Why I don’t feel like voting…
Don’t get me wrong. I am interested in politics. So interested that I am very worried about what I see; like many of us. So why is it that I am still not really into voting?
Remember at school when we learned how hard we (I mean our forefathers and mothers) had to fight to conquer the right to vote… That voting is the expression of the will of the people… That we come first and elected politicians are responding to us…
Well, that sounds good on paper, but since I have the right to vote it never felt quite like that.
And for sure I am not the only one. In fact in most recent elections, abstentions have been one of the main king and queen makers.
In my country, France, even for presidential elections — the tendency is clear: abstention is on the rise — around 25% when looking only at registered voters (it would reach 30% taking into account the entire voting-age population).
Less popular elections like regional ones hardly mobilize half of the voters.
So why does ‘It’ rather feel like a circus for so many of us?
Every few years the beauty contest starts again. We don’t trust most of them but we still have to go for it. Why do I feel co-opted to participate in this masquerade?
Should I feel guilty about not wanting to vote? In my case usually a bit of peer pressure is sufficient to get me to the booth (or an extreme right/left candidate on the ticket).
Sure, if I am not happy with the candidates what prevents me from running?! The rhetoric is well known: putting the blame on the voters.
But are elections really the best way — or rather the only way — for us, the people — to participate in the political life of our countries? Can’t we do better?
It is fascinating reading Van Reybrouck ‘Against Elections’ to rediscover something that should have been an evidence from my old days studying greek philosophy and its political system.
In their wisdom (and a few centuries of experimentation), the Greeks used sortition as the main tool to select their temporary leaders. Sortition is like a lottery for volunteers. Elections on the other end were used to pick up only a handful of magistrates (ca 1%).
At the time, it felt awkward to me and probably old-fashion to use hazard to chose leaders.
Classical bias — considering that we know better, or that we have ‘evolved’ from that time.
But when you look at it, this practice was great in terms of:
- avoiding nepotism and clientelism (difficult in such a system to reward friends or buy your way up);
- ensuring the involvement of as many citizens as possible (up to 13,000 Athenians out of 30,000 to 60,000 citizens at any given time and with frequent reshuffling);
- creating peer to peer check and balances (as all institutions played an important but limited role in the system);
- educating the citizens (what a better way to learn about legislative processes, their implementation and the life in the city in general but to participate directly).
Well, it sounds, indeed, like a lot of good reasons, especially todayswhere cronyism is the rule rather than the exception, power is increasingly centralized, citizens are clueless about their own institutions and only a handful of us get involved.
So why, having been exposed to it was I still dismissing it- like so many of us?
As a matter of fact, there is most probably a mental barrier.
One that has been transmitted to us generation after generation as part of civic education. But how is it that elections ended up being the only frontrunner left in the history of democracy?
Here is not the place to elaborate on Van Reybrouck’s argument — I suggest you go and check it, it is really worth a read. But in a nutshell, sortition was abandoned to the profit of elections precisely as a way to make democracy less democratic.
Abandoned for a new form of aristocracy. Don’t trust my words, but it was an evidence for Rousseau, Montesquieu as well as Tocqueville.
Since then the battle for equality focused solely on expanding the pool of voters. Remember that at first, only those paying a certain amount of taxes where allowed to vote. In France, for example, one out of 160 persons was allowed to vote!
The argument was that to care about the common good, you needed to have some vested interests. In fact, power was seized from the nobles and given to the economic elite. In the nineteenth century, workers fought for the right to vote and in the twentieth century it was women’s turn.
And here we are with the universal right to vote.
So this is where we stand right now. We can all vote. But, still, do we feel responsible?
What we have forgotten to question in the meantime is the value of elections as a democratic tool and even more as its main expression.
My personal experience with elections as part of international peace processes (Kosovo elections in 2007 and the self-determination process in 2008 as well as a few election observation missions and out-of-country voting exercises ) is that it is highly overrated by the international community.
Elections can be an indicator of immediate stability but they solve nothing if the institutions are weak or if some underlying issues that fuelled the conflict in the first place have not been addressed. They can even make matters worse. Look at Libya today.
We should ask ourselves:
- How much should we rely on or be satisfied with sporadic elections that are the heart of representative democracy as we know it?
- Can we assess the well-being of democracy differently?
- Can we use other tools (like sortition) to increase our interest in participating in the political system?
What do YOU think?
