Populism Consuming Representative Democracy

By Michael Bryan

Tucson's ballot initiative to peg the ratio of emergency personnel to population seems to me to be the latest iteration of populist discontent being cynically used to snatch at political power while denigrating and disempowering representative democracy.

Too frequently over the past few decades we have seen progressive institutions such as the ballot initiative used to tie the hands of representative government. There are many examples of extremely unwise, but politically facile policy created using populist sentiments: the Prop 13 property tax freeze in California and the disastrous Taxpayer's Bill of Rights arbitrarily limiting the growth of government expenditures in Colorado being chief among them.

In each case, what seems like an easy fix for the difficult and messy business of governance is sold as patent medicine for what ails the body politic. Only later does it become apparent the snake oil contains toxic waste.

There are no easy answers or simple formulas for good governance. Wise policy requires democratic debate and tough deliberation over alternatives, not simplistic slogans and expedient but static 'fixes'.

Every time that the populists tout their latest gee-wiz gew-gaw, they chip away at the power and accountability of representative democracy. By taking the power to make policy and actually govern out of the hands of our elected representatives, we only assure that the accountability and esteem of our elected representatives will further decline.

This latest iteration of this populist disease is the Public Safety First! initiative. By arbitrarily requiring a particular ratio of emergency personnel to population, the representative system by which public preferences for such matters ought to be expressed is bypassed. The fact that all the Republican challengers support this attempt to remove public safety decisions from the very democratically elected body they are seeking to become members of should tell you something about their opinion of the institution, and their philosophy of government.

What gets lost in all the rhetoric about crime in Tucson is that Arizona's communities already spend the most per capita of any state in the nation on crime control, save Nevada. Our communities already struggle under a high financial burden, yet those supporting Prop 200 would have us spend even more in vain.

Reductions in crime will not come from more police and more courts and more prisons. Effective crime control will come from better education, more economic opportunity, a vital civic community, and strong families. Prop 200 does nothing to pursue those goals; indeed, it only assures that less resources are available for those priorities.

The last thing we should do is hand representative political power to those who do not value or respect it, or worse, advocate to strip our democratic institutions of their powers. We cannot fix complex social problems with the blunt instruments of funding formulas and populist slogans. 

It is the American way to solve our problems by confronting them as a free and democratic society, served by those among us who are genuinely interested in coming together to debate and negotiate the best solutions possible. Representative democracy is a wonderful and powerful institution, we mustn't allow rank populist rage to bleed it of its vitality.