The following is an excerpt from Natasha Piano’s new book, Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science, now out at Harvard University Press.
The Stigler Center and Chicago Center on Democracy are hosting a conversation with Piano on her new book today, May 21, at 12-1 pm CT. The Stigler Center’s faculty director, Luigi Zingales, is moderating. You can register for the event livestream here.
The global political landscape indicates that the moment may be ripe for the untethering of democracy and election. Amid populist rejections of liberal representative governments across the world, the definition of democracy as free and fair election no longer seems to pass muster precisely because the plutocratic tendencies of electoralism have lost democratic credibility. In this sense, the reigning conception of realist democracy has come to be seen by many as entirely unrealistic.
Yet despite a decade of pointed attention to the contemporary political malaise, democratic theory still finds itself at an impasse. Two notable responses to the current turmoil within Western representative governments roughly correspond to the binary between the elites and the masses. Unsurprisingly, the two groups largely talk past each other.
One prevalent response among the elite, and especially among the intelligentsia, has been to worry about “democratic backsliding” or “democratic recession,” a concept that most generally refers to the decline in popular support for electoral norms. Often these commentators indulge in blaming this decline on the inherently dangerous features of mass politics. Some rail against ordinary people’s cognitive incapacities to understand their own interests amid increased technocratic centralization and/ or the erosion of bureaucratic institutions that serve the larger public. Occasionally such critics describe the rejection of the mainstream press or conspiracy movements as a type of semireligious delusion characteristic of the masses who are ultimately unable to understand technocratic centralization or simply feel disgruntled by sweeping socioeconomic changes that jeopardize their economic interest or social sense of superiority.
Even those who have been extremely sensitive to the rise of plutocracy and the accompanying rejection of liberal government have reflexively repeated the habit of looking for answers within electoral politics. If democracy is under attack, the reasoning goes, then the problem must lie in the decline of competitive elections. In this manner, intellectuals continue to insist that elections constitute the main organ of democratic politics in addition to some other supplemental criterion, whether that criterion lies in increased mass participation, deliberation, judicial proceduralism, or technocratic reorganization of bureaucratic apparatuses. According to this framework, the answer to the woes of liberal polities always lies in elections plus the incorporation of some additional element that implicitly assumes a subordinate role to electoral processes.
These responses strike the masses as tone-deaf, further fueling the rejection of liberal norms. The continued rise of support for demagogic leaders who promise to undermine representative practices once elected indicates that if democracy continues to be primarily predicated on the ideal of competitive election, even when supplemented by additional criteria, then that democratic chimera is not worth fighting for. Support for populist leaders is defended not merely or even most importantly as support for a particular candidate but instead as an expression of rejection of the “establishment” or the “system”— that is to say, as the only way to indicate distrust in the apparent cohesion of the ruling electoral class. Now and in the past, the involuntary intellectual response is to discredit the cohesion of elites on empirical grounds, yet this mass sentiment is not as preposterous as the rigorous standards of scientific objectivity often suggest. In a system where electoral politics is the only meaningful instrument to express dissatisfaction with the democratic possibilities contained within elections, on some level, supporting demagogic leaders who denigrate the intractable insider-aspect of electoral procedures makes some psychological sense.
Not only has mass disillusionment led to a rejection of the illusory picture of democracy as competitive election, but increasing majorities within representative governments are less inclined to appreciate the salutary effects of competitive electoral politics in their own right. This disillusionment has prompted mass publics to question the value of the rule of law, legitimate opposition, the peaceful transfer of political power, congressional and parliamentary deliberation among elite political actors, judicial neutrality, and other such cornerstones of popular representative government.
In reviving the Italian School of Elitism, I do not mean to deny that elections are a crucial mechanism in modern mass popular government. Fixing elections to make them more free and fair is central to the functioning of the liberal state. But research on voter suppression, campaign finance reform, gerrymandering, the role of political appointments in the judiciary, and so on is important because it makes elections more representative; it does not make elections more democratic. Returning to the Italian School helps us understand why even if we could solve the problems of representation in modern mass government, it would not necessarily lead to more democratic outcomes: elections can never be democratic because, by their very structure, they generate plutocratic outcomes as a result of the financial incentives that encourage collusion between different sects of political, economic, and military elites. Even when we work to make the link between the electors and their elected more representative—that is, when we aim to achieve a status in which officials “mirror” their constituencies—the success of the governor depends on the ability to coordinate with other elites in order to serve the voting publics. After all, an elected official can deliver only if in a position to coordinate with other elites: to find the financial resources for legislation, to maneuver political compromise between warring factions, and to appease lobbied interest groups in order to satisfy the promises made to constituents.
For the Italians, the issue is not that we need to find checks to electoral corruption, as important as it is to do so. The problem runs deeper: in our attribution of democratic power to election. It holds us captive to an image of democracy as representative government that has made us lose track of what democracy is and what it should to be: counter-plutocratic, majoritarian institutions and procedures that fend off the most deleterious threats of the electoral process in order to level unequal political power.
The Italian School offers conceptual and diagnostic resources that recover a lost path to combat plutocracy and fulfill the democratic promise. First, they help us theoretically disconnect the seemingly “natural” connection between election and democracy. The Italians’ bold claim is that competitive election is an instrument of representation, not an instrument of democracy.
Put differently, representation and democracy are two distinct concepts that work in a mutually constitutive way, in order to preserve the contemporary iteration of popular government we now call liberal democracy. This means that democracy requires constant vigilance against the ever-present threat of plutocracy internal to electoral systems through majoritarian institutions that are external to elections. External mechanisms are crucial so that the inevitable influence of the wealthy does not result in plutocratic capture of the entire government, just as elections and constitutionally guaranteed rights are crucial in protecting minorities from the tyranny of the majority. Such external democratic institutions also help keep electoral contests competitive as an antidote to the elite cohesion that is somewhat paradoxically necessary to run any political campaign. As the Italians insisted, electoral processes can structurally encourage collusion, and therefore electoral procedures must enable the contestation of the ruling class that renders elections meaningfully competitive.
The warning against identifying democracy with election is not a merely semantic issue. The Italians diagnose two distinct but related threats to the legitimacy of popular government that can result from equating democracy and election.
First, equating elections and democracy conceals the plutocratic threats of representative systems. The Italians claimed that the connection between electoral institutions and plutocratic governance must be constantly exposed and combatted—not fallaciously described as democratic. Otherwise popular government devolves into a contest between competing sets of plutocrats that we unconvincingly call “democracy.” This charade delegitimizes the value of electoral institutions in the eyes of the public. We currently face this precise conundrum in our own plutocratic moment: disillusioned citizens can, as the Italians warned, credibly contend that elections do not generate public officials who genuinely represent them—or even act in their interest.
The second risk in pairing election with democracy is the demagogic threat. Viewing elections as a democratic expression of popular sovereignty gives potential demagogues, many of whom are themselves plutocrats, the ability to claim that they truly represent the will of the people, speciously claiming a right to rule that becomes difficult to dispute.
When elections are understood as the democratic tool par excellence, elected leaders can claim democratic legitimacy to do as they please even though election alone does not confer that right. Election-winning demagogues proclaim, “The people have spoken!” as a mandate for unilateral rule. The democratic power we attribute to elections enables such leaders to characterize themselves as the voice of the people, allowing them to deal a death blow to popular government writ large.
Putting these two risks together reveals the Italians’ realist critique of elections: the idea that more enfranchisement leads to more democracy is a dangerous fantasy. The reality is that mass enfranchisement does not necessarily encourage elite competition and it still allows for plutocracy to persist, leading to mass disillusionment with electoral government and loss of faith in the system. Therefore, they argued that identifying democracy with election is perilous because it conceals the threat of plutocracy and generates unrealistically democratic expectations that elections, on their own, will never deliver.
On one level, this account constitutes a pessimistic approach. The Italians simply refuse to be enthralled with the image of democracy that is at stake in the idea of competitive elections because it is dangerously unrealistic. No amount of electoral engineering can ever lead to a functioning democracy organized around the idea of elections, and it may even prompt the loss of faith in the benefits of representative government.
But in offering a deflationary account of what elections can possibly achieve, we may generate a more expansive vision of what democracy in modern mass government can entail. The standard refrain for the last century has been that we cannot expect more of democracy in modern mass polities other than increasingly competitive elections. This book has argued that, given the current crisis of popular government amid ever-increasing plutocratic capture, disconnecting democracy and competitive elections is the only realistic path forward. Such an approach constitutes a radically new kind of realism for American political science, but popular faith in both representation and democracy depends on it.
This article is excerpted from Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science by Natasha Piano, published by Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2025 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by Permission. All rights reserved.
Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
