Representative Democracy and Its Limits

Abstract

Democracy is the dominant idiom in political discourse in Britain, as in all other Western countries. Everyone is a democrat irrespective of their other political views; and anyone with the slightest concern for political success carefully avoids criticising democracy for fear of the political wilderness. Representative democracy is such a powerful tool of legitimation of the actions of government that no serious politician, even if they have just lost an election, will question it. Democracy is an unquestionable good and representative democracy is identified with democracy. To challenge the dominant idiom appears to be political suicide, but such a challenge needs to be mounted in the name of democracy. The dominant idiom—representative democracy as democracy—in fact serves to legitimate modern big government and to restrain it hardly at all. Electoral victory serves as a means to stifle other claims to political competition, public pressure and governmental accountability. It permits governments to deny challenges to their authority which may in fact be necessary if government is to be made more effective and accountable. The following discussion is not an anti-democratic attack on representative democracy, but rather a criticism of its capacity to do the job it is supposed to do; supervise, restrain and control government. Part of the argument is that corporatist mechanisms of consultation and bargaining are a vital supplement to representative democracy in the era of big government and organised social interests. Corporatism, it is claimed, would strengthen rather than weaken democracy in the UK and assist in the solution of the problem of Britain’s economic decline. Despite democracy being the dominant idiom, most politicians and ordinary citizens are unclear as to its nature and purpose as a political mechanism. The term ‘political mechanism’ may appear odd, but it enables us to treat political institutions in terms of their functions and outputs. 1 If one asks people ‘what is democracy and what is it for?’ most of them are puzzled. They tend to treat democratic institutions as an unquestioned fact of obvious utility, as an ultimate value or as an end in itself. ‘What do you mean, what is it for?’ ‘Democracy is obviously a good thing, how can you question it, just look at the places that do not have it?’ And so on. But all political mechanisms are a means to do something, for example, to produce certain sorts of