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Real people don't vote

23 June 2003

The connection between elections and reality was always tenuous, but never more so than it is today. Non-voters are not nihilists, but honest citizens increasingly unwilling to collude in a deception.

Proposals for regional assemblies in England provoke a range of reactions, from worthy enthusiasm to jaw-stretching boredom, to no reaction at all. The last is the most common. As an issue it will never set the country on fire. Among a people where only a national parliamentary election can ensure a respectable turnout, democracy for democracy's sake is a minority interest at best.

The government keeps on at it, nonetheless. Proposals for elected community representation at the micro level in health and elsewhere pop up like horsefly bites at harvest time when the search is on for the next new idea. It chimes in with the New Labour Third Way idea of the People's This and the People's That. Now we have the People's Primary Health Care Trust to go with the People's Princess and the People's Lottery.

This is not to be cynical about democracy. But it is to say that the best forms of democracy are the ones that people actually use. It's easy to see why voting is not a hugely popular activity. Most elections don't have outcomes that people can relate to. A General Election is the exception to that, but for bad reasons. The presence of only two main contenders provides a gladiatorial spectacle and ensures a clear result. The consequence of that result is that things happen that are immediately newsworthy and appear, at least, to have a direct impact upon people's lives.

The real impact may not be as much as it looks. The perceived impact is in the newspapers and on the television - a different set of faces with a different set of questionable promises and aspirations. It's a sort of theatre but at least it grabs the attention. Compare that with a change in the political complexion of a local council. Paradoxically, of course, that could really affect people's lives since it delivers many of the services they rely upon. But because those services are more and more provided by statutory obligation rather than political choice there is less and less to notice when the council changes. The bins are still collected (often by a contractor whose contract is election-proof): if they weren't, that really would be something to take to the hustings.

The general election is the big event of the British voting scene, but even then turnout is down to not much more that sixty percent. In the U.S. presidentials it's lower than that. Scottish, Welsh, European, county, local and parish elections get down to the forties, thirties and twenties in percentage terms. And when it gets down there the danger is that a committed minority can squew the whole thing away from the popular will.

Not surprisingly the usual response to all this is: how to get people to vote? How to make voting relevant, or accessible, or plain easy, in order to get the numbers up? If numbers are all you are after, then some things, like postal ballots or on-line voting, work a bit. But if that's really what is wanted it would make more sense to go the whole hog. Compulsory voting certainly gets the turnout up, but does it really make the ballot a more reliable way of communicating the popular will?

Or what about the newspapers? Do the tabloids represent the most refined expression of popular feeling? Governments often react as if they think they do. Or they think that the tabloids have the power to mould the popular view, which is not quite the same thing but has a similar effect. The problem with newspapers is that, like opinion polls, they're notoriously fickle. They reflect (or create) a mood of the moment, but the moment changes every day.

So what are the democratic forms of expression that people actually use? Primarily, the things that they do. It has become a commonplace of psephology that people will say to a pollster that they would pay more tax for a better health service, but in the privacy of the polling booth they never actually vote to do so. But if you judge people's wants by what they do, then they want good health services, because they are constantly going to doctors and hospitals to get it. Those services have to be paid for - the only question being the link between the price paid and the quality of the service received.

The highest form of democracy is the state that allows the people to do what they want. That has to be interpreted, not by asking them but by watching them. People give money to beggars. They also put it in charity boxes in spades. That says something about the re-distributive effects of taxation - the desire to give and the desire to share. People don't bump into each other on pavements, and by and large they obey the rule of the road. They argue sometimes, but by and large they behave politely towards each other. That says something about the desire to co-operate, and is part of the reason why the adversarial house of Commons is so alien to most observers.

When it comes to the higher political orders, like the macro-economy, what people want is stability and certainty. We know that because they always behave as if they have it, until a shock comes and they are surprised and afraid. When it comes to war, people want war when they storm the recruiting offices, but not if they don't. A million or more demonstrating on the streets of London against the war in Iraq was a democratic statement if only because there was not a million demonstrating the other way. The government had to drum up support for the war and can hardly be said to have succeeded. A million active voices in this case, therefore, probably did speak for many more millions that were quiet. The mistake the government made in this case was to dismiss the protests as coming from the organised fringe (the anti-everything brigade) whereas the numbers achieved were more likely to be a consequence of the presence of sensible people who had the wit to see that the whole thing was a bad idea. (Maybe they were right - no WMD, no post-conflict resolution, no way out?)

Democratic expression comes about when people exert themselves - to protest, or to drive a car, or to smoke a joint, or to go to work - any way that they evidence by their actions how they want their society to be. The job of the government is to weave a path between the conflicts that arise, but not to posit a dogma or catch-all political model that can only work if it changes the way people want to be. The problem with elections is that they move the debate into a fantasy land in which all the language is of reform, renewal, change, challenge and the fight against social evils. Suddenly, people can have everything they want if they only will vote for it, and this makes a disconnection between the wanting and the exerting themselves to get it which is the only credible evidence that they wanted it in the first place.

People would vote to pay more tax for a better health service if there wasn't always another party (usually the opposition) telling then that they can have a better health service without paying more tax. The more elections there are, the more people there will be offering a fantasy prescription - telling the public what wonderful things they (implausibly) can have instead of looking at their actions to see what they want. People's real wants are, generally, realistic. Electoral promises destroy that realism to create a candy-floss of expectation that can only end in disenchantment and dissent.