10.6: Our Democratic Faith

In many ways, democracy in the United States functions as a sort of civic religion. Few if any Americans would claim that they “worship” democracy, of course, and modern campaigns, littered as they are with gaudy yard signs and vicious attack ads, seem more crass and worldly than reverent or sublime.

Look closely, though, and the religious aspects of American democracy are unmistakable. Like other religions, its adherents profess a creed of fundamental beliefs (about the people’s right to rule, the primacy of the will of the majority, and the responsibility of each individual to make his or her voice heard at the ballot box). It has its schisms, passionate disagreements over the interpretation of those beliefs and which set of rules (for administering elections and counting votes) is most consistent with them. It even has its own holy festival (Election Day), when believers congregate to reaffirm their faith in its values and principles by performing an act of devotion with both practical and symbolic importance.

Yet, as Figure 10.2 demonstrates, we the democratic “faithful” don’t always practice what we preach. When others (correctly) point out that each individual voter has so little influence on the outcome of an election that he or she could stay home without noticeably affecting the results, we tend to dismiss them the way heretics promoting sin and immorality would have been shunned in the Middle Ages. Still, many of us often fail to fulfill our civic duty of voting, as though we privately recognize the futility of our individual ballots, even if we’re ashamed to admit it.

Ultimately, democracy is not so much mystical as it is mechanical. The American political machine that purports to discern the will of the people by soliciting their views through the electoral process can only work with input from the citizenry. Regardless of the specific electoral rules involved, that will can easily be distorted when millions of Americans abstain. Each individual voter can be confident that his or her abstention won’t by itself change the results, but many voters abstaining together make it hard for elections to produce results that accurately reflect what the people want. In this way, popular sovereignty is itself a public good, and elections are yet another example of a collective action problem. As precious as we profess our right to vote to be, a large number of us seem perfectly comfortable to free-ride on the votes of our fellow citizens on Election Day.