OXFORD, ENGLAND -- This past week marked the premiere of the second season of FOX's hit reality show American Idol. One of the program's central innovations is that it allows the at-home audience to participate -- by phone -- in determining the show's outcome.
American Idol is a British import, which is not surprising when you consider that the English appetite for celebrity is like a child's craving for sweets. Brits participate in referendums on celebrity regularly. In December, finalists Sinead, David and Lemar sang over-synthesized tunes in the last episode of the BBC's Fame Academy, one of a half-dozen British television shows that, like American Idol, propel the young and ambitious to pop stardom. By the evening's end, nearly 7 million votes had been logged on a telephone hot line (this in a country of just 60 million people).
Promoters tout the shows as exercises in transparent, accessible democracy: After all, anyone can place a vote without even leaving the house. But while such shows may, on the surface, suggest a genuine populism that democratic political systems would do well to emulate -- Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) lip-synching to Shakira, anyone? -- they often end up serving as showcases for the worst in electoral processes.
Take, for example, an exercise in live democracy that gripped the British public -- at least the television-viewing public -- late last year. In November 2002, the BBC wrapped up an interactive series called The Hundred Greatest Britons. The final episode finished with a phone-a-thon that pitted former Prime Minister Winston Churchill against 19th-century engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (no, not Paul Burrell, the butler recently accused of stealing from Princess Diana) and Diana herself. Having defined potential nominees as "anyone who was born in the British Isles, including Ireland, or who has lived in the British Isles, including Ireland, and has played a significant part in the life of the British Isles," the BBC presented viewers in 2001 with a list of 800 famous names. By year's end, 30,000 votes had been logged; in August 2002, the top 100 names were unveiled to much chatter and hullabaloo.
In? Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols and Bono of U2. Out? John Keats, William Butler Yeats, William Wordsworth and Lord Byron. But Rotten and Bono were, in their own way, exceptions: Only 22 of those selected were living, and none placed in the top 10. One had the feeling that the British -- oversaturated as they are with current celebrities -- had decided, like gravediggers, to exhume the treasures of celebrities past.
What followed was a series of hour-long television shows devoted to the top 10 vote getters: Winston Churchill, Brunel, Diana, Charles Darwin, William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Queen Elizabeth I, John Lennon, Horatio Nelson and Oliver Cromwell. In a strange pairing of celebrities past and present, current icons of popular culture were appointed to present the case for their deceased predecessors. They sounded like tag teams or, like this pairing of a conservative politician and long-deceased monarch, presidential tickets: Michael Portillo-Elizabeth I.
At one point during the show, a presenter urged the studio audience to take a closer look at the top 10. Where else would you get such diversity? he asked. The question did not seem to make much sense, as all the finalists were white. But the comment pointed to a more serious problem endemic to such television shows and, in a sense, to the democratic political process as a whole: Television producers and politicians inevitably pander to their audiences. Of course, that's just democracy at work, but the downside is that the audience and voters end up with a pretty constricted set of choices. That's why Diana -- and not Shakespeare -- made the top three on the BBC's list. It's also why prescription drugs and not prison reform inevitably captures the attention of American lawmakers.
But a winner becomes even more predictable when the most enthusiastic voters are able to cast their ballots repeatedly -- which is exactly what happened on the BBC show. Despite BBC attempts to filter the votes, it became clear that anyone with enough technical know-how could vote early and often. Bookies stopped taking money on the race in late November, when the BBC disclosed that students at Brunel University -- named for that Brunel -- had swamped phone lines to cast votes in their founding father's favor. The university even ran a banner on its home page that read, "Is Brunel the Greatest Briton?" and included a link to the BBC voting form.
"We were very proud of the program and we are very proud of our engineering tradition," Brunel's vice chancellor, Steve Hodkinson, told The Guardian. "So we put this link on last week and we're pleased our students and quite a lot of our staff have voted."
"We would welcome more of this," responded a BBC spokeswoman to questions about the Brunel University incident. "Perhaps it would persuade science students to champion Newton or literature students Shakespeare."
The BBC tried to play innocent, but it, too, was implicated in the "election scandals." The day after the final vote, The Mail on Sunday alleged that a television program devoted to Churchill was purposely broadcast last to ensure that its subject did not leap too far ahead too early. (Churchill eventually won with 447,423 votes, or 27.9 percent.) Call it television's version of electioneering.
The show also drew attention to one of the worst elements of the political process: negative campaigning. Particularly brutal were some of the exchanges between Jeremy Clarkson, a television celebrity who represented Brunel, and Andrew Marr, the political editor of the BBC representing Darwin.
"[Marr] suggested the only reason that Brunel is remembered is for having a big hat and big cigar, and that those are phallic symbols to make up for his lack on inches," Mark Harrison, producer of The Hundred Greatest Britons, told The Guardian. "He was vigorously heckled by [Clarkson], who suggested Darwin was a plagiarist."
In the end, voting schemes on programs like American Idol may best be understood as the sort of poll that predicts and influences elections rather than as a model of civic engagement. Experts call them SLOPs -- or self-selected opinion polls -- a term coined by Norman Bradburn of the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. "SLOPs are vulnerable to mobilization and capture," says University of Texas political scientist James S. Fishkin. Furthermore, they are dangerous, Fishkin writes in his book, The Voice of the People, because they are "pseduo-representations of the people. They have no scientific basis, but once they are broadcast, their results take on a life of their own."
I wish the candidates of American Idol good luck. But if their show is anything like the British incarnation, it won't exactly be an exercise in high-minded democracy. After all, my housemate phoned in three votes for Sinead.
Asher Price is a former editorial assistant at The New Republic. He studies comparative social policy at Oxford University.
