Elections and democracy (part one)

Are elections any way to run a democracy? openDemocracy readers share their thoughts.The Indian experience
13 May 2001

Rajeev & Tani Bhargava write:

By virtue of their legitimate capacity to throw 'paper stones' at their ostensible rulers, ordinary people have begun to feel that those rulers can be made accountable.

Radical democratic theory never tires of claiming that democracy means something deeper and wider than mere elections, that to have real substance, democracy must embody social and economic equality.

So indeed it is. But it is mistaken to think that the deeper sense of democracy is necessarily opposed to or obfuscated by its other, narrow political meaning. A real and tangible connection exists in India between elections and, if not equality of wealth and income, at least equality of status.

For it is primarily as voters that the hitherto marginalised people, the poor peasant, the disorganised worker, the outcaste, have acquired a sense of empowerment. For them, casting vote is not merely a symbolic, expressive but a communicative act, signalling to their former superiors, oppressors or to cold-hearted governments that the equation of power is changing. Elections have transformed the self-understandings of these people, the very manner in which they imagine themselves.

It is plain for everyone to see that universal franchise has helped to dismantle traditional hierarchies.

The moral identity of Indian society has significantly altered because of a very real sense among the people that governments should work for the people and can be made to work for their benefit. All kinds of 'clientist' networks have since been built to make this possible, if not always to ensure it. The poor in India know that they have an enduring stake in a sturdy democracy. This is why they come out in hordes to vote.

This contrasts sharply with western democracies where voters' apathy is strongest among the poor and marginalized. It is also markedly different from the current attitudes and behaviour of the disillusioned middle classes in India, which, having grasped the causal link between democracy and an incremental shift in power, are tentatively turning towards somewhat authoritarian solutions.

On its own, political democracy is unlikely to improve the economic condition of the poor. But it has given them the self-confidence and the much needed social space to strive to improve their own life-chances. This could never have happened without their birth as voters.

UK media elections – debate the solution?
13 May 2001

Anthony Smith writes:

We feel today that we are merely spectators at a word contest between celebrities whose roles are being devised for them by professional manipulators of appearances.

Elections must surely be one of the necessary ingredients in any process of democracy, apart from tiny organisations or societies small enough and thus 'direct' enough to reduce or eliminate the need for representation. Elections are a manifestation of self-government but not a guarantee of it.

Elections can be used as instruments of tyranny, of majorities over minorities. They can be used to legitimise injustices as well as to prevent them. In our UK system the media have so transformed the conduct of national politics as to undermine the sense of self-government taking place at election times. We feel today that we are merely spectators at a word contest between celebrities whose roles are being devised for them by professional manipulators of appearances.

The processes which have reduced elections to performances (in addition to political life between elections) must now be eroding legitimacy down to danger levels. Our society is slowly losing the feeling both of being governed by consent and of being governed wisely. The rival value systems between parties have evaporated and the party programmes begin to lack moral and historical drive. The result is that Parliament, which should be the centre of the whole political process, has ceased to be the real fulcrum of national debate and its members are more and more drawn into the realm of manipulated appearances.

If we are to seek appropriate reforms, I would suggest that attention should first be concentrated upon the conduct of Parliament itself. If there were authoritative debate at the centre, improvements to the ancillary procedures such a elections might more readily suggest themselves. Elections would be again about issues rather than personalities and appearances.

Anthony Smith is president of Magdalen College, Oxford.

Don't write the Internet off!
17 May 2001

Paul Evans writes:

If our elected politicians matched the standards demanded by 'netiquette', we would have more respect for them.

I agree with Anthony Smith that the conduct of electoral politics today “must now be eroding legitimacy down to danger levels.” Is this trend likely to be reversed – and are new developments in civil society likely to improve the situation?

I often find that the potential of the Internet as a reinvigorating tool is too hastily dismissed. This is partly because the popular perception of the medium is one that many of us who have used the Internet for a while find unrecognisable.

The popular impression is of an ‘get-rich-quick’ scheme, impossible to regulate, and brimming with the porn that only AOL’s Connie can protect my family from.

Yet I find the web to be a place where I can get useful answers to complex questions, have meaningful discussions and find a wealth of data that was previously unattainable.

This new medium has the ability to re-inject the thoughtfulness into politics. Thanks to new services, we can get briefings that before only ministers could expect delivered to our desktops.

Sites like openDemocracy (among others) show a growing confidence in bringing more people into the charmed court circle of fruitful discourse. As on-line discussion begins to mature, we can surely develop a more meaningful relationship with those that we elect.

Rather than promoting ‘Direct Democracy’ we can use the web to teach us that there is an alternative to the shrill cacophony of dissatisfaction that modern politics is becoming. The web must be used to make representatives more accessible. We can learn to trust people with whom we only partly agree – and we can elect them to represent our best interests without suspicion. ‘Netiquette’ beats the egg-throwing that is disfiguring the UK general election any day.

Personally, I’ve never found any medium as good as e-mail for sustained and meaningful discourse. It makes us behave in a more civil manner. As someone with an unfortunate verbal turn of phrase, I can confirm that even people like me can have a constructive conversation with complete strangers. The joys of ‘asynchronous dialogue’!

But if this is to enrich the process, we require a civil space that we trust - not a million proprietary fragments. In short, we need to ensure v2.0 of Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) gets an effective service release. And this can only be ensured by a secure future for PSB v1.98 – the airwaves kind. See my contribution to the media topic for how and why…

Paul Evans is a UK-based new media consultant.

The seven dwarves of politics
18 May 2001

Charles Glass writes:

It’s no easy feat to explain to my compatriots in America what is going on here, but I’ll try. On 7 June, the British electorate will vote for its members of parliament. The leader of the party with the most seats will become prime minister.

The front-runner – the others are barely walking – is the incumbent, Tony Blair. They used to call him Bambi, but I see him as the Snow White of British politics, bringing out the seven dwarves in all of us. I’ve become Sleepy listening to his radio broadcasts, and most of my friends are Grumpy. A few Dopeys are voting Labor, and nobody is Happy. There may not be a Sneezy, but both Labor and the Conservatives are oversubscribed with Sleazies. And Doc can’t do a damn thing to fix it.

Luckily, the campaign in the country lasts only a month. Most people won’t bother to vote, but Labor will call its inevitable victory a "landslide," maybe even a "historic landslide." The Tories are hopeless. They had nineteen years in Downing Street under Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Major, but they haven’t been able to sell themselves since they went into opposition. You might wonder why.

Simple. Tony Blair took their policies: privatising every national industry the Conservatives didn’t offload below market value to their friends, sucking up to big business, playing the race card by calling every tortured Kurd or battered gypsy a "bogus" asylum seeker, letting the schools and health service rot, dutifully joining American air raids on the third world, selling anti-civilian weapons to the militaries of Israel and Indonesia, giving subsidies to the big agribusiness corporations to accelerate the bankruptcies of small farmers, spying on the public with millions of closed circuit cameras and listening devices and sending more and more young people to prison. When the so-called Left party can do all that, and still keep what is left of the working class quiet, who needs Tories?

The demise of politics, which used to involve public debate and the poor taking an interest in holding onto some of the national wealth, extends well beyond Britain’s shores. We saw it in the last pseudo-election in the United States. I hear about it when I visit friends in Italy, Germany, Poland and France. (Not Israel, by the way, where politics is the breath of life, and death, and voting, debating, writing and thinking count.) Protest is contained, as it was in London on the first of May when a few thousand demonstrators were hemmed in by 6,000 cops. There is no more political discourse, because there is no more politics. Everything now is management, and we voters have about as much say as the guy with one share of Microsoft.

It does not matter that Tony Blair gave, as he did, $1.5 billion to his friends and backers to build a worthless tent, grandly dubbed the Millennium Dome. Now that the thing is closed, no one will buy it until it’s knocked down. It is not much different from his predecessor selling off the railways to twenty-five different companies whose managements could not collectively run a gas station.

What depresses me is that we, the public, have given up. We surrender votes, if we vote at all, to advertising campaigns, public relations tricks and money. The only reliable guide to victory in a US Senate race, for example, is who spends the most money. A candidate’s sex, race, criminal record or political affiliation is a less reliable guide to success than the size of the cash box.

"What ass first let loose the doctrine that the suffrage is a high boon and voting a noble privilege?" the bard of Baltimore, H. L. Mencken, wrote in 1920. He was holding his nose to vote for Warren G. Harding, a drunk who would enforce Prohibition. I remember the early years of my political consciousness, when the choice that befell the country seemed to be the reductio ad absurdum of democracy: Richard Milhous Nixon versus Hubert Horatio Humphrey. My God. Compared to the intellectual midgets who followed, Tricky Dick and Hubey were statesmen.

I remember seeing Mike Dukakis in a Boston restaurant with a bunch of financial backers about twenty years ago. I never rated Dukakis, but until I heard him grovelling to a bunch of used car salesmen and realtors, I had no idea how low a man could go. You can be damn sure he was no different from his opponent or from Tony Blair and his opponent, a Yorkshireman called William (not Bill) Hague. They serve as lackeys at the court of money. They require the big bucks to run campaigns and, because politicians come to office young and live long, to see them through retirement with seats on corporate boards, speaking fees, book contracts and the rest of the perks in the gift of Murdoch, AOL-Time-Warner, Philip Morris or Lockheed.

Vox populi, vox dei? God help us. We must go to the polls whistling, under the idiotic smile of Snow Blair, "Hey, ho, Hey, ho, it’s off to nowhere we go." Unless Disney sues over copyright.

Elections, lotteries or direct democracy?
18 May 2001

David Beetham writes:

The system of representative government only works democratically at all if citizens are continuously active through campaigning groups.

The democratic justification for elections is that, since most citizens do not have the time to consider and decide the country’s law and policy in person, they hand over their right to do so to representative citizens whom they appoint as their agents, through an electoral process in which each vote counts equally. These appointees should be directly accountable to their electors by the threat of being voted out of office, and, collectively, should be representative of the citizen body in terms of its political opinions, social composition and geographical distribution.

Whether elections fulfil these democratic criteria, and how far they do so, depends on the electoral system. The UK’s first-past-the-post constituency system does not treat each citizen’s vote equally regardless of where they live or which party’s representative they vote for, nor does it produce a Parliament that is representative of the political opinions or social composition of the electorate, though it is geographically quite representative.

The system also makes it hard for small parties to gain parliamentary representation, and thus narrows the range of electoral debate, as well as concentrating attention on `swing voters’ in a handful of constituencies where the choice of government is decided. There is much room for improvement in all these respects.

The only democratic alternative to elections as a means of selecting legislators is a lottery, as juries are currently appointed, together with some mechanism for ensuring that the Parliament so selected would be truly representative of the citizen body in relevant respects. This method has the disadvantage of a loss of clear accountability (who precisely would the `lottocracy’ be accountable to?), and a loss of continuity and experience. It might, however, have a place, for example, in appointment to a second chamber, where it would be much more democratic than heredity, “buggins’ turn” or “Tony’s cronies”.

It is often said that an election every four years or so gives citizens a pitifully small role in the political process. However, elections act as a continuous discipline on governments, and all other mechanisms of public accountability ultimately depend on them. Moreover, the system of representative government only works democratically at all if citizens are continuously active through campaigning groups, voluntary associations, demonstrations, contacting their MPs, use of the law to defend their rights, and so on.

In this sense there is no contradiction between a system of elected representatives and direct citizen involvement; indeed, they are mutually interdependent. At the same time there are good arguments for increasing the formal role of direct citizen participation through a right to citizens’ initiatives and referenda on legislation, though with quite high thresholds to prevent abuse or overuse.

David Beetham is co-editor of the UK Democratic Audit 2001, and co-author of Introducing Democracy.

The right proportions
18 May 2001

Kennedy Stewart writes:

We're stuck with elections, anything else is just fantasy - so we'd better improve the electoral system.

Despite the regrets of many and the arguments of some, the only way to run a large democracy is by electing representatives to make decisions. To bypass these much-maligned processes, some have suggested that leaders should be selected by lottery or have their powers greatly limited by allowing more direct input through frequent referendums.

However, the idea that these mechanisms could replace elections is pure fantasy. Contemporary policy-making often requires long hours of intense deliberation and bargaining made possible only by delegating powers to a smaller group of people who closely reflect the preferences of the entire community.

In a practical sense, negotiations can only be accomplished by sets of leaders who can devote large quantities of time to the process. It would be hard to imagine citizens granting such tremendous responsibility to a group of unknown people, whether or not they are randomly selected.

For the most part then, we are stuck with elections. Thus it is probably more helpful to investigate how to improve these processes rather than rid ourselves of them. Correcting defective election rules is one way to enhance democracy as faulty rules can distort how ideas are represented in legislative debates.

The worst distortions can occur when votes are translated into seats, but this problem can be detected by testing proportionality - that is by assessing if parties receive a share of seats that closely matches their share of votes. Proportional systems guarantee that a party will not get a bigger or lesser share of seats than it deserves. Disproportional systems guarantee that some parties will be unfairly rewarded with seats they have not earned.

As acknowledged by the recent UK commission on election reform headed by Lord Jenkins, systems that unfairly alter how votes are translated into seats - such as the very disproportional first-past-the-post system used in British national elections - should be replaced by systems that are more proportional – such as those now used in Scotland, Wales and the Greater London Assembly.

Proportional systems serve to increase the overall legitimacy of elections as they more accurately reflect the preferences of all within a society. In the end we don't have to abandon elections, we just have to make them better. Election systems that guarantee proportionality are an important first step in this direction.

Kennedy Stewart is a director and lecturer (MSc Public Policy and Public Management Programmes) at Birkbeck College, London.

Elections are riddled with illusions
20 May 2001

Steven Lukes writes:

Once you think about them it becomes obvious that everywhere elections are riddled with illusions -

- that every four or five years political power reverts to the sovereign people; that elections exemplify genuine political equality, counteracting rather than reproducing the prevailing inequalities of power and privilege in society; that the electoral process is not systematically biassed, but provides a genuinely open competition among individuals within parties and among parties; that every voice, whatever its accent and whatever it says, has an equal chance to be heard; that the party programmes link individuals’ private troubles with public policies; that the electors are sovereign, informed and rational choosers rather than manipulated consumers or bemused spectators; that it is instrumentally rational for each person to vote, since every vote counts (and in the United States, is counted).

Of course people think about elections and they see through such illusions. All those who run elections and who run in them repeat them in public solemnly. They are the symbolic expression of this contemporary rite of our rulers and would-be rulers. Yet both they and those whom they run after, voters and non-voters alike, are practising, not believing. They all enact the philosophy of “as if”.

Of course political reality can be more or less distant from these illusions. Democratic elections can be corrupted in old and new ways. There are also times, periods of democratic intensity, often after wars, when, with high levels of participation and responsiveness by political elites, the sense of illusion is at its lowest.

The riddle of elections is that people participate in them at all. Many, of course, do not. In the most powerful, pious and proselytising contemporary democracy, one hundred million citizens abstain. As Tocqueville insisted, such withdrawal is the greatest danger to a democracy and at its most corrosive when based on cynicism. In the Soviet-style “Peoples’ Democracies”, such apathy was expressed through extensive participation in pseudo-elections.

Perhaps the best index of a well-functioning democracy is the extent to which people are prepared to pretend be fooled by electoral illusions. Through elections, democracies pay homage to political virtue.

Steven Lukes is a professor at NYU and LSE.

Democracy is in its infancy
20 May 2001

Titus Alexander writes:

Elections are not the begining or end of democracy, but necessary to decide whether to retain or reject a government. The development of democracy is in its infancy.

Elections are an opportunity for the public to confirm or reject the government and a local representative to parliament. Most people do not want to (and should not need to) be involved in government all the time, just at they do not want to be bothered about the drains, roads or whatever. It is neither possible nor desirable for everybody to be involved in everything all the time. But people should be able to take part in those issues that concern them, and take part in formulating (or opposing) policies and measures by government between elections. National elections are an opportunity for the whole population to decide whether to retain or reject the government that ultimately takes the decisions. The development of democracy is in its infancy and we need:

• national policy-forums of stakeholders in different policy areas (education, family, criminal justice, etc) to scrutinise and evaluate policy and legislation in depth;
• regional assemblies;
• revitalisation and empowerment of local and neighbourhood government;
• democratic oversight and participation in public institutions, such as schools, health authorities etc.;
• democratically accountable global governance.

But democracy does not just come from formal institutions. It requires a culture of participation and empowerment, which needs to start in schools (for which the citizenship curriculum and 'citizenship schools' are a start).

Titus Alexander is a freelance educationalist.