Prandial Philosophy Post
President Obama's Mandate
Arthur Isak Applbaum
15 March 2009
After an election, commentators make claims about the mandate conferred upon the winner. Said mandate is supposed to be a function of the margin of victory and related to the issues campaigned upon. So the fact that Barack Obama won by an electoral college landslide and won in states and among demographic groups that usually vote Republican is taken to have normative significance beyond his having simply won. Call this significance size. What President Obama is said to have won is not simply the authority to exercise the powers of his office, but the authority to pursue particular policies. That Obama won on a change agenda repudiating much of the foreign and economic policies of the Bush administration is taken to have normative significance beyond having simply won. Call this significance shape. I argue that electoral mandates in a representative democracy have neither size nor shape.
The powers and duties of an elected office of course have size and shape of their own. The substantive provisions of law and the principles of political philosophy rightly understood give shape to good, just, and legitimate public policy. Elected officials must not overreach their constitutionally given authority or shirk their constitutionally required duties. But the size of the grant of authority does not vary with the margin of victory and the shape of these duties does not vary with the wishes of voters in any direct way.
There are well-known evidentiary problems in reading the preferences and instructions of voters off of election returns. A large margin of victory may measure the depth and breadth of opposition to the loser rather than enthusiasm for the winner. The platform of positions upon which the winner ran may be very distant from the platform that, counterfactually, would have gained the largest majority. Indeed, a candidate can gerrymander an election-winning platform that does not contain a single position favored by a majority of voters. The message of a victory under such conditions is inherently contestable.
Happily for President Obama, the 2008 presidential election does not present such evidentiary ambiguities. Obama earned unusually high approval ratings and a majority of voters favored his policy positions on almost every issue that arose in the campaign (a notable exception being the public's endorsement of "drill baby drill"). If the will of the people ever can be read off of the aggregated stated desires of individuals, this election is an instance.
Consider, however, a deeper, conceptual objection. Any attempt to map the preferences and wishes of voters onto the size and shape of an elected official's mandate must fail, because - at least in the representative democracies familiar to us - elections for public office authorize persons, not policies, and this authorization does not come in degrees or with conditions other than those provided by law.
An election result, when the conditions for its legitimacy are satisfied, is the performative action of a group agent. When a political society has constituted legitimate procedures for making collective decisions, the procedures specify which group actions are possible. A presidential election in the US, when its procedures are properly followed, speaks for the will of the people in precisely one way: it determines who shall be authorized to exercise the normative and effective powers of the offices of president and vice president for the next four years. We have no mechanism for forming the will of the people with respect to specific federal laws and policies through the ballot directly. There is no conceptual barrier to creating such mechanisms: Switzerland makes abundant use of the plebiscite, and many of our state constitutions provide for ballot initiatives. But if there is no procedure for rendering a group decision on policy, then there is no group decision on policy.
To be clear: it is not that the will of the people on matters of substantive policy is difficult to discern. Without a procedure for rendering a group decision, there is no will of the people on the issues at all. Public opinion, even when overwhelming, is simply an aggregation, a vector sum of individual opinions. To use Christine Korsgaard's evocative image, a bag full of mice will move, but cannot act. As a normative matter, the voice of the people is silent on any question that has not been answered directly by election, or decided by properly authorized officials on behalf of the people through legislation, adjudication, or executive action.
Elections in the US may or may not meet the conditions of political legitimacy. We might wonder about a system that gives Wyoming the same two seats in the US Senate as California, with seventy times the population. But if US elections are legitimate, what they legitimately authorize is the exercise of the powers of office, simply.
Public officials who are authorized to make decisions for the public should do so on the facts and principles that apply to the decision. Which principles are relevant will vary. Some decisions invoke basic rights and liberties, others fair terms of social cooperation, and yet others the common good and welfare. Citizens will disagree about which principles are relevant, but that is not a reason to give majority preference about policies special status as a master principle. Every citizen, whether holding popular or unpopular views, is entitled to have her reasons and arguments considered, including her arguments for why her claims of justice trump the interests of the majority, or why the majority is mistaken about the common good and welfare. Public officials treat each citizen with respect when they are open to all arguments, including minority arguments, and decide on what they conscientiously hold to be the best reasons for action.
What role do campaign promises hold in such a view? Surely a president should not betray the trust of those who put him in office by making false promises. But there are two ways to never break a campaign promise: one is to always keep them, and the other is to never make them. If the view presented here is correct, then it would be a form of disrespect and disenfranchisement to claim prior commitment as a preemptive reason to enact a policy. Candidates for office should be transparent about their normative convictions and factual beliefs, and may propose policies that voters may reasonably expect will be adopted upon election. But if elections authorize only persons, not policies, a campaign promise, if taken to be a preemptive reason, puts an impermissible prior constraint on the elected official. He has attempted to bind himself to represent a faction of individuals rather than the people, understood as the group agent that has conferred upon him his powers. I say attempted, because there is reason to hold that campaign promises are void ab initio.
The most pressing tasks facing President Obama and Congress are pulling the world back from the brink of depression, securing our nation while respecting human rights, repairing a broken healthcare system, rescuing failing schools, and restoring integrity to public service. So I say, but the President gets to write his own list. In doing so, he has all the normative authorization from voters that he needs: no less, but no more.