Democratic “Rules of the Game”

ANALYSTS SOMETIMES DRAW a parallel between democratic institutions and the rules of sports games, explaining that formal and informal rules characterize the interactions of the participants. Players often cheat, improving their chances for short-term success at the risk of reputation or punishment. These institutional constraints on actors in democracies are called the democratic “rules of the game.” Political stability in democracies is associated with a political culture where there is a high respect for the democratic rules of the game. Instability, even leading to overthrows of government, can result when the people no longer respect the rules of the game.

Democratic rules can take several forms. Formal rules refer to written laws, regulations, and guidelines. In many democracies, the constitution provides the main set of rules that establish authority and rights in the political system. For example, the U.S. Constitution defines the branches of government, their roles, and their interactions with other branches, and with the states. It also defines the types of people who have the right to vote and to be candidates for these branches. These rules have changed since the adoption of the Constitution, with the addition of amendments. Changes in suffrage have been the most far-reaching of these additions, offset for a time in some areas of the country by electoral rules, such as literacy tests to determine voter eligibility. Furthermore, laws adopted outside of the constitution define the specific processes of electing leaders, including how elections are conducted, and how voters are registered. Lawmakers have also added rules about campaign finance and voting rights to the list of rules guiding democracy in the United States.

Democratic rules can also be informal. Informal constraints are social and cultural. For example, even in states that did not have formal voting laws to make it difficult for African Americans to vote after the Civil War, the societal pressures on them were often so great that they were not able to vote. Bureaucratic norms and clientelism are other forms of informal institutions or rules that are commonly found in a democracy. Clientelism can have an especially large effect on elections, as officials use their influence at the national level to bring a variety of economic benefits to their house constituency, with the specific expectation of gaining votes in the next election. The level of clientelism in democracies varies greatly, but is sometimes considered an accepted political fact or need, as is often the case with the distribution of “pork” in the United States. It is sometimes a disruptive force, as is the case in many Latin American countries. Additionally, many informal rules such as intimidation and clientelism are not [Page 178]constrained to democracies, but are found in countries around the world.

Democratic rules of the game are present in the electoral system itself, for example in the differences between proportional representation and plurality voting systems, as well as within governing bodies, such as legislative decision-making structures. In the United States, voters cannot elect a president directly, while the rules allowing for the direct election of senators changed after the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment. Campaign finance rules have changed over the years to increase regulation, but legal loopholes allow candidates to play by those rules while continuing to increase campaign war chests.

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