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The vast majority of people around the world want to live in a society with democratic values. Why is democracy receding? The problem is each of these five goals results in a political trap. For example, we all want a say in how we’re governed, but it’s impossible to have any true ‘will of the people’. And we want to be richer tomorrow, but what makes us richer in the short run makes us poorer over the long haul. What holds everything together are norms and institutions. This is especially frightening as we live in an era where the extremes on both sides of the political spectrum seek to tear both down. Great book, that takes *politics* seriously, rather than than policy. On the latter, a lot of people tend to think that there are some perfect solutions "out there", and that politics are in the way of us achieving it.
There is a danger for all of us that the grass is always greener on the other side. PR systems, I think, are more likely to create chaos and indecision, things not happening. There was the post-war era in Italy, where there was roughly a new Prime Minister per year. But of course, that's the period in which the Italian economy suddenly zooms to the front of the line in developed country wealth up through the 1980s. In some ways, it's the worst political time for Italy, but economically, it's fabulous for the country, and even the Fourth Republic in France is a period of growth. So sometimes it's hard to separate out these things. It feels unaccountable, because it’s hard to know who to punish, and seems unstable, because you have lots of politicians going all the time. And yet, it's also associated with a period of declining inequality, growing prosperity and the development of the welfare state. Proportional representation is going to work least well where there are a series of chaotic, different preferences that just can't be aggregated easily. Culture: Government might have created confusing missions that could not be communicated and embraced, were easily undermined by rank corruption and unethical conduct, or were beyond careful monitoring through performance measurement and management. Often, people stop at the policy-solutions, and scorn at politics. But, as Ansell argues, we must take politics seriously, as it is the arena in which we as a society make collective decisions that will affect us all. And while we all espouse to support these simple fixes, we are all bound by our self-interest, our essential guide to find our preferred policies - and the will that politicians must have in mind when making policies. Pepper Culpepper is Vice-Dean for Academic Affairs and Blavatnik Chair in Government and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government. His research focuses on the intersection between capitalism and democracy, both in politics and in public policy. Prior to coming to the Blavatnik School, he taught at the European University Institute and at the Harvard Kennedy School. His book Quiet Politics and Business Power: Corporate Control in Europe and Japan (Cambridge University Press 2011), was awarded the 2012 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research. He is the author of Creating Cooperation (Cornell University Press, 2003) and co-editor of Changing France (with Peter Hall and Bruno Palier, Palgrave 2006) and of The German Skills Machine (with David Finegold, Berghahn Books 1999). And so, I argue in the book that we need to take our institutions more seriously. They are not always fit for purpose. But they guide our expectations about what other people will do and to channel our disagreements more constructively. They embed the political promises we made to each other in the past and which will continue to serve us today.People really don't like extremes of inequality. But that doesn't mean that they are preternaturally driven to want extremes of equality. That doesn't necessarily hold. People don't care, it seems from most surveys, about equal wealth, per se. But they do care quite strongly about their treatment. People care about being treated equally—no exceptions, the rules apply to all of us. They care less about the more abstract ideas of the overall aggregate equality of outcomes in society. Structure: Government might have been unable to move information up and down its over-layered chain of command, select and supervise its contractors, or resolve the confusion associated with duplication and overlap. Ben Ansell’s Why Politics Fails is a good contender for one of the first broad-based works based on good political science research that you could also recommend to your friends. He takes an explicitly political economy approach that begins with the problem of individuals whose self-interested actions prevent the achievement of collective goals. Politics is necessary because of our tendency to disagree, dissent, and defect, but any political solution inevitably creates problems.
But although Ansell offers some policy solutions, the reader will not leave this book with concrete suggestions as such to solve our ills - rather, this book instructs the reader how to *think* carefully about politics, and in turn, be more successful in advancing the policy-causes they favor. It is the ultimate clash between individual self-interest and collective goals that pulls at the threads of political action. Once we understand this, we can implement solutions to make politics work better. These are big questions, I’ll grant you. But it’s a big book! Drawing on almost two decades of my own research and cutting edge scholarship across the social sciences, I explain why politics fails so often. Throughout the book, I continually trace how our individual self-interest sabotages our collective goals.Ben Ansell offers no pat solutions to our dilemmas. But he does believe that making a success of democracy requires us to protect institutions like Parliament, the courts and independent media where we argue and, crucially, compromise to defend us all against the inherent dangers from destructive radical right populism. Policy: Government might not have been given the policy, or any policy at all, needed to solve the problem at hand; or the policy might have been either too difficult to deliver or delegated to a vulnerable or historically unreliable organization. The democracy chapters cover the Schumpeterian definition, a brief history of democracy (from Athens to the Third Wave), majoritarian versus consensus designs, Condorcet cycles, Arrow’s impossibility theorem, strategic voting, median voter theory, and polarization. I'm not fully sold on proportional representation, not least because I think of Weimar Germany, the French Fourth Republic, contemporary Israel—none of these are great examples for proportional representation and multiparty systems. So there are weaknesses to that. But I think a system where people's votes translate into seats for parties in a much clearer fashion than is true in the United Kingdom or the United States would have a number of advantages in stabilizing politics. Essentially while lots of new parties can emerge and die in PR systems (and that's not necessarily a bad thing, either, because it means that new ideas can get represented), it's also the case that coalitions tend to be larger than just 50%. Oftentimes, you'll see that there are more moderate parties that are constantly in government. Even when you have a party more to the extreme governing in lots of PR coalitions, it can often end up governing with a whole range of other parties. Mark Rutte has been the Prime Minister of the Netherlands for over a decade now and he's had four separate coalitions in which almost every major party in the Netherlands had been represented at some point. That means that there is more stability in policymaking to the extent that there is the same Prime Minister and many of the same figures in charge, but also everybody gets a turn at some point. It's less slash and burn than in countries like the United Kingdom, where it's usually either the Conservatives or the Labour Party and there's a bridge-burning tendency where you get rid of all the reforms of the previous party and introduce yours as long as you can stay in government. Proportional representation systems tend to have the stability of a coalition that's much broader across the public and that almost always privileges groups somewhere in the middle of the distribution of political preferences. Now, that might be stultifying, in lots of ways, and it can be unstable too, as in Weimar. But in the northern European countries it has been really quite stable. That's been good for things like investment, for lower inequality in those countries, and for consistent funding of their public spending projects and consistent taxation to pay for that spending. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.
I construed that in the book by, to some extent, thinking the worst of everybody. But I'm not trying to create a moral message to say that humans are sort of fallen and that we all behave poorly in every instance. There are all kinds of ways in which we can have harmonious relationships with one another. But those usually only occur when we all agree on outcomes to begin with. Or when there aren't any interdependencies among us where, if I get something, it makes it harder for you to get that thing. And the moment we end up in a world where we do disagree with one another—and I think we've seen over the last several decades that we all do fundamentally disagree in liberal democracies and that in part explains our political polarization—we exit the world of harmony. This delivers un-flashy but socially transformative benefits – a cradle to grave welfare system, including maternity leave on full pay. And, remarkably, there is political consensus over the system and benefits – which now include huge investment in renewables. Ansell : As you say, Americans tend to agree on the specifics, but they often disagree on more general sort of philosophical issues. We see that in the United Kingdom as well. There are really large differences across parties in the UK on questions like the death penalty or whether children respect their elders enough—big-picture social issues. But if you ask people about government spending on education, or even the general tax level, you find a lot more agreement on this sort of specific policy question. So I don't think that the American experience is unique. Polarization between parties reflects in part these more fundamental preferences that people have or claim to have, but I think it does, in the American and, increasingly, the British context, also come from the way in which the leaders of those parties are increasingly elected through primary elections; if the American public as a whole has quite moderate preferences, that's not always true among those people who turn out to vote in the primary, who will tend to have more extreme preferences. It's also the case that moderate congressional representatives or senators tend to win elections in swing states and therefore are less likely to remain in office for longer periods of time, because those are swing states where a Republican is replaced by a Democrat and vice versa. The same is true in the United Kingdom, where there are safe seats that Conservatives and Labour MPs always win. And so the more moderate members of parliament, who represent those more moderate constituencies, are going to be powerless. In part, our political systems are structured to empower the extremists, both among voters and among politicians. Ben Ansell’s thesis – one which may offer some comfort to elected readers of this magazine – is that it’s not politicians who are the main problem for many disappointed voters, but rather our collective failure as citizens to compromise to achieve the goals we have set ourselves as democracies. It’s not all the politicians’ fault!Mounk : Your last trap is about solidarity—what is the trap of solidarity, how is that different from the trap of equality, and how do we get out of it? Proportional representation is one possible step toward fixing some of the problems we have. It has the benefit of being proven as a workable system with mostly positive results. I have long wished we weren't a de facto two-party state. For instance, a segment of the public is blaming their gradual loss of unjustified privilege on those who are still struggling to be accepted as equal human beings, let alone citizens. As reprehensible as that is, there is an aspect of it that is quite understandable. If your economic situation and future prospects aren't looking good, you want to blame someone or something. When those with too much power and money manipulate the public discourse to keep it about abstract appearances rather than tangible issues, it becomes easy to blame people who aren't like you, whether race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, whatever. Ben Ansell : It is a plausible answer to the extent that our politicians share the frailties that we all share. My answer is that, broadly, politics fails because all of us are driven by individual self-interest. That means that we find it hard to coalesce towards the kind of collective goals we might want. Our politicians are representatives of us and they face an even sharper set of constraints and incentives to misbehave, perhaps, than we do. Perhaps they're worse versions of us. That might be right. But ultimately, they disagree, at least in part—and often, mostly—because we disagree. In this research paper, Paul C. Light writes that the “first step in preventing future failures is to find a reasonable set of past failures that might yield lessons for repair.” To meet this goal, Light asks four key questions about past federal government failures: (1) where did government fail, (2) why did government fail, (3) who caused the failures, and (4) what can be done to fix the underlying problems? When it comes to politics, there are five goals that voters generally agree upon. We all want a say in how we’re governed, to be treated equally, a safety net when times are hard, protection from harm and to be richer in the future. So, why does politics not deliver that?
The democracy trap covers everything from battles over Brexit, to ancient Athenian democracy, to fights over the US debt ceiling; the doomed Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth to e-voting in Taiwan; citizens assemblies on abortion in Ireland to app-based voting. On equality Ansell considers the question of equality of what, the agrarian origins of inequality and Pikettyian theories of its evolution, the Meltzer-Richard model, Cohen’s egalitarian ethos, the equality/efficiency tradeoff, the relationship between inequality and polarization, the Swedish model, the Great Gatsby curve, redistributivist versus elite competition theories of democracy, gender inequality, and assortative mating. Democracy: we all want a say in how we’re governed, but it’s impossible to have any true ‘will of the people’. A meticulous study of how different societies find it so difficult to achieve widely shared goals' Financial TimesMounk : Even at a more fundamental level, it's obvious in the literature that there's just very, very basic conflicts between different forms of equality, which is a point made by Amartya Sen and others. Either you have real equality or similarity in how much money people take home at the end of the month or you have equality in how much they’re paid per hour. But unless there's a very tyrannical state that forces everybody to work exactly 30 hours a week, you cannot have both. Either you’re still going to have some people who are much more affluent because they choose to work a lot more or you're going to have to pay people very differentially for the time they do work. Either way, society is unequal in some very important respects. But talk me through what you think would be a better constitutional setup. Are there institutional reforms that would help the political parties represent where the center of public opinion seems to lie more effectively? The differences are just large enough to suggest that government may be somewhat more likely to fail during the last few years of a two-term presidency, perhaps because presidents start to lose focus, appointees begin to turn over, the other party becomes more assertive, and the media becomes more aggressive. The immense wealth of the United States should make poverty a historical curiosity. Why is income inequality growing and the scourge of poverty increasing? Before we get into what your answer is, why is that the wrong answer? It seems like a pretty plausible answer.
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