Our Problems With Parliaments

The idea of representative democracy finds itself on the the ropes. Public opinion, egged on by leaders playing to the less salutary angels of our nature, is giving it a beating. This has happened before — e.g., the late 1960s, the early 1930's — and we shouldn’t presume that the current discontents are somehow worse or without parallel. But maybe something really is different this time.

One of problems that Parliament or Congress or the Assembly (chose your relevant legislative body) presents to citizens remains the same. It is in these legislatures where our own (imperfect and partial) ways of looking at the world, and how we want that world to be ordered, are represented. It is in these legislatures where our representatives have to debate, deliberate, negotiate, wheedle, log roll, and horse trade with representatives of people who see the world differently. Both the process and the outcomes of these encounters are invariably less than we hope for, especially when we examine them closely.

But there is another problem, and it has gotten worse. We don’t like to be represented. We don’t like decisions to be made on our behalf, especially when we can’t fully track how the decisions are made, and even more so when we don’t fully agree with the outcome. Our forebears might have had to acknowledge that, when representatives had to travel to the capital by horse and buggy or steamship, there was no other way for democracy to work. But with the ubiquitous and instantaneous communications technology now at our fingertips, we can track what our representatives are doing 24/7. We can give them real time instructions as to what they should or should not do on our behalf. And the notion that they are better equipped to make these decisions by dint of their elected status, perspective, or experience has become (we tell ourselves) laughable. Not only the distance but also the deference needed for representative democracy have been obliterated.

Where do we go from here? For many, it is into the camps of political leaders who, by appealing to our baser instincts and / or offering simplistic descriptions of what can and should be done, brush aside the complexity of politics and law-making in a diverse society as well as the institutions in which they are meant to occur. We sense these leaders are giving voice to what we are feeling, that there would be no representative distance between us and them. This is of course an old temptation, for both leaders and the led. But it has been turbocharged by our communications technology and shifting assumptions about who can and should speak on our behalf.

These strike me as the core problems we have with parliaments. Anybody have good ideas about solutions for them? Or, to be more realistic, better ways of coping with them?