MANDATES

OK, Schwarzenegger can make a better case for a "mandate" than I originally thought was the case. More people wanted him than wanted to avoid a recall, as the Curmudgeonly Clerk points out helpfully, here. That's good enough for me, at least concerning majoritarian support for the idea that someone called "Arnold Schwarzenegger" should inhabit the governor's mansion in Sacramento for the next chunk of time.

Generally the next interesting question with respect to mandates is the extent to which they are specific -- whether they embody popular support for a particular set of programs, support that the person pushing the programs can then, theoretically, take to the bank when negotiating with other political actors who are subject to popular control. "Taking back the government" is probably not going to be enough, nor is fighting "special interests" since that phrase really has little meaning except as a phrase demonizing ill-defined groups of people who are supposedly to blame for the fiscal mess that CA is in. So I suppose we'll see what the new governor can make of the situation. That's ultimately what mandates are about, as far as I understand it: a claimed legitimacy based on majoritarian support and used in negotiations with other political actors who are only really going to be impressed with the argument if they fear repercussions in their own political careers. My hazy recollection of the political science literature on presidential mandates is that they don't amount to much once one tries to ground them in voting data, but I'll have to go back to my grad school notes and check that again. And at any rate, the Clerk and I agree that the clearest popular message emerging from the recall effort is "not Davis."

The Clerk then overreaches a bit by trying to draw analogy with what "the Left" has said with respect to President Bush's legitimacy:

The mantra of the Left was (and in some quarters continues to be) that President Bush is illegitimate because Gore received more votes than Bush.

I don't think that the not-the-popular-vote-winner argument, understood in a simply majoritarian fashion, has been the main argument of folks who think that Bush took office illegitimately. Everyone knows that the electoral college winner can be the popular vote loser. It's a silly system, ultimately, and every once in a while it's worth pointing out to those who claim broad, majoritarian support for Bush that without the strange institutional artifact of Founding suspicion of popular judgment (and founding sectional concerns) that is the electoral college, Bush would be wiling away his time in Crawford, not jetting all over the country on Air Force One and donning flight suits and landing on aircraft carriers simply because he can. The illegitimacy argument rests on a criticism of Bush v. Gore, one that would take precisely the same form if Bush had been the popular vote winner and Gore "merely" the person hoping to obtain a win in the electoral college by defending judicial federalism and trying to counter novel equal protection and Article II arguments and hoping that more than just the liberal Justices would rule in his favor.

MORE: A reader (let's call him BB) responded to this post by arguing that it's inaccurate to say that Gore would have won the popular vote if there were no electoral college, because the candidates' strategies were shaped by the existing institutional framework of the electoral system. Fair enough. In addition, the reader argued that the electoral college made sense in the eighteenth century given prevailing notions of the centrality of state sovereignty. Also, fair enough. I don't have anything more insightful to offer than the following: I see no reason why eighteenth century notions of state sovereignty -- which were never the consensus view at any rate (see Hamilton) -- should continue to influence the electoral process today, in the form of an institution designed to add an additional check on popular choices for president.

I didn't ask BB if I could post his full name or actual comments, so I'm paraphrasing.