CONGRESS

In the fall of 2014, a protest broke out across Hong Kong, led by students at first, and eventually joined by their parents. The protest challenged a law that the Chinese government had proposed for regulating the elections China had promised for Hong Kong's "chief executive." At the time Britain handed back control over the colony to China, it negotiated a commitment that China would give the people of Hong Kong "a high degree of autonomy" and basic human rights. In August 2014, China explained how it would live up to that commitment.

The explanation was not promising — at least for an ordinary conception of what a democracy should be. As Beijing described it, "The ultimate aim is the selection of a Chief Executive by universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee in accordance with democratic procedures." That "nominating committee" would be composed of 1,200 citizens — which means, in a population of about 7 million, about .02% of Hong Kong. It would then select the candidates for whom Hong Kong would get to vote.

Hong Kong's "democracy" would come in two steps. In the first, the nominating committee (.02%) selects candidates. In the second, the voters select among the candidates the nominating committee had picked. To be able to run in the second stage, you had to do well in the first stage. Thus, to do well in the first stage required making the members of the nominating committee happy.

This structure triggered the strike that brought the city to a standstill. The nominators, the protesters believed, would be "dominated by a pro-Beijing business and political elite." That domination would bias and therefore corrupt the selection process. Hong Kong wanted a democracy, not, as Martin Lee, the chairman of the Hong Kong Democratic Party, put it, "democracy with Chinese characteristics."

It's not hard to see the problem that angered those Hong Kong protesters. If there's an ideal within the concept of democracy, it is that citizens are equal. That principle either means that at each stage of a democratic election, citizens should have equal weight in the decision of that stage. Or, less restrictively, that at each stage there should be no inequality imposed for an improper reason. What is "proper" or "improper" will differ, of course, depending on the tradition or context. But the principle is fundamental, if the regime is to be democratic.

That principle, the protesters charged, had been violated by the scheme that China had announced. The nominating committee, they believed, would be a filter. And that filter would be biased, either because it would have the wrong loyalty (to China, rather than Hong Kong), or because it would be non-representative (representing not "the people" but a "business and political elite"). Either way, it would breach the "equal weight principle" embedded in the idea of democratic representation. Either way, it would justify the charge that the people of Hong Kong were going to be denied a properly democratic procedure for electing their governor.

If this indeed is a distortion of democracy, China didn't invent it. Caesar Augustus probably did, and many others copied him afterwards — from Iran (where twelve members of the Guardian Counsel select the candidates that voters get to select among) to the Soviet Union (where nineteen members of the Politburo selected the candidates that voters selected among). This structure is common in what we're likely to view as fake democracies. It is an obvious way to defeat the ideal of citizen equality within any democratic regime.

And it has lived in America too. Consider the quip of Tammany Hall's William M. "Boss" Tweed: "I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating."

Tweed is describing a democracy with "Chinese characteristics," too: A two-stage process, in which Tweed controls the first stage. That control means the first stage is not representative. Candidates wishing to pass that first stage know they must make Tweed happy, and Tweed, we might presume, is not the perfect representative of the population meant to be governed. That control thus narrows the range of candidates who can run — relative to the range a representative body might have selected. Such control disciplines them. It distorts the democratic process.

We can call any n-stage process for electing representatives "Tweedist" if, at any critical stage, candidates are improperly dependent on a body that, of necessity, is not representative of the population being governed. "Improperly" because, of course, any primary will be dependent upon one slice of the population to be governed, but that filter is normal within any party system. And "of necessity," because we couldn't practice democracy practically if the validity of every election turned upon whether a representative public turned out. Instead the question is whether an imposed filter actually blocks, not whether the public engages. Hong Kong's nominating committee blocks; in America's mid-term elections, the public typically fails to engage.

So defined, it follows that not all small selecting bodies are in this sense Tweedist. If Hong Kong designed the nominating committee the way Professor James Fishkin describes a "deliberative poll" — with a randomly selected and representative body of citizens — the first stage would be small but not unrepresentative. Yet few small bodies are selected with the discipline of Fishkin's deliberative poll. Certainly, Hong Kong's was not. Instead, the bias of the Tweedist system flows from the unrepresentativeness of the nominating committee.

There are many examples of Tweedism across the history of the United States, though none more striking than the history of democracy in America's Old South. Though America was committed, through its Constitution, at least circa 1870, to secure to all (males at least) the right to vote regardless of race, for almost a hundred years after that commitment, African Americans were routinely excluded from the right to vote. Through a wide range of practices, including literacy tests, grandfather clauses, poll taxes, and complex registration systems, whites throughout the South succeeded in excluding blacks from voting. Yet none of these schemes was as transparently Tweedist as the all-white primary.

Practiced in many states, but in none more brazenly than Texas, the all-white primary explicitly excluded African Americans from voting in the Democratic primary, at first by law and eventually, effectively, through informal practice. Blacks were not necessarily forbidden from voting in the general election. But as the Democratic Party was the only party that mattered across the Old South, that formal fact meant little practically. Instead, so long as blacks were excluded from the first stage of this democratic process, the effect of Tweedism would be felt throughout the process. It may well be that blacks had ultimate influence over elected officials — since, in some cases at least, they could participate in the general election. That ultimate participation, however, could not cure the exclusion from the initial stage of the process.

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