Voter disillusionment is rampant in the face of short-term political thinking and the increasing sway of business elites. Can democracy respond?
In the US, an amoral, convicted felon of proven incompetence is taking power with a convincing mandate. The UK is still reeling from the effects of a vote to leave the EU, which, according to surveys taken shortly afterwards, few people really wanted. In New Zealand, policy flip-flops and hairpin turns are a distinguishing feature of each new administration. And minor parties, with single-figure percentages of the vote, have formed a tail that is wagging a dog that appears to have no sense of smell.
These anomalous results could be seen as a failure of democracy to achieve its aims, or as a sign that voters are dissatisfied with the process. Either way, it’s impossible to escape the feeling that democracy isn’t doing the business.
What’s wrong
In many countries, including ours, “democracy” means representative democracy. Every three years, we hand over decisions about basic aspects of our lives – health, education, personal safety – to a few people who are then left to make the decisions. We have little meaningful input – in fact most of us aren’t aware of most of what goes on – and we repeat the cycle every three years.
The problems with organising things this way are many and obvious, although seldom discussed. In a 2017 speech to the Athens Democracy Forum, former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan summed up the problems as he saw them then. First, growing inequality within countries. Second, governments looking increasingly powerless in the face of the imperatives of the global economy and the ever-growing web of regional and global deals they have entered into. Third, a crisis of effectiveness compared with authoritarian regimes, which seem to enjoy record rates of growth.
Three for the too-hard basket. Under our system, it is in politicians’ interest not to deal with long-term issues. As David Runciman, author of The History of Ideas and former professor of politics at Cambridge University, says: “Change lacks political grip on our imaginations because it is so incremental.” Also, the future doesn’t vote. Politicians depend on the goodwill of the current electorate for their jobs, so focus on short-term fixes to please them.
Philosopher AC Grayling was the first master of the New College of the Humanities in London (now Northeastern University London) and author of Democracy and Its Crisis. He describes our system as “elective dictatorship”. He singles out the process of whipping, by which MPs are required to vote in line with the decisions of their party executives, as a form of “harassment and coercion [that] would be illegal in other workplaces and subverts the democratic process”. Put simply – MPs are forced to represent their party, not their constituents.
Democracy is also enfeebled, writes Belgian cultural historian David Van Reybrouck in his book Against Elections: The Case for Democracy, by “our insane media”, which “true to market logic, have come to regard the exaggeration of futile conflicts as more important than any attempt to offer insight into real problems”. Politicians want to score points, and the increasingly commercialised media provides the opportunity via “incidentalism” – incidents are better at attracting media attention than good debates.
Helmut Modlik, chief executive of Ngāti Toa iwi authority Te Rūnanga o Toa Rangatira, brings this criticism home. “Democracy creates a way to tap into the largest possible pool of ideas,” he told the Listener. “But if our pool of potential wisdom is poorly educated, is being propagandised and polarised, then we’ve shot in the foot our source of strength, and stretched our social fabric, arguably tearing it, which is what’s happening in democracies the world over.
“You can’t have a healthy democracy without a healthy economy and a healthy Fourth Estate … If the market can’t deliver that, then it becomes, by definition, a public good.”
JUST WHO IS BEING REPRESENTED IN our Parliament? Well, everyone, under MMP, which promised to deliver arithmetically proportional representation of the population. The arithmetic is flawless, but the system allows anomalies such as a majority one-party government in 2020 and an unbalanced coalition in 2023.
Grayling has written two books on the problems with democracy and possible solutions. He is so exercised by the problem that he is currently writing a third. Approached for an interview, he responded by supplying the Listener with a draft of the untitled new book’s first chapter and permission to quote from it.
Asked why MMP seems to have got derailed, he replied by email that the “Single Transferable Vote system (no system is perfect) would go quite a way to remedy” specific problems but that greater reforms are called for. “What is really needed is a constitutional system that constrains what party politics does in government … A clear account of the purposes of government, definition of the duties of elected and appointed officials and the limits on their powers, and remedies for misapplication or abuse of them, [are] crucial to reverse the evolution of ‘republican’ democracy into de facto oligarchy.” Party politics, he added, has infected and, in too many respects, usurped “government for the people”.
Under our system, it is in politicians’ interest not to deal with long-term issues.
IT’S SO HARD TO FIND good political help these days. Parties need people who are electable rather than competent; they thus favour people who want to be in Parliament and give the party their loyalty.
What may not be top of mind for them, says Anna Curnow of think-tank Trust Democracy NZ, is the idea that “you’re not here for yourself, you’re here for the people you serve”.
The problem is, it’s widely claimed, that competent people can earn much more in the corporate world.
Quite so, but this puts the issue the wrong way around – the problem is not that politicians get paid too little, it is that corporates get paid too much. To quote just one of an array of dazzling statistics available on this point: CEOs of major companies earn 30-50 times more than the average wage, an Otago University Business School study found. Corporate salaries need to come down; MPs’ salaries could stay about the same.
The system allows inconsistency to lead the way, as Modlik notes, explaining the epiphany he had around the issue. “When the pandemic happened and Jacinda Ardern announced she was shutting down the country, what was striking was how quickly the rules changed.
“For me as an iwi leader, having engaged in arguing for so many things and being told, ‘We can’t afford it,’ to see in an instant all of that money flow … it was hard not to cynically conclude, ‘Oh, obviously the wrong people were facing an existential threat before.’”
Multinational business lies outside the powers of single states and causes harm that democracy cannot control.
New Zealand has recently had its nose rubbed in a problem we long prided ourselves on not having: conflicts of interest and undue influence being brought to bear on politicians by well-connected lobbyists.
No one is alleging corruption out loud, but words are being chosen carefully. An analysis by RNZ data journalist Farah Hancock last October found companies and shareholders associated with the government’s fast-track projects had donated more than $500,000 to National, Act and New Zealand First.
Grayling points out in his forthcoming book that governments have less sway than they used to because “multinational business lies outside the powers of single states and causes harm that democracy cannot control. Capitalism has produced entities too large and powerful for national governments to constrain … [Vast] amounts of wealth are accumulated in fewer and fewer hands, wealth which is sequestered into tax havens depriving national economies of significant revenues, driving inequalities and empowering individuals and corporations to exert influence over governments, influence aimed at ensuring the protection of their activities and profits.”
Can we fix it?
Yes, we can, says Grayling, who has a long list of reforms of varying sizes, costs and degrees of difficulty which he thinks could get democracy back on track within the current framework. And what we have is worth saving for many reasons, including that “for all the failings and difficulties of democracies otherwise, they largely succeed in protecting individual freedoms … It is said that ‘the price of liberty is eternal vigilance’; this might better be adjusted to ‘the price of liberty is eternal engagement’.”
And that engagement should start early. People need to understand how politics works and how government works to stop it being subverted or corrupted. Grayling advocates compulsory civics education in school and compulsory voting, starting at 16. If people are able to put what they learn into practice from the time they leave school, participation in democracy becomes a central part of everyone’s life.
For politicians used to a complaisant electorate and reliant on slender mandates the prospect of a politically aware and involved population could be the stuff, if not of nightmares, of at least fitful slumbers.
In elections, says Grayling, there should be complete transparency about funding so we know who and what are contributing. Limits on spending level the playing field. Media should be held to rigorous standards for reporting and lobbying. Opinion polling should cease a week before voting day.
Referenda, often seen as the gold standard of representative democracy inclusiveness, are not a fix, he says. “A referendum is an opinion poll … It puts a question, usually complex, to be answered by a simple yes or no.” There is no requirement to get information, listen to arguments, form a judgment or justify it.
Mini-publics, citizen panels, policy juries: around the world, governments at all levels are experimenting with the likes of these as ways to strengthen representative democracy by adding new forms of participation, such as deliberative democracy.
Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures based at the University of Auckland has lived experience of this. Deputy director Anne Bardsley says the centre sprang from the office of the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Adviser in 2019. It acknowledges that “all these really complex or longer-term issues require public input in a different way, and New Zealand hasn’t been great at having conversations about tricky things,” says Bardsley. “We got an MBIE smart ideas grant to try a different kind of process, which led us into the whole deliberative democracy space.”
Koi Tū was recently asked to help out in Gisborne, where there are important issues about land use, forestry and soil to be dealt with. “Plantation forestry really can’t continue there at all. But what does this all mean?
“There’s going to be a consultation on this. There’s going to be the typical stakeholder loud voices, but if we get together a citizens assembly that represents the whole region and the affected communities, they can take in that information, start developing a picture, find common ground and make a set of recommendations on what they would like.
“It will come down to, ‘There are things we’d like to see done, but who’s going to pay and how do we make this fair?’ So that’s the big question. It’s pretty tricky.”
To succeed, such a process must be accepted as valid by the people who’ve been making the decisions so far. “It can take pressure off of them,” says Bardsley. “They don’t have to be politically responsible for a decision that otherwise seems hard to do, because the public will come around.
“We don’t give the public credit for thinking through the trade-offs and being able to make good decisions. And a lot of times, they’re different from what the politicians think the public wants.”
All these really complex or longer-term issues require public input in a different way.
Trust Democracy’s Anna Curnow is a former deputy mayor of Kaipara. She, too, after years working within the system, had a lightbulb moment. “We did spatial planning [land use], and we went to every single community, and we talked to a range of people and [asked], ‘What is it that you want in the spatial plan, which will then inform the district plan?’ And they told us, and we reviewed the district plan on that basis.
“It was the first time in my political life I got that sense of, ‘Oh, this is what it feels like when you really talk to people.’ You don’t do a statement and proposal and slap it in the library and tell people to go and read it and fill in a form about it. You actually sit down with people. You talk to them.”
She would like to see “a proper deliberative process, where the decisions are not made by a majority vote, but you have to get to at least 80%. You have to work hard to get to 80% on anything, but by the time you get there, you’ve kind of flushed out everything that needs to be flushed out, whereas 50% you can easily do with lobbying. An 80% majority might slow us down, but maybe we’d get a richer outcome.”
Rip it up and start again?
All the “fixes” discussed so far include traditional elections, with people voting for representatives of political parties. But there are other ways of practising democracy – if by that we mean ensuring the will of the people is met.
Contemporary representative democracy is tired, vindictive, paranoid, self-deceiving, clumsy and frequently ineffectual, says David Runciman. So why don’t we replace it with something better?
He considers several alternative systems, some of which are already in place in other countries, most of which have elements that are likely to make them unappealing here.
There is, for instance, China’s “pragmatic environmental authoritarianism”, or the technology-focused pax technica. Or adaptive governance (decentralised decision-making involving people with different backgrounds and skills), network governance (networks that collaborate to solve problems) and collaborative governance (with elements of both).
But what if, for instance, people didn’t vote? When we want to know what people really think, we survey sample groups at random, science having shown this produces an accurate result. Such polls are conducted with considerably more rigour than happens triennially at polling booths.
Party requirements force MPs not just to say things they don’t believe, but also to vote them into law.
An alternative means of selecting those who govern us ‒that’s being taken increasingly seriously ‒ is one of the oldest: sortition. In this, representatives are chosen by lot, as they were in the early democracy of ancient Athens (bar slaves, women and others not eligible). Koi Tū uses sortition in its work.
Belgium’s Van Reybrouck writes: “Sortition has been used as a valuable political instrument in several states … drawing lots generally resulted in less conflict and more participation by citizens.
“Sortition was never deployed exclusively, but always in combination with elections in order to guarantee competence.”
It reduces the potential for corruption, the leaning towards tribalism and the tendency to short-termism.
The example of juries, which are chosen at random to deal with big issues, encourages confidence in sortition.
Van Reybrouck again: “Reasons for not choosing citizens by lot are often identical to the reasons once put forward for not allowing peasants or women to vote,” mainly around competence.
It’s argued that elected representatives have more technical competencies than a body chosen by lot, but what’s the advantage of being governed by a group of people who know an awful lot about what it’s like to be a lawyer and nothing about what it’s like to be a cleaner?
As for ability, those elected are not always particularly competent. That’s why they have staff. Under a sortition model, there would be more freedom and incentive to call in experts to inform the decision makers.
Terry Bouricius is a leading US theorist and advocate for sortition-based systems. He is a former politician at city and state level, with an insider’s view of democracy’s failing.
Bouricius has proposed a multilevel, multi-body system of policy, administrative and legislative bodies chosen by lot. It looks eye-wateringly complicated, but so would the system we have if you had to explain it from the ground up.
He describes it in a paper Democracy Through Multi-Body Sortition: Athenian Lessons for the Modern Day in the Journal of Public Deliberation, and in a more user-friendly form in an episode of The Similitude Podcast.
Bouricius once said it would take 200 years to implement his sortition design, but it is gaining a foothold at some level in various locations, including several US states, France and Ireland. Three years ago, the German-speaking region of East Belgium moved to institute much of the model, and he is in the process of revising his timeframe downwards.
Other superficially drastic solutions are also worth considering. What if, for instance, we didn’t have political parties? Party requirements force MPs not just to say things they don’t believe, but also to vote them into law. It’s very hard to get out of that mindset and envisage a world in which we no longer had to listen to someone insisting something was black because the other guy said it was white. When actually it was yellow.
This would, of course, require the replacement of MMP, a system that forms governments based on party votes. MMP is an improvement on some systems but it has done nothing to deal with many of the problems discussed here.
If representatives didn’t have to devote time to telling us how terrible the opposition was, they would not only have more time to spend on solutions, they would be obliged to do so.
If everyone was an independent, voting according to what was best, they would have to think for themselves and ideas would have the potential to flourish.
Tribalism afflicts not just the politicians, but the people who vote for them. Between 2011 and 2020, according to a University of Auckland study, 90% of voters did not change their party vote.
All that campaigning huffing, puffing and bluffing to such little effect. Hardly seems worth bothering, does it?
