Friday 10 March 2017

What are we voting for?


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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