4. Party government is not democracy

This article is part of a series about governance.

In our democracies, politicians form parties for mutual support. The partiers create policies to appeal to voters and some of the parties become the government. They need policies in all of the areas government operates in, to catch every voter’s interests. That’s typically thousands of policies, for each party.

Do the candidates for each party agree with all of the policies they are standing for, that they are promising to help implement? Of course not. They disagree with some, they hate others, lots of them they have scarcely read and are taking the advice of colleagues more interested in those areas. Presumably, in balance, they think there is more good than bad. But they say they are all great and that they will support all of them, because if they don’t their party may well expel them.

From a democracy perspective, the problem is even worse than portrayed above, because of the way parties create policies.

There are two driving forces:

• Special interest groups, who have backed a candidate/party into office in the expectation of policies that favour them.
• Policies developed via research, that target specific voter groups the party needs to win over. These are not so much the hard core supporters of the party as the swinging voters who actually decide elections

While parties like to claim their policies are based on a particular philosophical approach, the reality is that most election policies respond to these two driving forces. They are developed to serve special interest groups with leverage and groups whose vote is needed. They are shaped by expediency, they will never all fall into a consistent philosophical alignment. More likely they will be a hodge-podge, chosen for the purpose they serve, not the principles they represent.

Or, as Nilsson¹ has his Pointed Man say, “A point in every direction, is the same as no point at all.”

How are the policies actually chosen? The party machine may develop a party policy document, but the policies that get taken to an election are usually chosen by the elected representatives, by negotiation among their leaders.

In a mature democracy, it works this way. The big parties have factions, whether formal or not. This happens because the party must encompass a range of interests in order to achieve majority electoral appeal and all these views together may not align. Certainly not everyone gives them the same priority. One group may be most concerned about environmental protection, another group about civil liberties. They form factions to push the priority of their interests and the factions manage the divergences enough to keep them within the party.

Generally no faction is completely dominant, or at least their is a recognition that they can’t afford to be so triumphant over lesser factions that those people are driven away and the broad appeal needed to win an election is lost.

So the factions trade. You support me on this, I’ll support you on that. To be able to deliver on these deals, factions pressure their members to toe the line.

This doesn’t just happen between factions, it happens within factions and between individuals.

A faction (with support to trade) can thus get its party to adopt a policy that is not supported by the other factions.

This means that the policy the party takes to the election may not be supported by a majority in the party.

It may not even be supported by a majority within the original faction: it can be pushed through by a few more powerful members, via vote trades within the faction and pressure on junior faction members.

Let’s unpack this in terms of votes.

Imagine Orange Party has three roughly equal factions; A, B and C. In faction A, some of the leaders want to push through a particular policy, say it’s government funding for private schools. They only have 35% support in their faction, but they are senior members. They trade and pressure and their faction endorses the policy.

Next, the factions trade. Factions B and C oppose government support for private schools. Faction C is strong in this view, Faction B less so. Faction B wants more spending on the military, it’s their big thing. Factions A and B do a deal, to both support each other: funding for private schools and more money for the military. With two out of three factions in support, these positions become official Orange Party policy. If the schools policy were to stand alone it would only be supported by 35% of Faction A, 20% of Faction B and 15% of Faction C, total just over 23% of the Party (the average of three equal factions).

Then comes the election. The opposing Purple Party’s policies include no government funding for private schools, something they are strong on. Orange Party however gets 51% of the vote, becomes the government and government funding for private schools go ahead.

The people who voted Orange Party into government don’t all support government funding for private schools. Some of them oppose it. They didn’t get to vote for a policy, they got to vote for a package of policies, things they wanted and things they didn’t.

The support for the policy within Orange Party’s Faction A is probably the highest support this policy actually has in any population segment: the majority of Orange Party members and the over-whelming majority of Purple Party members may oppose it.

Let’s say 25% of Orange Party’s voters actually support the policy. Of course some of Purple Party’s voters would be supporters of government funding for private schools even though their party opposed it. Let’s say 15%. Across the two parties, that’s 20% of all voters.

Party politics has delivered a “mandate” for a policy only 20% of voters actually support, that has no majority support in either party or any faction. Nevertheless, it’s going to become law and cost taxpayers billions of dollars.

Don’t think this is some extreme case cited as a warning, it’s more the norm. Many “majority” policies are not supported by a majority of party members or voters.

A system in which people vote factional and party line rather than personal opinion is not democracy.

Party politics, especially with factions, is institutionalised, structural dishonesty. It defeats democracy.

1 The Point!, studio album and animated film by Harry Nilsson, 1970 from RCA Victor