Our broken politics

Many of you believe that our politics is broken. I suspect this is right, in a particular sense.

What I mean is that pretty much all social institutions can be thought of as selection devices. The problem with politics is that these devices are working less well than they used to. Here are five examples of what I mean.

1. Parliamentary candidates used to be selected by mass-membership parties in which an ability to persuade or to build wide support was valued. Today, parties have been captured by fanatics and narcissists who select candidates in their own image; this problem has been exacerbated by the fact that there are bigger rewards on offer outside of parliament, which (at the margin) selects against some able people.

2. Ministers used to be selected as the most able MPs. Today, more premium is placed upon toeing the party line. The wretched Chris Grayling or Liam Fox thus occupy office because they are Brexiters, rather than because of any competence or character.

3. MPs used to see their role in Burkean terms - as being members of a “deliberative assembly” exercising independent judgment. In this way, the “hasty opinion” of the public was sometimes selected against. Today, with the rise of referendums and conception of politics as just another arena where the customer is king, this conception has declined.

4. We used to think that free debate would select for good ideas and against bad. As Mill wrote:

[Mankind’s] errors are corrigible. He is capable of rectifying his mistakes by discussion and experience. Not by experience alone. There must be discussion, to show how experience is to be interpreted. Wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument.

Today, this seems doubtful. People are asymmetric Bayesians. Confronted with opposing evidence, thy double-down (pdf) on their prejudices rather than yield to fact. Debate doesn’t therefore select properly for better ideas. (The BBC’s impartiality between truth and falsehood reinforces this failure).

5. Maybe there was a time when the media selected for intelligence or at least against egregious scumbags. Today, it doesn’t. In the 90s, David Irving was shut out of the public domain. Today, though, he’d have lots of Twitter followers and broadcasters, desperate to attract the viewers and attention that comes from controversy, would no doubt invite him onto their shows – as they do with Bannon, Gorka and Farage. This lust for mindless controversy – what I’ve called politics as wrestling – means that buffoonish charlatans like Johnson get attention whilst decent thoughtful MPs such as Jesse Norman do not. (A lot of the left should also be blamed here for preferring the moralistic posturing of “calling out” to engaging with serious ideas.)

Now, I’m not pretending that there was ever a golden age of perfect deliberation. There never was. Politics has always had a share of duffers and crooks. I just suspect that its selection mechanisms are more dysfunctional now than in the past. Bad ideas and bad people are more likely to be selected for rather than against. (This of course is not to deny that there are still some decent people left in politics: there are.) 

Our question, therefore, must be: how can we build better selection mechanisms? Paul Evans deserves huge credit for asking just this.

For me, at least part of the answer would be institutions (pdf) of deliberative democracy – mechanisms such as citizens juries which consider evidence and which help equalize political power by giving a say to the poor and downgrading the influence of the mass media. Paul Cotterill is right to call for a more Habermasian politics.

Merely saying this, of course, draws attention to the big problem here. Our current broken selection mechanisms serve the rich and powerful very well: why should they take a risk with deliberative, inclusive evidence-based policy-making? Perhaps, therefore, there is a tension between actually-existing capitalism on the one hand and a well-functioning democracy on the other.

Comments

[Lord]

Very much so, and that is the greatest problem with inequality, it leads directly to this situation as the rich identify what is good for them with what is good for the country.

[Adrian]

Well said.

[Jim]

We just know more about the duffers now, their every move is scrutinised, you can't move for people with smart phones recording your every word and action. George Brown anyone?

[Scratch]

I think they spent the last quarter century testing #3 to destruction.

It's hard to claim "trust us, we're better than you" when they've just presided over an unmandated full-spectrum socioeconomic assault on the punters.

[Dave Timoney]

You've pre-empted the obvious criticism of your claim by stating that there was never a golden age of politics, but even so:

1. Mass-membership is no guarantee of more thoughtful selection. At its peak in the 50s, the Tory Party routinely selected on the basis of social deference rather than effectiveness, which culminated in the elevation of Lord Home to the leadership. Our contemporary selection issue is the increasingly narrow background of candidates, which is largely due to the emergence of a self-replicating political/media caste.

2. History is kind to over-promoted idiots because it tends to forget them, unless they spectacularly screw up. There were just as many brown-noses and fools in the past.

3. We've had 3 referendums at a UK level in 41 years. While this is more than the period before 1975, we should bear in mind that we've only had universal adult suffrage since 1928 and votes from 18 since 1969. That democracy is becoming slightly more direct/representative is not necessarily a bad thing.

4. Mill's claim for the superiority of debate as a selection mechanism was part of the liberal ideology of the market, and was advanced at a time of limited suffrage. It wasn't an argument for democracy but for bourgeois plurality: the participation of all those who made and managed markets.

5. This is your strongest point in that there appears to have been structural changes in the media that have led to a greater appetite for frauds and gobshites, but I suspect this has less to do with Twitter than the profusion of TV channels that started with cable in the 80s.

Also, Irving wasn't really "shut out of the public domain" in the 90s so much as he went out of fashion. His earlier profile must be seen in the context of the Cold War liberal market for ideas (Nazis not so bad, Soviets worse), while he failed to retain interest on the right because he didn't move on from antisemitism to Islamophobia.

More deliberative democracy is probably the answer, as you suggest, but the battle for this shouldn't be fought solely in the realm of organised politics but also in the workplace. Choose your battlefield is the best advice.

[Jim]

I've said for a long time, the way to get a better class of politician is to stop politics being a career a young person can practically aspire to. Its perfectly possible to get to be an MP by your early 30s (Blair was 30 when he was first elected, Cameron 35). This means that a career of university (Oxbridge natch) followed by think tank/Spad/prospective candidate/safe seat is a well worn path to power. We need to break that path, and put the levers of power out of the reach of the sort of people who are loony enough to want to get their hands on them, and dedicate a decade or more to do so. So I propose a minimum age limit of 40 for local government and 50 for any Parliament (Westminster or devolved). Then no-one on leaving university will be prepared to wait 30 years to get to be a candidate in an unwinnable seat, let alone a safe one. Thus they'll have to go off and have real careers, and real lives, and learn something about life before they get to try to climb the greasy pole of power. Hopefully many of the power mad maniacs and general slippery @rseholes will fall by the wayside in the intervening years, and we will be left with politics being something that people do when they have already had a life doing something else, not a career in itself.

[Stephen]

Well, up to a point. The old system of selection by mass-membership parties gave us some memorably deplorable MPs: Horatio Bottomley, Tom Driberg, Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln, Robert Maxwell, Oswald Mosley, Noel Pemberton-Billing, Archibald Ramsay, John Stonehouse ... As you say, there never was a purely golden age.

I would particularly recommend a study of Trebitsch-Lincoln's career to anyone who thinks modern politicians are particularly awful.

[Miriam]

Your article is very well-timed. The day before it was published, the government launched its Civil Society Strategy. Included is the announcement of the Innovation in Democracy Programme which provides funding and support for 8-10 local authorities to trial deliberative democracy through citizens’ assemblies, devolving decision-making to those most affected by the decisions. Deliberative, participatory democracy is most definitely the way forward.

[Dave Timoney]

@Jim, you're proposing gerontocracy, which in the current circumstances of young adults facing weak wage growth and unaffordable property costs is hardly likely to make matters better.

The problem with Blair and Cameron was not their youth but their privilege.