Mandy @ POLI 333D

In the light of making my post relevant to our lecture, I have tried to analyze US presidential election through Schumpeter’s model of competitive elitism.

So I read this article, whole headline basically concludes the whole story. In fact, I find this article to be a bit tedious as it records the accusations back and forth between these Republican presidential candidates. As first glance, the situation appears to have confirmed Schumpeter’s model of competitive elitism, which emphasizes the role of competition between rival political elites and parties. However, at a deeper level, the fact that the capabilities of these candidates are evaluated not only by the campaigns between these rivals but also by empirical evidence – for example, Gingrich challenged Romney’s capability to create jobs because during Romney’s years as Massachusetts’s governor, the state was rated the 47th in the nation in job creation –  illustrates that popular political views are not as easily manipulable by the elites as Schumpeter suggests.

The most legitimate accusation I found in the article is the fact that Romney, a multimillionaire, paid only a ~15% tax rate, rather than the supposedly ~35% tax rates for top incomes (because his income was generated mostly from investments but not workplaces, he was not charged with the higher tax rates on incomes from work). Despite Romney’s admission of his low effective tax rate, the public and rival politicians continue to demand him to disclose his tax returns, arguing that such disclosure is conformity to the democratic ideal of transparency.  Meanwhile, there has been a tradition for presidential candidates to disclose their tax forms (Ironically, the tradition was started by Romney’s father). Accordingly, the standards imposed by the democratic system and the tradition have both triggered Romney’s rivals to depict him as an dishonest candidate. The article also suggests that Romney has been attacked for being “disconnected from the middle class realities” because of his unfair tax payment. This accusation implies the high value of economic equality in a democracy, especially in the United States against the backdrop of Wall Street Occupation. Although the influence of these quarrels between the candidates on popular political attitudes can hardly be measured, the fact that these candidates have been trying to criticize their rivals’ morality appear to have aligned with Schumpeter’s emphasis – that the electorate is emotional and can be easily affected by emotive information of candidates over the evaluation of their political competence.

Despite the similarity between reality and elements in Schumpeter’s model, the model has been criticized for holding lots of problematic accounts. Above all, the failure of Schumpeter to see democratic models as a benchmark rather than a method or a reflection of reality, had led him to underestimate the rationality and influence of the electorate in a democracy. As such, Schumpeter’s argument that his model is a substitution for “the classical democratic theory” (which at the same time does not exist) is invalid.

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