Ruling the Void (11 page)

This is the essence of the argument developed by Russell Hardin (2000) in an important essay on the problems of understanding political trust and distrust. Hardin argues that there have been two important changes in the way political issues have come to be understood and treated in contemporary democracies. The first is ‘the essential end, at least for the near term, of the focus on economic distribution and the management of the economy for production and distribution’ (Hardin, 2000: 41–42).
In other words, echoing Scharpf’s and Ruggie’s observations on the end of embedded liberalism, he suggests that governments are no longer capable of purposefully managing the economy with a view to redistributing resources or responding to collective needs, and that this failing capacity has fundamentally altered traditional political discourse. The issue of planning versus markets has been settled – for now – in favour of the markets (2000: 32), leaving much of the matter of conventional political debate without a supporting context. The second change is that problem-solving and decision-making in public policy have become substantially more complex, and hence less amenable to popular understanding or control. Voters can no longer easily grasp the issues that are at stake, and find it difficult to evaluate the often quite technical alternatives that are presented to them. The result of both changes, claims Hardin (2000: 42), is to ‘preclude the organization of politics along a single left-right economic dimension’, leading to a situation in which the concerns of citizens become ‘a hotchpotch of unrelated issues that are not the obvious domain of any traditional political party’. The left-right divide loses its interpretive power as a schema for making overall sense of mainstream politics, and is not replaced by any alternative overarching paradigm. Demands become particularized and fragmented, while party policy and voter preferences evidence a lack of internal constraint or cohesion. In these circumstances, it is almost impossible to imagine party government functioning effectively or maintaining full legitimacy. Almost thirty years ago, in the anniversary issue of
Daedalus
, Suzanne Berger (1979: 30) argued that ‘the critical issue for Western Europe today is the capacity of the principal agencies of political life – party, interest group, bureaucracy, legislature – to manage the problems of society and economy, and, beyond coping, to redefine and rediscover common
purposes.’ Today, it is their basic legitimacy as political institutions that is in doubt. Parties, like the other traditional agencies of the European polities, might well be accepted by citizens as necessary for the good functioning of politics and the state, but they are neither liked nor trusted, and one way in which we might better understand this change in perspective is by recognizing that although the trappings of party government may persist, the conditions for its maintenance as a functioning governmental mode are now at serious risk.

3
THE WITHDRAWAL OF THE ELITES

On the face of it, we might expect that the popular withdrawal from conventional politics discussed in
Chapter 1
would leave a lot of angry and frustrated politicians in its wake. Indeed, given how difficult it is becoming to engage citizens in the conventional political arena, we might well expect that party and political leaders would devote considerable effort to trying to keep politics alive and meaningful, even if only in theatrical terms. And, at a certain level, this has been happening. Rarely has there been such widespread discussion of institutional reform, be it of the electoral system, parliamentary procedures, local or regional government, plebiscitary mechanisms or whatever. Almost none of the European democracies has been untouched by these discussions, and almost all have devoted considerable research effort to discussing the limitations of their present institutional arrangements and the ways in which they might be changed – sometimes quite drastically. Moreover, the single thread that runs through almost all of these discussions in almost all of the countries concerned is that
reform is needed in order to bring government closer to the citizen. As Kaare Strøm and his colleagues conclude at the end of their long and exhaustive study of delegation and accountability in contemporary democracies, ‘there is every reason to mind the gap between citizens and their political representatives.’
¹
It was also what David Cameron, leader of the then opposition Conservatives, concluded in the wake of the MPs’ expenses scandal that captured the headlines in Britain in early 2009: ‘I believe the central objective of the new politics we need should be a massive, sweeping, radical redistribution of power. From the state to citizens; from the government to parliament; from Whitehall to communities. From the EU to Britain; from judges to the people; from bureaucracy to democracy. Through decentralisation, transparency and accountability we must take power away from the political elite and hand it to the man and woman in the street.’
²
It is in this sense that citizen discontent and disenchantment appear to prompt the elite to seek solutions through institutional change, as well as provoking quite pervasive official concern with how this ebbing of commitment might finally be stemmed.

That, at least, is how it appears on the surface. But along with the beating of official breasts and the show of distress at the hollowing out of mass politics, there exists in the practice of organized democracy a clear tendency to match citizen withdrawal with elite withdrawal. That is, just as citizens retreat to their own private and particularized spheres of interest, so too the political and party leaders retreat into their own version of this private and particular sphere, which is constituted by the closed world of the governing institutions.

Disengagement is mutual, and for all the rhetoric that echoes on all sides, it is general.

In politics, just as in communications, culture and war, the twentieth century was the mass century. It is now more or less one hundred years since the last of the property qualifications that once limited the right to electoral participation began to be waived, such that in most west European democracies by the early 1900s elections were already, or soon would be, organized around the principle of mass democracy.
³
With mass democracy came the emergence of mass political parties. In some cases, the organization of these parties proceeded as a consequence of the democratization of elections – new waves of voters became available, and political parties, both old and new, sought to incorporate these new voters through the development of mass-membership organizations. In other cases, the mass parties had already been established, and it was often because of their pressure and insistence that the electoral arena had been expanded. Whatever the particular sequence, however, the coincidence was evident: mass democracies became associated with mass parties, which now became the defining party model for the new political age. Moreover, with the initial development of the mass party, political parties as such entered their golden age, an age in which, at least for a time, they dominated politics, constituting its principal point of reference.

During this ‘golden age’, the mass parties in western Europe strove to establish more or less closed political communities, sustained by reasonably homogeneous electoral constituencies, strong and often hierarchical organizational structures and a coherent sense of partisan political identity. Voters, at least in the majority of cases, were believed to ‘belong’ to their parties, and rather than reflecting the outcome of a reasoned choice between the competing alternatives, the act of voting was seen instead as an expression of identity and commitment. As Richard Rose and Harve Mossawir (1967: 186) observed in an early review of voting studies, ‘to speak of the majority of voters at a given election as “choosing” a party is nearly as misleading as speaking of a worshipper on a Sunday “choosing” to go to an Anglican, rather than a Presbyterian or Baptist church.’ This was the politics of mass democracy as organized by mass parties, and one of the consequences of the rise of this party form was the relatively rapid stabilization or ‘freezing’ of collective political identities in the decades following the introduction of mass suffrage (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967).

In the main, these closed political communities were built on a foundation of closed social communities, in which large collectivities of citizens shared distinct social experiences, whether these were defined in terms of occupation, working and living conditions, religious practices, to name the most important. These social collectivities were in their turn cemented by the existence of vibrant and effective social institutions, including trade unions, churches, social clubs and so on. In other words, the closure of political communities usually derived from, or was based on, social closure, which, in a variety of European countries, tended to create a pattern of widespread segmentation, dividing social groups from one another while uniting their own
individual ‘members’ and adherents. This is the process the Dutch have called ‘pillarization’, which was probably carried further in the Netherlands than in most other polities (see, for example, Lijphart, 1968; Houska, 1985). Viewing its operation elsewhere, we can see it as one in which political cleavage structures became consolidated (Bartolini and Mair, 1990: 212–49; Bartolini, 2000: 411–501).