A complete list of things that are wrong with democracy
I’d like to ask readers for a bit of help. Over the past few years, in a very informal way, I’ve been trying to come up with a list of things that are wrong with democracy. I did this by reading a few newspapers, speaking to politically-minded friends, identifying the things that they say are wrong about democracy — the various democratic deficits that are thought to exist.
It is written out here in no particular order, and it has no weighting. Readers with different political perspectives will have views on what the big and smaller problems are. I am only asking readers to tell me two things about this list:
I’ve been noting them down, and I would now like readers to help me in the following way:
Think of something that you think makes our democracy less than perfect. Something that results in decisions not being as democratic as they could be, or a government not behaving as democratically as it could do.
Then look at the list (below) and see if I’ve captured it already. If not, please say what it is in the comments box. Or if anything on my list is completely irrlevant and shouldn’t be there, please say so?
- Have I missed anything?
- Are any of these problems 100% irrelevant?
1. Things that we say are taken less seriously than the things that some other people say. It’s not fair. Politicians and governments choose who they are going to listen to instead of treating us all equally.
2. The electoral system isn’t fair. Some people, if they live in the wrong place, will never hear from a politician and their voting decisions are not thought to be relevant to anything.
3. Even if politicians do work out the right thing to do, if often takes them too long. Slow decisions, or ones taken by people who don’t understand the issues can damage the dynamism and success of an economy.
4. Electoral turnout is often pathetic. We have people in government that very few people voted for. A higher turnout would have involved in a different sort of person being elected, or a different decision being taken.
5. Politicians all look the same. They all sound the same. A lot of them went to the same school and even more of them went to the same university. They seem to be largely self-serving and out of touch. The political parties often appear to be the same as each other, chasing a narrow bunch of ‘swing’ voters.
6. Politicians seem be able to lie with impunity because we have little redress when they do. Most voters don’t have any real social connection to any politicians, and we don’t expect that they will feel any embarrassment or discomfort because they have ignored our interests.
7. People who have power sometimes make sure that they keep it — no matter what the voters say. They are allowed to choose the times that elections take place, or use government resources to create political propaganda for themselves.
8. Corporations and bureaucracies can push elected politicians around too easily. Bankers or civil servants, for example, seem to be allowed to dictate what regulations they will have applied to them. Relatively small and coherent groups can behave in a purposeful way, pushing the interests of the wider public aside.
9. Politics appears to be a process in which power-blocs manoeuvre and negotiate outcomes. We have a clientelism in which powerful interests — either businesses, trades unions, civil servants, key professions or religious groupings — are bought-off. It occupies the space that should be reserved for the sovereignty of ordinary citizens.
10. Hiring a good lobbyist or spending a bit of cash on some dodgy ‘research’ can often result in lazy/corrupt politicians and journalists ignoring the public interest in favour of some sleazy ‘cloaked agenda’. Sometimes having more money, or better connections gets you the decisions that you want.
11. Any politicians that attempt a ‘brave’ reform that challenges any privileged profession will probably be buying a one-way ticket to political oblivion. Ideas will always be blocked if they are too imaginative or radical.
12. Governments sometimes think that they know best. They have all of their clever ways of making decisions, but they know what we — the voters really want, and it’s not always the thing that their processes will give us. They do what they want anyway.
13. Sometimes governments spend too much money and effort trying to get things just right. Sometimes the invest disproportionately too much in a decision when a quicker instinctive decision from the right people could have been better and/or more cost-effective. We sometimes suspect that this is because of political considerations and that being unnecessary rigorous suits some powerful political grouping.
14. Other times, government make snap decisions when they should have researched or consulted more. We sometimes suspect that this is because of political considerations and that not doing this suits some powerful political grouping.
15. Sometimes, in listening to everyone’s opinions, governments allow the weight of numbers for or against an idea to decide the outcome. An argument isn’t ‘good’ because a lot of people support it.
16. Some sections of society seem to have a veto over whole areas of policy. Older people are understood to be regular voters while young people sometimes appear to have almost abandoned electoral politics in favour of social media campaigns. Some voters are more ‘ignorable’ than others and manifestos reflect this.
17. It doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government always gets in. There’s an ‘Overton Window’ of policies that democracies appear to be allowed to adopt. Genuinely radical and popular policies are, their advocates tell us, ruled out of bounds by an insular and exclusive political class that only appears answerable to a vocal minority.
18. When voters are invited to influence a decision directly, they often appear to be criminally misinformed to the point that almost any group of experts or technocrats would probably make a better decision than the people voters chose to do it.
19. Public debate often appears to be spiteful and low-grade. Politicians have an understandable wariness of an electorate that doesn’t always seem to respond in proportionate, reasonable or rational ways. This in turn either deters or excludes contributions from citizens with mild preferences and equivocal observations.
20. Even being part of an active group of voters doesn’t always change things. Global trade-treaties signed by existing governments bind nation states in to rules and structures that make the voters of the future powerless.
22. Our governments appear powerless because of some treaty or loan that was signed decades ago, preferring to honour their debts to bondholders rather than voters — or simply because they can’t afford to disobey a coercive power.
23. Nations are often obliged to alter their legislation by the European Union (for example) and the ‘great powers’ — the United States, Russia and China also appear to be able to nudge us around when it suits them. Sometimes, undemocratic and unreasonable foreign powers can manipulate our comparatively open and transparent forms of government and take advantage of our democracy.
24. What about people who don’t have the time or the energy to vote or to get involved in political campaigning? Sometimes they’re too busy, but does this mean that their views shouldn’t be taken into account? And what about people who don’t have strongly held views, or the certainty and stridency to shout about them? Sometimes their views are just as relevant to everything.
What do you think? Is this a complete list? And a bonus question, are there any two points that would best be conflated into one, or any points that should be broken up into more-than-one?