What’s the Party For? A Comment on “Balancing Accountability and Effectiveness: A Case for Moderated Parliamentarianism.”

If Tarun Khaitan wasn’t such a nice chap, you’d really have to dislike him. Having written perhaps the most important book on discrimination law of the past decade or so, he has now turned his attention to the constitutional design of electoral institutions. What looks to be in the offing — including in this paper — is likely to be as rich, subtle, and rewarding as his earlier scholarship. Lesser academics (present company assuredly not excluded) are likely to twitch in jealousy.

“Balancing Accountability and Effectiveness” develops two main claims. The first concerns the central role properly played by parties in a democracy. The second postulates a specific governmental arrangement, a form of parliamentarian bicameralism designed to generate wide, inclusive representation along with effective government and a constraint on the centrifugal forces pressing on many contemporary polities. Like all of Khaitan’s work, the paper is sedulously careful yet also ambitious in its detail and scope. Any reader will come away from reading it wiser. I cannot hope to fairly address all of its details.

Instead, I take up in this brief comment its first element: to wit, Khaitan’s “idealized account” of “what parties do when they function as they should function in a healthy party system of a representative democracy” (Draft at 5, emphasis in original). In brief summary, I aim to offer some cautionary words about the foundations and implications of Khaitan’s epistemic account. I further interrogate the purpose and implications of an “idealized account” in respect to the reform of working arrangements in actual democracies.

Khaitan’s paper begins by developing what he calls an “idealized” and “fictionalized” account of parties’ proper role (Draft at 7). We must return to what this really means but let us start by attending closely to the details of his account. Striking a Coasean tenor more familiar to the law and economics literature, Khaitan flags four main “information and transaction costs” that parties can mitigate. That is, they reduce the cost to individuals of participating and informing themselves about political life. They also reveal information about what bundles of policies are “acceptable” to meaningful blocs of the public. And they reduce the epistemic burdens for other politicians and parties. Without the mitigation of these costs, Khaitan tells us, “democracy cannot function” (Draft at 9-10).

The parallel to economic theory is immediately apparent: in the frictionless world of perfect information and no transaction costs, the Coase Theorem tells us, all entitlements will be traded to their most productive user. In Khaitan’s fluid political utopia, there is a similar smooth realization of alignments between voters, parties, enacting coalitions, and policies. The goal of allocative efficiency is sub silentio elided into the ambition of perfect representation.

The close parallels between Khaitan’s model of political life and Ronald Coase’s account of economic life bring into focus a number of problems. Start with the presuppositions each model brings to bear about individuals: implicit in both models is a certain liberal ontology of the self as autonomous, and realized prior to market or political interaction.

This model might be a persuasive simplification in respect to the market but that is likely inapt when it comes to the political world.

In economic life, but not in political life, we are plausibly presumed to arrive at the market equipped with preferences already set. But as the advocates of deliberative democracy have long reminded us, this is not quite how we enter the political world. Khaitan’s model of parties misses the persuasive and formative function of parties, and so fails to capture possible conflicts. Information may be needful to preference formation, but its timing and context is also critical. In terms of shaping preferences, it is hardly clear that a ‘free market’ of parties is likely to yield consistently good outcomes. There is a hazardous analogy here to an unthinking optimism about the ‘free market’ for goods and services.

A related strand of the Coasean tradition is relevant here, although I think it qualifies, rather than negates, Khaitan’s argument. In the economic context, we might be sceptical that transaction costs can ever be reduced to zero. Therefore, we might think that the initial allocation of entitlements among persons will be sticky in some cases. By analogy, we might think that the party-based mitigation of transaction costs in the political market will not yield a market-clearing matching of voters and parties. It instead will reveal the asymmetrical influence of certain extrinsic, perhaps malign, forces. The empirical evidence, indeed, suggests that this is the case. Parental political orientations, for example, prove obdurate shaping influences in children, even in a context of competitive parties. The sunny informational story that Khaitan tells may need further caveating if the non-party informational environment is heavily slanted in one direction or another. Where market forces determine the context of news — think of the powerful role that cable television and talk radio in the United States play in disseminating false news — this may be a particular concern. An acontextual model of parties may mislead because it ignores certain epistemic dynamics and extrinsic transaction costs.

Another problem with Khaitan’s model concerns the credibility of political actors’ signals. Economists have recognized that not all signals in the marketplace are credible. Absent some way to verify the quality of buyers’ reputations, George Akerloff famously argued, a market is likely to unravel. Akerloff calls this the ‘market for lemons’ problem. In the labour market context, the economist Michael Spence observed that the lemons problem is solved by the use of ‘costly’ signals: that is, you acquire a degree from some tony university not because you learn some specific something, but because it is a costly signal to send, and demonstrates that you are more able than the next person to do a job well.

Khaitan’s model is, in effect, a solution to a ‘lemons’ problem in politics — who to trust, who to ally with, and who to lend your support to — without any explanation of how this credibility problem is solved. But unless that problem is addressed, it is not clear that a political marketplace will play any of the functions Khaitan assigns to it. To an economist, this is Hamlet without the ghost (if not the prince). The problem, moreover, is not merely hypothetical. In the United States, Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker have observed, the Republican Party has campaigned as a ‘populist’ party advancing the interests of its blue-collar constituents, but then modulated seamlessly to govern as a plutocratic party. This is the market for lemons gone really sour.

Still, I do think that Khaitan is on to something when he flags the epistemic function of parties. But I also worry that the latter’s normative implications are a bit less clear than he suggests. Consider here the work of NYU political scientist David Stasavage on the emergence of English democracy after the Glorious Revolution. In the classic account of Douglass North and Barry Weingast, limits on monarchical power in the late seventeenth century are explained in functional terms as a means of credibly committing to the repayment of national debts. Stasavage complicates this account by pointing out that the Glorious Revolution does not lead to an immediate dip in interest rates. Rather, rates fell due to the presence of monied interests in Parliament exercising an effectual veto on debt reneging. These interests could not form a party. Landed interests were simply too dominant. Instead, Stasavage argues, “a cross-issue bargain between Whig landowners and monied men” with quite distinct aims led to effective constraints. In Stasavage’s account, the Whig party is important because it lowered the transaction costs of this cross-issue bargain.

This is in line with Khaitan’s theory. But what are we to make of its implications? Freer access to credit might be a central effect of political parties at a given moment, and this credit might facilitate wars — or perhaps greater internal repression of those not already represented. That is, there is no theoretical reason that parties’ facilitative effect cannot be to consolidate extant exclusions or even to fuel anti-systemic forces.

If the salutary effects of parties as lubricants of political interaction are more ambiguous than Khaitan suggests, then what is to be made of this contingency? Here is one implication, which I offer briefly in closing: Perhaps it opens the door to new reflection on democratic theory that, on its surface, trades on a certain detachment from the present, fraught moment in democratic politics.

That is, rather than an “idealized” and “fictional” account of parties, “Balancing Accountability and Effectiveness” offers an implicit response to a quite particular and historically specific set of pathologies. It is a response to a historical moment in which parties don’t “work towards the flourishing of all people of their state” (Draft at 16) and where many party systems have an “ideological tilt toward small-state libertarianism” (Draft at 34). As Katrina Forrester’s recent work on John Rawls illuminates, even seemingly idealized political theories originate in particular political conjunctions. Khaitan’s is no exception here (and the comparison to Rawls is meant to be flattering). But I, for one, hope for more candid recognition of that historicity in future work, with all its rich implications.

Aziz Z. Huq is the Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law at the University of Chicago.

Suggested Citation: Aziz Z. Huq, ‘What’s the Party For? A Comment on “Balancing Accountability and Effectiveness: A Case for Moderated Parliamentarianism.”’ IACL-AIDC Blog (4 May 2021) https://blog-iacl-aidc.org/workshop-my-paper/2021/05/04-a-comment-on-balancing-accountability-and-effectiveness-a-case-for-moderated-parliamentarianism.