Why is mandate important

The uninsurance rate in the state fell by two-thirds within a year of the mandate. The average cost of a nongroup insurance policy, which nationally rose by 14 percent from to , fell by 40 percent in Massachusetts over that same time period. The program remains highly popular, with public support at about 70 percent in recent polls.

What would happen if we repealed the mandate? I find that: Total insurance coverage would rise by fewer than 10 million persons rather than the 32 million persons estimated by CBO. The number of uninsured would be reduced by less than 20 percent rather than by about two-thirds. Employer-sponsored insurance, which is projected to erode by about 5 million persons under reform, would instead erode by over 20 million persons.

The fully implemented cost of the legislation in would fall by only about 20 percent—we would spend 80 percent as much to cover fewer than one-third as many people. Those who do not obtain coverage would be the healthiest individuals, causing enormous adverse selection in insurance markets.

The average individual premium in the exchange would rise by about 40 percent without the mandate. Download this memo pdf Download to mobile devices and e-readers with Scribd.

Jonathan Gruber. You Might Also Like. Oct 16, Thomas Waldrop , Emily Gee. Skip to main content. Mandate in Politics In political terms, a mandate describes the authority given by an electorate to someone acting as its representative.

Imperative Mandates An imperative mandate sets certain restrictions on the policies an elected official can enact. Tracking has been deactivated Google Analytics tracking has been deactivated for this browser on this website. There's no question about that. But he's won it with the lowest vote to win an election that any of us can actually recollect He has a right to govern well.

And a government has a right to introduce anything that they like He is entitled to put forward any piece of legislation that he wants. And he can claim for that legislation the merits of the arguments associated with that legislation. He can claim no more for it than that.

A month later he was more pointed: 'He cannot claim a mandate for his GST, and he certainly cannot claim a mandate for the indecent haste with which he wants to implement it'. The Opposition's He later pointed to the Senate vote: 'In the Senate, 60 per cent voted for parties they assumed would stop it.

We will not accept it now. We will not put it forward as our policy option and we will oppose it absolutely. Now, we've made that amply clear'. The Opposition criticised the decision to call an election immediately upon release of the tax package: '[John Howard] did not want it subject to Parliamentary scrutiny. He did not want the accountability that normally comes when you are in office Whether he wins or I win, neither of us will'. Much as I don't like the fact They expect governments to get on with the Senate, and I would be doing my level best to do that.

After the election the Opposition Leader continued to develop his case for the legitimacy of parliamentary action: ' He left no doubt that the Opposition was 'opposing [the GST] lock, stock and barrel'. The Opposition also commented that the Senate which would consider the legislation, especially if it were to be dealt with by 30 June as the Government desired, was an 'old Senate', 62 its members having been elected at either the periodical elections of March or March On 14 September Democrat leader Senator Meg Lees South Australia entered the mandate debate, stating that 'there is also a valid mandate in the "House of Review"'.

Her view was that the outcome in the Senate as well as that in the House of Representatives should be respected. In the week before polling day the Democrats 'pledged to expand the role of the Senate as a House of Review, saying it is the best way of forcing Government to be honest, accountable and responsive to the public'. If, as the voting trends suggest, the Democrats regain the balance of power in our own right in the Senate, we will treat the Coalition's legislative program fairly and responsibly, but won't be bullied into becoming a rubber stamp', she concluded.

As John Howard himself acknowledged on , the mandate theory that says people approve every piece of Government policy at election time has always been phony sic. Within a week of polling Paul Kelly, international editor of The Australian , took issue with 'efforts to delegitimise [John Howard's] victory typified by the misuse of the mandate theory'.

Kelly's core argument was that '[m]andates, under the classical theory, relate to governments. The mandate is the link, the trust, the bond between the ruler and the people'. And later:. If the mandate is killed, then you kill the central means of keeping governments honest. The government has a right to implement its policies; but it has a responsibility to honour its promises. A government that breaks its promises is abusing its mandate.

An Opposition that denies a government a mandate denies any expectation that its promises will be kept Kelly buttressed his argument by locating the mandate-a polemical device-among those 'other conventions, rules or theories [needed] to make our democracy work' for, 'the Constitution, as law, can render Australia ungovernable'.

Kelly especially concentrated his defence of the mandate on its challengers in the Senate:. The entire Senate wasn't even elected last Saturday. The arrogance for the people held by some senators who claim mandates when half their numbers didn't even face the voters is as breathtaking as it is contempuous.

The mandate-the trust between the elected government and the people-can't apply to the Senate because the Senate doesn't determine the government and the Senate as a whole didn't go to the election.

In Kelly's analysis, the mandate concept is essential for Australia's system of government to work:. The system can work only if the Senate discharges its house of review functions recognising the legitimacy of the Government's program. If the Democrats have a mandate, then One Nation has a mandate This is the crazy logic we have created for ourselves.

A leading article in the Financial Review on the same day adopted a similar view: ' Mr Howard won on Saturday Australia made its choice with its eyes open and the Government should now be allowed to deliver'. It considered the argument that different voting for the Senate meant 'the intention of excising key elements of the package is also flawed'. With an Upper House in which it is virtually impossible to secure a majority, this is to suggest that the Australian people want governments which aren't able to govern.

The Senate is a house of review and a check on government excesses and duplicities, not a vehicle to stop them enacting clearly stated programs. Peter Cole-Adams in the Canberra Times endeavoured to locate the mandate idea in the institutional context of Australia's bicameral national parliament:.

To question the usefulness of the mandate idea is not to undermine the authority of governments, or to say that political parties should not make commitments, or to suggest that they should not do their damnedest to honour them. The electorate will punish them if they do not. It is simply to acknowledge the reality that what the Australian electorate gives a winning party is a parliament with which it must live. Our system, the way it has evolved, gives governments the power to rule but, when it comes to change, it usually guarantees them little more than the right to negotiate from a position of strength with minor parties.

Others were less sanguine about the case for the mandate. The Government has every right to govern. It has no right to make unconstitutional demands on the Senate, such as insisting that it rubber stamp legislation. Senators are elected to form a house of review over legislation; that is their purpose; it is their constitutional duty, and there is no reason why that right should be abandoned.

In our system, as in all democracies, the Parliament legislates, the executive governs. The mandate theorists would have us believe Parliament should function as an electoral college for the executive and then hibernate between polls, while Cabinet seizes legislative power.

Mandate: Dictionary and Academic Analyses. Because in Australia and elsewhere mandate doctrine is at the heart of debate and contention among active politicians, it is not surprising that dictionaries, either general or political, do not provide unequivocal definitions.

Most hesitate to vest the term in its political application with definitive meaning. Appendix 1 contains a brief survey of relevant entries in Australian, British and American dictionaries. Compilers of dictionaries of politics do not have any hesitation about including an entry on mandate in their lexicons but they, too, have considerable reservation about whether any precise or binding meaning can be attached to the term.

The dictionaries of politics refer to the usual range of matters-mandates are claimed even when winning margins are small and for policies which hardly figured at all during the campaign. Indeed, there is a view that the comprehensivity of modern manifestos dilutes any particular claim for a mandate.

Dictionaries from American sources write mainly in terms of the significance of mandates in presidential strategies for securing congressional support for administration programs, but some see the concept as more applicable to British than American politics. Appendix 2 contains a more extended review of entries in a selected range of dictionaries of politics. Academic analysis of mandate doctrine falls broadly into two categories.

Authors in the first category believe that the term has substance and is important for the integrity and democratic qualities of politics and government.

Authors in the second category question both the doctrine and its adverse implications for considered government and proper conduct of the legislative process. Relevant academic analyses are surveyed in Appendix 3. The many questions to which the term, mandate, and the related ideas give rise are firmly located in the centre of politics.

They concern not only the interpretation of election results for purposes of legislation and policy, but also who, if anyone, is able to impose an interpretation on the results of a particular election or, indeed, if anyone should do so.

What distinguishes Australia's situation in comparison to other Westminster-style systems is that the Government itself, whose claim to office is based on the House of Representatives, is only in a position to impose its view of the mandate on those rare occasions when it also has a majority in the Senate.

Otherwise the question is decided by whether and on what terms a government can build a majority in the Senate, finding support from beyond the ranks of its own party supporters. In this sense, an Australian Government has a good deal less latitude than various counterparts. It is not only that Australian governments have less latitude in interpreting election results in terms of legislation and policies, the constitutional framework for bicameralism in the Commonwealth Parliament and the method of electing Senators mean that attempts to resolve a dispute about mandate by resort to section 57 is only of limited and, in most cases, retrospective, value.

For some analysts this is not an unsatisfactory situation and, indeed, an assurance of at least a measure of parliamentary control of the Executive.

On most matters Australian governments win parliamentary support for most of what they want; they certainly fare better with the Senate than US presidents do with the Congress. They also preside over a House of Representatives which is more tightly controlled than many other lower houses in Westminster-based parliaments, including the Houses of Commons at Westminster and Ottawa.

The other view is that of Sir Robert Menzies. If there is some dispute between the Senate and the House of Representatives, and it is remitted to the people under section 57 of the Constitution, there should be a reasonable prospect of decisive resolution in favour of one side or the other.

Such decisive resolution is unlikely under the method of electing Senators. Appendix 1: Mandate-Dictionary Definitions. In a dictionary sense, the political usage of the term is neither primary nor prominent. In the edition of the Oxford English Dictionary political usage is fourth of five meanings: 'The instruction or commission as to policy supposed to be given by the electors to parliament or one of its members' vol. IX, p. Its first use in this sense dates from the late eighteenth century in France and in form has a decidedly Burkean resonance: 'The members of the legislative body are not the representation of the department which has chosen them, but of the whole nation, and no mandate instructions can be given them'.

Other dictionaries likewise give a low rating to the political usage of the word. For Webster's it ranks third: 'the wishes of constituents expressed to a representative, legislature, etc. The third edition of the Macquarie Dictionary includes the following under its entry for mandate: '3.

Politics the instruction as to policy given or supposed to be given by electors to a legislative body or to one or more of its members' p.

There is thus an equivocal quality to the entries in the OED and Macquarie; both hesitate to vest the term in its political application with definitive meaning. Appendix 2: Dictionaries of Politics. Authors of dictionaries of politics do not have any doubt that mandate has a place in their lexicons but they, too, share the hesitations of the general dictionaries about whether definitive meaning can be attached to the term. Mandates are typically claimed by successful parties in national elections even when they have actually gained only a smallish plurality of votes.

If a party, or a candidate, has stood for election on a particular set of policies, then, having won election, a mandate from the people has been granted to implement those policies. Thus governments often claim that they are 'mandated' to carry out some action even if there is no good reason to believe that the policy in question had very much to do with their victory Questions of whether a mandate does or could exist, how much anyone is bound by it, and when an election result would certify such a mandate are hotly-contested matters of modern arguments about democracy both in parliaments and parties.

The doctrine of the mandate is highly influential in democratic politics, although it is extremely difficult to see quite what it means, the problem here being inextricably bound up with the general problems of collective choice. It is sometimes said that when a political party stands for election, it makes certain promises, and by virtue of this secures the vote of the electorate. In return for the voluntary act of the electorate, it therefore stands under a contractual or quasi-contractual obligation to fulfil its promises, and has a 'mandate from the electorate' so to do.

In other words, the relation between a party in office and the electorate is one of mandation. The mandate is held to be a sufficient some say also necessary condition for the legitimacy of acts performed in fulfilment of it.

The whole structure of obligation stems therefore from the fundamental act of consent whereby democracies establish their claims to legitimacy. Scruton, however, enumerated several problems: the diversity of policies in a party program; the range of reasons lying behind the voting preferences of electors; the likelihood that for reasons, for example, of necessity it may be desirable or expedient to change a policy.

On the other side of the ledger Scruton posited that a. It may be that the correct response is to say that there is a mandate after election, but that its basis is not to be found in contract, or promise-keeping; alternatively, that there is no such thing as a mandate, in which case, with what authority does the ruling party act?

The Oxford scholar S. Finer perceived the positive and negative dimensions of the term: positively it implied that 'a government is bound to follow instructions given by the electorate in a general election; or, negatively, that a government ought not, in a democracy, to adopt some new policy unless it has first been put before the electorate'. Like other writers Finer considered that the range of modern party manifestos makes it 'difficult to maintain the doctrine'. In American political science protagonists of the presidency tend to be strong advocates of the mandate for the president whilst others who place more weight on 'checks and balances', and the importance of the Congress, are more sceptical.

President Eisenhower entitled the first volume of his presidential memoirs, Mandate for Change ; the title of the relevant chapter 8 is: 'The Platform: Promises to Keep'. Eisenhower initially won office by a significant majority, supported by majorities in both the Senate and the House though it was a frequent irritation to him that Republicans in the Congress did not feel it a duty to support Administration policies and programs.

The New York Times columnist William Safire, in Safire's New Political Dictionar y defined the term simply as 'the authority to carry out a program conferred on an elected official; especially strong after a landslide victory'. Kennedy, had a wafer-thin win in the popular vote-barely 0. The fact remains that he won, and on the day after the election, and every day thereafter, he rejected the argument that the country had given him no mandate.

Every election has a winner and a loser, he said in effect. The margin is narrow, but the responsibility is clear. There may be difficulties with the Congress, but a margin of only one vote would still be a mandate. Kennedy had very little leverage Popular support for a political program. A mandate is assumed to emerge from an election as a result of popular support given to a political party or to elected officials who ran on a set of pledges to the voters. A mandate may be vague or specific, depending upon the clarity with which alternatives are presented to the voters,.

The mandate concept is best implemented where a responsible, well-disciplined party, ready and able to carry out its promised program, exists. The American party system, unlike the British, lacks these qualities, and the mandate is consequently weakened. The authors observe, however, some signs of a trend 'in which voter action produces change'; for example, Ross Perot's bids for the presidency and the Republican 'Contract with America'.

Andrew Heywood in Political Ideas and Concepts-An Introduction presents a view of the mandate doctrine which underlines its two-way character where many analysts perceive only a one-way bid for power by winning politicians.

He writes that the 'winning party or candidate not only enjoys a popular mandate to carry out its manifesto pledges but has a duty to do so'. Whilst Heywood highlights the constructive characteristics of the mandate doctrine in its enhancement of democracy by giving a measure of substance to its meaning as government by the people, he is similarly concerned by the notion of a 'mandate to rule', not only because it is 'hopelessly vague' but because it 'comes close to investing politicians with unrestricted authority simply because they have won an election'.

Appendix 3: Academic Analysis. Important evidence that the mandate doctrine enjoys a lively existence in democratic life is illustrated by the attention it has received in general texts on politics. Most of these reflect the scepticism and hesitancy of the dictionary documentation and analysis of the term but there are some notable exceptions which attempt to discern the importance of the doctrine for democratic polities and, among other things, reasons for its durability.

After all, the term was sufficiently prominent during the latter half of the nineteenth century to support a London University doctoral dissertation on the doctrine as it applied to British politics from the Second Reform Act to the passage of the Parliament Act In the academic literature of the past generation there have been two important expositions of the significance and substance of mandate theory, and its importance for the integrity and democratic qualities of politics and government.

Two other major essays have questioned the doctrine both in its own terms and in terms of its adverse implications for considered government and proper conduct of the legislative process. Richard Mulgan, then of the University of Otago and now in the Public Policy Program at The Australian National University, was attracted to a study of the mandate doctrine in late for a number of reasons including the significance attached to it by ministers and Opposition parliamentarians in New Zealand, in contrast to the tendency of academics either to dismiss the term or, as he expressed it, to take 'the notion He briefly traversed various incidents in New Zealand where the mandate was seen to be a central justification for some action of government.

One such incident involved termination of a royal commission, an intention which attracted little attention during the campaign. Mulgan concluded that:. Inclusion in the election policy is sufficient, as well as necessary, for the existence of a mandate. If the public is unaware of or not interested in the policy, the mandate may be weakened but not destroyed. A more significant incident entailed suspension of a superannuation scheme on the basis of the election mandate, to be validated retrospectively by legislation: 'the mandate In the subsequent court case, however, it was held that the Prime Minister [Muldoon] had acted illegally, on the basis that under the Bill of Rights the Crown may not suspend laws without the consent of Parliament.

Mulgan was prepared to concede certain criticisms of mandate doctrine, for example, that 'most voters are unaware of most issues', or that mandates do not cover all policies advocated by a particular party, but his fundamental conclusion was that:. The theory of the mandate may thus be taken to justify governments in enacting their election policy and to oblige them not to introduce major measures which are outside that policy.

As such it seems an intelligible convention which is vital to our political system; without it both the authority and the accountability of elected governments would be seriously limited. Nearly two decades later, on the basis of debate about the mandate which followed election of the Howard Government in , Professor Hugh Emy of Monash University supported a broad formulation of the doctrine on the basis that it contains 'ideas of substance for organising representative democracy'.

In the context of Australian national government, mandate is usually taken to mean that a party which fights an election on the basis of policies clearly stated in its manifesto or the leader's policy speech, is entitled to pursue those policies if it wins a majority of seats in the House of Representatives.

The mandate is a commission to govern. This includes a general right to govern and a particular right to pursue stated policies. Conversely, the public has a right to expect that the new government will abide 'by the terms of its mandate', i. If it reneges on the terms of the implied contract with the people through which it gained power, it may be accused of ' dishonouring its mandate'. Emy also recognised that the mandate has a practical as well as rhetorical dimension.

As manifestos became long and detailed documents, they placed certain limits on the winning party's scope for action. He traced evidence in Britain that the parties take their manifestos seriously and, citing a study, 'what governments do "relates broadly either to their manifesto emphases or to their long-standing ideological commitments"'. In a key observation Emy contended that 'the mandate has two faces which are two aspects of one relationship'.

He continued:. An elected government does enjoy a right to govern and to legislate in pursuit of policies it announced either during or prior to the election campaign. Emy sees the vitality of mandate doctrine as having important implications for the reputation of government and politics.

Among the sources of low esteem of politics,. Emy thus sees in the mandate doctrine a mechanism for upholding 'the ethic of responsible party government itself'. Like Mulgan, Emy's analysis recognises most if not all of the various criticisms of the mandate doctrine; his own position, again like Mulgan's, is especially sustainable because he does not interpret the doctrine as a carte blanche for the winner, however defined:.

It must explain itself fully. It is obliged to defend itself against charges of inconsistency: that a Bill departs noticeably from what was foreshadowed, or confers too much discretion on minister and public servants.

With controversial policies, the government cannot necessarily invoke its own mandate as a trump card. In the context of responsible government in Australia, Emy posits an important role for the Senate to scrutinise claims made by a government to exercise 'a trustee's discretion to vary or create new policies'.

One of the major challenges to mandate doctrine came from America's leading theorist on democracy, Robert A. Dahl of Yale University, during the Reagan presidency:. Reagan's lofty mandate was provided by The mandate, according to Dahl, who was in turn relying on a study, Interpreting Elections , by Stanley Kelley, has four supports: that elections carry messages about problems, policies and programs; certain of those messages must be treated as authoritative concerns; to qualify as mandates, the messages must reflect the stable views of voters and the electorate; and, finally, a negative imperative that, except in emergencies, governments should not undertake major innovations in policy or procedure unless the electorate has had an opportunity to consider them in an election.

Dahl found little difficulty in negating these stipulations and concluding that:. Beyond revealing the first preferences of a plurality of voters, do presidential elections also reveal the additional information that a plurality or a majority of voters prefer the policies of the winner and wish the winner to pursue those policies.

In empirical analysis, Dahl pointed out that while in Reagan had a landslide, Democratic candidates in the House of Representatives secured 52 per cent of the vote, down from 55 per cent at the mid-term elections. Dahl cast the claims for a presidential mandate in terms of what he characterised as the pseudo-democratisation of the presidency and an attempt to elevate it above the Congress.

In contrast to Emy, who seems to hold that only governments have mandates, 97 Dahl considered that members of the Congress opposing presidential measures 'in effect also claim a mandate for their policies'.

It is of interest that Dahl's inspiration for his essay was Reagan's comparatively comfortable victories rather than Kennedy's much more questionable victory, decisive though it was in the electoral college. The scheme in the United States Constitution for election of presidents was, according to Dahl, designed to improve the chances of victory for a national figure rather than a faction leader or a demagogue-the president was not to be a tribune of the people.

This philosophy was challenged by the eighth president of the United States, Andrew Jackson, in when he lost in the electoral college having led the vote and Jackson conceived the president as 'an immediate and direct representative of the people'.

Little more than a decade later James Polk was justifying his use of the veto on legislation on the basis that the President was responsible to the people of the whole Union, as the representatives in the legislative branches were responsible to the people of particular States and districts.