I can’t shake off the feeling that our current implementation of Democracy isn’t working all that well. Every few years we get to choose from a very limited selection of politicians to represent us, most of whom, once they get into power, have very little power to change anything - in the Parliamentary system, at least, most of them are back-benchers, and around half of them are in opposition. Even the politicians who get to run a Government department don’t make big changes, as they don’t want to rock the boat in case they mess up. Consequently, the people who actually provide Government services - the civil servants and the quangos - have very little Democratic oversight, which leads to bloated, inefficient bureaucracies. The politicians, who are responsible for Government but unable to meaningfully control it, understandably get a little desperate and resort to doing anything that at least makes it look as though they’re tackling problems even if that is ineffective or counterproductive.
Is there anything at all we can do about this? Read on for a suggestion…
Once upon a time, there was a political idea floating around which said that the purpose of Government was to make sure the basics were in place so that society could run itself. The idea behind that was that if you, as a member of society, thought you knew how to solve one of life's problems then you could set up a business, or a charity, or a worker's cooperative, or a mutual society, or whatever else you thought was appropriate, to solve the problem. If the rest of society agreed, they'd buy from your business or donate to your charity, and if they didn't then they wouldn't. The appealing thing about this is that it's pretty much a true democracy with the citizenship running things for themselves and holding each other accountable. The problem is that poor people can be excluded somewhat - they may not be able to afford the services and products on offer, and almost certainly can't drum up the funds to set up and run their own services.
So the Government decided it would be better if they ran the public services instead and paid for them out of taxation. That way poor people could now afford the services they needed. Accountability would be taken care of via the normal democratic mechanisms - if the Government failed to provide adequate services they'd get voted out at the next election. There's also a problem with this system, though. The first system has a very direct way of ensuring everyone is providing services that people need - if they don't, they'll lose their customers who'll go elsewhere, taking their funding with them. The second system has a very indirect method of doing the same thing.
To illustrate the problem, imagine you have an issue with your supermarket. You can remedy this very easily by going to a different one - there are plenty to choose from, from large national (or even international) chains, through smaller regional chains down to the local corner shop. You don't have to wait up to 5 years for the next opportunity to switch, and you don't have to hope that everyone else also wants to change supermarkets. You can also mix and match supermarkets with small shops, online shopping, etc, to get the best mix of goods and services you're after. And if there's something you really can't find there's the nuclear option of setting up your own business to provide it yourself.
Now suppose you have a problem with the education system. You can't do anything about this yourself, so all you can do is write to your MP about it. But she's unlikely to be able to do anything about it either - she's probably a back-bencher, and may be in opposition. Even if she's the one in charge of the whole education system she's unlikely to be able to take broad measures that affect the system as a whole and so is unlikely to be able to tackle your specific problem.
So election day comes round and your MP has failed to do anything, so you decide to vote her out. However, there's a limited number of options, especially under the first past the post system, and everybody is voting on different issues so yours is going to get lost in the pile. It's not possible to mix and match MP's - if there's a candidate you think would solve your education problem but would like to keep your existing MP for everything else, you can't vote for him to represent you for education and her for everything else. The nuclear option of setting up a private school is available, but that takes us back to the original problem - poor people will be excluded. In fact that problem is now worse - your school will now only be available to people who can afford to write off the taxes they paid for education.
The upshot is that voting is a very poor alternative to a market-based mechanism. You can't vote very often and there's a limited amount of choice when you do. There's almost no way (other than complaining, which is easily ignored) to exert democratic influence to tackle a specific problem - you can only vote on how you think the Government is doing overall.
So, I got to thinking - is voting the only way to provide democratic control? Or are there other mechanisms that could potentially be used in addition to voting to give us more control over the public sector? What follows is a series of posts where I suggest a few ideas as to how we might run some aspects of Government with, hopefully, some real Democratic control. None of these are fully thought-through proposals, so they’re meant to act a starting points for discussion.
In part two we look at how we could get the public services we want.
In part three we look at the planning system, and how we could reduce the influence of officious bureaucrats and special interest groups
Part four looks at legislation. How do we get legislators to produce the laws we want, and could we maybe get them to tidy up the existing body of law a bit so that it’s easier to comply with?
Finally (for now), part five looks at local services. How do we use our Distributed Democracy ideas to improve local services without the whole thing descending into chaos?