h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Ah, good - that wasn't clear (to me) up to now.

As we all know, there are many ways in which a practical implementation of democracy can become corrupt. This has been the case since it was first tried, I think. So - bear with me if I'm being obtuse - what exactly *is* the motion under discussion? Are we considering the *variety* of ways in which corruption can be achieved, whether corruption is more common today than at some other time (please specify! ), or whether corruption occurs in practice (it does! )?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

How about: "This house believes that democracy (in practice) is more corrupt today than at any point in the past."?

Or am I getting too formal?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

Well, in my mind it is corruption that it all boils down to, yes.

However, by stating the question I was asking if there are any other factors that stop democracy from working, or if it is working perfectly.

But it seems to me of late, that democracy is becoming more and more abused more and more openly (see my two examples). Perhaps the abuse was more hidden in the past? Perhaps it was not? Or maybe there isn't any abuse going on? That's what I am asking.

I don't think your second example counts, actually (that was the referendum one?). Someone earlier brought up the athenian model, and I think the problem is that while we call both that and what we have 'democracy', the idea is different (has someone mentioned this? I was reading the backlog yesterday).

There they used their votes to vote on the issues. Acting, therefore, mostly like our parliaments, except that they weren't themselves elected. There were quite alot of people then who didn't have the vote.

The point of our democracy _as I see it_ is not to let us vote on the issues, but to let us choose the people who govern our country (who also vote on the issues). I mean, obviously wee also think about how they are going to approach certain issues when we cast our votes, but essentially we don't have a say directly ourselves, except inasmuchas we can choose to vote for someone else next time.

Anyway, I don't think there's an inconsistency in not allowing us a chance to vote in a referendum. In fact, being a black and white sort of gal, I'd actually consider that to be a decline in the standards of democracy. Not what the whole thing is about, in my opinion.

And also cos of the other example, as one of the problems of allowing everyone to vote on issues, I think, is that then you would get (I'm trying to think of the right phrase here) majority rule (?) which sounds nice, but we have to remember that the point of a democracy is to serve everybody.

A referendum vote which had a majority for interring everbody in the UK who could not trace their ancestors back to Wills the Conq. would be a very scary thing. But hey, it's the will of the people. A clear majority.

And the other problem with allowing referendums (apart from the tendency to redo them again and again if the public get it wrong first time) is that, well, we wouldn't do them for everything, would we? Only the topical things (which is why I brought the xenophobic one up). And that doesn't seem to me to be valid either.

Well, that was quite long, wasn't it...

But if the Government insist on having referendums on whether (insert backwater town here) have a mayor or not (which has been done, I just can't remember any examples right now), then why can't we have a referendum over a major power shift in Brussels that could affect us a great deal? Especially since the integrity of some of the people involved is highly questionable.

As it stands at the moment, it's a bit of a non-issue (just like my other example turned out to be) since we still don't know whether it's going to be a simple tidying up of the constitution or a major reform. But who decides what constitutes either of these things?

Have they had such a referendum? Well, I'm not sure I agree with that either. Because, then people will say "Well, if we have a referendum about that then surely we must have one about [insert popular topic here]" Although I suppose I could argue that a referendum about a small issue like the mayor thing is something which you could safely let the public exercise their ignorance on.

At the very least there should be rules about when to hold referendums. The easiest one might be about anthing constitutional. But 1) that's difficult since Brits don't have one and 2) is exactly the sort of thing that would be in danger of having us end up voting to stone single mothers in the streets.

I mean (sorry) because a constitution should be there to protect society from the problems of democracy (the majority ganging up to oppress a minority), and should be the last thing that we allow society at large to get their hands on.

Democracy is a little like censorship. People will always treat democracy (ie the will of the majority) as a sacred cow when it suits them but, if they were honest, they believe there are certain things the citizens of a nation should only leave to their rulers. The decision to wage war is a good example of this. As two-bit said, it may have been possible to obtain a majority vote in favour of nuking Afghanistan after 9/11.

Elected government is primarily a good thing because that government ultimately answers to it's people who can vote it out and this prevents excesses and tyranny as well as revolution. However, it is not possible for the citizens of a state to have a full working knowledge of politics, and so this is why most actual decision-making is left to professional politicians who they have elected to "represent them".

Referendums are primarily for overriding the politicians and answering to the will of the people. They are also an excellent way of legitimising a government motion (the establishment of self-government for Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland in the UK is an excellent example of this. Without referendums, the pro-centralisation politicians (mostly Conservative) could have attacked the national assemblies as "enforced".). They are best reserved for publically-sensitive issues such as (in Britain) the adoption of the European Single Currency and a European Constitution. I am quite convinced that any government which tried to impose either without a referendum would fall within weeks.

The majority ganging up to oppress the minority may be a problem of democracy, but let it not be forgotten that democracy is (part of) the answer to the problem of the minority ganging up to oppress the majority.

A constitution recognises (or should recognise) that there are other values than the mere rule of the majority. Some of these, such as freedom of speech and assembly, freedom from arbitrary persecution etc., are things which we take to be necessary for a democracy to function effectively. But how wide should the net be thrown? What about the right to education and information (the resources to make INFORMED decisions)? The right to property? How far can inequality of wealth (again, access to a certain resource) be allowed or disallowed, before it becomes a hindrance, rather than an aid, to various social goals?

Noggin

I take your point about referendums acting as a legitimising device, Zagreb. I suppose in that context then, a vote on a Euro issue would at least settle the arguements. What other context were you thinking about overriding? I can't think of another good reason to hold one.

An excellent, point, Mr Noggin. One of the things which periodically infuriates me is the faintly (and frequently not so faintly) smug way that our people tend to talk about democracy, as if the only thing which matters is the way that leaders are chosen (or not), particularly when the matter is raised in relation to other countries.

I simply cannot understand how people thought/ think that giving the people the vote is going to make everything miraculaously ok in countries from Russia to Iraq.

You notice I'm carefully not answering your questin, there do you? What do you think first, eh?

What do I think about which part of the question?

In general, there have to be checks and balances, and decisions have to be made and principles implemented within the constraints of the resources available to society.

One of my objections is the assumption that since some inequality is desirable for economic reasons (to reward, and encourage, hard work and initiative, for example), that it therefore follows that the maximisation of inequality is a desirable social goal. (a litle is good, therefore more must be better).

Noggin

Well, all of it, I guess. But that'll do for now.

Hmmm. The maximisation of inequality is a desirable social goal? What about all the effort we put in to minimising it? I mean I do see how the principle is a war with the idea of democracy as giving everyone equal influence. Surely there's something in the idea though that we have this system of elections coupled with other points of reference such as you mention above to deal with this very problem? Without this problem, we could all live in a communist utopia.

The problem is it's a question of degree, with no obvious cutoff points for too little inequality for incentive, and too much inequality for any sense of social fairness and cohesion.

Perhaps the most worrying thing (particularly in the US), is that where government should be providing some baseline protection of the weak from the strong, the upper echelons are composed exclusively of the strong.

Noggin

Just in case anyone is interested, the draft constitution was published. It can be found at http://register.consilium.eu.int/pdf/en/02/cv00/00369en2.pdf

I also find it of some concern that the system in both America and England seem destined to give the ruling party an awful lot of clout, the occassional third party's moment in the limelight notwithstanding. Yet we view with suspision these countries with their coellition governments. I wonder if that is one of the reasons why we are so unhappy about Europe: a distinctive mistrust of powersharing. Perhaps this as well leads to the eventual consolodation of power in a few hands: the fact that leadership is passeed around within two parties aids the formation of an oligarchical class.

I don't know where to post this, and I didn't want to start a new thread, so I'll do it here.

If you can, please turn your attention to Channel 4 on Saturday 31st May at 20:05 for 'Afghanistan: Here's One We Invaded Earlier.' Apparently, it's the first in a series of documentaries about the state of Afganistan today, and should be very enlightening.

Any non-UK residents should be able to watch the documentary on http://www.channel4.com once it's been aired.

My feeling on democracy is that it is not a form of government, but an ideal to which forms of government can live up to in different ways and to different degrees. It is one ideal among many, and some are contradictory. A few years ago I was fond of saying that the UK isn't a democracy, now I think that it doesn't make sense to say of a form of government that it is or isn't a democracy. If the UK isn't a democracy then no country is a democracy. But to say that the UK is a democracy suggests that it couldn't be more democratic, which is also incorrect. The UK has democratic features, and authoritarian ones. Just as it has socialist and capitalist features. (I wrote an article you can read on H2G2 entitled "Sham Democracy" - I'd still agree with much of what I said there although I would put it quite differently now.)

Historically, the major achievement of democracy is what the Tories (UK Conservative party) like to yak on about when anyone mentions proportional representation - in democratic countries you can kick out a REALLY unpopular government. A typical democratic government will be opposed by the majority of the people in the country (and no representative democratic system can avoid this), and so to say that democracy is about representing the will of the people is perverse and absurd. Democratic countries never get a very good government, but as Churchill (that racist bastard) said, you never get a REALLY bad government either.

The recent French elections are a good example of this. Yes, they ended up with a choice between a "crook and a Nazi" (incidentally, when I said that last time on H2G2 my post was censored), but they made damn sure they didn't get the Nazi. And if a government starts behaving really badly after it's been elected, it gets kicked out.

The point I'm making is that we shouldn't get overexcited about the forms of democracy we've seen so far. We should recognise their achievement for what it is, but we shouldn't be satisfied with it. In a way it's a bit like the sentiment "First do no harm". The first thing to do when reforming or designing forms of government is to limit the worst excesses of government. Once you've done that, you can then move on to stage two - making a government that is a really positive force. I'd say we were doing reasonably well on the first task, although we're by no means there yet, and that we should start thinking about how to modify our institutions of government and civil society in the pursuit of the second one.

It's important not to start working on the second stage before you've completed the first stage. Karl Popper once said that education in the UK hadn't yet achieved "First do no harm". Possibly this is true of primary education today, but government primary education strategies seem not to recognise this (not surprisingly) and so they cannot work.

As to whether or not democracy has declined, well, I haven't been long enough on this ball to have a very clear view of that. My impression is that representative democratic countries naturally stagnate towards a two party system. The US as the oldest one is most stagnated, the UK second most. Many other countries now have moved to a proportional system of one sort or another and these probably have their own form of stagnation which isn't yet entirely apparent. I'd say that the problem is not the institutions of government, which are probably more democratic now than they've ever been, but simply that times change and no single form of government will work in every situation.

What really worries me, especially over the last year or so, is the rapid increase in irrationality in political debate. Most of the things said by powerful politicians and influential media commentators would be treated with derision if they were said by anyone else. A connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda? The pretence that this war had anything to do with WMD? Come off it.

""free speech suppressed" - I have seen no such thing."

That's the whole point - you don't if it's suppressed. Less glibly, although the right to free speech obviously still exists, the impression of the US we get over here is there is an atmosphere of censorship. "Self censorship" is the phrase sometimes used.

"Democracy is a little like censorship. People will always treat democracy (ie the will of the majority) as a sacred cow when it suits them but, if they were honest, they believe there are certain things the citizens of a nation should only leave to their rulers. The decision to wage war is a good example of this. As two-bit said, it may have been possible to obtain a majority vote in favour of nuking Afghanistan after 9/11."

I agree with the premise but not the conclusion here. Another example is the death penalty in the UK. I think polls of one sort or another show that the majority of the population would approve of reinstating the death penalty. Another form of this argument we've seen recently is about Iraq. People have argued that they shouldn't be given a democratic government because they might vote in fundamentalists.

I think partly the problem is based on an overly simplistic view of democracy (the equation democracy = voting). As we all know, democracy requires a whole host of cultural and institutional arrangements to be meaningful. It requires a free press (preferably not a one dollar one vote free press as we seem to have now, but it'll do for starters), a diverse collection of political views and parties, institutions which don't exclude chunks of the population either by law or institutionally, etc.

With regard to direct democracy - if we had a direct democracy the standard of debate would have to become much higher. Political parties couldn't simply say "Look, either you vote for us or you vote for the other guy and he's MUCH worse", they'd actually have to justify their policies. Referendums are a poor example because they are so infrequent and the dichotomies they present are so artificial. Rather than direct democracy, we should be aiming at something like a participatory democracy. If people were to participate in the decision making process, they would probably acquire a facility for it.

Phew, I think I've said enough for the moment...

That's an excellent post, Dogster, well done . I'll get round to making some sort of reply when my brain's less tired .

Thanks Zagreb, it's one of my pet topics. Once I get started, I just can't stop.