The Crisis of Democracy: Practice and Theory

Abstract

298 Studies • volume 106 • number 423 The Crisis of Democracy: Practice and Theory Patrick Riordan SJ Is there a crisis of democracy? Democratic systems are forever facing crises and so I wonder if there is anything distinctively novel about problems now arising in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Writing in London in the summer of 2017, the local problems certainly appear as crises for some. The Prime Minister Theresa May has failed to achieve an increased majority from the snap election she called as popular endorsement of the Conservative Party’s stance in approaching the Brexit negotiations. She is having difficulty in getting the parliament’s support for her programme of legislation. And she is now dependent on the DUP (Democratic Unionist Party) to support her minority government. But are these problems of democracy as such? Or is it not the case that these are the kinds of problems for which democracy is adopted as the solution? I suggest that while there is no crisis of democracy, there is a crisis at the level of shared popular understanding of what democracy is and what we can expect from our democratic systems and the governments they produce. There is not a crisis of democracy, but there is a crisis of meaning in the shared understanding of democracy. What is democracy? At its simplest, democracy is a means for getting decisions made in the absence of consensus. There is a popular view that consensus, agreement and harmony are desirable in social affairs and that democratic processes of deliberation and debate are ways of achieving the desired consensus. This idealised view persists despite the undeniable experience that conflicts are managed or handled, but hardly ever finally resolved in politics. Conflict arises when good people wanting to do or achieve good things get in one another’s way, when the goals they pursue are mutually incompatible or frustrating. This is all the more the case when resources are scarce and not everything that is worth doing can be done at the same time. People will legitimately disagree on the priorities and they will advocate or agitate for Patrick Riordan SJ Studies • volume 106 • number 423 299 their preferred course of action. Around any cabinet table in a democratic system, government ministers will compete for those scarce resources for their own portfolio, whether education, health or security. All demand attention and many are disappointed. The same diversity of interests is found in society. In industrial relations we have learned to deal with one persistent conflict in the opposed interests of employers and workers. How the benefits of shared enterprise are to be distributed, along with issues of working conditions and pension provision, oblige both sides to manage the issues, preferably by negotiation and not by disruptive strikes and lockouts. Individual disputes may be settled in an agreement, but inevitably other disputes will arise and demand attention. When issues are urgent and decisions must be taken, we cannot afford to prolong the deliberation until all agree and consensus is achieved. We rely on a way to make decisions in the absence of consensus: take a vote and allow the choice of the majority to prevail. Of course, there is more to democracy than majority rule, but it is common to all notions of democracy. The required majority might be specified in advance, whether it be the absolute majority or some weighted or proportional majority (two thirds); and it might be the majority of citizens voting directly on the issue (direct democracy) or it could be the majority (again absolute or weighted) of representatives chosen to do so by their constituencies. In both cases we have to specify in advance who is to qualify as entitled to vote, whether in the compilation of the voter register or the construction of representative systems. Systems might be presidential or prime ministerial, congressional or parliamentary, with simple majority (first past the post) or proportional representation. Common to all these systems is the reliance on the determination of a majority which is charged with the decision. And a majority is relevant because there is no consensus: there are different goals and interests at stake. In the absence of...