The Good State

On the Principles of Democracy

A. C. Grayling

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786077196
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

The foundations upon which our democracies stand are inherently flawed, vulnerable to corrosion from within. What is the remedy? A. C. Grayling makes the case for a clear, consistent, principled and written constitution, and sets out the reforms necessary – among them addressing the imbalance of power between government and Parliament, imposing fixed terms for MPs, introducing proportional representation and lowering the voting age to 16 (the age at which you can marry, gamble, join the army and must pay taxes if you work) – to ensure the intentions of such a constitution could not be subverted or ignored. As democracies around the world show signs of decay, the issue of what makes a good state, one that is democratic in the fullest sense of the word, could not be more important.To take just one example: by the simplest of measures, neither Britain nor the United States can claim to be truly democratic. The most basic tenet of democracy is that no voice be louder than any other. Yet in our 'first past the post' electoral systems a voter supporting a losing candidate is unrepresented, his or her voice unequal to one supporting a winning candidate, who frequently does not gain a majority of the votes cast. This is just one of a number of problems, all of them showing that democratic reform is a necessity in our contemporary world.

1

What Democracy Entails

It is an assumption in almost all the world’s advanced states that democracy is the best – or, in Winston Churchill’s phrase, the least bad – of systems for answering the question: What is the source of power and legitimacy of government in a state? The answer variously (and not always synonymously) formulated as ‘the people’, ‘popular will’, ‘the consent of the people’, ‘majority will’, and cognates, indicates the basic idea, but leaves open the further question of how it is to work. For most of history the word ‘democracy’ was taken to denote a very undesirable way of sourcing authority in a state, for the reasons given by Plato in the eighth book of his Republic: namely, the ignorance, self-interest, short-termism, prejudice, envy, and proneness to rivalry widespread among ‘the people’. He thought that democracy would rapidly degenerate into ochlocracy, that is, ‘mob rule’ or anarchy. A much later sceptic about democracy, the American satirist H. L. Mencken, put the point more succinctly: to believe in democracy, he said, is to believe ‘that collective wisdom will emerge from individual ignorance’. And that, in the eyes of sceptics about democracy, is at best; if Plato had been alive in Paris between August 1792 and July 1794 – the Reign of Terror that usurped the French Revolution – he would have seen a paradigmatic and horrifying example of the very worst of his fears about ochlocracy realized.

There is, however, an answer to these sceptical – not to say dismissive and condescending – views, which defends the assumption now widely shared that democracy is indeed the best (or least bad) of systems. A number of significant points have to be taken into that answer, because the idea of democracy involves a dilemma, and solving it is complex. The dilemma of democracy is how to respect two rights that people have, rights that some think are incompatible with each other. On the one hand, there is the right of the people to choose and authorize the government under which they live. On the other hand, there is the people’s right to have government performing its functions at least adequately and, one hopes, better than adequately, in the service of their interests.¹ Plato, and two thousand years of theory and practice after him, thought that you could not get from the first of these rights to the second. A defence of democracy must show how this can be done.

Straight away one can state two fundamental reasons why democracy is worth having. First, if what is implied in the idea of democracy is fully realized, it offers the most justifiable basis for legitimacy in government. That is obvious. Only slightly less obvious is the second reason. Few can fail to notice that democracy is an inefficient way of managing a state, given the time and energy consumed in debate, and the disruptive changes in policy, economic direction, and law that can follow changes of government after elections. Tyrannies are greatly more efficient. But the values that are realizable in a democratic order – collected under the label ‘civil liberties and human rights’ – are a highly significant benefit for which the inefficiency of democracy is a price worth paying.²

However, one has to be alert to the fact that a political system’s claim to be democratic is not always, or perhaps even often, accurate. Indeed, many democracies in practice tend to be run by hidden oligarchies consisting of whichever group of politicians currently holds power, and by administrators who know how to operate the levers of government in more or less subtle ways. Almost all the world’s leading democracies evolved their systems from previous power-holding arrangements, and as a matter of historical record the steps by which this was done were incremental and partial; the degree of control that monarchy or overt oligarchy held was only reluctantly eked away, and those in control of making the change were careful to keep arrangements in place which ensured that their rule or at least influence could still be exercised.³

These points tell us that a defence of democracy needs also to be a reassertion of what the very idea of democracy implies, given that inefficiencies of government and the existence of de facto oligarchies can, and too often do, blunt or even subvert the point of democracy. In the discussions to follow, a constant theme will be that the concept of democracy itself stipulates what is required for its realization; the concept entails a set of principles which define it, and which if not put into practice render it empty.

This is why specifying the fundamental constitutional and political principles required for a democracy requires an analysis of what is meant by democracy itself. It is one of those concepts – in fact, one of those words – that everyone assumes they understand, sometimes without being aware that significantly different interpretations are placed upon it, that democracies can take different forms, and that the vagueness of both word and idea is often exploited for polemical reasons, too often when they do not even remotely apply.

Various forms of democracy exist and have been proposed, but they are taken to share the common assumption, previously noted, loosely describable as a commitment to the principle that ‘the people’ – which more accurately means ‘the enfranchised portion of the people’ – by right have a central part to play in conferring legitimacy on the government of the state in which they live. All aspects of this loose characterization – who is enfranchised? what is the part they play? what is the nature and extent of the legitimacy they confer by playing it? – are complex.

The inspiring idea of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ does not reduce that complexity. When Abraham Lincoln uttered these words in the course of his address at Gettysburg in November 1863, half way through the civil war in America, the franchise in his country was held by white adult male property-owners only. Although the vote was extended to black adult males by the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, ‘Jim Crow’ laws in the previously Confederate states effectively kept them out of voting booths until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Note also how long it took for women to be enfranchised. New Zealand women achieved the right to vote in 1893, but in the US and the UK full voting rights were not extended to women on the same basis as men until 1920 and 1928 respectively. It is important therefore to note that the phrase ‘the people’ has never meant ‘the population’, and until relatively recently meant only a restricted part of the adult population (depending, moreover, on the definition of ‘adult’). The right to vote still excludes many who have other rights and obligations in society that should naturally be accompanied by enfranchisement. For example, in the UK sixteen-year-olds can join the army, can marry, and are already liable to pay tax on earnings above a given threshold, but the voting age is eighteen and was only lowered to eighteen from twenty-one in 1969.

All this said, the trend over the course of the last century has been towards inclusion of greater proportions of the populations of states that have serious ambitions to be described as democratic, which reduces the degree to which invoking ‘the people’ is an insincere gesture. But it has to be remembered that all franchises are qualified or restricted, and that the phrase ‘the people’ masks this fact.

The question of the part played by the enfranchised in conferring legitimacy on government is even more complicated. An illustration of this is afforded by an example drawn from the history of the US. In June 1776 the state of Virginia adopted a ‘Declaration of Rights’, drafted by George Mason, which stated ‘That all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people’. The Constitution adopted by Virginia just a few weeks later did not reflect this rousing sentiment. It gave the vote only to (white) men of property.⁴ Later in that same month of June 1776, with the Virginia Declaration lying before him as he wrote, Thomas Jefferson drafted the ‘Declaration of Independence’. It echoes some of the phrases of the Virginia Declaration, phrases which in their turn had been adapted by Mason from John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government (1689). But the preamble to Jefferson’s document contained a significant and deliberate difference. It says that ‘Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed’. Note the large difference between Mason’s words and Jefferson’s. The latter substituted a much less committal idea, that of the ‘consent’ of the governed rather than that of their active grant of permission, which is the implication of Mason’s assertion that ‘all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people’.

Where Mason had thought bottom-up from the enfranchised to what they authorized, Jefferson thought top-down from government to what gave them their authority. The difference is highly significant. In Mason’s view the people endow government with legitimacy by the positive step of conferring it. Jefferson’s view leaves room for saying that the consent of the governed could be manifested in other ways – by tacit agreement or passive acceptance, for example. The idea that people could ‘consent’ to being governed merely by not actively opposing government had allowed Locke to say, a century earlier, that England’s Parliament ‘represented the people’ though it was very far from being a democratic institution. Locke allowed himself to say this because the people – here literally meaning the population as a whole – by their compliance and lack of active rejection of government, indicated acceptance of the rule they lived under. The recent English Civil War showed that this acceptance might be withdrawn; so he relied on the assumption that if it is not withdrawn, it is de facto granted.⁵

This assumption is of course highly questionable; lack of active refusal or opposition does not license any government to claim that it has the ‘consent of the people’. Think of a population divided, weak, and oppressed by force; its lack of resistance is not consent. Think of a population misinformed, misled, lied to; its lack of disagreement is not consent. This implies that the concept of ‘consent’ is too weak to constitute a ground of authorization for government. It is a necessary condition for that authorization, certainly; but it is not sufficient. Mason’s version stated a sufficient condition, Jefferson’s version merely a necessary one.

A stronger way of characterizing the role of the enfranchised in Mason’s sense is to say that they have ‘final authority in the state’. The enfranchised not only confer legitimacy on government, but by the same token specify the nature and limits of its powers, and can recall their authorization. Thus government is both licensed by the enfranchised and answerable to them. In other words again: those appointed to legislate and apply the laws are given temporary and conditional position only: this way of putting the matter reveals a central feature of the meaning of democracy.

This latter characterization goes a considerable way to capturing the intrinsic meaning of ‘democracy’, but it is not yet the whole story. In the Introduction it was pointed out that in a democracy every enfranchised person is, by definition, entitled to a vote. It is now accepted that every enfranchised person is entitled to one vote; which until quite recently (in fact, until 1948) was not the case in the UK, which had a plural voting system (not to be confused with a plurality voting system, discussed shortly). The slogan ‘one man one vote’ was not an idle one in the campaigns for self-determination by colonies of the British Empire after the Second World War. The plural voting system worked like this: all those associated with a university had a vote in their university constituency as well as in their home constituency. All those who owned property which they did not occupy could vote in the constituency or constituencies where their other property lay, as well as in their home constituency. Thus, one person might have several votes if he or she were a member of a university and/or a property owner, thus giving a weighting to more educated and better-off property-owning people.

Part of a justification for plural votes had been offered by John Stuart Mill in his Considerations on Representative Government, where, supporting an extension of the franchise to all who could read and write and who paid taxes, he added, ‘though everyone [qualified as just described] ought to have a voice, that everyone should have an equal voice is a totally different proposition’, for there should be ‘some mode of plural voting which may assign to education, as such, the degree of superior influence due to it, and sufficient as a counterpoise to the numerical weight of the least educated class’.⁶ This is a view that would resonate with such as Isaac Asimov, who in a much-quoted article entitled ‘A Cult of Ignorance’ in Newsweek in 1980 wrote that democracy promoted the view that ‘my ignorance is equal to your knowledge’.⁷

Acceptance of plural voting ended in the UK in 1948, and the assumption now is that every vote has equal weight with every other, because to have a vote is to have a voice, and the most basic assumption of democracy is that no voice has a claim to be louder than any other. But! – in plurality (‘first-past-the-post’ or FPTP) electoral systems, this is not the case. A voter supporting a losing candidate is unrepresented in such a system. Her vote is not equal to the vote of someone who supports a winning candidate; her vote is negated by allowing a mere plurality to decide who shall be elected. The assumption that every vote should have equal weight entails that a voting system should, in the overall outcome, yield a result as close to proportional to voters’ expressed preferences as it can be (short of allowing minoritarian super-influence on policy, explained below). Both the UK and US electoral systems for the House of Commons and House of Representatives respectively fail this most basic principle of democracy. So do Canada, India, and a significant number of other countries around the world claiming or aspiring to be democracies. Because of their use of the FPTP voting system, none are full democracies.

A simple example demonstrates the undemocratic nature of the FPTP system. Consider a constituency or congressional district of 100 voters, in which 10 candidates stand for election. Suppose 8 of them get 10 votes each, one gets 9 votes, and o...