Representing bad behavior.
Representative democracies like to hold themselves in high regard. In no small part, this is because they have become the hegemonic form of government in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. A form of government which listens to the people in the form of representatives selected and sent to govern. They make democracy easier for any polity of scale. Instead of requiring all members of the polity to pay attention to current affairs and keep a working knowledge of what laws and systems are already in place, the representative democracy allows for the people to offload their political concerns onto a willing avatar.
Representation is crucial because they speak and act for the will of the people, or at least, their people. Most representative democracies are designed so that individual members of the legislative body represent defined geographic areas. This means, in theory, they are accountable to the people who live in these specific areas or districts. In first-past-the-post (FPP) systems, this means that an individual candidate runs for office and wins elections in their district, beating out all competition to be the sole representative for that area. In party-list representative systems, multiple members of the legislature can come from an area depending on what percentages of votes various parties or individual candidates received.
The most idealized form of representative democracy, at least in the English speaking world, is one in which the legislative member is beholden first and foremost to their constituents. In this scenario, a politician may eschew party desires in order to satisfy their local constituents demands. However, representatives may also choose to be primarily beholden to their party demands, even if they necessarily supersede the desires of their local constituency. FPP systems require more direct care for a local constituency, after all, they alone decide your presence in the legislative body and you alone represent them. In party-list systems, a representative can behave more as a party member than an individual constituencies’ representative. However, some mixed systems exist wherein party-list votes can be supplemented by direct candidate vote. Denmark’s Folketing (parliament) is selected this way. This allows for some more direct representation while also not neglecting the minority of voters who choose smaller parties.
In practice, representative democracy works because nobody knows better what is best for their community than those who live there. Accordingly, the constituency of a representative should accordingly choose representatives who work for them and their communities. What happens when a representative acts outside the normal bounds of politics? Or when a representative willfully breaks the law in pursuance of political goals? The idealist would say that their constituency will vote them out at the next election. This, they’d say, is the beauty of representative democracy: the people decide what is right or wrong. But what happens when the people support bad actors?
Most representative systems have built in means to chastise or punish politicians who behave badly in their official roles. However, many politicians often have to balance the political optics of punishing their colleagues with the necessary operations of the state. As a result, you’ll often see politicians condemn bad behavior but stave off using the power of their office to do anything said behavior. Rather, they pitch it back to the voters. This deflection of duty was apparent in the very high profile case of the first Trump impeachment. When members of his own party were willing to admit he had behaved improperly in his call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskij, they nevertheless decided not to impeach. Their rationale was that the voters should decide. Now, during this second impeachment, more Republicans have decided to join with Democrats in impeaching their outgoing President but some Republicans still clung to the previous rationale that no punishment was necessary because the voters had already decided they had enough in November.
The problem with this thinking is that it allows for ever worse behavior from elected officials. Essentially, politicians can get away with bad or even illegal behavior because their voters should are only people who render judgement. This type of thinking is deeply flawed. There is a reason most political systems set up official means by which to judge and render punishment to elected officials. It is to prevent that behavior! Voting should allow for constituencies to offer feedback on how a representative has worked for that district, but what if the district likes that their representative behaves poorly? What if a district feels that bad or illegal behavior is in fact their representative fighting for them? Representative systems need a means in which to punish bad actors, pushing the decision making back on the voters is not a responsible rationale, it's a cowardly one.
A similar case is playing out here in Denmark. Former immigration minister, Inger Støjberg, faces a possible impeachment for her role in separating married asylum seekers in 2016. Her case was investigated by an independent commission established by the parliament and then reviewed by independent lawyers who determined her violation warrants impeachment. The Danish system requires that the parliament vote for whether impeachment should be brought against a member of the government breaking the law while in their official duty. This is their check on bad behavior by acting political figures. Even though the facts are clear the support for a case is thus far not. While some parties have come out in support for a case, both on the left and the right. Other parties are either against it (the two xenophobic nationalist parties) or have yet to make a decision. The most important party that has yet to decide are the Social Democrats who also run the government. While I have not read anything that indicates any politicians are arguing the voters should decide, the Social Democrats may feel themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place and may ultimately provide an equally mealy mouthed rationale for why they don’t support a trial. The Social Democrats government has also recently broken the law and may fear similar reprisal for their involved members in coming years.
If the Social Democrats refuse to support impeachment in the case of the former minister they will be setting the dangerous precedent that politicians are only accountable to their voters. This rationale makes the law irrelevant for lawmakers. Why not break the law if my voters won’t punish me for it? Or worse, why not break the law when that’s precisely what my votes want me to do?
Representative democracy requires guardrails. It’s not good enough to pitch all matters of conduct back upon the will of the voters. Some behaviors require collegial check. Democracy has already fallen under attack from a host of misinformation, opportunistic demagogues, and strongmen. The last thing democracy needs at this moment is for politically scared politicians to shirk their constitutional duties in protecting the system they have been elected to protect. Voters should have the final say on their politicians, but that doesn’t mean that politicians can behave carte blanche. Carefully created systems of checks and balances require politicians to make difficult decisions, it requires politicians to make decisions that may hurt their party or their careers if they protect the institutions in which they serve. When politicians are more fearful of how their voters will respond than they are of punishing illegality and bad behavior, it may mean our democracies are already moving towards disillusion.
