What
are we voting for?
From
direct quantity upwards to wider quality in democracy
The two Anglo-Saxon shocks during last year
in many minds cast doubts on the practice of liberal democracy, as we know it
in the Western world. Rather than voting for certain policies and
personalities, majorities mainly voted only against what they perceived as
elites and establishment without really knowing what the other choice really
would mean for their future. A wider net would also catch other fishy results
of direct voting that won’t easily fit into our orthodox order of political rationality.
Referenda on Ukraine’s association in the Netherlands, on CETA with Canada in
Wallonia, on reform linking to the Prime Minister’s post in Italy and on
immigration in Switzerland as well as farther away direct presidential
elections in the Philippines, all show sudden unexpected often emotion-carried changes
of the status quo of established democracies that amount to more than just cusps
of ‘disruption’ as in business competition.
Anglo-shock
not only for the European bloc
We were delighted to hear loud shouts of “Wir sind das Volk!” after the ‘Fall of
the Wall’ in Berlin. We foresaw the ‘End of Ideologies’ and once Fukuyama even
the ‘End of History’ altogether. However, these ‘Ends’ ended with the
Americans’ shock of 9/11 and only years later many media claimed not to have
heard the other ‘secret voices’ of angry people opposing their establishment that
finally voted for Brexit and for Trump; only the official results convinced us
of their quantity in the majority. The vote for President in the USA in
practice is directly binding without Congress even convening, but also the vote
for Brexit in the UK will hardly be overturned by its Parliament and rather
followed up by the British government (BBC on 31.1.2017: “… by bill of only 133
words.”), although it might take some time to negotiate with the EU.
This Anglo-Saxon decisive directness –
though both fought almost 50-50 -- differs from the fate of referenda on the
European continent. In September the Swiss saw their representatives in Parliament
climbing down from the solid mountain of a popular majority vote in favour of
limits on immigration and their government caving in to EU intransigence on
free movement that only would allow access to the EU Single Market. Down in the
Netherlands, a clear two-thirds majority of the people dismissed the proposal
of an EU association treaty with Ukraine, only to see their Prime Minister
chairing the European Council to champion that very deal with Ukraine. Idem for
CETA in Wallonia.
Obviously, the votes on the continent –
though with clearer majorities – shocked us less in the end since the established
elites have found ways to qualify the quantities and airbrush them, often in rational
compromise. However, the Anglo-Saxon shocks also seem to relate more to
individual politicians and concrete cases than abstract principles and distant
people that remind us of the basic differences between more flexible British
case law and stable continental legal provisions.
Nevertheless, thanks or rather due to the
increasing role of the (not only social) mass media the individual political ‘person’
has greatly gained in simply getting politically undeserved attention, in
particular in the more direct presidential systems, often independent from the
candidate’s substantive argumentation. Taking the Latin term persona literally not only from its original meaning
of ‘mask or false face’ as worn by the actors in the Roman theatres, one is
tempted here to trace it further in Latin to “per sonum”, meaning merely ‘through the
sound’, when hearing the big talkers from Nigel Farage to Donald Trump. They cheaply
profit from their sheer showmanship in the mass media and attract with
simplistic slogans quantities of people in the ‘echo chambers’ built by confirmation-biased
algorithms for ‘fake facts‘ favouring right-wing sites 38% over 19% for
instance on Facebook (almost 2 billion regular users, including foreign hackers;
FT, 19.11.2016; whilst the established BBC reaches only 500 million) and the
like. An unfortunate fact is that some 60% of adults in the USA have only
passing familiarity with political reality and rely on such hardly reliable information
from social networks. And with such focus on beaming personalities and less-rational
but emotional choice the outcomes have become less predictable and manageable.
These politicians can directly impress the
masses on TV and the more virtual screens of the Internet with divisive self-praise
and pillory of ‘post-truth’ much more than any quack would ever dare for the
quality of his goods on the real market. And here we link to another phenomenon
of recent politics, namely the marketisation of it. By their appeal to voters like
consumers of superficial (talk-)shows and post-factual tweets they advertise
themselves through unheeded promises in quantities of glib and unqualified
words. Anglo-Western individualism adds its bit to the admiration of pretentious
big-mouthed men, notably if they carry the image of success in Big Business
(“Why not also in ‘Small Government’?”) or a big mug of beer. Marketing methods
with spin doctors make their way also into continental politics, but the
parliamentary system seems still to be a strong qualifying filter in most European
countries. While short-termism also spills from Anglo-led business management
into public governance here, it de facto further reduces political planning and
responsibility in favour of the fast ups and downs of the markets’ volatility. High-frequency
trading and commercial profiling of us as consumers deeply dig into Big Data of
enormous amounts of information up to the limit of the numeric capacity of the
latest super-computers. But it is only recently that economists increasingly realise
that the crunching of pure quantities of numbers often do not suffice to
succeed. In her book “Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases
Inequality and Threatens Democracy” Cathy O’Neil argues on the basis of her
experience as a ‘Quant’ (quantitative analyst) that Big Data is sowing
injustice and exacerbating social stratification. Programmers behind
computerised systems have encoded their prejudices, misunderstanding and bias
into software that increasingly manages our lives. These self-validating
systems with their untested assumption amount to “weapons of math destruction”.
However, even econometrists recognise
unquantifiable patterns of human conduct on markets that transcend rationality
and that only qualified behaviourism can explain. Not only as economic actors
and hungry consumers, but often even more so as voters, people decide off the cuff
and from the belly rather emotionally in a way (even as an outlet for anger while
hi-tech dominates most of their life) that pre-election surveys and number-crunching
cannot quantify, but often favours populism. QED in this year’s votes for
Brexit and Trump.
Learning from the shift in economics
towards more behaviourism, public governance and democratic processes should also
better reflect the reality of society by giving competences in decision-making
to the stakeholders and actors involved at the various levels from local,
provincial, national, regional all the way to global.
We should, in the interest of all
omnilaterally, start with improvements in the mass media that ought to mediate
between the private sphere (where they are the biggest actors on public opinion)
and public governance. Three big Internet companies, Google, Facebook and
Amazon, have become ‘netopolies’ with almost 90% share in their respective
markets, decrying any competition law. In democracies, these media with their
filtering function also have an immense impact on voting outcomes because of their
Big Data and micro-targeting (SZ 10.12.2016). On decision-making at local level
such media’s impact is the lowest, because people know their neighbours rather directly
through everyday experience. However, the higher we advance in multi-level governance
of our democracies, notably in federal systems or even to the regional and global
level, the less people can judge from their own direct experience but have to
rely on information from these media. Nobody directly heard him say it and only
the Pope himself could confirm whether or not he endorsed Trump. It is the
media and their multiplying (ab-)users that made it an influential message ‘right
or wrong’ going viral on the Internet and getting a million clicks. 80% of 13
year old students in the USA cannot distinguish between news and advertisement
(Die Zeit, 8.12.2016). Some enlightened users already left Twitter because of
lies like “Pope endorses Trump” or “Queen for Brexit”. Although 35% of
Europeans have lost trust in social media (EBU study 2016), for most
information they see no other choice and depend on it. Now under criticism from
reliable sources in view of Trump’s ‘majority’ of the electorate, Facebook’s American
boss Mark Zuckerberg reluctantly admitted that there is a problem and has just
announced that he is considering blocking fake news with the help of third
parties.
However, with the help of these mass media
the damage to democracy is already done, at least to the governance by the
Anglo-Saxon elites that have lost votes to Brexiters and Trump, nationally and
additionally in geopolitics. Consequently, the Anglo-sphere is also ceding leadership
at global level to European continentals and to Chinese leaders. Obama made
that markedly clear during his last presidential visits to Athens and Berlin,
and Chinese President Xi already has shown his eagerness to step into the geopolitical
vacuum at the recent summit of APEC in Peru, partly supported by Putin; primarily
only pacifically in the Pacific (FT, 21.11.16:
Headline p.1: “China claims Pacific mantle in Trump era”, i.e. taken away from the
USA).
From
quantitative economics to behaviourism also in governance?
When Abraham
Lincoln famously referred to “government of the people, by the people, for the
people” in his Gettysburg address, he was referring to the representative nature of the USA’s
democracy. (Since, at that time, in 1863, at least half the adult
population did not yet have the vote, ‘by the people’ was a rather relative
term; and on top even today the electorate system can have a filtering function.)
In our more
fully enfranchised age, the ‘people’s’ voices -- in most countries with more
parliamentarian democracies many millions of them -- are filtered through
elected representatives as the most workable modus operandi for stable
government. For instance, since 2008 the economic shock that knocked the door
open in Iceland for more participatory democracy has led to further refinement
of representative governance on this northern island. Even from abroad “red
cards” have fed into the collective intelligence of the newly added crowd-sourcing
‘Constitutional Council’ that grew out of a thousand randomly
selected Icelanders outside the established parliament. Similarly, the
Belgian historian David van Reybrouck (“Against Elections”, 2016) pleads for a
mixed procedure of lottery and elections. According to him, citizens drawn by
chance into a ‘House of Lots’ and supported by experts should supplement the
elected parliament in order to bridge the gap between the politicians and the
people.
Obviously,
empowered by access to social media and other channels of algorithmic echo-chambers
inviting feedback of ‘likes’, opinion and petition-signing, it appears that
many citizens now want a more direct say not just as consumers on the market,
but also in political decision-making. However, the public sphere (Habermas’ “Öffentlichkeit”) -- as political
equivalent to the free market in the economy – is fragmented in narrow-minded echo-chambers,
chat-rooms and redirecting mails and thereby isolated from the mainstream of more
balanced argumentation.
Even in our
online one-click age, could any government realistically deliver responsible policy
on the basis of such disparaged direct democracy i.e. by means of frequent
online polls and all sorts of referenda? Would the purely quantitative capture
of ad-hoc public opinion (and fluctuating emotion) prevailing on any one day
really provide a better basis than decision-shaping by mandated representatives
over a period of time, as situations evolve and the consequences of particular
policies, sometimes unintended, reveal themselves for assessment and
adjustment? A murder of a cute child that goes viral on the Internet would
immediately bring back the death penalty, and long-term policies against
climate-change at the cost of certain cars would hardly find majorities.
And yet
what is the outlook for our system of representative democracy if, once elected
and seasoned, these same representatives are rejected by populists as elite
insiders out of touch with voters and either operating in a distant ‘bubble’
(Westminster, in the Brexit context) or as part of a faraway ‘swamp’ to be
drained (Washington, according to Trump). Experts claim the Internet would
bring the ‘death of distance’, but still all the quantities of fast data flows in
real time are often the less verifiable the farther their origin. At local
level, the citizen can easily verify if the commune’s taxes were better spent
on a new football stadium or for building a theatre. He/she can check the
interests involved in the neighbourhood and might even directly know the
responsible politicians in person and possibly join the debate for the
decision. However, the higher the stage in our multi-level governance from local
to global, the less clear the situation becomes for the voter, notably in the
bigger industrialised countries where economic and political interests are
intertwined, mixed and mingled to such degree and density that even the American
NSA’s comprehensive data capacity would not suffice except for taking out tiny
parts in its own interest.
Social
media giants and algorithms may be relatively new to the mix but populist demagogues
swaying the masses are not new. Worrying perhaps that Trump’s newly
appointed chief White House strategist, Steve Bannon, has declared that
building the ‘economic nationalist movement’ is as “exciting as the 1930s” (cf.
The Times of London, 21.11.2016), when plain majorities already carried the day
but brought the night over Europe.
Could direct or populist presidential democracy actually mean less
democracy, not more? Unlike the traditional Swiss system of weekly votes on
direct concerns in the Cantons, historic examples range from Napoleon III
reaching by a direct vote for the imperial title of Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler,
Joseph Stalin as well as more recently Vladimir Putin using referenda to
incorporate territories. Why not also leave a territory like the EU, logically
in line with such history, one might ask? Not only have our societies advanced
towards more refined representative democracies in order to deal with today’s
much more complex issues (cf. Prof. N. Khrushcheva in NE, 9.10.2016) than
unilaterally gobbling up weaker neighbours of the past. But also the new social
divisions from technological advances and feral globalisation have created
emotional eruptions of assumed empowerment among many voters that render
dangerous the direct-democracy process of a simplifying ‘Yes or No’ decision. Such decisions
should not only serve divergent interests as on the consumer market, but also ought to share overall responsibility in
politics based on common values -- and not only interests -- as laid down in
constitutions and (still too few) global agreements omnilaterally for humankind. A rebalancing of the
relationship between private profit and public welfare is overdue (cf. “Europe
rewrites the rules for Silicon Valley” by Philip Stephens in FT, 4.11.16).
Conclusion
for Europeans
With Brexit, the output-legitimacy of the British
government is expected to decrease in parallel with increasing numbers of particularly
‘Bregreters’ suffering first as consumers from higher prices as well as from less
choice on their markets. Likewise, their reduced mobility outside their islands
will impact in particular the younger and more educated Brits. In parallel, we
might soon see some early negative impact of Trump’s rule in the USA on the
lives of not only Americans (his support already in early January shrinking to
only 37%, BBC on 12.1 2017), but also worldwide to arrest and turn around this
falsely nurtured nationalism based on fakes instead of facts. In Germany, the
trust in the traditional media already is growing (Die Zeit, 26.1.2017). The widening
gap in our societies is a fact to overcome together, but a return from the global
economy to smaller units and “introspective unilateralism” in the end hurts all
of us.
As an optimistic European, one can only
hope that we learn this lesson fast and the negative effects of Brexit and
Trump manifest themselves early enough to be reflected by the voters on the Continent
before the forthcoming elections in France (Can
François Fillon stop Marine Le Pen?), the Netherlands (DutchNews.nl
on 26.11.2016: Wilder’s PVV “dropping to 19%”) and Germany (SZ on 10.12.2016:
AfD dropping another 1% to 12%) in order for qualitative arguments to de-mask
the quantity of fake and biased news from the glibly chattering mouths and viciously
controlled keyboards of only one-sided nationalistic orientation. Some
observers already see support for EU membership shooting up in most countries
since the Brexit vote and also Trump’s win as strengthening Europeans’ resolve
(The Economist, 12.11.2016). If events bear out the unwisdom of these ruptures,
politics will tilt back. Populists are the weakest in the tedious matter of
sound government (Janan Ganesh in FT, 24.1.2017).
Learning from recent lessons of voting, there
is a silver lining on the horizon with the younger generations moving forward
to share not only angst and anger from the past. But they also exchange valid arguments
for the future of governance in Europe towards more directness at local and
wider representation at higher up to omnilateral global level.
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