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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
February 22, 2004
Democratic deficit
It is irritating when politicians -- Paul Martin for instance -- use glib expressions such as "democratic deficit" as if the waving of his personal wand will fix damage done over several generations. His party was in power over most of this time and thus did much of the damage; and he was the man who signed the cheques for nine years. Now he is proposing a few more free votes in Parliament and to give backbenchers a little more say -- and he thinks this will fool people. It probably will which makes it doubly irritating. The phenomena to which the phrase refers do not reduce to a single issue. >From top to bottom we now live under a system of governance that is called "democratic" but remains so only in outward form. The ability of the people to make choices effecting their own lives by voting at any level of government has almost disappeared as we have become locked in by massive bureaucracies and vested interests integrated across both "public" and "private" spheres. The chain of command which was once established -- the idea that real power would be vested in political representatives that the people could remove in free elections -- has been broken. Nor is this the case only in Canada. It is an international trend which presents itself as universal inevitable irreversible. And indeed much of the decision-making and pressure now comes from above the national level through institutions and treaty arrangements for which no one ever votes. Even if they refuse to rubberstamp this multinational legislation Parliaments are obliged to work within the orders they create. The mobility of capital guarantees the "globalization" of both business and its regulation. It is generally conceded that "the world is too complicated today" to allow anything so small as a human being to gum up the works. In a wonderfully quixotic even Alexandrian gesture little Norway decided six years ago to take the "democratic deficit" seriously. The Norwegian Storting or Parliament appointed a royal commission of five members under ?yvind ?sterud a professor of political science at Oslo University to investigate "power and democracy" in all their dimensions with an almost unlimited budget to review vast quantities of existing social-science research from Norway or anywhere and to subcommission special social studies to fill any holes. Co-ordinating with similar projects in Sweden and Denmark they were to consider the whole history of power relations from the Middle Ages forward but focusing on constitutional questions and within those on the question of popular consent. Some dozens of books and hundreds of smaller reports and learned articles have been generated in the interim mostly of course in Norwegian. And what I've seen in English is mostly vitiated by the usual mortal sins of social science: authors unable to spot the circularity of their arguments through the Humpty Dumpty of their own jargon. Yet the overall conclusion is strikingly clear: In Norway at least the ability of voters to determine outcomes did once really exist and is now really all but lost. A more surprising discovery is that this is not because the people are apathetic or uninterested in political issues. Their attention is turning to other activities and fewer and fewer bother to vote because they no longer see any point to it. Some of the reasons for this are peculiar to Norway. A country which voted decisively against membership in the European Union finds itself stuck in the maw of the darkly corrupt utterly unrepresentative Euro-bureaucracy all the same in order to trade with the rest of the continent. And the system of proportional representation has in Norway as elsewhere made it nearly impossible to change the national government. No matter how you vote you get the same people you want to be rid of back in your face -- as part of the same perpetual coalition. Public funding for the political parties further removes them from any serious competition for public support. But more fundamentally the whole political order has been inverted. While Norway still has theoretically strong municipal governments their power to decide any local issue has been subverted. Like municipal governments here their entire budgets are swamped paying for and delivering services locally that have been mandated from above. They have responsibility without power; the governments above have power without responsibility. When people cannot influence what happens around them they have no power. Democracy works from the bottom up but government everywhere now works from the top down. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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