Tomaltach made a very interesting comment on my ‘Vested Interests’ post the other day about how the Irish are now severely disillusioned with the political system in Ireland. In the comment Tomaltach argues that such disillusion occurs because the political system is not adapting to the challenges of a new age:
“An age of extreme fragmentation of interests, an age of celebrity culture, an age where a plethora of interests compete for people’s time, and so on, you know the story.”
He also argues correctly that ‘our body politic seems at best indifferent towards, at worst utterly resistant to, reform.’
Which I think is very true.
I would argue, however, that such disillusionment has something to do with the nature of modern democracy and how inherently, the voter is effectively disempowered by that system or chooses to remain disempowered. Increasingly voters find they are just observers of a process that they can never really influence. Certainly they can vote, but once elected the politicians can do pretty much anything they want. While in power politicians can slow up reform of the electoral system and maintain power in the centre by making appointments based on loyalty to the leader, passing decisions to Committees which are under the control of the Government party and dragging its heals on the reform of local government.
However, one could argue that voters are not really disillusioned with politics. They’re just apathetic. Historically, democracy is seen as the best way to produce peace, stability and prosperity. Of course, one of the consequences of such stability is that, for all intents and purposes the majority of the electorate remains in a sort of political coma, while the technocrats of the State get on with the business of running the country. When things are going well and the economy is in good shape why worry that you have very little power within that system to decide how your life is being organized? It seems inevitable that most people will have a low boredom threshold for the daily haranguing in the Dail, or hot TD on TD action, which we currently being forced to witness, now that the Dail has been reconvened and Bertie is attending the Tribunals. Yet, ironically, if the political process is to work properly the electorate must to be more engaged. In the reality, though, it seems that the less power people have, the less interested they are in what is being done.
Or, to look at it another way: the more boring people find particular political institutions, the less real power people have over those institutions. Curiously, the political institutions that appears to interest them the least also happens to be the least democratic - and the most powerful.
And it just so happens that the political institution that is most likely to make the eyes of the average voter glaze over is the EU. So it follows that at a time when more and more power is being devolved to the EU and away from national governments (and therefore away from the voter as well) EU citizens couldn’t be less interested. In a fascinating analysis of the current EU Perry Anderson shows just how disinterested the modern EU voter is and how undemocratic the burgeoning empire of the European Union that controls so much of our daily life has become:
“Constitutionally, the EU is a caricature of a democratic federation, since its Parliament lacks powers of initiative, contains no parties with any existence at European level, and wants even a modicum of popular credibility. Modest increments in its rights have not only failed to increase public interest in this body, but have been accompanied by a further decline in it. Participation in European elections has sunk steadily, to below 50 per cent, and the newest voters are the most indifferent of all. In the East, the regional figure in 2004 was scarcely more than 30 per cent; in Slovakia less than 17 per cent of voters cast a ballot for their delegates to Strasbourg. Such ennui is not irrational. The European Parliament is a Merovingian legislature. The mayor in the palace is the Council of Ministers, where real law-making decisions are taken, topped by the European Council of the heads of state, meeting every three months. Yet this complex in turn fails the opposite logic of an inter-governmental authority, since it is the Commission – the EU’s unelected executive – alone that can propose the laws on which the Council and (more notionally) the Parliament deliberate. The violation of a constitutional separation of powers in this dual authority – a bureaucracy vested with a monopoly of legislative initiative – is flagrant. Alongside this hybrid executive, moreover, is an independent judiciary, the European Court, capable of rulings discomfiting any national government.”
In the modern era power is increasingly ring-fenced around the leadership, with the average voter barely getting a look in. In his recent review of the Campbell diaries John Lanchester provides a very snappy summary of how power is concentrated in the hands of the leader of government once an election is won.
“In effect, power has been devolved from the electorate to the political parties, and in particular to the leader of whichever party is in government; given a fat enough majority, the prime minister can do more or less what he likes, and the only brake on his power is how much he can get his own backbenchers to sign up to. So a leader can, after winning a general election, in effect take the phone to the electorate off the hook for the next four and a half years. This is not an accident, it is the way the system is supposed to work: a fundamental democratic deficit, designed to deliver functioning majorities of power with a minority share of the vote, and a permanently empowered class of politicians and civil servants.”
Lanchester is talking about Parliamentary politics in the UK and is alluding to how Tony Blair’s political decision to join the US invasion of Iraq was not in least affected by the millions who were protesting against the possibility of that decision being made in their name.
But I believe the centering of power around the leader is even worse in an Irish context, because at least in the UK some power is devolved to the regions (although, George Monbiot points out that Gordon Brown has “quietly scrapped England’s regional assemblies and handed their powers to the business people running the regional development agencies” ).
So, I would argue that in the case of Bertie Ahern and a Fianna Fail led government in particular, Government power is distributed by patronage notwithstanding the relative weakness of the coalition partners. Indeed, the agreement of the Greens to enter government and thereby solidifying the hegemony of Fianna Fail for the next five years is interesting in a number of ways. Will the reforming instinct of the Greens be strong enough to counteract the sluggish thinking of the soldiers of destiny, or will the Green’s desire to show that they are committed to strong stable government allow the talkers in Fianna Fail keep reform on the backburner.
But how do we counteract this political apathy and disillusion with politics? Ironically, it is in reforming one aspect of government that the Greens, and John Gormley as Minister of the Environment and Local Government in particular has committed itself to reform – that is Local Government.
Last July John Gormley issued a press release announcing ‘a programme that will lead towards one of the largest reforms ever to occur in how local government works in Ireland’.
First he has called on submissions from the general public and interested parties, which will be followed by the establishment of an advisory committee. This committee of the great and the good of local management will advise on the formation of Green paper to be published at the end of the year.
According to the press release, the Green Paper will address the following key areas:
• How a directly elected Mayor will operate in Dublin, what powers will the office have, and what areas will it be responsible for
• Should there be directly elected Mayors for other towns or counties in the country
• Should there be a rebalancing of powers between elected councillors and local authority managers and officials
• Should new town councils be established for the new large communities that have been built up in the last decade
As we know, reform of local government was on the Green election manifesto but not on Fianna Fail’s. So the questions remains, how much reform will Fianna Fail allow? Curiously, according to a politics.ie thread(which was started when the consultation was announced by Gormley) many of the plans for reform of local government came from Dick Roche:
“On 15th June on RTE’s “Today” programme, Dick Roche told Tom McGurk that he was proud that all but 3 lines of the Local Government Reform section of the agreed final Programme for Govt had been written by him!”
This wasn’t contested by Gormley, as far as I can discern. However, a contributor to the politics.ie thread who identified themselves as a ‘negotiator on the programme for government’ said:
“There is very little in the Fianna Fáil election manifesto on local government reform. The proposals in this area in the programme for government are largely Green party proposals.
The problem with all this is not that it’s being initiated by the Greens or Fianna Fail but that the wheels of reform will grind too slowly. At the moment the plan is to have direct elections for Mayors by 2011. This could be delayed even further, of course. What we are delaying though is a real opportunity to invigorate our democracy and get people more involved in politics again. It seems obvious to me that people are more likely to care about what happens in their local community if they can hold those who are responsible to account.
At the moment, the situation is like this:
Most of the power in a local authority rests with unelected country managers and is administrated by civil servants. Mayors are effectively a figure head, without staff or support and get replaced every 12 months. Elected councilors have little to lose when things go wrong as they work an almost voluntary basis and have little real power.
Of course, for central Government to shift power and financial resources to an elected and therefore accountable Mayor and councilors would change the dynamic of national politics. As Michael Marsh article ‘None of that Postmodern Stuff Around Here: Grassroots Campaigning in the 2002 Irish General Election’ shows, the electing of TDs, contrary to European trends, is achieved by their active involvement in the local issues. His research indicates that those TDs who actually visit the houses of the voters are more likely to get elected than those who have a high media profile but don’t. Parish pump politics, as well as being an alliterative mouthful, is alive and well.
But it seems that in Ireland the opportunities that reform of the local government provide are too great to ignore for long. And it’s a golden opportunity that the Left should grab hold of.
In his recent post How the Left Can Successfully Argue for Higher Taxation 1: Surveying the Ground Michael Taft grabs the nettle of Taxation and the Left and argues that there is a way that taxation can be increased while still remaining well below the average EU tax take in that specific area. After providing a thorough survey Michael argues that there are two areas where Ireland is actually well below the European average on the tax it receives: social insurance (the different forms of PRSI) and local government.
“Local government is another area where Ireland bottom-dwells. We trail the EU-15 average by over €6 billion. Of course, addressing local authority finance is a little more involved than just raising tax levels. The over-reliance on highly regressive service charges, combined with a lack of powers and democratic accountability suggests that any attempt to raise local government taxation would have to be done in the context of overall local government reform.”
George Monbiot, writing about Gordon Brown’s attempts in Britain to reignite grassroots politics, gives a salient warning:
“I have followed the politics of development planning for long enough to recognise that public consultation is even easier to manipulate than parliamentary politics. In several cases I have seen how fake consultations have been used to manufacture consent among unwilling populations, giving a semblance of democracy to decisions which have already been made by property developers and venal councillors. This is by no means an argument against consultation or participation, just a warning that it is not a magic formula for democratic renewal. Every process can be corrupted: all forms of democracy require perpetual vigilance.”
So, we will watch the consultation process on local government reform and the resulting Green paper with interest, and hope that this is not another opportunities that certain politicians let slip through their green fingers.
Note: Michael Taft promises a post on Local Government in the near future.
Your statement “Increasingly voters find they are just observers of a process that they can never really influence” brought Tocqueville to mind:
“Le tableau que présente la société américaine est couvert d’une couche démocratique, sous laquelle on voit de temps en temps percer les
anciennes couleurs de l’aristocratie” Alexis de Tocqueville De La Democratie en Amerique”
So according to Tocqueville “The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through“. For Ireland, substitute vested interests for aristocracy. Voters go the poles, express their preference, the percentages tip up and down, but nothing changes. (In Ireland, not even the government changes - our opposition haven’t won an election now in a quarter of a century). But even if the government changes - nothing else does. The same vested interests retain their position of privelege and all major decisions go in their favour - tax breaks, closed profressions, or at a more mundane level, non-performance wage rises for public servants.
That local issue are the determining factor in getting TDs elected is no surprise. In my view there are at least two parts to the problem. First, as you say, there is really no local democracy. Therefore the TD is the de facto local councillor who deals with trivial issues from roadside kerbs to college grant applications. If there were councillors with real power this would not be necessary. But even if councillors had the power to deal with all local issues, the TD would continue to cover the same ground because he or she is more powerful and would want to protect their support base by seeming to take local action. So the second necessary change is breaking or diluting the link between the TD and the constituency. A modest proposal would simply be to vastly increase constituency size, say triple it, so that TDs simply counldn’t get an electoral return on time invested in local issues. This would entail reducing the number of TDs or, if roughly current numbers were required for effective committees etc, then we could have a party list system to add to the constituency TDs. But never mind the details, the essence of effective national politics is to sever, or at least cut back, the links between the national parliamentarians and the parish pump.
Regarding local government itself, some would argue it cannot work in Ireland because we have no tradition of real local government. That argument doesn’t stand up. Irish participation in voluntary organisations is very high. People run schools, volunteer for charities, run tidy town committees, etc. In short, people doget involved. Why then would they not be willing to get involved, as paid and voluntary local officials with real power. And if they had tax raising powers there would at least be a link between voter choices and the quality of local service.
Another issue is democratic deficit and sovereignty creep to other institutions outside government. The EU was mentioned in the post. But there are of course more destinations for the power which has leaked from democracy. First, the media. Without doubt the media now has massive power. We’ve all heard the phrase ‘power without responsibility’. It rings true. Who elected the shameless pro-FF Sunday Indo? Or remember the 1997 pre-election day editorial in the Indo ‘payback time’? Not to mention the importance of editorial lines in RTE or other TV channels.
Furthermore there is that growing, diverse, unquantifiable, and controversial thing called corporate power. Whether we agree or disagree, governments have been removed from the centre of many institutions or corporations which enjoy considierable power. From Airlines
to postal service to, in future probably all utilities and in Ireland increasingly provision of health and education. This has seen a huge transfer of power to agents outside the reach of electoral control. And we should not be deluded into thinking that the consumer has won the power over these institutions that voters once had (or should have had)!
People often throw their hands up and say that with Globalisation power is sucked out of our control anyway. But this argument can be turned on its head. The best shield against Globalisation, the best way to shape our adaption to it, must come through enhanced democracy - at national and EU level. To share the pain and gain of globalisation what better mechanism than a political system based on a concept of democracy that is both broad and deep, flexible yet robust, and which is fair and inlcusive.
Typo: I wrote that voters go to the poles. No wonder our democracy isn’t working
Eeeek Donagh, hot TD on TD action… yikes…
On the post I’m particularly struck by your thoughts on the nature of the EU. I’m less convinced that the EU is powerful in direct implementation of policy/action. But I think that it has managed to operate as a grand narrative which because of its seeming banality allows it to shape national discourses to a much greater degree than is often thought. That can be a good thing, as seen by the helter skelter enthusiasm of former Eastern Bloc nations to join. But it can also be a very worrying thing since it can push agendas (and I’m thinking here of quite bizarre attempts to engender competitive markets in various areas) that are highly dubious to those of us on the left.
The EU began as an idea to bolster the peace in Europe and perhaps as a close second as a dam against the advance of communism. But the means by which it would deliver on these objectives was pure and simple:economics. Coal and Steel, Single Market, Single Curreny. There was nothing about society, it was always economic. Of course along the way it picked up the social the political and now, in embryonic form, the military.
Basically putting economy first meant putting business first, which was never going to sit well with the left. Nevertheless I personally think that Globalisation would have happened one way or another and co-operation at an EU level is critical for small members in order to stand a chance in the game of big players.
But the big difficulty is as discussed above the democratic deficit. This will be a difficult problem to fix because any solution necessarily means more centralisation of EU power (what good electing an EU foreign minsiter for example if she has nothing to do!), i.e deeper integration. And more integration will be a difficult sell to among national peoples whose attitude to Europe ranges from indifference to paranoia! The enthusiasm of our Eastern neighbours is already wearing off!.
I wanted to make a comment about the resistance to reform in Ireland. There is another factor - the influence business elites. Surely oh surely the last thing they want is a vigorous, robust democracy with people deeply engaged at all levels. For they know that the result would be beefed up redisributive measures. The entire political class have been co-opted. Their ideology is deeply pro-business, which is good if proportionate and not all consuming, but bad when it is an end in itself. Such is the buy-in to this creed that the first criterion that all policy must pass is will this hurt business. Since more and better democracy probably would fail, it is a non-starter.
Here is a quote I thought rang true, from Peader Kirby’s “Celtic Tiger in Distress:
The Irish State tends to institutional and policy problems by simply adding new structures and policies to the old while avoiding the underlying need for coherent reform. Despite much talk, the Irish state still faces the tests of fundamentally reforming local government, modernising the political system, and developing a more coherent policy to address social inequality and disadvantage. The attenuation of politics under the Celtic Tiger and the severe limitations of the partnership process have had the effect of demobilisting dissident sectors of Irish society and have created the impression of virtually universal acquisescence in the present market-led orientation of the Irish state.
Check out almost any of the excellent documentaries by Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self, or The Trap (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis). There are two main concepts:
1) Negative freedom, which personally is exemplified by the rife consumer culture that prevails these days. This means that the individual is largely concerned with what they want at any given instant, and as long as that is not unreasonably curtailed their political interest will largely consist of maintaining the status quo.
2) Focus group politics, as exemplified by new labour and Clinton, where marketing techniques are used to sell the people the message they want to hear, often feeding through into poorly thought out knee jerk policies that do little more than apply a band aid to the gaping gash.
Bill Hicks also hit the nail on the head, “Go back to your homes people, watch american gladiators, there’s nothing out here for you to worry about”. The masses have very few burning issues, so keep em entertained and fed and supplied with iPods and they will keep toeing the line. Unfortunately this is not what great civilisations or economies are built of. The system is being manipulated and going to seed.
Wow, Tomaltach, that’s another impressive comment, which is almost as long and as detailed as my original post. It’s curious, while reading WorldbyStorm’s post on Putin’s suggestion that he might decide to top the United Russia list of candidates to be elected Prime minister, I noticed that he used a Donald Horne quote which emphasizes exactly the layer of ‘democratic paint’ which covers the various sectional interests who, one could argue, really control the State.
“The very way in which the ‘myth’ of representative democracy ‘legitimates’ state power in the name of the people can distract citizens from the realities of political power. It can suggest that since they all have the vote and use their votes with relatively equal weights, there must be in their society an equality in the distribution of power.”
But this is not to say that there is a better system, but the weaknesses inherent in representative democracy should be compensated for by adequate checks and balance, and for its citizens to do everything it can to avoid sectional interests dominating the policy dictated by Government. On the latter issue I think we’re failing at the moment, but certain something has to be done with regard to reform.
The reduction of the number of TDs has been suggested before and increasing regional autonomy would certainly allow us to escape the closed loop of parish pump politics. Its weird that a strong social democratic movement is almost completely absent in Ireland, and surely the way to develop it is through the reform of local government rather than trying, in the short term to cozy up to the bigger parties with the vain hope of somehow influencing their policy, when that policy is effective dictated solely by business interests ( business interests, I would add, that are not using an enlightened economic model that looks towards developing sustainable economic growth, but one – as we can see with property developers – that is interested only in making a quick buck).
I’m in two minds regarding the power of the media. Certainly it is influential, and when you see it so nakedly in the Sindo you have to admit that this onslaught of support for our anorak sporting Taoiseach is going to have some effect on the opinions of Sunday Mass goers, but it’s very nakedness means that it also easily dismissed even by those who read it regularly. On the media generally it seems that every one automatically presumes that various media outlets have an agenda, but this agenda, broadly speaking, is not coherent enough to be considered propagandist.
One can to easily presume that the majority of the population are minnows, just because we’re so smart, super-informed and copped on, but its more likely that when things are good they’re just not bothered with the details.
On the Kirby quote: virtually universal acquiescence in the present market-led orientation of the Irish state.. This is something that Labour failed to challenge and have paid the price for it. Why does it take a downturn to force politicians to admit that there is an alternative to the neo-liberal economic model that can produce sustainable economic growth?
WorldbyStorm, I almost vomited when I reread what I’d written about TDs in the Dail, but I thought if it produced such a reaction in me it has to stay in. Sorry about having it appear as a comment on CLR.
I think the EU is powerful in its ability to directly implement policy/action. The Services Directive is one example. The SSIA in Ireland was initiated because of EU had said that the Irish economy was overheating. But I’m getting most of my information about the EU – not that I’m against it, just wary of it – from the Perry Anderson article. This quote encapsulates the point I was trying to make:
“Since the Treaty of Maastricht, the Union has not by any means been confined to regulatory issues of scant interest to the population at large. It now has a Central Bank, without even the commitment of the Federal Reserve to sustain employment, let alone its duties to report to Congress, that sets interest rates for the whole Eurozone, backed by a Stability Pact that requires national governments to meet hard budgetary targets. In other words, determination of macroeconomic policy at the highest level has shifted upwards from national capitals to Frankfurt and Brussels. What this means is that just those issues that voters usually feel most strongly about – jobs, taxes and social services – fall squarely under the guillotines of the Bank and the Commission. The history of the past years has shown that this is not an academic matter. It was pressure from Brussels to cut public spending which led Juppé’s government to introduce the fiscal package that detonated the great French strike-wave of the winter of 1995, and brought him down. It was the corset of the Stability Pact that forced Portugal into slashing social benefits and plunging the country into a steep recession in 2003. The government in Lisbon did not survive either. The notion that today’s EU comprises little more than a set of innocuous technical rules, as value-neutral as traffic lights, is a fatuity.”
Add to that the neo-liberal thinking that is at the core of EU economic thinking, the appointment of Barroso as President of the European Commission, the most powerful arm of EU government and the almost complete acquiesce to US foreign policy and you have plenty for the Left to worry about.
But there’s no point in being paranoid about it.
I only saw one or two of those Century of Self documentaries but they were excellent. The problem with theories that everyone is being manipulated is that no one thinks of the alternative: not being manipulated. What would life be like if you had to think about every element of your life before you did it? Vapid consumerism has a plus side you know
Interesting comment Thriftcriminal. Those docus had completely passed me by. The thrust of your comment reminded me of something chomsky wrote years ago about people were happy enough with their having a say because they were allowed to vote for who’s head would appear on a postage stamp. This was years before the scourge of TV voting shows. Obviously many people out there would never miss big brother and the text voting! They probably don’t vote in elections! But at least they feel satisfied they have a say in something!!
Funny, i was thinking of something Chomsky said in UCD last year in relation to what thriftcriminal posted also; he was talking about how a lot of relatively unpoliticised people had been motivated by the impending war in 2003 to come out and march and had been disgusted when their governments ignored them. Chomsky attributed this to two things; political naiveté - not realising what hard work it is, and, more depressingly, people seeing a political gesture - marching, signing a petition, wearing a wristband - as akin to a consumer decision, a purchase, and therefore carrying with it an implicit contract; we march, sign, whatever, you (govt, G8) are obliged to perform your end of it. when it doesn’t wrok that way, they drift back to more immediately satisfying commitments.