Democracy

While democracy is widely regarded in the western world as a good thing, it has its drawbacks. Winston Churchill was quite cynical about it when he noted in 1947 that “democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”.

The Greeks started it all. They had the idea that the people should rule – well only the property-owning men, or course. But, if you were a citizen of Athens or any of the other city-states that embraced this thinking, you were expected to be involved in public life and do your part to keep the show running.

The is now called direct democracy and it has largely vanished over the years in favour of representative democracy. But direct democracy is where citizens had a real say in how their world evolved.

The representative idea has its merits, in that people who were good at debate or administration could be empowered to represent a constituency and they served the interests of the people who selected them. It works on the same principle as a trade union.

Unfortunately, many of today’s representatives are very good at lobbying for the people who fund their election campaigns, not the people in the district that voted them in. The controversial film-maker, Michael Moore, has expressed the view that America has the best representatives that money can buy.

He has a point. The US has the highest prices for prescription drugs in the world, thanks to big pharma spending billions funding various representatives. The gun lobby has been equally successful – ensuring few restrictions on gun ownership, despite the 40,000+ gun deaths a year that are a side effect of this.

Another drawback of representative democracy is the type of people we end up representing us. As Douglas Adams put it: “it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it”.

We can see that in the Right Honourable James Hacker, MP, Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn’s creation in “Yes Minister”. Hacker’s fundamental flaw was his vanity. He was more interested in his press coverage than in the good of the country.

But leaving all that aside, let us assume that our public representatives are good, earnest people who want what is best for us. Here in Ireland (and I suspect in other countries that have followed the British, bicameral system) we have a serious flaw in the workings of government.

The bicameral system is all about checks and balances. In Britain, they have a House of Commons, where elected representatives propose and debate legislation and they have a House of Lords where unelected, titled people keep an eye on what the Commons is up to. Both houses need to approve any new legislation.

Here in Ireland, we have a similar arrangement. The Dáil is where the elected characters debate legislation and there is a Senate where the legislation gets a second opinion. Most of the Senate are appointed by political parties (it’s a good retirement home for those who failed to get elected to the Dáil), but some are elected through votes from graduates of certain universities.

Whatever the mechanics of the process, the idea is to have checks and balances. The US has a similar arrangement – the Senate and the House of Representatives. However, in the US, the executive branch of government is where the real action is and that branch is closely scrutinized by the two other branches of government (known together as Congress).

This I believe is where we (and the British) fall down. After a general election, those we have chosen enter Dáil éireann and there is a vote. The majority then gets to form a government – the executive branch.

So far, so good. However, instead of the government (executive branch) now leaving the Dáil and having their actions scrutinized by the Dáil, they still get to vote in the Dáil. You can see the problem: To form a government, you need to have a majority. But, once you have a majority, you can get every crazy piece of legislation you dream up approved.

This is guaranteed by the “whip system”. This is where members of political parties are forced to vote as directed by the government. It takes a brave, or principled representative to defy the whip and vote against the government. It usually is a career-ending decision.

In other words, the Dáil (our house of parliament) is not in a position to hold the government of the day to account. The Senate might be able to raise concerns, but they are mostly in their positions because of their political parties – so they are unlikely to rock the boat.

What I reckon should happen is that any government, as soon as it is formed, no longer has voting rights in the Dáil. They should be accountable to the Dáil and different ministers need to visit the Dáil chamber in order to explain their performance, or lack thereof. They also need to present any legislative proposals and cannot act on them until approved by both houses.

This would require a complete change of mindset. Today’s representatives represent their respective parties, rather than their constituents. If the role of the Dáil was to hold the executive branch to account – regardless of which party holds office – then we might see more intelligent debate. The concern of any analysis should be whether this will be good for the country, not for getting the government re-elected down the line.

Democracy has been described as “the tyranny of the majority” (Alexis de Tocqueville in “Democracy in America”). We are certainly seeing an element of this here in Ireland and elsewhere. If we are going to have representative democracy, I reckon we need some way of ensuring that our representatives represent us and not their parties or their commercial backers.