Schumpeter’s two chapters on democracy in his great book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy provide the best framework I know of articulating the things that trouble me about the current state of democracy.
The chapters assert the following propositions:
- Rousseau’s idea of the will of the people is an illusion for the simple reason that that will is distilled from a chaos of conflicting interests.
- Democracy arrives at decisions by way of a process by which factions of the political class vye for the consent of the governed.
- When considering politics, people are in a highly abstract world that’s usually far from their own concrete experience. They also know that their own singular vote amongst millions gives them an infinitesimal chance of influencing political outcomes. So their practical knowledge and their incentive to exercise care are both gravely diminished compared to situations where they are making decisions about their own welfare. This invites voting which is at least as much expressive as it is deliberative. In Schumpeter’s words, “In politics the typical citizen . . . argues and analyses in a way which he would readily recognise as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again. His thinking becomes associative and affective”. Schumpeter draws attention to the similarities between this and the process by which advertising is addressed to manipulating the unconscious.
- In all things organisational, whether from the Federal Government to the local tennis club, a division of labour is necessary for the organisation to function effectively. Schumpeter puts it this way. “Collectives act almost exclusively by accepting leadership — this is the dominant mechanism of practically any collective action which is more than a reflex.”. Schumpeter thus grafts the idea of leadership onto this division of labour and perhaps he is right that one needs leadership, but one doesn’t even need anything as strong as that to make the point. We need a division of labour. And that calls for delegation. Right now I am reliably informed that the polity is in the lengthy process of investigating how to deal with Food Derived from Reduced Lignin Lucerne Line. I’m thinking we need delegation here. Getting us all to come up with an opinion on Alan Jones show just won’t cut the mustard. Thus we have any number of agencies in our society that do this kind of stuff, or advise governments and all the rest of it. But the people remaining sovereign have the power to overrule their delegates. That’s as it should be. But if the thing is going to function tolerably the people need to give due regard to the fact that they don’t know the details – the people we delegated the issues to know the details.
Alas as time has passed since Joseph Schumpeter shared his dyspeptic but insightful thoughts with us, two things have been exacerbating the tensions in this system.
On the one hand, our social and economic world has become much more complex with the division of labour proceeding apace. On the other the processes of democratic deliberation have been coming increasingly under the sway of infotainment. The result of this is an increasing number of no-go areas for policy.
There are memes of the right that the left dare not disturb in their lair. For instance that debt and deficits are bad. Of course debt and deficits are bad, but only if other things remain equal. Once you understand what debt and deficits might purchase, one is then in a world of abstract and difficult calculations. That, the left have judged, won’t play well for them. And so for the best part of twenty years fiscal populism has held sway. Another one that the left won’t be disturbing any time soon, at least in a serious way, is the regulation of media content.
There are memes of the left that the right dare not disturb. I suspect there are more of these. I’d include the following.
- We should take action against ‘dumped’ imports.
- Nuclear power is a bad bad thing.
- Kerbside recycling is something we can do for the environment (it’s effects are negligible and for the money we spend on it we could do a lot more for the environment).
And these are just the ones that can be ideologically identified. However most of the blockers are bi-partisan blockers which is to say that both mainstream parties run a mile from them simply because they know that the rules of vox pop democracy mean that trouble can be stirred up against any government that tries to change things, no matter how bona fide protagonists of the policy are or how well credentialed the policies are. In this we can include all tax reform.
So gentle readers, I’d be interested in any comment on these observations and any additions to the list of areas in which the rules of Vox Pop Democracy prevent us from making political progress.
Hi Nick,
The import of health services would fit your list, or major changes in worker’s rights.
I am not sure this is merely due to politics as infotainment: if we wanted to reform things, we could probably first take them out of the political arena via some institution that is charged with optimising some outcome, and then let that institution take the difficult decisions we can’t take in full view. We for instance do not let politicians openly decide who gets that life-saving operation and who doesn’t. But there is still a decision to be made. This decision is taken at the local level by nurses and doctors. Also, tax reforms do still happen, but at a slow pace, and often at the local level, out of sight.
What I would sooner point to is that we have lived through very peaceful and prosperous decades. You then get entrenched privileges of all types and people who defend those privileges. Public life gets divvied up in territories, complete with political protection. Things then need to get bad enough for the privileges to start to be recognised as detrimental to the majority, which entails a long process of counter-organisation. Then you get a reform cycle, after which the game starts anew.
Thanks Paul,
Certainly the laws of Vox Pop are not the only things stopping progress.
On your point about peace bringing this kind of stasis, I reluctantly concede you may well be right. Still there are times when there is a kind of momentum from past efforts.
The success of the early Hawke years was parlayed into a kind of reform mentality – the idea that reform was what governments did and were principally there for – which outlasted the trouble that introduced us to that reform – the two recessions of 1975-6 and 1981-2. It lasted up till the rolling out of the GST in 2000 as the dividends from past reform were rolling in. So it would be nice to think that good times can bring reform, though it’s rarer.
The other really big problem with the idea that we need bad things to happen to get reform is not just that often bad things just lead to more bad things (see Weimar, Republic and Hitler, Adoph) but also that reform requires insight, not just a ‘no pain, no gain’ mentality. And I think this is increasingly an issue. A lot of the reforms of the ‘reform generation’ from 1983-2000 were pretty straightforward. Eliminate tariffs and silly regulation on airline competition, shopping hours etc, rationalise government service delivery by corporatising, splitting regulators and service deliverers, purchasers and providers, impose access regimes on natural monopoly assets of national significance and then consider privatisation and re-regulation of prices.
But improving regulation of finance, or occupational regulation of doctors and specialists, and the delivery of better health and education services. These are not things that require a lot of thought, not just political courage. Indeed, there’s a strange tendency for economists to speak of ‘reform’ as if it’s all pretty straightforward what it is. There are still some fairly clear areas where that’s the case – for instance in tax policy, and perhaps commenters can suggest some other reforms – but in other areas it’s not so easy.
hmmm. I am trying to see your point Nick. The closest I get to seeing what you describe is the 24/7 media battle that politicians now have to be engaged in: much more than in the decades preceding the internet, politicians have to manage their media profile and have to spend lots of time spinning stories and reacting to image attacks by their opponents. This certainly reduces the quality of open debate. But the real debate was normally held behind closed doors anyway, so the quality of the open debate is not necessarily informative of the quality of the actual debate.
So does the ‘Vox Populi’ reduce the possibilities for reform and the quality of those reforms? Not so easy to say.
Mainly, I would say, the 24/7 chatter puts the government departments more in charge as their political masters simply don’t have the time to absorb the underlying issues and thus have to rely on departmental expertise to make the real decisions. The Gonski reforms and the disability reforms are a case in point: as best as I can tell, the departments are making up their content as we speak. And this might not be a bad thing, depending on the quality of the debate inside departments.
Yet, there are knock-on effects. As a result of these political pressures, the departments too will be somewhat intellectually emasculated as they too are now made more subservient to the media cycle. I truly don’t know what the balance of those effects is.
I expect that things have got worse, but it’s also possible that, at least for some time it has been ever thus. That still provides the same spur for action – which is to say, can we, and if so how can we, get a system in which broad consensus can be realised in law and policy making without it so easily being paralysed by partisan spoiling.
Simply having a third house of parliament where such consensuses can be made visible would be useful.
And in a future post I’ll set out a further development of that idea.
Road congestion pricing (even when the polity can buy the idea of latent demand)
Hi Alphonse, I had filed ‘road congestion pricing’ under ‘taxes’ otherwise I would have included it, but you’re right. And it’s one of those ideologically neutral ones – or one that one could imagine either ideology going for, with the opposing major party fanning the flames of reaction and obstruction.
Yes, ideologically neutral. Might this therefore be one where an opposition leader could enter the cabinet room bearing a white flag and say “let’s do this this together – major parties plus Greens v reactionary ignorami. It’s the answer to your problems now and we’ll appreciate it being there when we wrest back the government benches from you”. The public would be so gobsmacked, they might even listen and learn. Alternatively, the bones could go into place consensually while the parties argued about hypothecation for transport expenditure, compensation for the car-dependent etc.
Of course the motivation and capacity for refrom is much less in peaceful and propserous times, but doesn’t this get things the wrong way around? The whole purpose of reform is to make peaceful and prosperous times – reforms are not good things in themselves but rather justified by their consequences.
For my part, I say long may reform be difficult.
that is a very optimistic take! The problem is that rent-seeking activities continue unabated in peaceful times and lead to more privileges and higher inequality. So there is change, but not for the better. I am more with Nick in that it would be good to have a continuous reform mentality. The question of how to get that is not an easy one.
I don’t really understand you point DD. Reform produces worthwhile consequences. So we should pursue reform. Yes, we might wish for prosperous times in which, let’s assume that reform is more difficult, but so what? And whether we’re in good times or bad, if reform can produce improvements in our lives, I’m for it.
How about these for Vox Pop?
State run health and education systems
Public subsidy of private schooling
Road funding taking precedence over public transport / rail funding?
US Centric foreign policy
Obesity programs that leave Big Food revenues untouched
Cost of living knee jerk reactions. Especially fuel prices
Truth in sentencing / tough on crime / victims’ “rights”. It’s first revenge-based and second the delusion that higher penalties have a significant deterrent effect. Meanwhile the prisons are chocka and consuming funds that could be applied to better policing, crime prevention and early diversion. Throw in needless drug criminalisation as a further component of this seemingly inescapable law and order vox pop syndrome.
Alphonse, do we have a problem here? I accept that the US does. I guess I wouldn’t want a much higher prison population. But we seem pretty lenient for violent crime. We also seem to make a habit of especially lenient sentencing when nice middle class people commit crimes – like murder for instance.
I think you are both right.
We are overly lenient on violent and sexual crime. Personally I have no fundamental objection to the death penalty nor to permanent incarceration for pedophiles and violent sex offenders, in part based on their crimes putting them insofar as I am concerned outside of my sphere of common interest and because of the recidivist rates which I understand to be unacceptably high.
However we do also lock up far too many people for minor offenses. This is the war-on-drugs disease (although it is not just about drugs, drugs are a massive part). These people often suffer considerably from the experience and frequently return a more hardened criminal with a worse drug problem.
The net return to society of this appears to be so far negative it isn’t funny.
NSW minister and ex-DPP prosecutor, Greg Smith, noticed the problem before attaining office. Let’s see if it is considered politic to address it. My opinion is that judicial discretion did more good than bad before Bob Carr decided to see the Libs and tabloids and raise them. He was nothing if not pragmatic.