Lend us your ears: fixing the crisis of legitimacy in politics
A crisis in legitimacy afflicts British and American politics. Voters complain their voices go unheard. Democratic Audit editor Ros Taylor asks Harvard democracy professor Jane Mansbridge why, in a society where new channels of communication are opening up, politicians are increasingly distanced from the electorate. How does it help to explain Donald Trump’s success – and what are the lessons for the Democratic Party?
Drawings of ears in Giovanni Battista Cipriani’s Rudiments of Drawing. Wellcome Trust via a CC BY 4.0 licence
You argue that there’s been a breakdown in trust between voters and their elected representatives in the US and UK. Yet it’s arguably easier than ever before for them to contact each other. Are the representatives not listening, or do voters find it difficult to use new methods of communication to convey their concerns?
I argue that we should have a new ideal of recursive communication among representatives and constituents. The new methods of communication of which you speak are all essentially one-way. What today we call “two-way” communication usually consists of two separate one-way communications: constituents making demands and representatives making claims. Instead, we need both constituents and representatives to listen, hear, digest, and respond to one another on the basis of what they hear the other saying. Michael Neblo, a political theorist in the US, and his colleagues have developed technologies that make online small-group discussions of this sort possible between representatives and randomly selected groups of constituents. That’s one new method. We might also repurpose surgeries to have a stronger policy component. The goal is the representative as interlocutor. If we keep the ideal of recursive communication in mind, we can invent new methods of communication to approach that ideal.
What did Trump understand about voters disadvantaged by globalisation that Clinton didn’t?
Trump tests my ideal of “recursive communication” between voters and their representatives because his speeches capture the bad side of recursivity. He himself stated that his speech-making technique was to say something and if the crowd was enthusiastic, repeat it; if they were bored, he tried something else. To the degree that this is true, he did not so much understand them as let himself be shaped by them. As many know, Clinton’s speeches were more scripted by coastal elites and consultants, although based on her convictions. These speeches were relatively sensitive to the concerns of minorities and women but not so sensitive to the concerns, and also the language and world-views, of the disadvantaged working class. Trump picked up on the festering anger, tied it to immigration, and ran with it.
In the US, voters are worried about outsourcing; in the UK, immigration. Protectionism and closed borders have been presented as appealing solutions, with politicians like Trump and Theresa May arguing that they are what voters actually want. How can we challenge politicians who claim to channel the popular will, without patronising voters?
I think we listen to the voters. When I speak of “the representative as interlocutor,” I mean a representative who listens carefully to what people in her constituency are saying, processes that, responds to constituents recursively on the basis of what she has heard, and then tries to communicate what she has heard to other representatives from possibly very different constituencies. Every citizen – every person – has implicit biases, both about people like her and about people unlike her. Sometimes those biases amount to outright xenophobia. When we can recognise those biases we ought to respond to them sensitively, not building the biases into policy but recognising the experiences that create them and finding ways to meet real needs. Politicians who claim to challenge the popular will are falsely denying the plurality that makes a polity wise and strong, as Aristotle and many after him recognised.
Clinton’s motto, “Stronger together,” was right. But she herself knew that she communicated that message better through her life than through her speech-making abilities. When she faced a 40-year campaign to demonise her, starting when she was First Lady in Arkansas, it became hard to show others the lesson behind her life. I think in other circumstances she could have made understandable the lesson of strength together, and I think other leaders can do so going forward. Each one of us knows from our own lives that we need players with different abilities on the team. When those other players are perceived incorrectly as, for example, taking one’s job, I believe that it is possible to correct that mistake on a basis of equal respect, not patronisation. When the perception is correct, however, it is the job of political leaders to do something about it – by intervening to create new jobs and facilitate mobility, as in Denmark, by protecting jobs, or even by restricting (not stopping) immigration. When people complained in France about “Polish plumbers” taking their jobs, they were laughed at. That’s not a good response.
What do the Democrats need to do to reconnect with voters?
Build the Democratic Party from the counties and states up. Nurture and encourage to run for office what I think of as “people in place” – people who have grown up in an area, speak the language and understand the perspectives of those who live there. Working class people and women particularly need encouragement. They respond to expressions of confidence backed with support. In the US, however, the Democratic Party is too weak to perform these functions adequately or even at all. In the United Kingdom and the Continent party strength has declined dramatically, but it is still greater than in the US. People often don’t understand that one of the major jobs of parties is, and ought to be, seeking out those who might want to run for office and helping them make the often difficult transition to the political world. If parties don’t do that, who will? Like representatives, parties also should be interlocutors, helping citizens to communicate and explaining them to one another.
Jane Mansbridge delivered a lecture on 15 May 2017 at the LSE, Listening to One’s Constituents? Now, There’s an Idea. Listen to the podcast or see her presentation.
This post represents the views of the authors and not those of Democratic Audit.
Jane Mansbridge is Charles F. Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values at the John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard.
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The author is an academic, part of a large group of related groups which share power in the western democracies. There are many relevant issues which members of this co-agulation of groups cannot or will not see and/or acknowledge. Further, there is a huge industry totally dedicated to proscribe and censure opinion, views and facts which the people in power wish not to be divulged to that part of the public which they have still mind-control over. Slowly, the general public is taking more of an interest in political and financial-economic affairs. It is a slow awakening in the West which The Establishment seeks to pervert, destabilise and dilute by immigration legal and illegal. So, what are academics for? Like most scientists, they work for a living. They who pays the piper calls the tune, but in the western democracies a clique of diverse interests has successfully interposed themselves between the taxpayer/ratepayer and private investor and most consumers to direct affairs to the advantage of the corporate globalising new world order and their acolytes, supporters and everyone under control of same. Since the Seventies, a transnational corporate cabal has gained increased control over government at all levels, education, academics, and scientists, amongst other significant crowd/mind controllers. More and more this is resulting in a giant international cluster love-in which is strengthening and gaining more rigidity and control as a hierarchy. Inexorably, this new class war will lead to a struggle between the politically and economically disenfranchised and the globalising clique now in control of the western democracies.
It will only be a matter of time for people in the West to realise how they are situated. How it pans out in the West is anybody’s guess, but rest assured, the globalising corporates and the top of this new world order dictatorial hierarchy have nowhere to go but to play this game to the bitter end.
…fitting into this point of course is the fact that in the UK election yesterday many clearly were not fooled by the corporate attacks on ‘unelectable’ Corbyn, made most constantly through supposed left-of-centre ‘New Labour in Mourning’ newspapers and media (eg the endless smears and attacks since his election as leader by The Guardian and the former newspaper now a blog, The Independent).
People who began to wake up, specially the young, made up their minds via other sources of info and voted for his vision (not one I share btw, but delighted to see voters coming to a view in a way that offers hope) – your final paragraph is apt: what has often been described as a kind of gangster capitalism and elitism in charge will fight to the bitter end to maintain its rigged version of democracy and capitalism, so we have some interesting times ahead…
I question the author’s claim that UK Prime Minister May is in favour of protectionism and closed borders or believes that that is what the British people want. She campaigned for Remain in last year’s referendum, was the elite’s choice for Tory leadership when the discredited former Prime Minister could not credibly remain in power (and then they smeared the alternatives through their chosen media on a highly personal basis). The old elite, battered and bloodied but unbowed, and its preferred Remainer choice, won the Tory leadership.
No major party is arguing for a free-for-all on migration, and none is arguing for closed borders, and neither is anyone suggesting that a drawbridge be pulled up on trade – in fact the Conservatives are trying to subtly rebrand the departure from the EU as an exercise in pursuing a global future (rather than one trapped in a declining and itself increasingly protectionist bloc). Something which indeed Labour suggests it is more wholehearted about. Even the standard bearer of departure, UKIP, flies the global flag.
From a political point of view, Clinton’s slogan ‘Stronger Together’ surely cannot have been ‘right’. She lost. Politics is about winning. Her slogan dramatically failed to connect and in fact appeared trite, patronising, outdated and totally wrong for the occasion. A cover-all whitewash slogan that sometimes works. But not in 2016. But the essence of the author’s argument has some very sound points – there is a need to listen but it starts with the political class: alas, it is clear that the political class is still not listening and has no intention to listen – it is bound heavily with wealth and privilege, whether left or right, and the rigged capitalism which has so soured the voter’s view of its ‘betters’ so it CANNOT listen, but affect and pretend it is – in the UK this elite and its ‘experts’ are seen by most people of all political views as having botched financial regulation, made a load of rubbish predictions, then forced everybody else outside London to pay for the mess while they got richer and dodged responsibility. They are right. This is exactly what happened. Why would they listen when told, by cartloads of Remainers a year ago, in a patronising tone: “you have to put up with the EU being a lorryload of old poo, or else you’ll be unemployed and the country will fall to pieces within days.”
While it is true that May campaigned for Remain, she has since embraced a hard Brexit – leaving the single market and putting an end to freedom of movement, while (continuing to) call for a cut in net immigration to the tens of thousands. ‘Closed borders’ is of course a vague term. But May is indisputably keen – as she has always been – to reduce immigration and ensure more jobs go to Britons rather than migrants.
I am not sure where you get the idea that ‘leaving the Single Market’ means a commitment to protectionism, which the author incorrectly stated that she supports or believes the voter supports. That is the reason you give for appearing to support the author’s false claim that May is committed to protectionism. You cannot mean this or believe it, as it is simply untrue and represents a fundamental misunderstanding of both the Single Market itself (often used to reinforce protectionism at EU level) and the views of those who wish to leave it. One is not sure indeed what May really believes. She has not ’embraced’ a ‘hard Brexit’ whatever that means.
Outside of the Single Market, freer trade is more possible not less, removing inappropriate tariffs demanded by the EU, removing extraordinary restrictions placed upon the UK by the EU, and removing the ban by the EU on states negotiating trade agreements. It is the EU and Fortress Europe that are the protectionist threat. Suggestions that departure from the Single Market means ‘protectionism’ are simply wrong. Never once has the Prime Minister pushed protectionist policies – these are clear and obvious when raised and the author is surely not correct in her assertions. She has not provided any proof or links to such an extraordinary assertion.
Closed borders is not ‘a vague term’, as you suggest, and it is simplistic to cover over an incorrect claim about someone’s opinions to fit a flawed thesis by now suggesting that it can mean almost anything you want it to. Otherwise you can argue the same thing about Labour and fit its views into the same jigsaw, by banging pieces conveniently into wrong holes to complete the argument. And if it IS a vague term, then it should not be used in such a way, to sustain an unsustainable argument attributing very strong views to others without proper explanation. The author is clearly incorrect – Theresa May, as I said, has never argued for ‘closed borders’ or suggested that ‘is what the voters want’. She is also a Remainer, and has not had some dramatic conversion.
As I also said, the author has some good and sound points but spoiled
them but lack of rigour and intellectual clarity, possibly (but not certainly) driven by agenda and opinion. It demonstrates the danger of lashing together what you yourself suggest are ‘vague terms’ and arriving at a firm thesis with no links or footnotes or sustainable evidence other than opinion … which all vaguely sounds/feels kinda Ok … but then falls apart on examination of the hard facts.
What’s new? Sure, we have systems for deliberative democracy and can invent new ones. But politicians like power and I struggle to imagine how an interlocutor might function.
The reason there is a “breakdown in trust between voters and their elected representatives in the US and UK” is obvious: the representatives don’t represent them. For democracy to work, voters needs a wide range of representatives to choose from. This means a multiparty democracy with a proportional voting system. Currently voters are denied this system in the US and UK.
I’d be interested in the evidence or any studies where it can be clearly shown that systems using PR in major democracies demonstrate less of a breakdown in trust and increased distancing between politicians and voter. Since its PR-elected government simply did the opposite of what it promised after coming to power, at the behest of its real government in the EU Commission and Germany, respect for Greek politicians for example has collapsed totally, after a period in which a now discredited new player appeared to offer hope.
If systems are important, surely the most important thing of all is the elected representatives themselves and the clarity in the mind of their voters that they are not just the agents of some higher or outside force, simply delivering the edicts and Directives of their occupiers or masters. That is what Greek voters appear to think, and it is what an increasing proportion of UK voters thought when they were motivated to voted to leave the EU – if you cannot elect politicians who can do what you want, then what indeed is the point of the exercise? Whether under PR or any other system.