Stumbling and Mumbling: Solving the trust problem

« Clare Short's blindsight | Main | Chrissy elsewhere »

September 15, 2006

Solving the trust problem

There's something very naive about Sir Alistair Graham's response to this survey (pdf) showing that the public - gosh - don't trust politicians. he says:

The public want politicians... to own up when they make mistakes, explain their reasons more than they currently do for their actions and decisions. They very strongly want them to tell the truth and react strongly if they feel they are not. They also want them to be more in touch.

This misses the point. If you don't trust people, asking them nicely to change their behaviour won't get you far. Instead, you should do two things:
1. Change their incentives. Politicians lie because they think they can get away with it. They'll stop lying if the penalties for lying are greater. One possibility here is for voters to have a right to recall ministers, analogous to California's recall mechanism. Another possibility would be to give voters a "none of the above" option, so that their contempt for politicians could be better expressed at the ballot box.
2. Remove their discretion. We put criminals in prison because we can't trust them to be free. Likewise, if we can't trust politicians, we should give them less freedom to run our lives. One possibility here would be a serious bill of rights. Another would be to take their discretion away from them, by using more referenda.
Take for example the Iraq war. It's a common complaint that Blair lied about the reason for the war. For me, this is not the real problem. The real problem is that he shouldn't have had the discretion to take us to war. War is a public good (or bad). And there's a simple way for the public to choose the public goods it wants - demand-revealing referenda.
Now, the precise mechanisms I've mentioned are not of course the only possibilities. The key point is that lack of trust in our politicians is a problem that requires more radical solutions than merely asking them nicely to behave better.

September 15, 2006 in Politics | Permalink

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451cbef69e200d8341fc08453ef

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Solving the trust problem:

Comments

Referenda: yes, I suspect you're right. And I also suspect that Blair has tested the notion of the "unwritten constitution" pretty much to destruction too. It's time for some rather sweeping reform. To which almost no-one on the left will contribute much of value, since they've been chattering about the wrong things for the last decade or ten. (Naturally, you don't fool me with your amusing conceit of being a lefty.)

Posted by: dearieme | September 15, 2006 at 05:24 PM

A bill of rights is an odd thing, and you may want to look at Canada's experience with one over the last 25 years before advocating one too seriously.

The main effect of such a thing is to shift power from parliament to the courts. Now depending on who is where, you might like the outcome or not. Personally, I absolutely agree with many of the decisions that the Supreme Court of Canada has made. But I do find it makes me nervouse that the court rather than parliament has been setting the pace for social change - abortion, gay marriage, and reproductive technologies are all getting addressed by the court, while parliament (to date) doesn't want to touch them.

Posted by: tom s. | September 15, 2006 at 06:43 PM

Plus, I've never quite understood how inequality affects the outcome of demand-revealing referenda and so on. The topic is ignored in the texts I've read because that billionaire might covet that $10 just as much as the homeless guy, but I have a feeling it must make a significant difference. Not that I've thought it through or anything - just mouthing off.

Posted by: tom s. | September 15, 2006 at 06:45 PM

For referenda, please use the Venezuela version (where the incumbent can present again) and not the California one (where he can't, so he can reach 49.9% at the referendum, and a candidate having 5% will be subsequently elected).

Anyway, I think the main thing to do is not mentioned, here it is:

3. Take advantage of the zero-cost media internet to publish every single public "legal" act of our representatives: who are they sending money too.
And force detailed releases of statistics made by public servants.

Posted by: Laurent GUERBY | September 16, 2006 at 09:56 AM

Aren't you assuming all the problem lies with the politicians?

I’d argue that politicians act in a relatively rational manner, discounting quite a lot of what the public say. They do that because what the pubic say and what they reward are quite different. Politicians who change their mind and admit mistakes run a huge risk of being pilloried in the press and hammered by the electorate.

We tell pollsters that we dislike control freakery, but consistently vote against parties which are perceived to be split. We say we dislike negative campaigning but vote for parties that use those tactics.

This isn’t to say that the spiral that this creates where neither the public or politicians better instincts are allowed space to grow doesn’t have a corrosive effect on democratic institutions. But if we’re changing the incentives for the politicians shouldn’t we change them for the public and the media as well?

Posted by: Andrew Brown | September 18, 2006 at 10:25 AM