Irish Elections: Chasing the Democracy Dream

With government no longer able to put off the inevitable, election time has finally arrived in the Republic, and with it all the sloganeering, overpromising, and tantalizing infighting that one has come to expect. Nearly all of the above will be channeled through the prism of the old blunt-edged left-right divide on ‘the issues’ du jour, with any leftover column inches devoted to the obligatory mud-slinging. But, swept away as one can get by this predictable entertainment, almost no one will question just why our method of choosing a government never fails to serve up this unpalatable broth.

The reason for this avoidance is that we believe that these few brief weeks of intense competition are the best – nay, the only – way to govern a country. We have faith in the electoral process. And someday, so this fairy tale goes, the ‘right’ people will finally be elected and humanity will metaphorically gallop off into the sunset to live happily ever after. What exactly constitutes the ‘right’ people may depend on one’s personal convictions, but all are in agreement that this Holy Grail exists.

I’ve spent ten years researching democracy and I’d beg to differ. Good government doesn’t depend on the right people, but rather on the right system. The corruption, the broken promises, the bias to the rich and powerful that characterize much of our politics today are not so much down to the failings of individual politicians as they are the inevitable by-products of the very system of electoral-representation that commands so much of our devotion. And the essential reason why this system produces all those things is that it’s not democracy.

It may seem shocking at first, but in the two hundred and thirty-nine years since electoral politics made its comeback, we’ve only been whole-heartedly calling it ‘democracy’ for the last eighty or so. That’s mainly because the kind of government we use was – contrary to popular myth – not invented in ancient Athens, the birthplace of democracy, but in another society: Rome.

The Athenians and the Romans shared many things, including a tendency to drapery-focused fashion and a predilection for marble statuary, but they had some radically different ideas on government. In Rome, it was all about elections with most State power reserved to the winners of those elections. By contrast, the Athenian system, then known as ‘demokratia’ or ‘people power’, minimized the importance of elections and focused instead on intensive citizen debate, frequent direct votes, and an army of lottery-appointed officials to handle the bureaucracy.

When the Founding Fathers of the USA revived the idea of non-hereditary government in the 18th century, they were explicit that it was the Roman system they were copying and the Athenian democracy that they rejected. What they didn’t know was that the Roman system had some serious flaws and that these would snowball over time. But we now have access to one or two facts that the Founding Fathers didn’t, and we know that the two main issues with elections are that they aren’t very accurate and that winning them tends to be a matter of spending money.

The British election earlier this year presents the quintessential example. The Conservative Party, raising spending limits to take advantage of its deeper coffers, won over 50% of seats in the House of Commons with less than 37% of the vote. By contrast Labour received just over 30% of the vote, but only 36% of the seats, meaning that a 6% difference in votes translated into a 14% difference in seat allocation. These kind of discrepancies between the popular vote and the actual government outcome are by no means unusual, and they were even more pronounced among the smaller parties: the Scottish National Party received 56 times as many seats as either UKIP or the Greens, although the Greens had a comparable vote count and UKIP garnered twice as many votes.

While Ireland’s single transferable vote isn’t as crass as the UK’s first-past-the post, electoral skewing occurs here, too. According to analysis of the latest polls, Independents and others are projected to win precisely the 29% of seats they deserve, but Fine Gael will likely win 29% of all seats with only 24% of the vote, with Fianna Fail taking 20% of all seats with 19% of the vote. That 6% bonus puts FF and FG only 2 seats off a majority (1 of the FG seats is tied up with the non-voting Ceann Comhairle), whereas SF/Independents would be 9 seats off, despite having a combined greater vote share.

These bumps in favour of the larger, richer parties are typical of so-called ‘proportional’ systems and it means that changes in election results tend to lag behind electorate views. That may not have been such a big deal when the fastest way to get a message from A to B was via the Pony Express, but in today’s era of instant communication, the fact that we’re still only holding elections at 4-5 year intervals makes them a great way to lock-in the status quo well past its sell-by date.

Among the many things wrong with that is that locking in the status quo disproportionately benefits the very rich – after all, they are per definition the very people and corporations that have gained the most from whatever the current set of rules is. And they are by no means passive spectators, because when it comes to winning elections, money talks. Study after study confirms that heavy spending substantially increases the chances of a candidate being elected.

In the 2011 Irish general election, for example, candidates spent 10,000 EUR on average; successful candidates spent nearly 19,000 EUR on average. And that’s only the kind of spending that surfaces in the paperwork; resources can also be deployed through favourable editorial coverage and preferential media access – areas impossible to regulate for given protections for press freedom. Even under the new, allegedly strict campaign donation rules, individuals will still be able to donate tens of thousands to parties each year, and they have a vested interest in preserving any establishment that maximizes their own wealth.

So, in short, elections don’t necessarily deliver the governments people voted for and he who has the most money wins. And when it comes to the problems with so-called ‘democracy’ this is just the tip of the iceberg. Add in the international treaties negotiated behind closed-doors, as well as the increasingly militaristic treatment of protestors and other alleged ne’er do wells, and you end up with a system where the vast majority of people are simply surplus to requirements and extremely easy to ignore.

But when one door closes, another opens. We’ve arrived at a crucial turning point in history, in that just when elections seem to be reaching their natural limits, technology has opened up other avenues of participation that make a turn to the real democracy the Founding Fathers rejected finally possible. Participatory budgeting; online accountability for elected representatives; and electronic initiative platforms are just part of a future that’s fast becoming a reality, a reality we’d do well not to ignore.

Soapbox

This is a guest slot to give a platform for new writers either as a one off, or a prelude to becoming part of the regular Slugger team.