The Will of the People
What the public really wants from government can only be discovered if democratic processes allow everyone to truly express their will
In my previous post, Untangling Electoral Reform, I pointed out the conflict of interest inherent in Members of Parliament choosing the method by which they themselves are elected, and suggested that the details of the voting process should be delegated to an independent body. In this post, I consider how abstentions and protest votes are dealt with and the adequacy of current rules governing who can be elected. In a subsequent post, I turn to the framework of representation.
I’m conscious, as I write this, that ‘the will of the people’ has often been invoked in ways that, in many people’s eyes, have degraded the meaning of the phrase. So I’ll start this post with a recap of what I said about it in my post, A Trust of Sovereignty, where I examined the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty:
From a modern perspective, if we recognise the Crown as the embodiment of our collective commitment to higher principles and the Lords as the representatives of local authority, we can see that those two estates of Parliament represented different aspects of the public will – aspects which are distinct from what was represented by the House of Commons.
As individuals, most of us recognise a moral framework that we believe should constrain our behaviour (the domain of the Crown). Similarly, we all have ideas around collective identity and how society should operate as a whole (the domain of national government). And we have beliefs and wishes about how it should operate in relation to ourselves personally (the domain of local government). There is a dynamic tension between these three strands of our individual wills – which are often in conflict with each other – and this dynamic tension is also present at the collective level. In a healthy governance system all three of those strands need to be separately represented.
Looking at the will of the people in this light exposes another shortfall in our democratic processes. We have procedures for electing representatives at different levels of government but we have no effective way of indicating where our priorities lie in regard to those different levels. In practice, in the UK particularly, it seems that our individual power is deemed to be ceded to the highest level, who pass down to the lower levels only as much as the higher level thinks necessary.
The result is that the very lowest level of government – the parish or ward – tends to receive minimal powers and resources. This is despite the fact that it is at the very local level that we have the best opportunity to judge our representatives, and that they have the best opportunity for understanding what we want from them, and despite the fact that it is at the very local level that many of the omissions and failings of government make themselves felt.
I’ll be writing more, in future posts, about how the balance of power between local and central government might become much more fluid than it is currently in the UK. I mention it here because, although I focus below on elections to Parliament, the principles I discuss are relevant for representation at every level. The will of the people is neither simple nor static, and a mature society needs to find ways to represent it dynamically in all its complexity.
Voting processes and the framework of representation
Previously I argued that there is a clear distinction between the (essentially technical) voting process and the (essentially political) framework of representation. On the face of it, how abstentions and protest votes are treated is a technical issue which is part of the voting process. However, if we look at some of the reasons people don’t vote, we can see that the framework of representation plays a major part.
Currently, non-voters are treated as though they are deferring to the wishes of those who do vote. That may perhaps be a conscious intention of some of them, though many are probably just leaving it to chance. More importantly, we know from research that, for many people, it is actually a rejection of all the candidates or of the system itself.
So is there any way we can reasonably treat that position as a valid choice?
The will of the people and the silent minority
Elections are, in principle, society’s means of finding out what the people want in regard to how we are governed. So how can we properly determine the will of the people when large numbers of the electorate don’t actually vote?
A glib answer is to dismiss non-voters as apathetic and say that, if they can’t be bothered voting, they only have themselves to blame if they don’t like the result. But this ignores the fact that many people who don’t vote might in fact have given far more thought to the underlying questions than some who do.
It also ignores the fact that some voters support candidates they dislike, as the only viable hope of blocking someone even more unpalatable, while others vote for the same party in every election simply because that’s who their family has always supported. Should we really treat their votes as a true expression of their will but simply dismiss the wishes of someone who has looked closely at all the candidates and feels unable to vote for any of them?
Some general assumptions can be made about non-voters’ wishes by looking at what reforms have been proposed. Sortition, for example: many people who despair of the current system feel we might get better government if we simply chose our representatives randomly. This method was used in ancient Athens (because elections were thought to favour the rich) and there are active movements across the world advocating its adoption today.
Most of us, I suspect, are instinctively wary of random selection because of the danger that … well, who knows what kind of person we might get saddled with? And, if it were introduced as a straight replacement for elections, as is sometimes suggested, it would be unfair on those who would like to be represented by a specific person or a member of a specific party. Neither of those objections undermine the principle of sortition, though, and both are fairly easily got round.
Direct sortition – simply picking an MP at random from a constituency’s electorate – does present clear problems, but is there any reason not to do it indirectly, and offer that as a ballot option? Though it’s not generally regarded as part of our political constitution (and is not without its critics) the jury system is widely regarded as a successful method of involving randomly-selected members of the public in important decisions of public concern. Is there any good reason why ballot papers should not offer a ‘Jury’s Choice’ option in addition to the named candidates?
There are certainly reasons why it should. The current system may theoretically allow anyone at all to become an MP but, in practice, it restricts it to those who are willing to put themselves forward. The world is full of capable, diligent people who, when called upon, are prepared to step up to responsibilities that, for a variety of reasons, they would not actively seek. Do we really want an electoral system that effectively excludes such people from representing us?
In its simplest form, a ‘Jury’s Choice’ option would involve a dozen randomly-selected members of the local electorate choosing one of their number to be the new MP. This would be voluntary jury service – anyone not prepared to take on the job would be expected to decline – and would only happen if voters had effectively rejected all the named candidates. Before making their choice, the jurors would hear presentations on the requirements and challenges of the job1, and would spend some time assessing each other and discussing among themselves which of them would best fill the role.
The jury would know how much support party candidates had received and, in a preferential voting system, they would know that all those candidates had been rejected by the majority; so they would be in a position to consider what kind of person might represent the full spectrum of opinion in the constituency.
This system would have the virtues of random selection, tempered with a deliberative element that is generally absent in purely competitive elections. And, since the new MP would be stepping up to a responsibility that he or she had not actively sought, it would mean they wouldn’t be beholden to a party or to other sponsors.
Legitimacy of the current system
Adopting this idea would be a more significant step than switching from single-option to preferential voting, which I discussed in the previous article. Like that reform, though, it can be seen as a technical change whose validity rests on the same question of what would best fulfil the essential purpose of elections.
Can an electoral system that does not offer an option like this properly represent the wishes of every member of the electorate? Well, I can state unequivocally that the current system does not properly represent the wishes of this member of the electorate: for most of my life, I have not felt it was worth my while voting in elections. This is not because I am apathetic (I have, in fact, spent a good part of my life thinking about how a mature society should govern itself) but because the current system simply doesn’t offer an adequate choice.
My impression is that there are many people who, like me, doubt the ability of members of political parties to put the public interest ahead of the interests of their party (and are instinctively suspicious of anyone who actively seeks a position of power) but believe that most members of the public will try to do what is required of them when they’re put in a position of responsibility. I suspect that many people, like me, would generally prefer our MP to be chosen by a panel of (hopefully responsible) members of the public, than by the sort of cattle-market competition we currently use. The existing system fails to provide us with the means to properly express our wishes, and that failure seriously undermines the system’s legitimacy and the legitimacy of the governments it produces.
A ‘Jury’s Choice’ option could well attract support from many people who don’t currently vote and it might well be preferred by some who currently vote for a candidate they don’t really like, in order to keep a worse one out. And, where preference voting is used, it would quite likely be many people’s fall-back option.
Elections are not merely a means of appointing representatives; they’re also an important method of gathering information. As long as there is no option that might appeal to protest voters, ballots cannot possibly give us a proper picture of how satisfied the public is with the status quo. I believe this reform would significantly increase turnout, so elections would give politicians a much better view of the political climate. No doubt there would still be a lot of people not voting, but it would be much more reasonable to regard them as apathetic than it is currently.
Like preference voting, adding a ‘Jury’s Choice’ option to ballot papers could be done without any other constitutional changes. Combined with preference voting, it has the potential to transform the make-up of Parliament and significantly reduce the dominant role of political parties – which might even release us from the cycle of lurching between political extremes that we’ve seen over the last few decades.
Conclusion
The reform I’ve outlined above would obviously not offer any guarantee of good representation. We should recognise, though, that no electoral system can make up for the shortcomings of other parts of the infrastructure of governance and we need to be careful not to demand more from the electoral system than is reasonable.
Most of us are host to a bundle of conflicting wishes which are in constant flux. If we confine ourselves to occasional democracy – allowing ourselves just one opportunity every four or five years to demonstrate our wishes – we make that single ballot far more important than it needs to be. Similarly, if we confine ourselves to electing just one representative – and expect them to be both our agent in government and an impartial overseer – we load far more onto the framework of representation than it can reasonably bear.
In this post, and the previous one, I’ve looked at how the voting process might be reformed. But we can’t properly assess what broader reforms are needed to the electoral system without looking more deeply at how representation works and what its limitations are. In my next post, I’ll be looking at why politics is so polarised and suggest that radical reform of our framework of representation could both better reflect the public’s wishes and provide more stable government, and would further reduce the need for giving political parties a special role.
Subsequently, I’ll be writing about different possibities for bringing about reform if normal political processes continue to frustrate it, building on some of the ideas outlined in A Trust of Sovereignty and The Fog of Law.
What is required of a Member of Parliament – and how much of a burden it imposes on them – depends very much on the underlying structure of government, and the relationship between the Legislative, Executive and Judicial branches. I’ll be discussing this in a future post.