Democracies are underperforming on both sides of the Atlantic.
At the Economist Philip Cogan reflects on an academic paper which demonstrates that policies backed by those on higher incomes have a higher chance of being adopted, compared to those supported by middle income earners. The support of business interest groups also increases the chances of a policy being adopted, while the support of mass based interests groups has no effect. A draft of the paper can be found here.
This will not improve any time soon. In 2010 the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United v Federal Election Commission judgement found that corporations had the same rights as individuals to free speech, paving the way for the Super PACs to inject around $500 million into the 2012 presidential election melee, though they can’t work directly with parties. In April of this year the Supreme Court removed caps on the number of candidates to which individuals could donate. The founding fathers, said Nancy Pelosi (Democratic leader in the US Congress), wanted "a government for the many, not a government for the money". Then her fundraisers hit the phones.
Meanwhile, in the run up to Thursday’s European elections, there’s much talk of Europe’s ‘populist’ turn – a phenomenon which includes Front National in France, the People’s Party in Denmark, Holland’s Freedom Party as well as of course, the United Kingdom Independence Party. This looks like a right-of-centre populism, until you include Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement in Italy or Syriza in Greece. I’m not sure there’s much which unites all of these parties, other than the feeling that the ‘ordinary’ man or woman in the street has been handed a raw deal - and that a large contributing factor to that is a loss of sovereignty to European institutions.
Populism is obviously ‘a bad thing’, not because it draws deeply on public opinion but because it constructs public opinion in a particular way, working mostly with people’s fears and anger to persuade them that there’s one big problem that must be dealt with, and once that's dealt with we can move on (or back) into sunlit uplands. It leaves no space for wisdom or judgement - still less for the notion that we're quite capable of having cooked up some of our own problems - only for what people think and want. As David Marquand put it recently, populism is the bastard child of a reasoning democracy.
But populists aren’t the problem – they just operate in the space vacated by mainstream political parties. In the US, this is largely the result of the connection between money and the production of political power. In Europe the picture is more fractured - distant and unresponsive European institutions and national political concerns and problems. The suprising thing, though, is not that populist political movements - Tea Party, Syriza or UKIP - are have a significant impact, but that they have not had more.
Paul Bickley
Image by Matt Brown from flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence
