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Democracy alone is not enough Samuel Brittan The Financial Times 13/05/05 In the recent British election the Labour party received 36 per cent of the votes on a turnout of only 61 per cent, but gained 356 out of a total of 645 seats. It looks then as if the UK is to be governed by a minority of less than 22 per cent of adults. Is this a scandal? The right of even a genuine majority to overrule a minority is dubious. I do not want to idealise the shopping mall where consumers can be driven mad by the changing fads of sales consultants. But, given enough time and patience, you do not have to buy what the majority buy. Nor do you have to watch the same television programmes. Of course there are public goods and regulations that have to be determined by political decisions. The best that can be said is that it is less bad that a majority should dominate a minority than the other way round. As Winston Churchill famously said: "Democracy is absurd, but all other systems are worse." The most plausible case for democracy is that it is the best known way of changing the government without resort to force. The very concept of majority voting is far from clear. Some two-and-a-half centuries ago the Marquis de Condorcet showed that if there were a choice between as few as three policies - A, B and C - it could easily occur that A was preferred to B, B was preferred to C, but C preferred to A; and that much depended on the order in which the alternatives were put. (He was guillotined for his pains.) In the mid-20th century the American economist, Kenneth Arrow, established that there was no voting system that could be assumed to satisfy a few elementary rules of fairness. But the mathematical paradoxes are not the worst weaknesses of majority voting. A true "economic man" would not vote at all because the chances of his choice influencing the outcome are minuscule. Many people are not that "rational". But the incentive to consume time and energy in a serious study of the issues is small. The Austro-American Joseph Schumpeter - who was the true founder of the economic theory of democracy - remarked that even a highly educated lawyer would normally devote less attention to political choices than to his weekly game of bridge. Nor is a low turnout always bad. In the Iraq election the turnout was 58 per cent, only a couple of percentage points less than in the British one, in spite of the physical perils involved in voting. This could be because far more was at stake than in most western countries, where a low turnout may be a sign that not too much turns on the outcome. In 1945, some Greeks, in the middle of their own civil war, hearing that Churchill had been defeated in the British election, asked whether the Tories had taken to the hills. Is it better to have a system close to proportional representation or should countries such as the US and the UK stick with first-past-the-post? It seems scandalous that the UK Liberal Democrats, with 22 per cent of the votes, achieved less than 10 per cent of the seats. (In 1987, with a similar vote the Liberal SDP Alliance achieved less than 4 per cent of seats). But if we think of democracy as a decision rule, the issue is a little more complicated. At times when radical reform is needed, such as in the Britain of the late 1970s, first-past-the-post enables a government such as Margaret Thatcher's to take unpopular initiatives and allow the electorate to vote subsequently on the results. In Germany today the combination of proportional representation, plus the need on many issues to get a majority of the regional governments as well, puts a brake on needed reform. Of course, it is not possible to devise constitutions for particular occasions. The main constraints required to make democracy a reasonable system are summarised not by voting systems but by words such as "constitutional" or "liberal" in front of it. These constraints can take a variety of forms. For instance, a separately chosen second chamber can put a brake on elective dictatorship. Human rights can be entrenched by legislation that is somewhat more difficult to reverse than most other laws. There can also be constitutional courts, formally, as in the US, or brought about by the normal courts gradually enlarging their function. Above all there is what is known as "due process", which means that government decisions cannot be made at the whim of the head of government and a few soulmates sitting on a sofa. For what it is worth, I believe that first-past-the-post in Britain has outlived its usefulness. It is tolerable in the US because of the checks and balances of a separately elected Congress, a Supreme Court and powerful individual states. Ultimately what matters is not counting heads but a society where people are free to lead their own lives without fear of either the government or what their neighbour will say. This was labelled by Karl Popper as the Open Society - none the worse for being difficult to define precisely.
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