A core principle of The Declaration of Independence, Popular Sovereignty, is the idea that a government only exists to serve the will of the individuals it represents.
I understand this to mean that all people are considered equally, and no one citizen should have more say than the next.
Does the practice of lobbying, where a small group of individuals fund politicians in exchange for their cooperation adhere to the ideals of Popular Sovereignty?
A core principle of The Declaration of Independence, Popular Sovereignty, is the idea that a government only exists to serve the will of the individuals it represents.
I'm willing to accept this premise as true.
I understand this to mean that all people are considered equally, and no one citizen should have more say than the next.
In a formalistic political structure sense this is true, but it has never been meant to be true in a practical sense.
There are always going to be many issues (indeed, realistically, most issues that politicians encounter) with respect to which the vast majority of people have little or no personal interest in the outcome, a much smaller share of people have a small direct interest in the outcome, and a smaller still share of people have an intense interest in the outcome.
The concept of "Popular Sovereignty" as generally understood, does not provide clear guidance in those situations and instead calls for an informed exercise of judgment in a spirit of fairness.
Sometimes we give the people with an intense interest in the question priority and we call that their "right", other times we think that the people with the intense interest are seeking an unfair benefit and we call that a "special interest" and may legislate to prevent them from realizing that special interest such as an unfair economic benefit from a particular situation. Other times, we balance out the interests of the parties involved and split the difference (e.g. allowing a single company to have a monopoly over providing a utility that it is not cost effective to have two companies provide, but regulating that company's profits).
Does the practice of lobbying, where a small group of individuals fund politicians in exchange for their cooperation adhere to the ideals of Popular Sovereignty
This is a common but inaccurate description of how lobbying works.
The first tool of the lobbyist is always to provide information and appeal to a legislator's sense of fairness, usually on issues upon which only a small percentage of the public cares or is affected at all that don't have a strong partisan bent.
Even when lobbyists make campaign donations to politicians, their main goal is usually to gain access, so that a politician will hear them out, and not to actually buy the vote of a politicians disinclined to support them in the first place. Lobbyists are most likely to donate to candidates for all sides, or to candidates who are predisposed to support their clients anyway, and to seek the ear of the politicians with the most inclination to support their clients.
For example, if a politician has a major employer in their district, the politician may very well get campaign contributions from that major employer, but that politician would listen to what that employer's lobbyists have to say and be favorably inclined to take it seriously in any case, because the employer's power to add or cut jobs in the politician's district is far more important than a few hundred or thousand dollars per election cycle of campaign contributions.
Does this mean that there is never a politician who votes contrary to his or her sincere beliefs about what is best for his or her constituents because that politician is "bought"?
No.
But a truly "bought" politician is far more the exception to the rule than is widely believed among supporters of campaign finance reform.
Back To The Question
More generally, "the will of the people" is simply not a self-evident thing.
The writers of the Declaration of Independence had precious little basis upon which to predict how democratic self-government in a republic, which had never been tried on this scale before would work. The political concepts like Popular Sovereignty, that they were working with were blunt instruments susceptible to many different interpretations because they didn't have much of a sense of what issues could emerge in true non-monarchists democracies, and that leaves the question of whether they've been satisfied open to interpretation, and also to question over whether those ideas alone are really the most important ideal to protect.
For example, the Founders didn't even foresee the widespread, indeed, almost universal, institution of political parties to mediate between individual wishes and political action though governments.
We're wiser now, or at least have the potential to be with the wisdom of history, and so we can better evaluate questions about what a good democracy looks like with more precision and accuracy.
Determining the "will of the people" is also inherently more difficult when "the people" are not homogeneous and instead are made up of factions and clusters of people with profoundly different ideas, such that it is impossible to make everyone happy with any set of policies. Some countries are very homogeneous and have an easier task to represent the will of the people than others. The United States is on the more difficult end of the scale, although it has more common ground between its main factions than some countries (e.g. Bosnia or Lebanon).
Also, unlike people out there in their homes that can wish for anything, politics is the art of the possible, not only politically but in terms of what it is actually possible for government to do. No matter how much constituents wish everyone was a millionaire, it can't be done right now.
In the United States, government is more responsive to the "will of the people" than in many other countries, but it also probably isn't the best system in the world at achieving that end.
One index one can use to judge how closely policy tracks the "will of the people" is the median voter theorem, which predicts that in a well functioning democracy, policy should track the will of the median voter in the electoral that selects the decision-making body.
By this measure, on a wide variety of issues, e.g. like funding education, reality and the median voter theorem are reasonably close.
There are issues where there are big gaps, the one of the jobs of political strategists for politicians is to figure out how to exploit those gaps.
But on the whole, there isn't a gross deviation from the median voter theorem ideal.
Why Is The System Imperfect?
Even if you conclude that the U.S. falls short of representing the will of the people, however, there are multiple causes of that, not all of which are equally important.
Some of the shortcomings of the U.S. political system are because it is the "Microsoft of Nations" with institutions that are adequate for many purposes, but clunking and not optimal, in respects largely divorced from the impact on lobbying money in inappropriate ways (e.g. the electoral college v. popular vote issue, gerrymandering, the filibuster, chance timing of U.S. Supreme Court vacancies, D.C. and Puerto Rico representation, election administration and state courts run by partisan elected officials).
Because the U.S. was an innovator, and because it is a large country with an old regime in terms of democratic systems, it has lots of inertia and doesn't benefit from all of the latest democratic innovations.
Still, it is certainly true that some of the shortcomings are indeed due to the undue influence of people with money on some kinds of political decisions through the mediating device of lobbyists.
Lobbying and corruption can be a problem in government, and in the U.S. in particular, although most countries are more corrupt.
But crude and simple proposed solutions like banning lobbying or limiting campaign contributions tend to be much less effective than foreseen by their advocates.
This is because most of the people proposing those solutions don't understand how lobbying works, or what factors are most prone to lead to corruption or address it.
All of these matters are non-obvious and require serious in depth familiarity with a lot of the fine details of the process and the pressures placed on the people involved in it.
A core principle of The Declaration of Independence, Popular Sovereignty, is the idea that a government only exists to serve the will of the individuals it represents. I understand this to mean that all people are considered equally, and no one citizen should have more say than the next.
There are many different reasons that one citizen tends to have "more say" than another, some of which the idea of popular sovereignty touches upon, but others in which it is largely silent or apathetic. Consider three scenarios:
Benjamin Franklin owns a successful printing company. He uses his wealth to publish thousands of pamphlets opposing an act before Parliament. His neighbor, Franklin Benjamin, is also a printer, but a poor one. He can only afford ten pamphlets.
Benjamin Franklin opposes an act before Parliament. As a resident of Pennsylvania, he does not vote for an MP. His friend Franklin Benjamin, now a landowner in Sussex, gets to vote.
Benjamin Franklin supports an act of Parliament. His neighbor the printer Franklin Benjamin wishes to repeal it. The authorities decide that Franklin Benjamin's beliefs fall under the definition of treason, obscenity, etc. and find a pretext to stop him from spreading his beliefs.
Popular sovereignty mostly has to do the second scenario, in which there are concrete, legal barriers that prevent the people at large from "having a say" in who actually controls their government. The popular sovereignty theorists of the 17th and 18th centuries also tended to care immensely about the third scenario, in which the bounds of the popular debate were controlled by government. But they weren't generally concerned with the first example, where there is a free exercise of rights unimpeded by the state, but not necessarily an egalitarian one due to existing inequalities.
A core principle of The Declaration of Independence, Popular Sovereignty, is the idea that a government only exists to serve the will of the individuals it represents.
That's completely false. Representing the interests of the citizens is the core principle of a Republic, not of a democracy. It's the same representation that a lawyer (specifically "solicitor" in the British distinction between a solicitor and a barrister) provides.
In fact, this site's description of the tag "republic" says
A form of government in which power is explicitly vested in the people, who in turn exercise their power through elected representatives.
The translation of the Latin "Res Public" is "public affairs" or "the business of the people."
Some republics are not even democracies. But, at least nominally, their governments act on behalf of their citizens.
It so happens that because of the way the US Constitution is written, many of the government entities are elected by a vote. However, that is not a guarantee or a necessity in any Republic.
In fact, the only elected positions in the Federal government at the time of the writing of the Constitution were the members of the House of Representatives. The President, court judges and Senators were appointed(and some approved) by other elected representatives.
I understand this to mean that all people are considered equally, and no one citizen should have more say than the next.
During the elections they don't. But elections only decide who would act as the elected representatives. On the Federal level, they don't decide anything else.
I agree with @TenthJustice's note above. Given the previous question is already closed and this one now has answers, seems better to keep the discussion here?
– Greg Venech Dec 05 '22 at 21:40