In the most often used setting, it is really hard to tell. Every party with a majority in one house of the legislature says it has a “mandate” to do what at least some of the candidates promised to do in their most recent campaigns. President Obama claimed he has a mandate to deal with the nation’s healthcare woes as a result of his victory in 2008.
That isn’t the clearest meaning of the term, certainly. The handily available Latin source is the verb mando, “to command.” The Congress, for instance, “commands the Environmental Protection Agency to start obeying the law and the EPA fights back, saying the Congress does not have the right to mandate such an action.[1] The Congress demands that certain states where minority voting has been suspiciously low actually register minority citizens and allow them to vote. The demand was specific and was backed up by the kind of penalties that catch the imagination. Those are mandates.
What do the voters “demand?” That’s harder. The EPA decision was 5-4. You could say that five justices demanded that the law be obeyed and four demanded that it not be obeyed. Both are mandates; one carries the prestige and power of the Court and the other does not.
Command, connotes, at the very least, that only one thing is being demanded, but in popular votes, contrary things are being demanded. The voters are apparently not of one mind.
But if they were of one mind, what would they be saying? One of the simplest divisions of the popular vote is among those who vote for a candidate, those who vote for a party, and those who vote for the candidate closest to the voter’s stand on some issue. Imagine, in that case, a unanimous vote for Barak Obama in 2008. That would be 69, 484,215 votes for Obama. Now imagine that 23 million voted for him because he was black (a candidate-oriented vote); 23 million voted for him because he was a Democrat (a party-oriented vote); and 23 million voted for him because he promised to end the war in Iraq promptly. What is his mandate? Keep on being black? Continue being a Democrat?
In fact, I think things are more confusing than that. Many voters have a sense that there ought to be a balance in public policies and they feel, sometimes, that “things have gone too far.” I don’t want to have to be the one to say that things could not go too far, but it seems to me that “too far” requires a single policy axis. Most often, the political arguments are not made on a single policy axis. Take the current wariness about the necessary budget reductions, for instance. If the policy axis is “live within our means,” then people are overwhelmingly in favor of it. If the policy axis is “do without crucially important government services,” then people are overwhelmingly opposed to it. If the policy in question does both, how shall we determine a “mandate?”
I think this sense of “too far” is a little like the thermostat. We get to “too cold” and the thermostat kicks the furnace on. We get to “too warm” and it kicks the furnace off—or, in some homes, kicks the furnace off and the AC on. The thermostat works on what I call a single policy axis. It doesn’t have a setting for “using too much of the world’s resources.” It doesn’t have a setting that says, “Conservation is the same as a reduction in the demand for energy; get a sweater.” It’s just on and off.
But I think it’s worse than that. The thermostat doesn’t have a minority vote, so that it can kick the furnace on by 5-4 but the minority is large enough to keep the AC on as well. The thermostat doesn’t take reaching the “send a message to the furnace” temperature, decide enough is enough, and send a crew down to rip out the furnace. The public, operating as it does on multiple policy axes, doesn’t so much turn on and off the furnace, as send a crew down to tear out the furnace; then another crew to install a furnace, when it gets cold.
Of course, that would be more expensive, but the Framers didn’t give us democracy because it was efficient. They gave us a democracy because they had just fought a war against “efficient” and wanted to see how “inefficient” would suit us. I think they really nailed it. The government they designed was just perfect—for the 18th Century.
[1] The EPA lost at the Supreme Court level where the justices opined that it would be a good idea if the EPA obeyed the law.
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