| 摘要 | How Democratic Is the Constitution? By Robert A. Dahl Yale University Press. 208 pp. $19.95
Robert A. Dahl, one of America’s most prominent political scientists, asks us in his latest book to judge the Constitution in the light of a single criterion: By present-day standards, how democratic is it? Dahl examines just about every provision of the Constitution–those regarding the legislatures, the presidency, the courts, election methods, the federal structure, the party system, and more–and finds them all unacceptably undemocratic.
Dahl tells us at the very outset of How Democratic Is the Constitution? that his purpose is modest: “My aim in this brief book is not to propose changes in the American Constitution but to suggest changes in the way we think about our constitution.” But it becomes clear that his intention may not be modest at all, when, just one page later, he poses this devastating question: “Why should we feel bound today by a document produced more than two centuries ago by a group of fifty-five mortal men, actually signed by only thirty-nine, a fair number of whom were slaveholders, and adopted in only thirteen states by the votes of fewer than two thousand men, all of whom are long since dead and mainly forgotten?” Dahl is not posing this question rhetorically in order to explain why we should continue to “feel bound” by the Constitution, Instead, since no one alive in the United States today has ever been asked “whether they wished to continue to be governed under the existing constitution,” Dahl is challenging its very legitimacy. If the Constitution has no legitimacy, if there is no reason for us to be bound by it as the foundation of our national political life, the consequences are indeed profound.
What are some of Dahl’s specific complaints? He devotes a chapter to the electoral college and finds the usual faults–that the original design had major flaws that had to be corrected by amendment, after which it was still unworkable; that the electors are nonentities, not individuals of superior judgment as was at first anticipated; that small states have more electoral votes than should be their due based strictly on population; and, most important, that the candidate with the most popular votes may not win the election.
Dahl makes much of the fact that the Framers struggled LI over how the president should be selected. At times in the Constitutional Convention they considered having the president chosen by the state legislatures, at other times by Congress; then they changed their minds and brought the question up again, more than once. The final decision was made only in the closing weeks of the convention. Dahl presents this information as evidence that the delegates were “baffled and confused” and eventually came to a consensus only because they were tired and had run out of time.
But the delegates were struggling with a problem for which they had no guiding precedent. Election of the president by popular vote was considered impractical, given the great extent of territory and the inadequacy of communication. But what were the alternatives? They sought to establish a sufficiently powerful executive who would be independent from national and state legislatures. If separation of powers and checks and balances were to work, the president must not be made beholden for his election to one of the other branches of government. One can well imagine what pledges might be squeezed from a presidential candidate by Congress or by state legislators had either of those bodies the power of presidential appointment. But if the president was not to be selected by one of the regular institutions of government, what else was there?
The solution the Framers finally arrived at was to invent a one-time, one-task, widely dispersed body of electors, who would assemble in their own states, and whose only function would be to cast their votes for president and vice-president and then disband. And thus the president would not be beholden to any existing body for his election.
As everybody knows, the original arrangement worked for only two elections before breaking down, and has since been revised over and over again. But what remains of the electoral college is a prime target for Dahl’s democracy test: Every state has the same number of electoral votes as members in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and this gives the smaller states more votes than Dahl thinks they deserve. And the electoral winner may have a minority of the popular vote, which Dahl denounces as clearly offensive to democratic standards. Additional insults to democracy result from the almost universal practice, not provided for in the Constitution, of states awarding all of their electoral votes to the candidate who carries the state vote, no matter how slim the margin, instead of dividing them according to the proportions of the popular vote in the state.
What can be said of this condemnation of the electoral college? It is worth dwelling on this facet of Dahl’s complaints because the electoral college encompasses much of what he finds objectionable in the American constitutional system: federalism, winner-take-all elections, the two-party system, bicameralism, and the composition of the Senate.
The Constitutional Convention made its great breakthrough when it hit on the plan for satisfying both the big states and the small states. There would be two houses of the legislature, based on two different schemes of representation, one apportioning seats on the basis of the equality of the states, the other based on the unequal size of the populations of the states. Senators would be chosen by the state legislatures, two senators from each state, each with one vote, while Representatives in the House would be apportioned among the states according to the respective numbers of persons in each state.
Dahl denounces this arrangement as undemocratic. His objection is to the vast difference in size of populations. California’s population, for example, is 34 million, and Nevada’s is 2 million; since both states have two senators, “the vote of a Nevada resident for the U.S. Senate was, in effect, worth about seventeen times the vote of a California resident.” And since electoral votes are equal to the number of the state’s representatives plus the two senators, a smaller but similar disparity results: “The vote of a Wyoming resident, for example, is worth almost four times the vote of a California resident in the electoral college.”
How seriously should we concern ourselves with this arithmetic imbalance? In the 2000 presidential election, there were eight states, like Wyoming and Nevada, with three electoral votes, and six more states each with four electoral votes; all fourteen of those states combined were outweighed in the electoral total by California. Should California voters share Dahl’s complaints about the excessive power of the voters in Nevada and Wyoming? Dahl’s concerns are mathematical abstractions with almost no political relevance.
If we start from the fact that the United States is, for solid reasons, a federal democracy, not a unitary democracy, we must accept the consequence that numerical equality in every aspect of our politics is not to be expected. Districting is at the heart of the way we are constituted, and it is not possible to make every district equal. The states are districts in the national scheme, and within each state there are districts within districts. My Montgomery County, Maryland, voter’s card shows that I live and vote in congressional district eight, school board district three, state legislative district eighteen, county councilmanic district one, and election district precinct seven. The federal scheme, whose foundation was laid when the Framers established the equality of the states in the Senate, has institutionalized this remarkable democratic abundance of local governing and local politics. But along with this state and local political activity and decentralization of power, we must accept the burden of complexity and an inescapable measure of inequality (both of which Dahl deplores), not only in the electoral college but wherever we have district-based elections. As Martin Diamond pointed out decades ago, “Since 1900, control of the House has gone four times (1910, 1916, 1938, 1942) to the party that lost the national popular vote.”
Well then, what of the defect that the candidate with the most popular votes may lose the electoral vote? This may have happened in 2000 and may have happened in 1888, and it may happen again when the popular vote is so close, practically a tie, that the tally is very much in doubt. But the great scandal of the 2000 presidential election was not the consequences of the electoral college but rather the inaccuracy of the voting apparatuses in Florida and around the country, incapable of reliably discerning the winner of the popular vote when the margin at the state and national levels is a fraction of 1 percent.
How should we judge Dahl’s treatise on the Constitution? Dahl began “by posing a simple question: Why should we Americans uphold our Constitution?” After all, how many Americans, “have ever participated in a referendum that asked them whether they wished to continue to be governed under the existing constitution? The answer, of course, is: none.” This is outrageously misleading.
Dahl ignores or overlooks the tacit consent quietly given by law-abiding citizens in the ordinary course of their daily lives. But if that is not enough, if he must hear it spoken out loud, then consider every naturalized citizen, and all those who have served in any branch of the military. They have vocally pledged to be bound by the Constitution. And countless more Americans–legislators, both federal and state; “all executive and judicial officers”; and anyone who has held any appointed civilian position, federal, state, or local–in short, millions and millions of us from the beginnings of the nation up to the present moment have “bound” ourselves, “by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution.”
You can look it up, Professor Dahl: Article VI of the Constitution.
Robert A. Goldwin is a resident scholar at AEI. |
