Lobbying for Change

Find Your Voice to Create a Better Society

Alberto Alemanno

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781785782862
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Civisme et citoyenneté

'We need effective citizen-lobbyists – not just likers, followers or even marchers – more than ever. I have no hesitation in lobbying you to read this book.'Bill Emmott, former editor in chief, the Economist
Many democratic societies are experiencing a crisis of faith. Citizens are making clear their frustration with their supposedly representative governments, which instead seem driven by the interests of big business, powerful individuals and wealthy lobby groups. What can we do about it? How do we fix democracy and get our voices heard?
The answer, argues Alberto Alemanno, is to become change-makers – citizen lobbyists. By using our skills and talents and mobilizing others, we can bring about social and political change. Whoever you are, you've got power, and this book will show you how to unleash it.From successfully challenging Facebook's use of private data to abolishing EU mobile phone roaming charges, Alberto highlights the stories of those who have lobbied for change, and shows how you can follow in their footsteps, whether you want to influence immigration policy, put pressure on big business or protect your local community.

PART I

THE PROBLEM

Powerless

‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’

Edmund Burke

Many of us feel like spectators nowadays. Regardless of where we come from and what we do in life, despite the wealth and opportunities our societies offer, we feel overwhelmed and hopeless in the face of mounting challenges. We have never enjoyed so many opportunities to have a say in shaping our democratic societies. Yet we feel too feeble and helpless to do anything about it. We don’t always grasp why this is.

Powerlessness has a profound effect on our physiology and mental capacity.¹ It amplifies our response to stress which, in the long run, damages the brain. This in turn inhibits our ability to function and engage with the world. It damages our individual and collective well-being.²

Many factors can explain why we feel so powerless – including an intriguing bystander effect that reinforces inaction³ – but four things, all of them interconnected, are central to it:

• Nobody speaks for you: the unequal distribution of power;
• You’re not in the club: the distance between voters and decision-makers;
• Nobody teaches you: the disconnect between our schools and reality;
• Somebody decides for you: powerlessness by design.

We’re about to look at these in more detail. The remaining parts of this book will tackle what we can do about them.

Nobody Speaks for You: the Unequal Distribution of Power

‘The reality of political life is that the voice that shouts the loudest is the most likely to be heard, no matter how numerous the silent majority, no matter how just their cause.’

Brian Stipelman⁴

How can you feel powerless in a democracy? Doesn’t democracy mean that power belongs to the people? At least that’s what we learn at school. World leaders assure us that it’s so. They may even compare our modern democracies with the ideal of the first known democracy in Athens. The truth, however, is that during the fourth century BC, there were probably no more than 100,000 people belonging to citizen families in Athens. In other words, about 30,000 adult male citizens were entitled to vote in the assembly.⁵ If we, like the Athenians, lived in a small community where everyone could discuss issues of common interest, better their understanding in public debates, identify and assess available options and their consequences and eventually reach an informed consensus on what to do (based on universal suffrage and by a majority of individual voting), then we too might have a ‘true’ democracy.

Unfortunately, there are too many of us to make that work, and the delegation of political power is a necessary (if minor) evil. Indeed, the original idea of democracy, as the Ancient Greeks conceived it, was soon adapted by the Greeks themselves into an indirect, representative system that, wittingly or unwittingly, disempowered citizens (so as to empower them through their representatives). That’s what we call representative democracy.

The 19th-century English liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill explained it as:

the participation should everywhere be as great as the general degree of improvement of the community will allow … But since all cannot, in a community exceeding a single small town, participate personally in any but some very minor portions of the public business, it follows that the ideal type of a perfect government must be representative.⁶

Indeed, representative democracy is often considered a compromise which is forced on us by practical constraints. But there is another case for it.

It also tempers high emotion and the ensuing violence of the majority. That’s why we entrust a few citizens – today’s politicians – with the task of governing us in our countries’ best interests.⁷ That’s why today our political power is limited to expressing a preference for a candidate (sometimes not even that, due to the electoral system) or a party, rather than taking a stance on every single issue.

Under the model of representative democracy, we decided to raise up a governing elite who should be able, as US President and founding father James Madison saw it:

to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a model, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose.⁸

This vision has spread over time across liberal democracies, from France to Austria, from Germany to Spain. As a result, decisions are distanced from everyday people and delegated to their representatives. In other words, we deliberately established a governing elite. So it is no surprise that a small group of professional politicians – rather than us – do most of the public speaking and take the decisions on issues of broad concern.⁹ It sounds like a fair division of labour: our representatives take care of the big challenges, since they are best able to do so, and we can spend our lives focusing on our own concerns without having to give much thought to what is happening in our society. Despite some disgracefully bad outcomes, this system has worked reasonably well for the last couple of centuries.

But today, elections, which made democracy possible, are the fossil fuel of politics. After giving democracy ‘a huge boost, now they cause colossal problems’.¹⁰ Our role as citizens, limited to voting every few years, is frequently sidelined and usually cosmetic. We think of government as them, not us. The Austrian-born US economist, Joseph Schumpeter likened democracy to a free market mechanism where parties (firms) have to sell the electorate (customers) the best policy in order to win their votes.¹¹ In other words, political candidates compete for votes in the same way firms compete for customers. This procedural understanding of democracy, which is partly shared by philosophers such as Max Weber and Norberto Bobbio, seems to legitimise a situation in which people play a minimal role in political life. It speaks to a commodification of politics. But democracy can’t be reduced to voting. Elections cannot be an end in themselves.

Delegating the workings of democracy made sense when communication and access to knowledge were limited. But it is completely out of touch with the way we interact with each other and learn today. Even as long ago as the 18th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed:

The people of England deceive themselves when they fancy they are free; they are so, in fact, only during the election of members of parliament; for, as soon as a new one is elected, they are again in chains, and are nothing.¹²

If democracy boils down to a method of choosing political leaders, there is no room for a community to emerge that can tell the elected what citizens are thinking. As predicted by Mill, ‘Let a person have nothing to do for his country and he will not care for it’.¹³

Despite these powerful reminders, the centralised systems of authority we find in today’s representative democracies not only accept but actually reward political passivity. The habit is institutionally and culturally encouraged in each of us. How so? As it has recently been proven, what determines our political behaviour, in particular voting, is group identity and party loyalty rather than our policy preferences.¹⁴ This explains why elections typically fail to result in popular control of public policy. It’s no wonder we feel powerless; the system is structured so that we can’t vote on individual policy issues. We are not supposed to be in control.

But could it be any other way? Any system of government needs administrators to carry out decisions. We have busy lives, little interest in the technicalities of decision-making and limited mental bandwidth. Evidence confirms that ordinary citizens do no master the intricacies of political issues.¹⁵ Yet we – citizens – are expected to hold accountable those we hired to represent us, through a set of counterpower mechanisms. Political philosopher Pierre Rosanvallon refers to them as ‘counterdemocracy’.¹⁶ This is the essence of representative democracy and its intrinsic division of labour between them and us: those who hold power do not exercise it, but delegate it to those who exercise it but do not hold it. This is the key (yet often neglected) distinction between sovereignty (us) and governance (them).

But in order to hold officials accountable, we need to know them, and how many of us know our elected officials at a local, state and – if you are an EU citizen – European level? Only a small minority. Fusion’s Massive Millennial Survey showed that 77 per cent of 18- to 34-year-olds could not name one of their senators in the US.¹⁷ Similarly, 75 per cent of Britons are unable to name their MP.¹⁸ Worse, just one in ten can identify their local Member of the European Parliament, according to the Guardian.¹⁹ Similar trends are found across the world.

In these circumstances, we shouldn’t be surprised that most of our politicians are persistently indifferent to us – except, of course, at election time when they court us for our votes. They respond instead to the affluent and organised. And in doing so they give the impression that not all citizens deserve equal consideration.

Voting is supposed to equalise power: the wealthy and the poor all have one vote and should equally be offered the opportunity to voice their concerns. This conclusion flies in the face of today’s democratic realities. In particular, the contrast with our online experience, where each of us can speak our mind and expect our views to be considered and acted upon, is stark. This disconnect between our digitally-enabled lives as consumers and the low-tech, offline world of politics is sharper than ever. While our model of representative democracy rests on the premise that the elected respond to our opinion and represent the public interest, the practice of political representation – as experienced by all of us – proves that wrong. Without an equal voice for every citizen, there cannot be equal consideration of interests. As a result, there is a widespread belief that our votes do not really matter. Martin Gilens of Princeton University recently confirmed this conclusion with compelling evidence that the opinions of the bottom 90 per cent of income earners in America have a ‘statistically non-significant impact’. As a result, the preferences of economic elites, business interests and people who can afford lobbyists have ‘far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do’.²⁰ Other studies have demonstrated that the large majority of the population, in particular those on lower incomes, are effectively excluded from the political system. Their opinions are systematically ignored by the elected representatives, while the preferences of a tiny segment of the richest have overwhelming influence.²¹

The fundamental problem in this system is that one set of interests systematically overpowers the others. The most powerful players in the policy game are the wealthy, the educated and the well-connected. Partisan interests, notably but not exclusively corporate ones, have the most resources, skills and commitment to participate in the day-to-day workings of government. As a result, even in the most democratic countries, we, the citizens, have only limited impact on policy decisions. You probably live in a democracy. But how democratic really is it?

This situation of systemic unbalances in the representation of interests is expected to worsen. Runaway inequality has created a world where eight people own as much as the poorest half of the world’s population, according to a 2017 study.²² This number has fallen dramatically from 388 as recently as 2010, 80 in 2015 and 62 in 2016.²³ While just six of the 62 were women in 201...