fair, the annual Al Smith dinner is supposed to feature self-deprecating jokes; yet, Bush’s supposed self-irony here (as so many of his other remarks delivered with a smirk) plainly revealed the truth. See https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4506459/user-clip-haves-mores [last accessed 24 May 2020].

  43. Critics of the private financing of politics often conflate different issues: one concern is corruption—which even a conservative Supreme Court recognizes as grounds for restrictions (albeit understood by Roberts and colleagues in the narrowest possible sense of a quid pro quo, not the more general dependency on a donor class which can set—and limit—the political agenda); another is equality of opportunity to influence politics, which is distinct from corruption: a self-financed billionaire—as Trump kept emphasizing during his first campaign—probably cannot be corrupted, but if only oligarchs can have a shot at running for office, political equality is obviously violated. Voucher schemes are likely to reduce dependence on the donor class, and they can certainly be justified as a step in the direction of equality of political opportunity, but they will not assure such equality as such (see Pevnik 2016).

  44. For such well-financed right-wing campaigns against the BBC, see Barwise and York (2020).

  45. The initiative still prompted the public service to undertake a number of what were presented as important reforms: more investment in information-gathering on the one hand, fewer texts freely available online on the other, so as not to engage in what private publishers had criticized as unfair competition.

  46. Cagé (2016)

  47. Mudge (2018), 74–5. Arguably Mirabeau was the first modern campaigning journalist. Gramsci would be another example. And maybe Boris Johnson (who, after all, combined a seat in parliament with the seat of the editor of The Spectator).

  48. There’s also the problem that supposedly non-partisan non-profit journalism in fact relies on partisan sources; see Konieczna (2018), 59–61.

  49. Rosen (2000)

  50. See his remarks at https://pressthink.org/2019/06/key-steps-in-the-citizens-agenda-style-of-campaign-coverage/

  51. See O’Neill (n.d.)

  52. Issacharoff (2017), Schlozman and Rosenfeld (2019), Meyer (2017)

  53. It also must be possible to come to some reasoned judgement about its internal pluralism (even if we saw that pluralism is a tricky criterion: it’s possible to see whether there’s a real possibility for debate, but we can’t mandate that partisans or journalists, for that matter, disagree).

  54. Gerbaudo (2019)

  55. Article 21 of the German Basic Law states: “The political parties participate in the formation of the political will of the people. They may be freely established. Their internal organization must conform to democratic principles. They must publicly account for their assets and for the sources and use of their funds as well as assets.” The Party Law in turn regulates the specifics of internal democracy to a degree of detail that one might well consider as an infringement of the right of free association. In general, constitutionalizing parties has become the norm in Europe, see the excellent overview by van Biezen (2012).

  56. On the wider significance of intra-party democracy, see also Scheppele (2018).

  57. Of course, something like the Fairness Doctrine can also be weaponized by those who wish to use “both-sides”-journalism to obfuscate particular matters. The demand to present ‘both sides’ on tobacco and global warming are the well-known examples (see Oreskes and Conway 2010).

  58. Matsusaka (2020)

  59. Winters (2011)

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Acknowledgements

This essay draws heavily on my forthcoming Democracy Rules (2021). For comments on how to think about standards for intermediary institutions, I owe thanks to a large number of friends and colleagues. Particularly useful feedback on an earlier incarnation of this paper was provided by Carlo Accetti Invernizzi, Peter Giraudo, and John Morijn. I also benefited from the comments of an anonymous reviewer for the journal.

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  1. Politics Department, Princeton University, USA; Institute of Advanced Study, Berlin, Germany

    Jan-Werner Müller

  2. Exzellenzcluster SCRIPS, Humboldt University and Free University and Social Science Research Center, Berlin, Germany

    Jan-Werner Müller

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Correspondence to Jan-Werner Müller.

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Müller, JW. A Theory of Standards for Intermediary Powers. Jus Cogens 3, 141–158 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42439-021-00040-7

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