Conclave Democracy

Among the charges against democracy, the claim that it undercuts stable authority holds special prominence. Hobbes, Schmitt, and more recently Yarvin have all argued in different ways that democracy undermines the concentration of power necessary for security and political autonomy. That is why it is striking that the Catholic Church, arguably the world’s stablest and most authoritative institution, chooses its leader by vote. Obviously, a closed process among cardinal electors is not popular democracy. Still, the Church could just as well determine papal successors by any number of less democratic methods—successor-appointment, straw-drawing, strength contest—so it is worth asking why the College of Cardinals votes. Can we learn something about democracy from the Catholic Church?

The Church is thoroughly hierarchical and has gone to great lengths to clarify the absolute authority of the Pope. So the vote in the conclave is certainly not virtue signaling. Instead, it seems to suggest that where unitary authority is absent, voting is second best: the least dangerous way of establishing authority, or the least profane way of discerning it. 

Hannah Arendt distinguishes three forms of political dictatorship: tyrannical, totalitarian, and authoritarian. Tyrannical regimes are “one against all”: the leader is at odds with the people as a whole, ruling by force and therefore lacking any true authority. In totalitarian regimes, a personalistic leader guided “from within” surrounds himself with layers of “vanguardist” operatives who work to discern and actualize his vision. In authoritarian regimes, the leader is guided “from above” by a transcendent authority recognized by all as supreme. The authoritarian form of politics, more than the tyrannical or totalitarian, has exerted normative influence on Western political thought since Plato, extending through the Christian era and into the Enlightenment.

If voting processes are conceived as mere aggregators of independent desires, democracy looks more like a compromise between would-be totalitarians than a collective discernment of transcendent authority.

Accordingly, the idea of an authority above the pinnacle of temporal power is no less evident in a political executive’s submission to the rule of law than in the Pope’s status as the Vicar of Christ. Yet while cardinal electors understand that their task is to vote for the common good of the Church, and not merely parochial interests, voters in modern democracies do not always think of themselves as accountable to the constitution or the body politic. If voting processes are conceived as mere aggregators of independent desires, democracy looks more like a compromise between would-be totalitarians than a collective discernment of transcendent authority. The distinction between these very different visions of democracy lies not in procedures, but in the attitudes of participants. This is why John Dewey saw education, and the formation of citizens, as the cornerstone of successful democracy.

Despite presuming the cardinals’ piety, the Church is still attentive to interference in the voting process, whether by bribe, coercion, or propaganda. Since 1274, the cardinals have held their elections in physical and informational seclusion, so that worldly powers lack the opportunity to influence them. This recalls the concept of “air-gapping” in cyber-security, and also receives a linguistic echo in the term “secure enclave.” It reminds us that voting processes have only as much integrity as the informational environment in which they occur.

It did not always work this way. For the first thousand years of the Church, popes were frequently chosen by public “acclamation.” This was a social and religious phenomenon where Church leaders gathered with the lay public in large convenings and reached rapturous unanimity. When this spontaneous consensus arrived, it was taken to indicate divine inspiration as to the next Pope’s identity. Public acclamation is revealing as an ancestor to conclave voting. It was less rigorously procedural, with no vote counting, but at the same time much more “open.” It is therefore not easy to say whether the transition to conclave voting signals an increase or decrease in “democraticness.” This highlights a deep ambiguity in what we mean by democracy. Does democracy require placing openness above the integrity of the process, or vice versa? Often, there seems to be an inconvenient tradeoff between these values. 

One thing we can clearly say about acclamation is that it sought to capture truths flowing through individuals “from above,” not an upwelling of discrete “internal” or personal preferences. That is to say, it aimed at the transcendent Judeo-Christian-Platonic type of authority, which also informs the constitutional tradition. The trouble was that in addition to being vulnerable to bad actors and mob dynamics, acclamation did not always yield a clear result, resulting in rival claimants to the papacy and threatening Church unity. As a response, the College of Cardinals was designated the exclusive body of electors in 1059. In later centuries, while acclamation by the cardinals remained legally valid, alternative pathways were adopted, including a two-thirds majority requirement with a secret ballot process. This change need not be interpreted as an ecclesiastical admission that the public ideally ought to be kept at a distance from power, and still less as an attempt to rationalize the charismatic nature of the selection process. Rather, it is a concession to the imperative of achieving a result that is unambiguous and credibly free of improper influence.

The Church’s use of voting rebuts anti-liberal arguments that portray democracy as inimical to stable authority. But only in part. It suggests that voting is the stablest and most authoritative governance method when no absolute leader is at hand. Yet, it also sees democracy as precarious, and second-best to unitary authority.

Transposing these lessons to a secular context, we might look at political democracy as a kind of ersatz filling the authority gap during a long interregnum. On this view, democracy is not opposed to authority, but rather oriented towards it. Yet it only fulfills this role plausibly when voters look scrupulously—even piously—to a shared conception of the common good, and when they are carefully insulated from bad-faith influences. 

To understand democracy’s place in a post-liberal world, we could do worse than to consider the role of voting in pre-liberal institutions that have stood the test of time.