What’s the point of political parties?
Keith Sutherland (Exeter, Imprint Academic): Alex Parsons’ inspired proposal for the delegated vote would help to restore democratic legitimacy. However it does nothing to address the more fundamental problem of how to facilitate informed political decision making in mass democracies. Political psychologists can predict, with 80% accuracy, voters’ judgments about complex issues, solely on the basis of emotional preferences and passions that bear no logical relation to policy issues. In 82% of twentieth-century cases, the tallest candidate won the US presidential election, and surveys show that the public does slightly worse in estimates of the parties’ positions on most issues than it would do if it proceeded by flipping a coin.
As the age of representative democracy has segued into the age of manipulative populism, there is a need for more radical alternatives than Mr. Parsons’ proposal. In classical times electoral representation was viewed as a mechanism to preserve aristocratic privilege; the truly democratic principle was the appointment of office-holders by sortition (the random casting of lots). Sortition went out of use for a number of reasons, but is still retained for jury service, as it is believed that “12 good men and true” can represent the considered judgment of the community. Note that jurors are not delegates (like modern MPs), but deliberative representatives in the Burkean sense.
But if so for trial juries then why not the High Court of Parliament? Sortition is coming back into fashion among a number of writers, motivated both by a philosophical concern with social justice and a more practical concern with ensuring that the trains run on time. Serious proposals have been made advocating the lottery for the House of Lords, the US House of Representatives, and the House of Commons. The Labour Government has clearly been inspired by the “deliberative” turn in political science (derived from the work of James Fishkin); indeed Michael Wills, the minister of state responsible for constitutional renewal, is currently participating in a debate on this forum over how best to fulfil the government’s commitment to a citizens summit.
But if policy matters are to be decided by citizen juries then what is the point of political parties? Or, to put it slightly differently, if the job of ministers is to implement policy decisions arrived at by public deliberation, then should they not be appointed on merit, rather than by clambering up the greasy pole of party politics?
Filed under: Deliberative democracy, Participation
It’s a difficult one to answer.
My problem with Lords reform and an elected Lords is in replicating the partisan nature of the Commons. I couldn’t think of anything worse to be honest.
Hereditary Lords are a form of sortition. It’s the landed gentry / privilege aspect to the Lords that most reformers seemed to object to, because it was unrepresentative of us lumpen oiks (as opposed to careerist politicians who are even more unrepresentative).
I’d reinstate hereditary Lords, and pick some more by lottery. Get rid of the cronyism completely.
But Keith’s point Gareth, is: why confine this argument to the Lords?
Anthony
Sortition has an honourable history - it was used in the the very first democracy in classical Athens - and I am attracted to it in principle. However, I have two points: first, I rather like the idea of a second chamber filled with older men and women of experience and achievement who are not in thrall to the political/media establishement. Second, a first chamber chosen by sortition could be exploited by a permanent civil service and media hyenas.
Political parties in general represent cynical bargains: if you support my pet scheme even though you think it nonsensical, I will in turn support your nonsensical pet scheme, and we will both get what we value most highly. The corollary is that as few as 25% of representatives can force a scheme through, as a majority of the majority party; and as many as 75% can be powerless to block it, as the entire minority party and the minority of the majority party. This is in a pure two-party system, in multi-party systems the controlling minority can be much smaller. Summary, political parties are good for people with political careers that need a vehicle, it’s highly questionable what good they do for the people they ought to serve.
I see that Anthony.
Have you ever read The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart? The fear is complete anarchy I suppose, and decision-taking without fear for the consequences. Democracy needs some element of representation, some person directly responsible for outcomes, which is why governments set the terms and possible outcomes of referenda. Sortition is great in principle but it needs a framework and a defined context in which to operate (as juries do, revising chambers do, or Sharia law does in the West).
I would agree with all of Puncheon’s points. The solution that I proposed in The Party’s Over to the domination of the Commons (selected by sortition) by the civil service and the media is that the “older men and women of experience and achievement” in the Lords should act as advocates for and against legislative proposals in the same way that trial juries weigh up the arguments of prosecution and defence advocates. They would debate in front of the Commons but NOT vote.
This model is ultimately derived from Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana (1656). The constitution I am proposing is a mixed one, with each element (administration, legislation and advocacy) quite distinct.
These are interesting ideas, and not just because I’m thankful for anything that makes me look less radical!
I think a chamber appointed by lottery would be an excellent check on an elected chamber (and one of the few uses of a second chamber that makes sense to me) but I think using it for a sole chamber would cause more problems than it solves and I worry that a sortition house would be more, not less, vulnerable to the media and manipulation.
As Churchill famously called democracy the worst system of government (except for all the others), Trial by Jury is another least-worst system, prone to manipulation by a few strong members. There’s an interesting argument to be made that a double-jury system where two isolated juries of six reach a verdict independently would improve it. However, this doesn’t apply itself well when scaled up to the political process as isolation of two separate lottery-appointed chambers would prove impossible. Likewise the media restrictions on covering court cases could not be scaled up to government.
The other problem that juries suggest it’d run into is that most people avoid it and that’s when it’s only for a fortnight and you can stay at home! This would potentially require not only a longer period of time but an at least partial relocation to the capital. How long would this chamber sit? Six months? A year? Two years? The longer it sits the less vulnerable it would be to outside pressure, but it would also become more of a burden and less attractive to its members.
The other question is if our only chamber is run by lottery, who’s running the show? Choosing a leader of the executive at random would seem a bad idea, and appointing one based on competency raises the question of who judged them competent. I don’t think it would work having them appointed by the citizen legislature as being judged best by 0.000025% of the voting population seems a pale imitation of democracy.
Even If we have an elected president whose laws are either passed or rejected by a citizen legislature there are still problems. As the legislature is likely to change completely several times during their term of office, there is no entrenched position of opposition to the president. As elected, longterm MPs no longer exist, where are future presidents getting the experience? The obvious remaining candidates are big business, the civil service or a big leap from local government. My objection to the first is that running a country isn’t like running a company and democratic leaders should be more than managers. The system you describe for ministerial positions is more similar to the US cabinet than the UK one, but whilst that’s a system that promotes competence for their department, US cabinet members are rarely seen as future leaders.
Of course you could argue that once we take out the easy elected way to power, all those people would flock to the civil service, but that presents its own problems. Either way, a professional political class is likely to emerge and I’d rather it was in the elected sphere where we could keep an eye on them, rather than the civil service.
Then we get to the other roles MPs play apart from debating policy such as representation. Perhaps you could solve representation by picking people out of constituency-like areas to represent that area, but that only makes obvious the illegitimacy of the process. I suspect it’s more empowering to know you have the ability to choose your representative rather than the small possibility you may be your representative. Without elections I think the links between the chamber and the public at large would be far weaker.
So the answer to your question of ‘what are political parties for’ would be to create a definite series of values and policies which people can either approve or reject and keep ideas ticking over for longer periods than citizen legislatures could realistically do, but I think the more important bit is they do this whilst being accountable to the public. I think it’d be fair to say sortition may be representative, but it lacks accountability. So I’m all for sortition as a second-chamber check on government, but I’d like more accountability in a primary chamber than it would create.
Thanks to Alex for his thoughtful and detailed response. It won’t be possible to reply in full in a short post (it’s taken two books so far), so I’ll restrict myself to a few points:
1) Iraq and the looming financial crisis refute the claim that our current arrangements lead to responsible and accountable government. The principle of several and joint ministerial responsibility has long been in decline, and it’s hard to think of a single example of the former since the Falklands. Regarding the latter, by the time governments are held to account it’s usually too late. If ministers were appointed by headhunters at least competence would be the criterion; their appointment would be confirmed by parliament and they could be removed by a censure motion – far greater accountability than at present.
The analogy between political juries and criminal trials is only a loose one. In the former the jury would simply listen to the competing arguments and then vote individually; the ‘verdict’ is the statistical aggregate of the votes cast. I deal with the various options for length of service, remuneration, logistics etc in The Party’s Over.
I agree with Alex that a professional political class would still be running the show in one way or another. Indeed they should certainly be staffing the government departments and proposing/arguing against legislative proposals, but they should not be judge, jury and executioner (as with the current arrangements). Voting should be in the hands of the citizen parliament, randomly selected.
Although my original book concluded that the party was over, I’ve since been persuaded that political parties should continue to publish manifestos and offer themselves for election and that the majority party should be able to introduce legislative proposals. But these would still be put to the vote of a citizen parliament and the majority party in parliament would not run the government.
As for the problem of where would our future political leaders gain their experience, again compare this with our current arrangements where previous experience is often little more than membership of the Oxford Union and other student debating societies. Under my proposal a significant proportion of the house of advocates (the Lords) would have served time in government departments; others would have gained their experience in a wide range of positions in civil society.
I’m not sure I accept all of your starting premises. For example, why do you so confidently asset that MPs are delegates rather than trustees, as Burke held and therefore like modern jurors?
I’m quite happy to have my laws drafted by experts. I do think there could be a role for randomly selected members of the public, as in, for example, a ‘representative chamber’ to approve proposed laws or consultative ‘citizens’ juries’, but I don’t think their role should be to make laws.
Even there, though, I’m not convinced of the merits of random selection over other approaches to representation, such as stratified samples or letting the people choose who should represent them. (Which is not to say I prefer those methods either, merely that I haven’t made up my mind).
In any case, I think political parties could still serve organizational and motivational roles, somewhat like pressure groups, except with policies ‘across the board’. It’s often said, for example, that the existence of parties with ideologies makes it easier for voters to reach decisions - they don’t have to work out what they think about every issue, if they know they’re broadly in sympathy with Labour (say), they can assume the Labour party will make roughly the decisions they would.
I suppose the continued existence of political parties could, thereby, create something of a danger in a system with a randomly-elected house, however. The worry would be that ‘professional’ demagogues would debate out the issues in somewhere like the Oxford Union, and then once they’d decided the representative sample (or many, obviously not all, of them) may vote like sheep, as decided by the politicians…
In The US, the House could be elected by Lot, and the Senate, by popular Vote. The Word Ballot, comes from the words Ball, Lot. How the Greeks selected, the council of the 500, they wrote their name on a Ball, and threw it into a tub, They believed the Gods, selected, the representatives.
Ben Saunders asks why modern MPs are like delegates rather than trustees? Because debating and holding the government to account is no longer their main concern. They spend most of their time in their offices dealing with constituency matters until the division bell is sounded, when they assume their primary function as lobby fodder. This is a long way removed from the Burkean ideal of representation.
My proposal is not that the citizen parliament should draft legislation, only vote on proposals put before them. In a court of law the jury doesn’t prepare the prosecution or the defence case, it simply adjudicates. Regarding the demagoguery issue, although trial juries will be influenced by the oratory of a skilled barrister, nevertheless the jury is still trusted to decide the matter on the basis of the competing arguments offered. There is no reason to believe that this would be any different in the high court of parliament.
It certainly used to be the case that party ideologies made it easy for voters to reach decisions, but this is no longer true in the post-ideological age. Political parties stand for whatever the psephologists tell them swing voters in key marginals are looking for, and ideology has been replaced with an obsession with image and the cult of personality.
jdlaughead’s proposal that Congress could be selected by lot and the Senate by the popular vote has been worked out in detail in the Callenbach and Phillips book, A Citizen Legislature (currently out of print but soon to be re-published by Imprint Academic). And Oliver Dowlen makes an interesting argument that one of the reasons the secret ballot has replaced the public drawing of lots is because of the privatisation of religious belief after the Reformation:
“The religious origins of the lot may help explain why it has gone out of fashion: although some of the early American colonies experimented with sortition, one of the reasons that they opted in the end for the secret ballot is that it resonated with the Protestant ideal that the private individual should be alone in his judgements and answerable only to God. The public drawing of lots smacked of ceremonial ritualism and was impractical among the scattered rural population of the American colonies. The lot as a public token of divine guidance appealed more to southern Mediterranean and Catholic sensibilities than to New World Protestants, with their emphasis on private revelation.” (Dowlen, The Political Potential of Sortition, 2008, forthcoming).
Whatever the negative aspects, political parties remain the most effective means for pursuing policy agendas offered to the electorate during election campaigns.
When voters cast their ballot for a political party they can rightly expect that representative (if elected) to pursue the common aims and objectives outlined their manifesto.
Of course, other issues will arise during the course of any administration which will not be covered in a manifesto. However, one should be able to gain a sense of direction as to how the politician will vote based on the party they belong to and their work as a constituency representative.
As Churchill once said “…democracy is the worst form of government except all the others…”
Chris Binding may be one of the few people (mostly policy wonks) who read election manifestos, but in recent elections it’s been the Sun ‘wot won it’ and Sun readers don’t buy election manifestos, even when they’re on sale in Tesco.
As Anthony Downs demonstrated in 1957, the appalling level of ignorance over policy issues amongst voters shouldn’t really surprise us — voters may well be ‘rationally ignorant’, but they’re certainly not stupid — they’ve simply realized that their individual vote makes no difference at all — even in an exactly tied poll, their own ‘casting’ vote would be swamped by the margin of error, leading to a fresh election. So why bother to turn out in the rain to vote or take the trouble to master the considerable knowledge required to vote intelligently? ‘Having the liberty to cast [my vote] is roughly as valuable as having the liberty to cast a vote on whether the sun will shine tomorrow’ (Hardin, 2003, p.179).
By contrast, James Fishkin’s experiments in deliberative democracy have demonstated that ordinary citizens are perfectly capable of informed decision making after listening to the arguments of competing advocates. But this will never happen in large-scale elective democracies because the individual vote makes no difference. Random sampling is the only way of ensuring that decision making is both informed and (statistically) representative.
I’m genuinely puzzled as to why we have this obsession with voting (even when the individual vote makes no difference). I think it’s probably something to do with the modern Western cult of the individual. Perhaps this is why electoral democracy has failed to catch on in more collectivised societies. According to Dowlen (see my previous comment) it’s a religious matter. Whatever it is it’s profoundly irrational.
When Winston Churchill made his back-handed compliment to democracy it was still true that political parties had recognisable aims and objectives. But I doubt that Churchill would have come to a similar conclusion at the start of the 21st century. He would certainly have disapproved of the obsession of MPs with constituency affairs (as opposed to holding the government to account), as he ridiculed MPs’ surgeries as “going into the medical business”.
Just to add to Keith’s opening on sortition and political parties. What the use of lot to select political office holders achieves is to keep the process of selection free from interference and manipulation. This, in turn, inhibits the ability of anyone with power and influence from exercising that power in respect to the distribution of offices…thus it helps to break up concentrations of partisan power within the body politic.
Now one of the problems with political parties – and possibly one reason that they are distrusted by many members of the public is that they are prime examples of such concentration of power. What is more that power often manifests itself in ways that are clearly incommensurate with many of our ideals of open, fair and sensible government. A party can operate as a locus of power outside the due political process –i.e. it can make what are essentially public decisions in private or out of the public gaze. Furthermore because party loyalty is rewarded and because parties are probably the only ladder into public office, partisan conformity is encouraged and independent thinking is discouraged. Thus a political party quickly degenerates into a culture of dependency. It is also debatable whether a decision primarily motivated by the interests of partisan competition or under the pressure of partisan conformity can be as sound and sensible as we should expect from those we elect to govern us.
Not all parties and not all party members succumb to these pressures, and some are able to combine party life with a high level of non-partisan public service – but I would suggest that this is a very difficult balancing act not facilitated by the role of parties in liberal democracies.
By placing independently chosen citizens into the body politic sortition can add new independent voices and witnesses to the political process and this, in the correct context, can go some way to remedying some of the problems of excessive partisanship. To do this, however, we need to know what sortition can contribute and why we might wish to use it.
While these are just some preliminary observations on sortition and parties, I believe that the debate should be informed by discussion on what is meant by open public government and on what value we place on a politically active independent citizenry.
I am a citizen of this Land. I am not an Academic in any way nor am I versed in the ‘political sciences’. I have, however, over the years come to much the same conclusion as some of the other contributors here.
The Party System of Politics is anathema to Democracy. Quite often the Party with a lower count of the votes, wins!?! This parties leadership then says we will do ‘this’ and make the cabinet and government members vote ‘this’ way - how is that Democratic?
The Lords, I feel, as a sortition (not a phrase I was familiar with) work very well - often scuppering the Government of the day in OUR name. The fact that they may be hereditary peers or similar is, to all intents and purposes, highly irrelevant. They are, after all, private citizens too and at the end of the day they are working for US, the ‘common man’ and they do a good job! Where else would we find such a foil?
The concept of engaging the ordinary citizen in a governmental role is an idea I have been kicking around for some years now. The party political lines need to be removed so that we become a non-partisan state. The population that is entitled to vote can all be put onto a computer system which then can “elect” the government from that database. A citizen who is thus chosen can be exempted much as a jury member can be, otherwise he/she serves for, what, 2 -3 years? Any job they may have at the time can be safe-guarded under law, but can be filled by a ‘roving workforce’ as such. We could retain a core ‘civil service’ to come up with proposals that need debating and voting on.
There was, I noted, a concern that there would not be any head of a system like this. I propose that, to appease the republicans at least, the acting Monarch of the day sit as head of the ruling body / government. That way they are included in the political process (why should they not have that right?) and they are working for the money WE pay them.
There is, of course, the ever-present problem of the undesirable citizen, whether he (sic) be a criminal or part of the ‘great unwashed’ with all that that engenders in the mind. These people can be discounted from serving if that is what is required. Perhaps it would make for a better society as we could educate the young to understand that they could - if they are ‘good’ citizens - help run the country.
(I am writing this in the knowledge that I would not be eligible to serve in the system I am advocating as i have a criminal record)
Anyway thats my two pen’orth for what its worth, thanks for an informed debate.