Soft despotism

Robert A. Dahl
ON POLITICAL EQUALITY
142pp. Yale University Press. £14.99 (US $24).
0 300 11607 6

This is a tiny book, 120 small pages of text; mild-mannered, careful and balanced, but in the end disturbing. Robert A. Dahl argues that something is afoot in the world of democracy, and it’s getting serious. Everywhere, people want democracy. Those who get it rejoice. Where it is absent or weak, rulers often insist that for their populations other things matter more. In particular from Asia, we are told that people hold to “non-Western” values and ask for effective delivery in government, not democracy. Yet, when the matter is put to the test, people prefer democracy.

They have good reasons. Everyone wants to live well and to decide over their own lives. Democracy fosters well-being and protects freedom, at least better than any other regime. The magic is government by consent, whereby politicians are rewarded if they rule as citizens want, and punished if they do not. Government by consent comes from equality, from everyone having a say, and the same say behind collective decision-making. Therefore, when we want democracy we also want equality.

Where democracy is most advanced, however, economic and social conditions are notoriously unequal. Democracy coexists most comfortably with market capitalism, and market capitalism thrives on inequality; in recent times massively increasing inequality. Although we live in societies of inequality, we do enjoy a range of political equalities: first, in the vote, an institution we mostly take for granted but which is utterly remarkable. It enables citizens to appoint their leaders and to throw them out if they are no good, and it gives everyone an equal say in these matters so that no individuals or small groups are able to decide public business on their own. Elections are complicated and costly. Any economist can prove that this is an inefficient way of spending time, organization and money. The fact that we continue to hold elections is proof that citizens value democracy and understand its logic of equality.

Then there are rights. Where there is democracy, human and political rights are universal. Everyone has the right to speak, read and listen freely, to worship freely, to form families freely, to be treated fairly by the police and in the courts. This, too, is cumbersome and costly, but no economic calculus is going to compel us to give away our basic rights. On the ground, these democratic virtues are always imperfect but no less real for that.
In recent decades, while some forms of inequality have increased shockingly, political equality has advanced marvellously. From 1985 to 2000, the number of authoritarian regimes in the world went down from sixty-seven to twenty-six. More than two-thirds of the world’s people live in countries with multi-party electoral systems. (If China came around, 90 per cent would.) In On Political Equality, Professor Dahl speaks more forcefully for equality than most theorists now incline to do. In so doing, he is an advocate of practical reality and not just lofty idealism.

The logic of equality in democracy appeals to our reason, but the demand for equality sits deeper. We humans have an ingrained sense of fairness which is visible in children and adults alike. It is in human nature to want to be treated as equals. Instincts such as these add up to what Dahl calls “a passion for equality”. Hence, in today’s world of inequality there is a strong demand for equality that is grounded in both reason and passion.

Against the demand for equality stand equally strong barriers. People may want equality, at least political equality, but democracy cannot guarantee that they will have it, or keep it. Dahl, who is optimistic about the state of equality as a goal, and careful to observe recent advances, is still pessimistic about its actual achievement and ability to prosper. The barriers are going up, so that even where democracy is established, its future is in the balance. It is not impossible that democracy can be lost in, for example, the United States or Britain. Indeed, that may be happening. Professor Dahl is the pre-eminent authority today on the theory and practice of democracy. Now aged ninety-one, he has in recent years crowned a lifetime of research and reflection with a series of three brief, beautifully simple, yet penetrating books. In On Democracy (1998), he dispatched the conventional wisdom that democracy is good for fairness but bad for efficiency. The experience is that democracy outcompetes the opposition on both fairness and efficiency.

In How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (reviewed in the TLS on March 14, 2003), Dahl questioned the very democratic credentials of the American Constitution and reminded us that there are serious shortcomings in even the most respected democracies. The lack of democracy in the American system comes from inequality in political representation, and the degree of de facto legislative power in the hands of non-elected officials: the appointed members of the Supreme Court. That book has much to say to Britain, where it seems that political opinion has decided against proportional representation and an elected upper house, and in favour of appointed legislators and a more powerful supreme court.

Now, in On Political Equality, Robert Dahl turns to the tug of war in capitalist democracy between political equality and economic inequality. What binds these books together is a stark message: democracy is fragile, it can be won but also lost. In the twentieth century, observed Dahl in On Democracy, “on more than seventy occasions democracy collapsed and gave way to an authoritarian regime”. Or it might just wither from within. This danger was identified by the most eminent analyst of democracy ever, Alexis de Tocqueville, in his Democracy in America (1835–40). He saw that the competition over equality could result in the reality of democracy eroding, even if the forms of democracy persist – gradually, imperceptibly, without citizens even noticing it. He called it soft despotism, others have called it electoral dictatorship. If the risk of a coup d’état against democracy in Western Europe or North America is remote, the danger of a slide into soft despotism is near and present. In fact it is already happening, exactly as Tocqueville predicted: slowly and barely noticeably.

Democracy is decentralized power. The making of decisions in public affairs is visible in a legislature that answers to the people, who in turn are political equals: everyone counts and no one decides. Dahl lists the following barriers to political equality: the distribution of economic resources, limits on time, the size of political systems, supranational decision-making, and the inevitability of serious crisis. In modern capitalism, wealth is abundant and concentrated. In Britain, equality advanced up to about 1975, then trends turned abruptly and strongly to inequality. In the United States, we must look back to the nineteenth century, to what we would now consider pre-democratic times, to find economic inequality on today’s level. The driving force in this revolution is a strong concentration of new wealth, from economic growth, in the hands of the richest 1 per cent.
This very strong concentration of very abundant wealth is creating a new aristocracy of economic power, which is a fact of life for anyone who needs money. Charities make themselves attractive to private largesse, as do cultural institutions, schools and universities, and public and care services. In all these areas, elected legislatures do less decision-making publicly, and the rich more privately.

Economic power is also making itself felt directly in the machinery of democracy. The mechanism is mega-expensive politics, whereby political candidates, parties and campaigns become dependent on large donations from rich individuals or institutions. This disqualifies anyone from entering politics who is unable to obtain the blessing of economic power. Elected politicians answer more to money and less to voters. Democracy is increasingly corrupt, and from one country to another tainted by crises of funding. In countries like the US and Britain, it is not too extreme to say that this is already making nonsense of the idea of fair democratic competition.

Time and size dictate that democracy’s commitment to being representative in practice limits the role of most citizens to that of occasionally casting a vote. In big political systems, there is a vast space between the little citizens and the big decision-makers. If this space is empty we have what political scientists have called “the distant democracy”, in which decision-making is removed from effective citizenship control. Worse, if it is filled by non-democracy, we are into the drift towards soft despotism. One way this can happen is that economic power crowds in and gives itself undue influence. Votes still count, but instead of no one deciding, economic resources decide.

Dahl wants more nearness and smallness in social and political life to fill the space between citizens and representatives and to keep citizenship control intact. The vote is the most important instrument of control, but to keep elected politicians on their guard there must also be institutions that are democratically at work between elections.

If we look to Britain, there are virtually no such institutions left. There is Parliament and the government in London, the voters around the country, and void between. Political parties are professional machines of power, under leadership control from above, with a rapidly diminishing membership base. Local democracy is to all intents and purposes dead. There is local government, but in the form of management under the command of Whitehall, with next to no autonomous decision-making. Understandably, voters are abandoning local elections.

International organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the European Union and so on, make decisions that have important consequences for citizens in democratic countries. These organizations are necessary and useful, doing work of great importance in the world community, but they are pulling decision-making out of elected legislatures. With the possible exception of the European Union, democracy sits firmly in the nation state, while supranational decision-making is outside the reach of democratic accountability. “Decisions of international systems are not and probably cannot be made democratically.” The discussion of inevitable political crisis is inspired by the fallout in national politics in the US from the “war on terror”. This has shaken the political establishment profoundly and resulted in a centralization of power from Congress to the President, removing yet again decision-making from the legislature. It is starting to look like an elected dictatorship. “Because of a decline of the direct influence of citizens over crucial governmental decisions, and also in the influence of their elected representatives, political inequality might reach levels at which the American political system dropped well below the threshold for democracy broadly accepted at the opening of the twenty-first century.” Consequences follow: “the threat of terrorism was employed by the president and his associates to establish systems of surveillance, control, and arrest of citizens and noncitizens that eroded previously upheld rights and liberties”.

From analysis, On Political Equality turns to reform. At the top of Dahl’s list are control of political funding, and the limiting and regulation of private contributions to political parties and campaigns. He is surely right in this priority. Democracy can coexist with many forms of economic and social inequality, but it cannot coexist with the combination of excessive wealth in the hands of a tiny minority and the freedom for that minority to use its economic power politically. If minority money decides who can run for office, and voters only decide who gets in among those anointed, there is little left to electoral democracy. This has now escalated beyond a problem and into a crisis, and one, to repeat, that is not only potential. Here and now, the political use of money is destroying the people’s democracy.

Dahl also proposes social reforms to counter the drift towards ever more economic inequality, mainly in the form of anti-poverty policies. Again, he is surely right. Poor people in an affluent society do not have effective freedom of political participation on a par with others. However, in spite of these and some other proposals, such as those on electoral reform, this great advocate of improved democracy is here a timid interventionist. Fair enough. His eye is on American politics, and because of the rigidity of the American Constitution and the conservatism of the Supreme Court, much modernization, even if obviously needed, is simply impossible there (another way in which that constitution is undemocratic, according to Dahl). Outside the US, however, our thinking about how to improve democracy should not be restricted by the straitjacket of the American Constitution. It is possible that the US will find itself unable to reform, and decline in inertia to “well below the threshold for democracy”, but that is no reason for others to follow.

On political funding, some limitations on private donations to parties and campaigns will not root out the erosive power of money in democratic politics. It is too late. For a long time, the price of, for example, Presidential campaigns in the US has roughly doubled for every election, and has long since become obscene and deeply undemocratic. In Britain, the government has resorted effectively to selling peerages to bring in the money. It is time to put a full stop to all private donations to political parties and campaigns – from individuals, from businesses, from unions, even from candidates’ own pockets – and make political parties economically dependent on members. Democracy does not need mega-expensive politics. It would improve democracy if political budgets were cut, and members given power in parties. There are no compelling reasons why the rich should be allowed to use their wealth to destroy the protection ordinary people have in the form of equality voting.

On social reform, democracy should obviously protect citizens against poverty, but again this is not enough. Measures to protect the poor do nothing to stop the concentration of economic power. When inequality becomes a democratic problem, we must also call for tax reform and economic democracy.

One reason the rich are growing richer is that they do not pay their fair share of the tax burden. In Britain, income from wealth is taxed leniently, and most taxation is on work and consumption. In the US, the current administration has handed out vast tax benefits to the super-rich. Government is increasingly paid for by the same middle class that is increasingly deprived of influence on public policy.

In addition to fair taxation, we need to find ways of channelling the top of large fortunes away from the privatization of democracy. In the US, interestingly, some of the very richest citizens have taken a lead in this, such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, intellectually and practically, in part on the argument that a free and open society should not tolerate the emergence of an economic aristocracy. (See, for example, www.responsiblewealth.org and www.ufenet.org.) Economic wealth can be redistributed at no cost to economic efficiency by regulating the now vast non-economic use of private wealth.

One of the traditional qualities of American democracy has been in “nearness”. The space between people and power has been filled by a fabric of associations and voluntarism. This has been a source of life quality and social vitality and has at the same time represented the people’s buffer against the coercive tendencies in big government and big business. From Tocqueville on, observers of American democracy have admired it for the strength of its associational life.

In a culture in which togetherness was the norm, increasingly, in Robert Putnam’s phrase, people are “bowling alone”. In an optimistic scenario, Dahl thinks that the associational culture could be revitalized. He believes that might happen because once people reach a reasonable level of affluence, further additional affluence does not add noticeably to happiness and quality of life. We may then hope that people turn away from the materialistic rat race and devote more time and energy to social cooperation.

This is not a vain hope. In Scandinavia, for example, major social trends in the last generation have included a surprising triple combination: more people participating in work, in particular more women; shorter working hours and more leisure time for workers on average, and increasing participation in social and cultural life. In America, a work culture of long hours is pulling people away from social and cultural participation.

The reason that combination has been possible in Scandinavia is that people can afford to work less. Economic growth is distributed broadly enough for most people to benefit sufficiently for them not to have to run harder to stay where they are. In America (and probably also in Britain, another culture of long hours) middle-class workers have seen no or very little improvement in real hourly earnings. Therefore, while the rich grow richer by the day, and define social expectations, workers must work more, in order to have a share in the new prosperity they see around them. The results are two-earner families, longer working days, less free time and less participation in social life. It is not that Americans are workaholics: no more there than anywhere else do people want to work more and live less. It is economic conditions that tie them to the treadmill. Dahl is probably right that there is not much happiness at the end of this race; but it is not happiness people are running after, it is fairness. To liberate working women and men from futility, deep economic reforms are needed to spread more evenly the benefits of economic growth: in wages, in working life and worker protection, in taxation. It is not easy to see where such reforms should come from in the American system, or in Britain, but the case needs to be made.

In other democracies, smallness and nearness have come more from local democracy and perhaps less from associational life. Local democracy is the pre-eminent arena for equality of opportunity of political participation. On the British scene, local democracy has collapsed and needs to be reinvented. Britain needs more and smaller local political entities – municipalities – with more responsibility and authority, and many more elected politicians to represent citizens’ interests. There are too many Members of Parliament but too few local politicians.

Dahl sees no prospect for democracy in international organizations, but I’m not so sure. International organizations make decisions that affect citizens in member countries and should ideally be under democratic control. This principle has been accepted in the European Union, which is trying to find a way to make supranational decision-making democratic. The European model is so far not very successful, but the correct principle has been conceded. As the chain of citizenship control must be solid from below, so it should extend above. The solution is not to replicate national democracy on a global scale but to connect national democracy and supranational decision-making.

That could be done by democratizing the assemblies of international organizations, by way of indirect elections. Let the members of those assemblies be elected by and among the elected members of national parliaments. The beauty of this simple idea is not only that it is a practicable way of connecting supranational decision-making to citizenship control, but that it does so in a way that both encourages international cooperation and makes national legislatures more politically relevant and not less so.

What is afoot in democracy is that citizens care less for it, believe less in it, participate less in it and have less trust in governance with it. What makes that serious is that citizens trust democracy less not because they are less trusting but because democracy is less worthy of trust. The good news is that we know what is happening, thanks in no small measure to Robert Dahl; and that ways are available to improve democracy. The bad news is that the energy and determination to reform are slow to emerge.