Why democracy is overrated

Why democracy is overrated
Samuel Brittan

Winston Churchill is often quoted as saying that democracy is a very bad system but that all the others he knew about were worse. The last part of his saying meets with widespread approval. But not enough is said about the first.

Definitions

If I tried to discuss the derivation and many different meanings of democracy I would keep you all night. If I wanted to curry favour or win an Oxbridge style union debate I would attack "majoritarianism" and distinguish it from true democracy.

I heard the other day a distinguished legal and political philosopher outline his ideal liberal society. One component was "democracy". But he was careful to explain that he did not just mean free elections, but safeguards for civil liberties and for minorities and much else. I asked him if he knew of a state that approximated to his ideals. He was quick to reply "the United States - except when the Supreme Court judges have been appointed by a Republican president." This little anecdote may help explain why I prefer a simple definition of democracy as decision by popular vote. I have nothing to lose thereby except the ugly word "majoritarianism".

Anyone looking for evidence of cultural dumbing down in the West need look no further than the way in which "democracy" has become a one-word slogan for all desirable objectives. What do both American neoconservatives and European liberal interventionists both say they hope to achieve in the Middle East? Spread democracy. What is the most common complaint against the working of the European Union? The "democratic deficit" How would many critics like to reform the public services? By introducing more local democracy?

Democracy has gained undeserved support from the popular belief that the alternative is dictatorship by someone like Hitler, Stalin or Saddam Hussein. One way to get out of this impasse is to realise that it is a matter of degree. You can be in favour, as I am, of a referendum on EU treaties which determine the overall arrangements under which we are governed without favouring incessant votes on every subject under the sun.

Voting Paradoxes

The whole idea of majority voting is indeed deeply ambiguous, as has been known at least since the time of the 18th Century political philosopher, the Marquis de Condorcet. One embarks on voting theory at one's peril. It is so complicated that it can confuse the bulk of an audience. Yet there always are some people who understand the mathematics much better than I ever will and who will regard anything I say as a terrible simplification. (Gordon Tullock: On Voting, 1998).

There are at least two standard problems about majority voting. First there is what is called the cyclical problem. Voters may prefer A to B, B to C but perversely C to A. Everything then depends on the order in which the votes are taken. Experienced chairmen know this in their bones. Secondly, and rather more importantly, there is the question of picking the winner in a general election. (Condorcet, Arrow).

Normally I have tried to bring the subject down to earth by citing election material from different countries at different times. But I would like now to try a different approach. I suspect that the radio station, Classic FM, is mostly listened to by older listeners. It is an amazingly profitable attempt to popularise serious music. This radio station holds frequent competitions, which can be regarded as imaginary elections, in which listeners are asked to choose pieces of music, for the top 300 of the year, the top 30 of the week and so on. The composer with the largest number of entries is declared the winner.

How does this pan out in practice? For quite a few years the greatest number of mentions was received by the German romantic composer, Max Bruch, for his first violin concerto. I admit I find it an enjoyable work. Yet Bruch is hardly a superior composer to Bach, Mozart, Haydn or Beethoven. He won because this radio station plays very few pieces by Bruch and the violin concerto more frequently than any other. But supposing supporters of Beethoven had wanted to take this competition seriously: they might well have conspired to concentrate on just a few works of his, for example the 9th symphony. If they had done this I guess he would easily have triumphed over poor Max Bruch. Those of you who follow the music scene will know that Haydn has suffered because of the great number of works that he has written, many of roughly comparable appeal. In political terms this merely splits the vote and even in this 200th anniversary year I doubt if he will come near the very top.

The serious point I am getting at is that an ideal voting system is one in which people can vote for their own favourites without bothering with tactical voting. But I am afraid that such a system does not exist. If your main aim is to get something good done you should favour first past the post. If your main aim is to prevent bad policies you should favour one of the many varieties of proportional representation. As the main need will vary from time to time, even in the same country, an all wise god would require frequent changes in the constitution, which creates its own complications.

Oppression of minorities

The voting paradoxes are not however the heart of the matter. Even if they did not exist, some 51 percent imposing its will on 49 percent is only slightly better than 49 percent imposing its will on 51 percent. Market liberals often point out that a supermarket acts as a continuous referendum where each voter can express his own preferences without imposing them on others. You can have carrots and I can have peaches.

Let me hasten to note that there are of course collective goods such as defence or environmental overspills where the supermarket analogy does not fit and political decisions are required. There is no way in which Gordon Brown can have a nuclear deterrent and Clare Short can do without. Some public authority has to decide how much to spend on the maintenance of public parks and in what way. This would still be true if we paid to go into them, as a large part of the benefit accrues to those who see them, without necessarily entering.

The best known economic defect of democracy arises from the concentration of producer interests and the dispersion of consumer ones. Hence the difficulty of building political support for free trade policies. A more interesting problem is what American political economists call "rational ignorance". The chances of any one person's vote determining the outcome in a national or even regional election are so slight that a rational egotist would not bother to vote at all. And even someone slightly less egotistical has little incentive to study issues in any depth. The Austro-American economist Joseph Schumpeter long ago said that even for intelligent and educated people, politics had at most the status of sub-hobbies, attracting less intellectual consideration than a weekly game of bridge.

One can of course go too far the other way. Plato argued that giving every citizen the same say was no more rational than putting a newly recruited rating on the same footing as a master mariner. The problem with Plato's comparison is that there is no undisputed expertise in ruling a country and that the ordinary citizen has as good an idea of where the shoe pinches as a high powered civil servant.

A popular opinion among some American writers is that democracies do not wage aggressive war against each other. I tracked this view down to a landmark study by the American Political Scientist Bruce Russett (Grasping the Democratic Peace, 1993). His main evidence is a table of disputes between 1946 and 1986 showing no wars between democratic states and 32 wars when one or other party to the dispute was non-democratic. His greatest difficulty is in covering the period before World War I when many countries were somewhere between democracies and autocracies.

Yet this earlier period cannot be ignored. To the chagrin of those who believed that wars were capitalist conspiracies, the social democrats in the Reichstag voted overwhelmingly for war credits in 1914. No reader of the memoirs of Bertrand Russell can forget his sense of isolation when he walked the streets of London in that year among a population that was overwhelmingly bellicose. The most one can suggest is that the mass public tires of war more quickly than elite groups. Examples include the German and Russian revolts at the end of World War I and the movement of American opinion against the Vietnam war, and more recently against the Iraq war.

If I remember Thucydides correctly, the Athenian assembly, spurred on by demagogs, was often an influence for more aggressive action. More recently Israelis have elected a series of leaders tainted by involvement in terrorist groups and war crimes and all too keen on the tragic incursion into Gaza. On the other side there is no dodging that the majority of Palestinians voted for Hamas whose doctrinal commitment to the destruction of Israel is hardly an encouragement to peace in the area. In 2002 the Hindu Nationalist government of Gurjat supervised the killing of more than 2,000 Muslims. The state's chief minister, who was heavily involved, was re-elected by a landslide (Pankaj Mishra, the Guardian 11th February 2009).

Even inside a country democracy is not itself a sufficient protection for personal and political freedom. Democracy and freedom are often spoken of, especially by Americans, as if they were almost the same thing. They are not. There is a positive, but modest, correlation between them. The relationship was explained very concisely by Schumpeter. "If everyone is free to compete for political leadership by presenting himself to the electorate, this will in most cases, though not in all, mean a considerable amount of discussion for all. In particular it will normally mean a considerable amount of freedom of the press. This relation between freedom and democracy is not absolutely stringent and can be tampered with [Putin]...At the same tune it is all there is."

An intolerant majority can make life hell for other citizens. For this reason entrenched provisions are often inserted in constitutions in places like Northern Ireland where one religious or racial group is in a permanent minority. But this will not work in all situations. A ban on smoking in so-called public places is oppressive, whatever the majority shown in favour in the public opinion polls. [Keynes: agenda vs. non-agenda of govt.]

There is however no magic bullet against such threats. In the final runoff ballot in the French presidential elections Nicolas Sarkozy won 53 percent against Segolene Royal's 47 perccent on a high turnout. Did this give him the moral right to twist the French-tax system in favour of longer hours and more overtime as he promised before the present recession? If the pendulum had swung the other way would Ms Royal have had the moral right to force shorter hours on the those who would rather work longer and earn more?

Safeguards

Most democracies have developed a variety of safeguards against elective dictatorship. They include written constitutions, second chambers, Human Rights legislation, judicial review of laws and much, international courts and much else. The US electorate might well have voted to give both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton a third term, but the constitution forbad this as a protection against dictatorial aspirations. Such safeguards need to be extended rather than impatiently pushed aside by impatient pragmatists.

But above all we need more careful use of language. Never let anyone, however eminent, get away with using "democracy" as a shorthand for everything politically desirable. A bad offender in the use of democracy as the be all and end all of wisdom was our old friend George W. Bush and the neo-conservatives who act in the spirit of "fight them, beat them and make them democratic". It is worth noting that neither the US Declaration of Independence nor the US constitution contains the word "democratic". What the constitution does guarantee to every state in the Union is a "republican form of government".

In the last British general election (2005), the Labour Party secured 36 percent of the votes cast on a turnout of 61 percent. So it looks then as if Britain has been governed by the inclinations of less than 22 percent of all adults. Is this a scandal? Not necessarily if you regard democracy as a way of changing the government without the use of force rather than an ethical absolute.

At the very least however, one should never praise democracy without qualifying it as liberal or constitutional democracy and taking some trouble over these qualifying adjectives.

I will conclude with some words by another journalist, which are better than anything I can devise, namely Matthew Parris. "To me the popular will is like the ocean. It may carry you far. Ignore it - its currents, its lulls and its storms - at your peril. But always distrust it. Learn when to fight it, when to run with it and when to stay in port when a storm blows over." (The Times, May 26, 2007).