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Conflict
Old and new democracy can conflict
in many ways. For instance, the old
democratic practice of having voters assemble to vote and instruct their
representative becomes increasingly difficult the more voters participate. One way keep assemblies of voters to a
manageable size, of course, if to have each legislator represent a small district,
but this can only be carried so far before the legislature becomes too large to
be manageable. Another way to restrict
the size of voting assemblies is to restrict the number of voters, by setting
high qualifications.
Furthermore, when votes are openly
taken in public assemblies, non-property holders who depend on others for a
living are vulnerable to economic coercion.
Some people at the time defended property restrictions on the vote as a
way of limiting the influence of the rich and aristocracies. Hence, Gouverneur Morris could say, “The man
who does not give his vote freely is not represented. It is the man who dictated the vote.” or Noah Webster, “A master of a vessel may put votes in
the hands of his crew, for the purpose of carrying an election for a party.”* In other words, it was assumed that landless
tenants would necessarily support their landlord, or wage earners their
employer, and thus increase the power of the rich at the expense of the large
middle class of small property owners.
This was no idle fear before the invention of the secret ballot. Voting in public assemblies has other
disadvantages from a new democratic viewpoint.
Not only are non-property owners vulnerable to economic coercion, but
the most prominent citizens can have an excessive influence on their neighbors, or particularly good public
speakers can have undue influence on the debate, or good writers can exercise
and undue influence by preparing instructions for the representative.** If an election district is too small, a few
rich and influential residents can even conspire to influence the outcome. England provided an extreme example; some
districts had as few as one or two eligible voters, who were easily bribed in
choosing their representative.
New democracy calls for
representatives to be elected from districts of equal population, even if this
means cutting election districts across city and county lines. Old democracy calls for representatives to be
elected from towns and counties because these organized political bodies are
best at controlling and instructing their representatives. New democracy calls for direct elections of
the executive and national representatives.
Old democracy may consider it better to have the state legislature elect
both the governor and national representatives because, as a more structured
body, it is better able to control them.
None of this is to suggest that new
democratic concepts were unknown at the time to Constitution was framed, nor,
for that matter, that old democratic concepts are unknown today. Today, for instance, most people would agree
that frequent elections are more democratic than infrequent elections, and that
if elections become too infrequent, liberty is in danger. But there no consensus what too infrequent
means, and certainly no sense that annual elections are necessary to preserve
liberty. Likewise, in 1787 most people
agreed that the broader the suffrage, the more democratic the government and
that too narrow a suffrage was a danger to liberty, but there was no consensus
on how narrow was too narrow. Most
people of the time agreed that representation should be at least somewhat
proportional to population and allowed a town or county with a larger
population to elect a greater number of representatives. When Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, criticized the Virginia constitution as undemocratic, he did not see danger in a four-year Senate, and he actually thought the executive need to
be strengthened. His criticisms were new
democratic criticisms – Virginia’s property restrictions excluded nearly half
of all white males from the vote; its system of representation by counties
denied the western portion of the state its due voice.
In a few places, new democracy was
even edging out old democracy. Pennslyvania, which had the broadest suffrage, also had the highest ratio of people to representatives at 5,000 to one and in large counties had the people meet in several different places to choose
their representatives, a practice which must have interfered with their
instruction. In Connecticut and Rhode Island, delegates to
the Continental Congress were elected by the people instead of by state
legislatures, which, again, must have made it difficult to
instruct them. (Maybe the people elected
representatives but the legislature did the instructing). In Massachusetts and New York, as we have
seen, the governor was elected by the people directly instead of by the
legislature.
* This comment is in a footnote that, alas, is not included in the link I have supplied. See, however, Noah
Webster, “A Citizen of America,” “An Examination Into the Leading Principles of
the Federal Constitution,” The Debate on the Constitution, Volume One,
p. 143.
** On the
other hand, in our present system the expense of running a campaign can keep
out good candidates, and a well-crafted but misleading 30 second commercial can
determine the whole outcome.
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