“Populism” has received many definitions and historical interpretations. Some analysts take it simply as a more active form or stretch of democracy, but this may underplay the existence of very different theories and practices of democracy. One analytically useful definition of populism was given by political scientist William Riker in his 1982 book Liberalism Against Populism. He defines the essence of populism as a political ideal in which the will of the people ought to be public policy: “what the people, as a corporate entity, want ought to be social policy.”
“The people” and “the will of the people” have long been invoked by populists of the right and populists of the left. Carlos de la Torre (University of Florida) summarizes the history of populism in Latin America (see his article of the Oxford Handbook of Populism, 2017):
I understand populism as a Manichaean discourse that divides politics and society as the struggle between two irreconcilable and antagonistic camps: the people and the oligarchy or the power block. Under populism a leader claims to embody the unitary will of the people in their struggle for liberation.
The idea of the will of the people being incarnated in a popular leader was strongly expressed by Hugo Chávez, whom de la Torre quotes as saying:
This is not about Hugo Chávez, this about a people. … I am not an individual, I am the people.
Closer to us, both Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren have invoked the will of the people, in a less flamboyant manner:
Elizabeth Warren (quoted by David Frum in The Atlantic, December 2019):
“We have to … have leadership from the inside, and make this Congress reflect the will of the people.”
Donald Trump at the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly, on September 25, 2019:
“A permanent political class is openly disdainful, dismissive, and defiant of the will of the people.”
Jack Holmes, politics editor at Esquire, who believed that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s primaries platform was reasonable, wrote (“The President’s War on Democracy Is a War on the American People,” August 14, 2020), speaking of president Donald Trump:
Since democracy is our mechanism for communicating the will of the people into the laws and policies that govern our lives, this does not merely make the president an enemy of democracy. It makes him an enemy of the people. He ought to recognize the phrase.
Populists of the left and populists of the right invoke the same will of the people against each other. Populism is the people against the people.
Which brings us back to William Riker, who explained, on the basis of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem and social choice theory, that the “will of the people” simply does not exist. It does not exist because there is no “the people” to have a will like an individual has. The “will of the people” is a rhetorical device to exploit a large proportion of the individuals who are the only reality under “the people.” The people’s preferences cannot be aggregated into a sort of social superindividual without being either dictatorial or incoherent, which is the essence of Arrow’s theorem. Those who pretend to represent the will of the people, from the French Revolution until 20th–century populist experiments, can only be authoritarian rulers, with or without the legal forms of democracy. (See also my Econlog post “Missing Something About Populism?“)
The tyrannical strand of the French Revolution—there was also a classical-liberal strand, rapidly overcome—was anchored in the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who made “the people” and “the will of the people” the foundation of his political philosophy (see his The Social Contract, 1762; see also Graeme Garrard et al.’s short blurbs, “The Prophet of National Populism“). Rousseau may be the father of modern populism of the left and of the right.
Perhaps this illustrates what John Maynard Keynes wrote at the end of the General Theory:
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.
READER COMMENTS
Peter Gerdes
Sep 11 2020 at 7:54am
Except much the same could be said about individual people. It’s only an idealization to regard as has truly having coherent preferences. Make different options salient and we will choose different outcomes. It’s not even that hard to show statistically that, depending on how you are prompted, you can be made to claim to prefer A to B and B to A. And this applies to major decisions (who to ask on dates, what cars to buy) as well as to really unimportant matters.
Ultimately, for individuals we are content with the idea that in the normal course of things our dispositions are enough like actual preferences to treat them as such. Given that violations of transitivity are relatively rare in politics I see no reason why the same kind of idealization should be inappropriate about the people at large.
Having said that I don’t see what’s magic about the ‘will of the people.’ I think the idea of democracy just being the least bad government we’ve managed to find is exactly correct. It’s a practical system not an a prior moral obligation to let the people choose.
Jon Murphy
Sep 11 2020 at 8:22am
True, but that doesn’t mean preferences are not stable and coherent. Adding options that are more salient, or adjusting costs in general, changes the choice calculus, but not preference ranking.
I prefer Starbucks to Dunkin’ Donuts. But I drink more Dunks than Starbucks because I have a relatively low salary now. That doesn’t mean my preferences have changed; just my budget constraint. But, let’s say that budget is no constraint; the costs do not change. Whether I am asked if I prefer Starbucks or Dunks, or if the question is reversed (Dunks or Starbucks), the answer remains the same.
Conversely, the “Will of the People” has been shown mathematically to be impossible to be stable. The order in which options are presented matter for a vote. Thus, even though the options and costs remain the same, the preferences differ.
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 11 2020 at 11:17am
@Peter Gerdes: (1) Of course, an individual can be tricked into making bad choices, defined as those that violate his (rational and transitive) preferences (given his budget constraints, as Jon mentioned): politicians are experts at such frauds. And, as pointed out by James Buchanan, if humans have free will, one may choose to buy white chocolate even if he prefers less expensive black chocolate, or buy his preferred car only because its price has increased (his future price expectations being unchanged). But if individuals generally do this, there is no room for economics or social science and we can never explain what’s happening in the social word (including, say, the dating market and option prices on financial markets). (2) What social choice theory proves is that social choices are incoherent even if individual preferences are transitive. (3) According to social choice theory in the wake of the Arrow Theorem, intransitivities (or dictatorship) are extremely frequent in voting processes; it is a meaningful aggregation of individual preferences that is extremely rare. (4) If you read Riker’s classic book, you will see that your last paragraph, however, is very consistent with his demonstrations.
SaveyourSelf
Sep 11 2020 at 6:38pm
“I think the idea of democracy just being the least bad government we’ve managed to find is exactly correct.”
This is a common misconception. Self-regulation with mutually agreed upon (typically local) arbitration is the least-bad government we’ve managed to find.
On a separate note, Jon Murphy, I liked your dunkin donuts – starbucks example.
Jon Murphy
Sep 11 2020 at 9:26pm
Thanks!
Mark Z
Sep 12 2020 at 2:13am
Since the will of the people is the aggregate of the wills of many individuals, to me it seems that, to the extent that individual preferences are unstable and inconsistent, that further undermines the collective will as well, since it adds yet another source of instability and irrationality the collective will. Criticism of the rationality of individuals (perhaps well-deserved) is necessarily an equal criticism of collective rationality, so I don’t see it tilting the balance more in favor of the collective will as useful. As irrational as individuals are proved to be, one by definition proves groups to be even more irrational, unless there is some mechanism by which group decision-making tempers individual irrationality rather than fully incorporating it (I suspect in fact individual irrationality amplified in group-based decision making).
Jon Murphy
Sep 11 2020 at 8:30am
Isn’t it interesting how the “will of the people” always just happens to coincide with whatever the politician wants to do?
Craig
Sep 11 2020 at 2:36pm
I’d say peoples’ experiences frames their pov (their biases too?); I can make no claim to being exempt from this. The will of the people? I don’t know, but I can say unequibocally its not how I view Trump, right or wrong? Bottom line my pov is framed by living in a high tax blue state, NJ, where I had to pay $.56 off each dollar earned in local, state and federal taxation. All in. Left an indelible impression on me for sure. For me, Donald Trump isn’t deference to the will of the people. Honestly quite the opposite, he (and yes, a move to South FL) as a result of the TJCA represent the difference between the governments spending the majority of my incone and ME getting to spend it. Is he an imperfect illustration of that principle? Of course, but aside for his ridiculous demeanor, he’s not different from Republican predescessors and yes, that absolutely includes St. Reagan himself.
Right now the polls suggest a Biden victory and in two months its likely I will be supporting the pre-impeachment of the man who has vowed to repeal the TJCA.
I’ll vote for Trump anyway on the basis that he represents my ability to exercise my own will and to pursue my own happiness.
Jose Pablo
Sep 11 2020 at 9:05pm
Does Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem mean that the “We” in “We, the people of the United States” is just a figure of speech?
That´s a pity since many look at the Constitution of the United States as one of the very finest moment in the struggle of the individual against the “We”.
And does it also mean that the “We” in “We hold this truths to be self-evident …” can only be understood as referring to the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence and cannot, logically, be extended to “The People of the United States”? (well it is obvious that the Declaration does not even properly “aggregate the preferences” of the signers just by looking at the “created equal” part)
That’s a pity too, since many “individuals” would love that the immense beauty of the individual “right to pursuit happiness” would have been granted by “The People of the United States” (this pathetic quest for the approval of the “We”!)
Using Arrow’s theorem against populism does look like a “nuclear option”.
Half of the history of humankind and most of its cultural achievements, could be explained as “individuals” trying to build a strong “We, the People”. The other half being the blood, sweat and tears that comes with the realization of the monster that the “We” can become. And yet, even knowing that, the building of a “strong We” is like “Happy Hour”: it is always happening somewhere.
So, what Arrow means is that the main driver behind the human history does not make any logical sense. Human history then became a kind of Quest for the Holy Grail … almost the Monty Python kind of.
Down this path we soon face an unpleasant truth with devastating epistemic consequences: maybe logic (rational thinking) is not the best tool to understand human beings. We use it because we don´t know any better, not because it is the right tool.
Jon Murphy
Sep 11 2020 at 9:25pm
No. The “We” in the Preamble is a legal term. It denotes authority, like “We” in reference to a king. The idea is that a government derives its power from its citizens, not from a crown or divine right or something like that. It is not a statement of popular will or anything like that.
Jose Pablo
Sep 12 2020 at 12:29am
The idea that “a government derives its power from its citizens” looks a lot like “a statement of popular will” and could be understood as an “aggregation of the preferences of the People”, the sort of aggregation that the Arrow´s Theorem makes logically meaningless.
Jon Murphy
Sep 12 2020 at 7:17am
The two concepts may look similar (I don’t think so, but I can see why), but they are very different things
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 12 2020 at 2:31pm
@Jose Pablo: A unanimous social contract satisfies all the Arrow conditions for preference aggregation. It is not easy to pull unanimity even theoretically, but Buchanan tried to do it, with some success. Buchanan also argued that the Arrow Theorem was of no consequence because (1) talking about transitive preferences for “society” is anthropomorphizing the latter; (2) intransitive and cyclical exploitation of minorities is better than the permanent exploitation of a single minority. In this approach, however, there is no “the people” and even less “the will of the people.” Another way out of Arrow is the Hayekian-Humean focus on coordination and traditions–but here too, no “the people” nor “the will of the people.”
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 12 2020 at 12:34am
@Jose Pablo: If these things cannot be discussed rationally, they cannot be discussed at all. If a political “we” can only be dictatorial or incoherent, this discovery must be integrated in our thinking about politics. Moreover, it can be cogently argued that “we the people” means “we ‘the people’ as individuals”–which is the title of Chapter 3 of Randy Barnett’s Our Republican Constitution. It is only “the rise of progressivism in both political parties,” Barnett argues, that “led to an assault on our Republican Constitution” and to the 20th-century victory of the collective concept of “the people.” Note also that the Enlightenment, precursor of the Industrial Revolution, cannot really “be explained as ‘individuals’ trying to build a strong ‘We, the People’.” On that point, you will find some ideas in my review of Joel Mokyr’s A Culture of Growth, and in my review of Walter Scheidel’s Escape from Rome.
Jose Pablo
Sep 12 2020 at 11:51am
Thank you for the answers and the link, Pierre.
Popper in The Open Society concluded that it was impossible to build a philosophical political system based on a limited number of logically coherent premises. At some point we will always need “moral judgment” and getting into the murky waters of the “good” vs “bad/evil” discussion. Judgement calls and practical compromises will be required.
There will be “good” “preference aggregation” and “bad” “preference aggregation”, even if all of them are either dictatorial or incoherent. Even under the “collective” interpretation of the “We, The People” in the USA political system foundation, these are “good” “preference aggregation” that lead to an open society in which the individual can be relatively free from the “aggregate will of the People”.
The way “preferences” are aggregated in North Korea, Cuba, China, Russia … are definitely on the “bad/evil” way of “preference aggregation”.
I am afraid there will be murky discussion between these extremes. I don´t see how we can use Arrow´s theorem to get us out of these discussion without annihilating also the “good” “preference aggregation” our more open societies are based on.
I do think that the concept of Social Contract in Rousseau is an example of an ‘individual’ trying to build a strong ‘We, the People’ … and yes it is nonsense but I don´t know if it is part of the “good” or the “bad” “nonsensical preference aggregation” (I found the “non Arrow´s Theorem based Huemer ‘s critic” of the whole concept delicious and convincing)
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 12 2020 at 2:38pm
@Jose Pablo: The old “new” welfare economics, basically destroyed by Arrow, also concluded that value judgments (moral judgments) are ultimately required to define economic efficiency: you’re right on that point. But note that once you try to determine what are the “good” or “bad” preference aggregations, you are back into Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem if you want “the people” to make this determination. My reply to you above provides some other escapes from Arrow. What’s the Huemer reference you cited?
Jose Pablo
Sep 12 2020 at 10:38pm
The Problem of Political Authority (Chapter 2).
Here a (too short) review by Bryan Caplan.
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2013/01/the_problem_of_1.html
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 13 2020 at 12:42am
Thanks, Jose. It looks like an interesting book, as I thought when it appeared, but I have not read it yet.
Tiago Santos
Sep 13 2020 at 3:27pm
This is a great post. Indeed I was looking for some accessible explanation for why the idea that presidential elections or referendums do not elicit the “will of the people” in any meaningful way but found wanting. This fills that.
I would argue, however, that there is one sense of “the will of the people” which can be persecuted with relative success: the utilitarian optimal. And deliberative assemblies are theoretically capable of achieving that (see Parisi, “Political Coase Theorem”), and evidence shows that countries with strong parliaments do approach that. I wonder what are your thoughts on this.
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 14 2020 at 9:29pm
@Tiago: Thanks. My thoughts on your question are incomplete. But the fact that you also feel obliged to put “the will of the people” in quotes suggests a first answer: since “the people” does not exist or its “will” is unascertainable, there is no assembly that can represent such things. Moreover, assemblies themselves are subject to Arrow’s theorem and the paradox of voting. Such assemblies are obviously useful, though, as they have some power to stop the concentration of power: you then come back to a humble liberal democracy, where the result of elections merely represents a veto of the majority or the lack of such veto. (Riker is quite interesting on this. I will review his old classic in the Winter issue of Regulation.)
Secondly, Parisi’s model seems to suffer from two major weaknesses. (1) It assumes single-peakedness in individual preferences, which of course means that the median voter will win and that intransitive choices will be avoided (at the cost of everybody else being more or less dissatisfied). He assumes away the main problem in social choice: the difference among individual preferences. (2) The model assumes cardinal utility.
Jon Murphy
Sep 15 2020 at 11:44am
If I recall correctly, Parisi’s story doesn’t differ much from Buchanan & Tullock in that he’s talking about side payments for votes. That is a way to approximate unanimous choice (and thus the only true “general will”), but it’s not quite the same thing. Let’s say we have two people: Bob and Phil. Bob strongly prefers A to B, whereas Phil weakly prefers B to A. If Bob is able to make a side-payment with Phil to “buy” his vote for A, then both Phil and Bob are made better off with the outcome of A winning over B. But that doesn’t mean that both Phil and Bob (as a “general will”) prefer A to B. Phil still prefers B over A; Bob was just able to buy his vote from him.
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