How can Congress reinvigorate representative democracy? Try TEFs

Americans appear to believe Congress does not represent their interests. Polling shows that 75 percent of Americans disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job, with supermajority disapproval the norm since 2005. But there is something Congress can do about this. Congress can reinvigorate representative democracy.

I propose an instrument called Taxpayer Empowerment Funds (TEF). Congress can enact TEFs through statute to empower voters to reveal their wants across the many areas of action taken by the federal government. By empowering voters and delivering information about their wants, TEFs can help Congress improve its legitimacy and help Americans achieve better representation.

The challenge

One challenge to representative democracy is that voters must select from a small number of candidates to indicate their wants across many policy areas. Each candidate campaigns on a portfolio of different policies but none of these portfolios necessarily matches what the voter would prefer. If the voter selects Candidate D over Candidate R, we do not know if this is because they agree with D on all issues, or disagree with D on all issues except the one that is most important, or if they disagree with D on 90 percent of issues but with R on 95 percent, thus selecting D as the lesser of two evils.

This many-to-one problem is a fundamental challenge to good governance in America’s representative democracy. Voters cannot use single votes to communicate to representatives all that they want, and elections do not provide mandates that determine what lawmakers should do to make voters happy.

How it works

The TEF program would work this way: Each year each member of Congress creates a Member Budget (MB), which indicates that member’s fiscal priorities. The MB assigns a fraction to each of the currently authorized federal programs. The MB also can allocate a fraction toward paying down the federal debt. The fractions sum to one.

Each taxpayer uses their tax return to allocate their own fractional budget — their TEF — to one or more Member Budgets. Taxpayers might allocate their TEF to a mix of MBs to represent their own priorities for federal spending or debt retirement. Alternatively, taxpayers might use MBs to endorse the political leadership, actions, rhetoric or values of specific members of Congress.

For example, if Taxpayer A wanted more federal money spent on building infrastructure and paying down the national debt, they might split their TEF 50 percent for a Member Budget allocated 100 percent to infrastructure and 50 percent for a Member Budget allocated 100 percent toward paying debt. If Taxpayer B were uncertain about how the federal budget should be allocated but knew they felt that “Senator Smith” shared their values, they might allocate their TEF 100 percent to Smith’s Member Budget.

The TEF program would be funded by Congress as a line item on the federal budget, some dollar amount or percentage of federal expenditures, for example 1 percent of expenditures. This allocation would be automatically distributed to programs and debt service according to the fractional allocation aggregated across all taxpayers. Congress would decide whether the aggregate fractions would be weighted by taxes paid, by head, or by some mixture of the two. Tax returns that do not assign their TEF would be distributed automatically in proportion to the aggregate allocation of assigned TEF shares.

Benefits of the TEF proposal

TEFs could have multiple benefits for the political system. First, the instrument reveals information about voter preferences subject to a budget constraint. When opinion surveys ask voters if they support more spending on infrastructure, the survey rarely asks the respondent to indicate from where that money should come. Higher taxes? Lower expenditures on some other program? TEFs force voters to make trade-offs across fiscal priorities (or across the members of Congress they admire), with real money on the line. The information revealed through this process would be valuable for politicians who aim to deliver policy voters desire.

Second, TEFs would encourage voters to learn more about how their federal government spends tax dollars. The interface where taxpayers elect their TEF allocation might present the current budget allocation for the taxpayer’s reference. Further, asking members to come up with their own budget allocation, instead of simply voting on the log-roll authorizations that come to the floor, could provide an incentive for greater effort and reflection by members on the trade-offs facing federal fiscal choices.

Third, TEFs might mitigate some of the current frustration with single-member districts in the United States. At present, there is some discontent with American democracy, particularly that the system is so dominated by only two political parties. Some reformers call for ranked-choice voting, others for reforms to primary elections, and others, more radically, suggest a move to proportional representation.

My sense is that much of this frustration follows from the challenge of aggregating the incredibly diverse wants of Americans into two-party electoral competition. If TEFs allowed better reflection of the diversity of interests across the electorate, it could dissipate some of the current discontent.

Fourth, TEFs can be a new information source for political parties and political entrepreneurs. One of the central mechanisms of representation in American democracy is the actions of political candidates and parties ambitious to gain office from the current incumbent. These challengers aim to identify and rally coalitions of voters dissatisfied with the officeholder. In finding dissatisfied coalitions and promising to represent their interests, this process facilitates representation of voter wants.

Identifying dissatisfied voters and building electoral coalitions requires information about voters that can be difficult to gather. This difficulty is compounded with the contemporary challenges of low and uneven response rates facing public opinion polls.

If Congress were to direct the IRS to provide TEF data disaggregated to congressional districts, ZIP codes, or some other low-level geography, political entrepreneurs could use the information contained in the TEF data to identify voter wants unfulfilled by their incumbent. Incumbents, too, would have access to this information and the knowledge could lead to more faithful representation of voter wants in fiscal policy.

Fifth, a speculative possibility: The opportunity for members of Congress to create and advertise a Member Budget each year could provide a more productive forum for members seeking political attention than social media or cable news. Members might choose to compete for the greatest share of TEF allocations for ego, or as evidence of their political appeal in pursuit of higher office, redirecting some of their current energies targeted to the social media attention chamber.

In the hands of Congress

Taxpayer Empowerment Funds could expand opportunities for voters to communicate to their representatives and participate in politics, encourage more learning and engagement with fiscal policy, and might improve representation and satisfaction with American democracy. And, by empowering voters, Congress might be able to improve its standing and legitimacy in the public eye.

Seth J. Hill is a professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego. Follow him on Twitter @seth_j_hill.