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How to solve the paradoxes of politics? A Response to David Blunkett

David Blunkett offers some compelling reasons why we should defend our traditional democratic institutions. But are they increasingly distant compared to people’s everyday social and political lives? Matt Wood suggests we need to investigate new forms of participation and ‘everyday politics’ to address the paradoxes of disengagement.

David Blunkett’s Policy & Politics lecture is a lucid and reflective statement on many of the paradoxes that we find in contemporary politics. As has become somewhat of a mantra for our times in academic circles, he notes that many British people are incredibly disillusioned with and disengaged from traditional democratic institutions. But he goes a bit further than this, noting that people make unrealistic and contradictory demands of government and that these put politicians in an unenviable position of having to ‘please all of the people all of the time’. People want conviction politicians like Tony Benn or Margaret Thatcher, but they also want an end to ‘Punch and Judy’ politics and ‘common sense’ governing where the solutions, apparently, everyone agrees on. This makes things doubly difficult for addressing disengagement because the causes of the problem are often as contradictory and confusing as the various solutions.

What should be done, then? For Blunkett, the first point is not to resort to extremism. He argues passionately that as a society we should resist the temptations of David Graeber’s ‘anarcho-populism’ and the politics of Russell Brand. Simply ‘taking to the streets’ will be destructive and regressive, as any glance at the history of revolutionary politics tells us. Instead, we should all try and be more understanding and less hateful of politics and politicians. Politics, Blunkett notes, is a deeply civilizing and uplifting practice. Politics may not be perfect, but has been necessary to achieve some of the great social advances of the twentieth century (and hopefully will be the same in the twenty-first century). As he rightly notes, establishing and maintaining those formal political institutions that we in Britain take for granted is critically important for consolidating the gains made in the Arab Spring and to avoid the horrific bloodshed in countries like Syria. Blunkett mentions Bernard Crick’s famous book ‘In Defence of Politics’ as a brilliant statement of precisely this point, and Matthew Flinders’ update of the book, ‘Defending Politics’, makes a similar argument for the twenty-first century. The media, the market and meretricious, Brand-esque figures are in danger of doing down the social, economic and cultural benefits that we gain from our stable Parliamentary democracy, despite all its faults.

Is it enough though simply to defend the old system when, as Blunkett mentions towards the end of his speech, people are still often interested and engaged in political issues, they just might act on that interest in different ways?  In fact, as a lot of current research shows, we may be seeing a real sea-change in how people engage with and try to solve what they see as the big political issues. Political scientists have a number of words for this type of behaviour, but a good way of summing it up is the term ‘everyday politics’. People doing everyday politics know all the values Crick defended are important, but they also know that new technology can be utilised to drive change outside the formal system. They do politics when they like, where they like and how they like. This might be on the internet, through a local community project, a charity, or boycotting unethical corporate brands (some people see boycotting the BBC by not buying a TV as a political statement!). These people might vote occasionally, when they get time out of their busy lives, but they don’t see voting as the best way to get things done. They’re similarly turned off by party politics, which strikes them as too narrow or obsessed with media spin, or by Parliament, which seems dispiritingly anodyne and idiosyncratically outdated.

There are, of course, a number of paradoxes and inconsistencies here as well. People might ‘act locally and think globally’, but does that really make any difference? Everyday politics is often sporadic, disorganised and consumer-driven. While people might think they can do more by acting ‘closer to home’ rather than with the system, are we in danger of throwing the democratic baby out with our institutional bathwater? Would it really be better if the NHS was organised on a part-time ‘do-it-yourself’ basis? We think not. Traditional democratic institutions clearly do, and should have a place, as Blunkett makes clear. What we do think is these new forms of participation aren’t going to go away soon, and that simply defending the old system isn’t necessarily enough if we’re going to improve politics for the twenty-first century.

The challenge for us at the Crick Centre as we embark on an exciting programme of research is delving into how people live their political lives in the twenty-first century. While there’s already a lot of research out there on alternative forms of participation, we think there needs to be more into how and why there is a disconnection between people’s increasingly busy and congested everyday lives and the slow, churning world of ‘big-P’ Politics. Once we understand this better, we can begin to address how the institutions we should cherish (our national and regional parliaments, political parties and local councils) can evolve and adapt to our paradoxical political world.

Matt is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield Department of Politics, and Deputy Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics. He is currently researching ‘everyday politics’ and solutions to political disengagement in advanced liberal democracies.

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The Ethics of Cyber-War: Are we Prepared for Web War One?

Dr Matt Sleat

University of Sheffield

 

If we take history as our guide, war and violent conflict seem to be permanent albeit regrettable features of human experience. But warfare changes; and the recent introduction of cyber-weapons represents one of the most radical and far-reaching changes in how conflicts between states take place at least since the advent of nuclear weapons some 60 years ago (arguably in the history of warfare).

Cyber-space has recently been recognised as the fifth domain of warfare by the United States (alongside land, sea, air, and space) and the UK government has only in the past few months announced that its cyber-strategy now goes beyond simply securing us against cyber-attacks but actually developing our own cyber-weapons for future employment. Though the definition of cyber-war remains a matter of some intense dispute, at the most basic it is possible to say that it is an action carried out by a nation-state, usually via the internet, to perpetrate another nation’s computers or information networks for the purposes of causing damage and disruption to its critical infrastructure.

Though it might sound like science fiction or the preserve of Hollywood blockbusters (it is the focus of the fourth instalment of the excellent Die Hard franchise, for instance), cyber-war has been a part of contemporary conflicts for at least a decade. Cyber-war is here and it is happening. Yet many are beginning to question whether our traditional ethical frameworks for thinking about the morality of warfare, frameworks that were developed after World War Two in response to  conventional kinetic weapons, apply to weapons employed in the cyber realm.

I have just returned from a conference at the Centre for High Defence Studies (Rome) on ‘The Ethics of Cyber Conflict’ dedicated to exactly this issue. The conference was organised by NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE) and attempted to take a first step in filling the ethical and policy vacuum that currently exists at the international level in relation to cyber-war, exploring from different practical and theoretical perspectives the numerous ways in which the novelties of cyber-weapons fundamentally challenge or problematise our traditional understanding of the morality of warfare. What motivated this conference was a genuine worry (or maybe fear, if that is not putting it too strongly) that cyber-weapons will play a significant role in any future conflict, yet we currently lack an appropriate moral compass that can help us think through the novel ethical issues that this new domain of warfare gives rise to. Are we prepared for ‘Web War One’?

So what are these distinct issues that we urgently need to think through? Let me just mention a few. One of the biggest issues surrounding cyber-attacks is what is called the ‘attribution problem’. It is well-established in both ethics and law (e.g. Article 51 of the UN Charter) that a state is permitted to defend itself when it is the victim of aggressive actions on the part of another state. In traditional warfare it is more often than not very clear exactly whose tanks it is crossing your borders, whose planes are dropping bombs on your munitions factories, or whose soldiers are shooting at you (indeed such public disclosure of the identity of the aggressive actor is required by international law).

The case is very different in cyber-space. There are two main reasons for this: The first is that the internet was purposefully designed to be security-light in order to enable the greatest degree of access and communication. A consequence of this is that the vast majority of actions in cyber-space are completely anonymous and take place without requiring the declaration of one’s identity. Furthermore, it does not take a computer-expert to be able to re-route their connections through servers located anywhere else in the world, making it seem like the connection is coming from South Korea when the ‘cyber-warrior’ is sat in Skegness. The consequence of these two factors means that when an attack is taking place it is incredibly difficult to track with any high degree of certainty exactly who the aggressor state is.

This is not a theoretical problem; it has happened. For example, just before the first Iraq War (so cyber-attacks have been a feature of modern warfare for decades) the United States’ Department of Defence (DoD) realised that its network security was systematically being breached. Initially the DoD were unable to establish who was behind such breaches, though the fact that tensions between the US and Iraq were high, and that the attacks seemed to be coming from the Middle East, meant that most analysts and military chiefs strongly suspected that Sadam Hussein’s regime was responsible. It turned out that the real culprits were two Californian teenagers, aided by an Israeli man, who had managed to reroute their connections through the Middle East to mask their actions (this event has been code-named SOLAR SUNRISE). All signs reasonably pointed to Iraq. Yet they were completely innocent. And in more recent attacks, while again there is good reason to suspect that it was Russia behind attacks on Estonia and Georgia given the geopolitical situations at the time (in the case of the cyber-attacks on Georgia, the two countries were actually at war), their responsibility cannot be proven to the degree of certainty that many think would justify retaliatory response. For all we know they could indeed be totally blameless, and any military response would hence be unwarranted and potentially immoral. So the crucial question is begged: to what degree of certainty must it be possible to attribute responsibility to a state for perpetrating a cyber-attack in order for a military retaliation to be morally, let alone legally, justified? At the moment, we simply have no answer to this question.

The ‘attribution problem’ is compounded by a second issue. Unlike traditional kinetic weapons, bombs and bullets, cyber-weapons are packets of code that cannot in and of themselves harm human beings. Indeed, it is not clear that such weapons are even physical in the normal sense of the word. Furthermore, most cyber-attacks are very unlikely to cause major harm or injury to human beings. They are much more liable to be disruptive rather than violent in nature. To be sure, cyber-attacks might be seriously disruptive: they have the potential to take down entire power-grids, to significantly damage economic activity, to destroy oil or gas pipelines or uranium enrichment plants (as the Stuxnet worm, discovered in 2010, did in Iran), to cut-off a government’s pathways of communication to its people and the outside world (as happened in the Georgia attacks), and to seriously undermine a military’s command and control facilities and processes. All of these represent serious potential damage to a state’s vital interests, but none of them are acts of aggression in the traditional Clausewitzian notion of violence: in most cases of cyber-attacks no physical damage need be done to any physical object, nor are persons likely to be harmed (at least not directly). So alongside the question of who the aggressor is in any cyber-attack is the equally significant question, in the absence of any physical intrusion into a territory or actual violence to human beings, of whether a cyber-attack can rightly be considered an act of aggression? And if it is not an act of aggression, then how can any military response be justified?

So cyber-war throws into doubt the most basic questions of warfare: are we being attacked and who is attacking us? In academic and legal terms, this requires us to ask whether a cyber-attack provides a casus belli, i.e. a justification for going to war (though there are further interesting questions as to what forms of military response are appropriate to a cyber-attack: Only a retaliatory cyber-attack or could a traditional kinetic attack also be justified?). But cyber-war also poses questions for the morality of actions undertaken during a conflict, what in just war theory is called jus in bello. Most theorists believe that there are moral rules that limit what states can do to one another even when they are at war. One of the most important of these moral laws is the principle of discrimination. In both ethics and international law there is a strong prohibition against killing non-combatants, that all acts of war should be directed towards enemy combatants and not towards those who are not involved in the conflict. The killing of civilians, often classified as non-combatants or innocents, who are playing no role in the war effort is therefore prohibited.

Yet cyber-attacks can be highly indiscriminate. An attack which took down a power-grid, communication services, or significantly disrupted economic activity is likely to have major impact on both combatants and non-combatants. The deeply integrated nature of much of our critical infrastructures ensures that such discrimination would be very difficult to achieve in even the most sophisticated of cyber-attacks. Taking a more global view, once many cyber-weapons have been employed it is often the case that even those who developed it will be unable to adequately track who it will target. This is especially true for computer viruses and worms that are specifically designed to replicate themselves so as to infect numerous computers and networks. As of September 2010, for instance, the Stuxnet worm which was originally employed to infect Iranian uranium enrichment plants had been found to have infected over 100,000 computers in 155 countries across the world! That Stuxnet was designed to damage a specific target, and that the vast majority (if not all) of these over 100,000 computers were not involved in the enrichment of uranium, meant that such widespread and indiscriminate infection caused little harm. Yet a cyber-weapon that was less specific in its target and objective and which spread in a comparable manner would clearly be much more of an issue.

It is one of the ironies of cyber-war that those nations whose populace and infrastructures are most dependent upon and integrated into cyberspace, like ourselves and the US, are most vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Our dependency makes us vulnerable. And hence it is probably right that we prepare ourselves for conflict in the cyber-domain, which must include developing our own cyber-weapons. But we have a moral responsibility to properly consider the ethical ramifications of such conflict before we find ourselves faced with some of the issues I’ve briefly mentioned. Yet this discussion has only just begun.

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Nelson Mandela

Professor Graham Harrison
University of Sheffield

 

At Nelson Mandela’s national memorial, ANC Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa and Barack Obama hailed Nelson Mandela as a ‘founding father’. This is a powerful tribute to a great man. Ramaphosa was referencing Mandela’s determination only to negotiate when the apartheid National Party agreed to non racial elections for a unitary government; his ability to embody a historic moment of racial reconciliation; and the dignified way in which he maintained himself during his presidency. This is why Mandela presided over a largely non-violent democratic transition embedded in a new constitution and elections in 1994. All of these traits lend to Mandela an image not simply as a head of state or political leader, but also as a ideal of what political leadership should be.

Obama, contrastingly, did what many politicians have done since Mandela’s death, which might be described as virtue by analogy: his struggle was our struggle, he encapsulated a spirit that we all aspire to, Mandela speaks to us all. In particular Obama associated the United States’ constitutional history with that of South Africa’s non-racial constitution: ‘Like America’s founding fathers, he would erect a constitutional order to preserve freedom for future generations’. Of course, America’s Founding Fathers would hardly have agreed with Mandela’s vision of a ‘rainbow nation’; in fact most would not have listened to him as a citizen or countryman. But, the point of having founding fathers is not respect for historical accuracy. What matters is effective myth building. Myths of origin are part of the DNA of so many modern state and nation building projects, whether expressed through the imagery of founding fathers, constitutional assemblies, monarchies, cultural-ethnic ancestor/heroes, or religious texts and places of worship. In this sense, Obama and especially Ramaphosa’s evocation of Mandela as South Africa’s founding father repays some reflection. The political work of his memorialisation offers a rough metric of the current progress of South Africa’s non-racial national  project.

Calling Mandela a founding father in South Africa’s troubled times highlights how badly this country needs strong and stable historical narratives and political ideals. Currently, South Africa suffers from income inequality that might be greater than it was at the end of apartheid. This is evident in its political economy: a lack of housing and basic services, perhaps a quarter of people living on less that $1.25 a day, perhaps 40% of the working population either unemployed or insecurely employed. Historically-entrenched and still significantly racialised inequalities in property and incomes remain. Crime is a massive problem, as is sexual violence, and HIV/AIDS. Issues concerning corruption, xenophobia, the creation of an ANC party-state, the extent to which a ‘black bourgeoisie’ can drive a more inclusive development project have generated many political tensions and battles in South Africa’s highly politicised society. And, above and within all of this, the South African economy remains heavily dominated by international capital and reliant on a small group of mineral and agricultural exports.

Little surprise, then, that South African nation-building – and aspiration that seemed so possible when Mandela was sworn in – now seems to take the form of a fairly weak mantra: ‘we have made some progress, but patience is required…’ or even worse, ‘there is no alternative’. This is not the stuff of strong national purpose, nor is it evocative of the myriad and virile political streams of socialism and social democracy that characterised the struggle for South Africa in the 1970s and 80s. And, before we are entirely socialised into a liberal airbrushing of history, it is worth remembering that, for all of the personal integrity of Nelson Mandela and for all of the concerted struggles of anti apartheid movements around the world, it was the civic associations, labour unions, ANC branches, and other popular organisations that made apartheid unsustainable both politically and economically.

Mandela’s passing and the State Memorial taking place today seems to express the anxieties of South Africa’s progress as each speaker endeavours to connect Mandela’s remarkable image of political virtue with something grander and aspirational for the country. One aspiration shared by all of the South African speakers was to memorialise Mandela, make myths from his history, and revitalise the inclusive national project.

Amongst the speakers, those who participated in the struggle against apartheid shout amandla! (power) and viva! (long live), the core vocabulary not only of resistance against apartheid but also of political radicalism: of socialism, national redistribution, the overthrow of apartheid as a step towards ambitious social justice. As the current President’s image was shown on the big screens, and as he stepped up to the podium, there was a considerable amount of booing. But, there were also cheers, and Zuma was the only person to give a balanced narrative about the extent to which apartheid’s devastation was far greater than Mandela’s incarceration. Indeed, anyone born in the 1980s or after, listening to the international mass media narratives would be forgiven for thinking that apartheid was a brief phase in South Africa’s history, defined by one man’s imprisonment and also seemingly benefitting no-one in particular. For all of his laboured delivery, Zuma did remind those watching of the difficulties of forgiving without retrospectively trivialising aparthied’s history and legacy. But, as the crowd became quieter and the rain continued one could almost imagine this as a national lament rather than a revitalisation.

The fact is that South Africa’s transition to a non-racial democracy has not addressed the powerful historical legacies of centuries of racism and dispossession. To speak of ‘the nation’ in the South African context is to speak aspirationally rather than of a robust working fiction. After nearly twenty years, poverty and inequality remain as severe social blights, racism remains even if implicit or coded, the South African economy’s periods of growth have not powered a process of socially-beneficial development. So, the bigger question – and the reason why Mandela’s memorialisation has been both so prolific and tense – is: founding father of what?

 

'Do you have confidence in national government?' survey
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Confidence in Democracy Crumbles

Matthew Wood, Deputy Director, Crick Centre and Visiting Fellow, ANZSOG Institute for Governance

Latest data from the OECD show that trust and confidence in liberal democratic governments has fallen to depressing new lows. The solutions they offer though are more of the same old ‘good governance’ accountability agenda since the ‘90s. Could it be we need more innovative ways of engaging the public to really invigorate our ailing democracies?

This week The Economist published a short but prescient article lamenting ‘crumbling confidence’ in liberal democratic governments across the OECD. The article presents some fascinating data from a report that gives us yet more cause to worry about ‘democracy in crisis’. The headlines are as follows:

  1. Only 40% of citizens in OECD countries trust their governments, down 5 points from 2007.
  2. Trust was hit hard by the financial crisis. In Ireland, Greece and Portugal trust is down by more than 20 points, and in Greece now rests at an astonishingly low 12%.
  3. Trust in ‘emerging’ countries is comparatively healthy, sitting at 54%. Interestingly from a democratic perspective, the Chinese and Indonesian governments (certainly not considered paragons of liberal democracy) come out in the top 3.

Accountability Again

The Economist is certainly right that this data is deeply concerning, even ‘dispiriting’. The questions inevitably raised are ‘why is this happening?’ and ‘what is to be done?’, and here the OECD Secretary General Angel Gurría has been particularly vocal. In a recent speech to the OECD Network of Senior Officials from Centres of Government, he set out a ‘strategy on trust’ that contained some familiar elements: integrity, transparency and engagement:

  • Integrity: ‘Too many citizens believe that corruption in government is widespread. At the OECD we help countries to strengthen trust in the policy making process by developing good practice principles in high-risk areas and monitoring their implementation’.
  • Transparency: ‘Citizens want to know how their money is being spent. Governments must be accountable, and this means publishing and communicating easily digestible budget data’.
  • Engagement: ‘We need to get serious about Open Government as an interactive process that promotes inclusive and responsive policy making through real engagement with citizens. Trust is not only about tackling corruption and putting government data on websites, it is also about giving citizens a voice in the process’.

As much as it’s difficult to find fault in any of these largely agreeable themes, there is a distinct sense of déjà vu here. Since the 1990s, international organisations have promoted ‘good governance’ based on exactly the principles of transparency and openness Gurría advocates. Western states have made reams of government data, reports, accounts, etc. available like never before via Freedom of Information acts other forms of ‘open government’. We’ve also seen a significant growth in consultations, ‘big society’ programmes, and the like. In other words we live in an era of what John Keane (2009) calls ‘Monitory Democracy’:

Monitory democracy is a new historical form of democracy, a variety of ‘post-parliamentary’ politics defined by the rapid growth of many different kinds of extra-parliamentary, power-scrutinising mechanisms … Within and outside states, independent monitors of power begin to have tangible effects. By putting politicians, parties and elected governments permanently on their toes, they complicate their lives, question their authority and force them to change their agendas – and sometimes smother them in disgrace (pp.688-689)

Keane goes on to document a stunning array of ‘over one hundred new types scrutinising institutions’ scrutinising all aspects of political systems including their inputs (elections), outputs (policy evaluations) and throughputs (processes of decision making within government) (p.690). So, if we are to take the word of Keane’s extensive study, as well as the variety of academic literature on accountability, the world of integrity, transparency and engagement Gurría yearns for is already with us. And yet, as the Gallup survey data shows, it has not, and is not, making us trust our governments more.

Arguably, and controversially, this endless quest for accountability may even have paradoxically fuelled disenchantment with democracy. Matthew Flinders, Director of the Crick Centre, warns that too much transparency, openness and accountability can be as damaging as too little, as it fuels public expectations to unsustainable levels. In a similar vein, political philosopher Stephen Bilakovics even suggests that the very principle of openness may be the source of democracy’s problems, because it exists as an unsustainable ideal of absolute citizen power and control against which the reality of messy political compromises can never measure up.

A Way Forward?

If it is the case, then, that yet more accountability and yet more openness has not, and will not, solve our democratic deficit (and may even exacerbate rather than ameliorate the problem), then what is to be done? Besides the already considerable body of academic recommendations on this topic, if we dig a little deeper into the findings we see a very interesting trend that may be overlooked in the headlines, as the OECD itself notes:

Despite diminishing trust in national government, citizens are generally pleased with the many public services they receive locally in their daily lives. For instance, on average 72% of citizens reported having confidence in their local police force. Almost the same percentage considered themselves satisfied with health care, and 66% were satisfied with the education system.

This point could be crucial for understanding the problem we face. Put simply, citizens seem to trust institutions more when they know more about them, understand how they work, and interact with them more. It would hence be unsurprising that trust in traditionally ‘big government’ Nordic countries is generally higher (as shown in the Gallup data), or that governments regularly holding citizen referenda (such as Switzerland) also come high up the list. By contrast, despite numerous accountability initiatives, large and complex democracies like Britain, Germany, France, the US and Australia are almost inevitably more distant than the relatively smaller countries (or the ones with relatively emergent democratic cultures) higher up the table. In these latter countries, since public interaction with government will often be infrequent and complex, trust may be more difficult to build and maintain than merely posting impenetrable accounts and reports on anonymous government websites and pretending this is ‘democratic engagement’.

A different approach, then, might be called for. Could it be that finding ways to help citizens understand government beyond ceaseless ‘accountability’ initiatives might help? We could start by enabling people to understand the political process through citizenship education programmes and public engagement initiatives in public arenas – churches, libraries, theatres, cafes, pubs, shopping centres – thinking outside the box a bit. These events could bring together politicians, public figures and other experts (academics, even?) to build a genuine public sphere and help a cynical public understand why politics really matters. The Crick Centre’s recent event on Britain’s House of Lords was an attempt to begin a wider debate about the future of our democratic institutions. Perhaps this approach is optimistic. What the latest data shows, though, is that if anything the old international trust agenda is not working, and we need ways of improving trust that go further and deeper.

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Political Inequality in the UK and Why Voting Matters

A central claim of democracy is that every citizen’s preference, no matter what their status, should count equally. There are, however, good reasons for supposing that the principle of political equality and democracy are under threat and that politics is increasingly becoming the preserve of the affluent and the powerful (see Gilens 2012).

In Britain, there is a growing public consensus that some segments of the British population are better represented politically than others, giving rise to a widespread suspicion that the policy preferences of a few are given special priority by the governing elite. This accusation came to the forefront last month when comedian Russell Brand explained to BBC news presenter Jeremy Paxman his reasons for refusing to vote – his rationale that voting “changes nothing”.

Our recently published report at the Institute for Public Policy Research shows that Russell Brand is wrong to think that abstention from the electoral process will instigate change. Worryingly, we show that he presents a far greater danger to young people as they’re the group most likely to take note of his advice.

It’s well documented that over the past several decades voter turnout in national and local elections has been on the decline. The overall turnout rate however isn’t the only thing that should worry us. The far greater problem facing British democracy is the growing inequality within voter turnout as electoral participation is falling fastest among younger and less affluent people, therefore giving older and more well-off voters disproportionate influence at the ballot box.

In the 2010 general election just 44 per cent of 18–24-year-olds voted, compared to 76 per cent of those aged 65 and over. This gap in turnout rate has grown at an alarming rate in recent years jumping from 18 percentage points in 1970 to 32 points in 2010. A striking social class divide has also expanded in recent decades. In the 1987 general election only a four-point gap in the turnout rate existed between the highest and the lowest income quintiles; by 2010 this grew to a staggering 23 percentage points.

If certain groups are less likely to vote than others, governments have less of an incentive to respond to the interests of those who don’t show up to polls. To demonstrate the preferential treatment of voters over non-voters, our analysis investigates the 2010 spending review in conjunction with the 2010 British Election Study. We find that those who did not vote in the 2010 election on average faced cuts worth 20 per cent of their annual household income, compared to just 12 per cent of those who did vote.

This disproportionate political favouritism greatly affects the young and the poor, precisely the two groups mentioned above which vote less frequently. Individuals aged between 16–24 years old faced cuts to services worth 28 per cent of their annual household income, compared to just 10 per cent for those aged 55–74, while those with annual household incomes under £10,000 stood to lose an equivalent of 41 per cent of their average income in services compared to just 3 per cent for those who earn greater than £60,000.

Unequal turnout reinforces a viscous cycle of disaffection and under-representation among those groups where electoral participation is falling. As government policy becomes less responsive to their interests the less inclined they will be to vote. The less they vote, the less likely governments will respond to their interests; thus establishing a downward spiral excluding these groups from electoral life.

To contest this we recommend first-time eligible compulsory voting. Research has shown that voting is a habitual action (see Dinas 2012, Inglehart 1990, Gerber et al 2003, Franklin 2004).

Those who vote at their first eligible election are considerably more likely to vote throughout the duration of their life. Obligating young people to turnout at to the ballot box would go a long way in breaking the non-voting habit plaguing the youth and have a substantial impact on voter turnout as each generation ages. First-time compulsory voting alone would not conquer public disaffection or disengagement from political life but it would present a radical institutional step towards reinvigorating politics. An extreme problem may require a radical solution – but waiting for Russell Brand’s revolution shouldn’t be one of them.

Glenn Gottfried is Quantitative Research Fellow at IPPR and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield

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The Second House

Malaika Cunningham

For my Year 12 work experience I worked for the Outreach Department of the House of Lords. I was obviously thrilled to have secured myself such a great placement, but I went in with plenty of vague biases against what I believed to be an outdated, undemocratic and elitist house. I, like many others, believed the House of Lords to be full of elderly, white men with an outdated birth right to their place in government. I imagined it would smell a bit like a combination of pipe tobacco and old money. I remember that my excitement for my placement was largely due to its proximity to the Commons. It did not take me long to realise that I was wrong about the Lords. On my first day of trailing after the staff of the Outreach Department I had already met two peers: Baroness Young and Baroness D’Souza.

The first public event of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics invited Baroness D’Souza to the University of Sheffield to launch ‘Parliament Week 2013’. The Baroness reaffirmed my ideas of the Second House: a place transformed from an aristocratic hangover into a house of individuals who are there because of what they have achieved in their professional careers. The majority of hereditary peers have now been removed.

It is not an elected chamber, and this has led to the argument that it is an illegitimate hangover from previous centuries that continues to cast a surprisingly long shadow over twenty-first century politics.   However, Baroness D’Souza has argued that making the House of Lords an elected chamber would only serve to put the house into direct competition with the House of Commons thereby risking constitutional grid-lock and further undermining public confidence in politics. It might also be suggested that having a chamber full of professionals who – in the large part – do not owe their position to the government of the day provides a healthy counterbalance to the well-known dominance of the executive over the House of Commons. (The Whips in the Lords are far weaker than their counterparts in the Commons.) As Russell Brand has recently pointed out, the majority of the public feels that politicians are ‘disconnected’ from the electorate and therefore, in theory at least, the Lords offers a more diverse spectrum of people who may have taken a different career path to ‘the professional politicians’ (interestingly, now a firmly pejorative term) in ‘the other place’. As one audience member pointed out on Twitter: “Not all political legitimacy should depend on a cross in a box’ and it was in exactly this vein that Baroness D’Souza argued that the House of Lords can ‘hold the government to account from an /issue driven /perspective, rather than a party political viewpoint.’ //

The question is whether the social representation provided by the Lords can really be viewed as legitimate when compared with the wider population it claims to serve?
Matthew Flinders has argued that we needed a broader range of people in politics and the Lords Speaker conceded that the membership of the Lords was possibly too narrow
(http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/main-topics/politics/speaker-says-lords-is-lacking-expertise-in-key-policies-1-6248044). Limited terms, a clear retirement age, the capacity to ‘throw the rascals out’ when members of the Lords break the rules or the law, a limit on the number of members, different appointment procedures…the possible reforms to alter the role, nature and perception of the Lords are numerous but the problem is that reform seems to move at a glacial pace.
And yet what last Thursday’s event really revealed was that the public do not ‘hate’ politics. On a fairly damp and cold November night around 500 people came along to take part in a debate about democratic change and reform in an environment that was as friendly as it was enlightening.

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Why Do People Hate Politics in Australia?

Matthew Wood, Deputy Director, Crick Centre and Visiting Fellow, ANZSOG Institute for Governance

Latest research on political disengagement in Australia suggests localism could be the solution to anti-politics. Yet, recent work on expectations management and depoliticisation suggests we need to look a bit deeper into how people understand politics to really tackle the problem.

The Crick Centre aims to improve people’s understanding of politics and reinvigorate political engagement the world over, not just in the UK. In Australia though, you’d think our job would be a bit easier. With a relatively thriving (if uncertain) economic outlook – comparatively low unemployment, stable inflation, and twenty-two years of consecutive growth – Aussies ought to be fairly content, or at least less disillusioned, than countries still reeling from the 2008 crash. Compulsory voting, an electoral quirk in Australia, should also in theory produce a more politically literate citizenry. And yet, the well-known problems of disenchantment we experience in Europe and America are equally, if not more troubling down under.

In an investigation into Australians’ attitudes towards politics published this year, Mark Evans, Gerry Stoker and Jamal Nasir report findings from a national survey that contains some fairly bleak news. The findings, they rightly note, ‘should give all democrats pause for thought’. Here are the headlines:

  • Over half of Australians (54.7%) could not remember doing anything political in the past 2-3 years other than voting;
  • 9 out of 10 Australians think they have no say over decisions at the national level
  • 9 out of 10 Australians think politicians should ‘stop talking’ and just ‘take action’ on important issues
  • Australians agree with negative statements about politicians to the same extent as voters in countries with worse economic situations
  • The oldest age group (65+) is twice as engaged as the youngest (18-24)

Some of these stats will be familiar to political disengagement watchers: old people vote, young people don’t; most folk want government to just ‘get on with the job’ (a phrase that always betrays a lack of knowledge of the overstretched lives of national MPs). On the other hand, point four raises eyebrows. Why do Australians not give more credit to their politicians when they managed to steer through the economic crisis relatively harm free? Maybe this has something to do with the rather unsettled and unusual nature of the recent Labor-led coalition government. The unseemly rankling and ruthless ousting of Julia Gillard (although this nadir occurred after the poll was taken) certainly wasn’t Australian democracy’s finest hour. Even if this did have an impact though, the recent election of Tony Abbott’s Liberal-led coalition doesn’t look like helping things. Just this week The Australian reported political trust falling to an all-time low amongst citizens, despite Abbott’s hackneyed ambition to ‘restore faith in government’. The causes of disengagement then are complex, and not easily remedied by a new government or steady economy (the UK coalition might take heed of this omen).

What, then, can help restore faith in politics down under? Evans et al think that localism is the way out – more participatory initiatives and direct engagement of citizens through, for instance, jury-style decision making bodies, lay representation on parliamentary committees, and more referendums – to go with representative institutions. Yet, work by the Crick Centre’s very own Matthew Flinders and Katherine Dommett might speak the lie to some of the inflated hopes around localism. In their ‘gap analysis’ of a local participatory drive in Sheffield, Flinders and Dommett show that where local councillors created high hopes that lay participants would be put ‘at the heart of the decision making process’, those participants were subsequently left feeling let down and disillusioned. On this analysis more participatory initiatives might set us up for an even bigger fall, raising people’s hopes of having a real say but ultimately failing to ‘make all sad hearts glad’ (to steal a riff from the Crick Centre’s eponymous public intellectual).

Perhaps this perspective might be a bit pessimistic. After all, who doesn’t want an invigorated local participatory democracy, and who would want to be the spoil sport pouring cold water over the enticing ideal? Maybe giving up on local participation isn’t the right way to go. An alternative might say we need to manage our expectations about what localism can and can’t do. Expectations management is a key theme for the Crick Centre, we need to foster a better understanding of all the different trade-offs and difficult choices involved in democratic politics. In Australia, this is arguably even more important than anywhere else, with the vast distances, stretched resources and need to make tough and politically unpopular choices about ‘who gets what, when and how’. One need only look at the contentious politics surrounding the Federal government’s local consultation on a new water reform Plan for the Murray Darling Basin in 2010 to see the ideal of localism being roundly trumped by a breakdown of understanding and engagement from both sides. Local communities accused policymakers of not taking socio-economic issues into account, and this culminated with farmers in the Griffith community of New South Wales publicly burning copies of the Plan, and a full parliamentary inquiry. Maybe a common and productive understanding about what politics and public decision making can do – and what it can’t – might have helped in this case.

But then again, the Crick Centre isn’t just about the limits of politics, we’re very optimistic people! We think politics has great potential and does a lot more than many people (even politicians) give it credit for. Often many of the problems with politics arise when politicians say they can’t do things, and people rightly think “then why do we even bother voting for you”! One salient example of this happened during the recent bush fires in New South Wales, when Tony Abbott denied that the government (or indeed humans in general) could do anything about preventing bush fires, despite decades of evidence showing the link between human-induced climate change and the increasing regularity of these catastrophic events. For him it was just ‘part of being Australian’ – not a political issue at all. And we wonder why people don’t put their faith and trust in politicians when they constantly tell us they can’t do anything! This is an example of what Colin Hay calls depoliticisation – fatalistic arguments about us not being able to do anything to control, change, or even discuss, our common destiny. Depoliticisation comes in many different forms, and it may well have a profound effect on politics that much research on participation has suggested, but hasn’t yet captured. Perhaps if Abbott, and other politicians in Australia and beyond, were a little more brave about taking responsibility for tackling big issues like climate change, whilst acknowledging they can’t wave a magic wand, we might make a start in getting more people to understand why politics matters (perhaps more than ever before) in the twenty-first century.

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Anti-Politics Outside The Anglo-European Sphere

Jack Corbett

The burgeoning literature on political apathy tells a depressing tale of rising negativity and cynicism regarding politics. Even the most cursory glance at the relevant bookshelves provides a worrying picture of contemporary civic culture with titles including ‘Why We Hate Politics’, ‘The End of Politics’, ‘Disaffected Democracies’ and ‘Don’t Vote for the Bastards It Just Encourages Them’.The problem with this literature is that it tends to be incredibly narrow in terms of both disciplinary and geographical breadth. What happens when you step outside political science and look beyond the ‘usual suspects’ in terms of counties?

‘We don’t study anti-politics’ a colleague who specialises in Development Studies recently reflected ‘we do anti-politics!’ Such statements challenge a host of assumptions about the role of the scholar vis-à-vis society while also posing distinctive questions about the nature and extent of anti-political sentiment in developing countries (i.e. countries that have been almost completely over-looked in the contemporary scholarship on political disaffection). There are clearly exceptions to thisstatement such as Will Hout’s Governance and the Depoliticisation of Development (2009) and before this James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine (1990). The question this leaves us with is how well do the theories, assumptions and findings of the literature on ‘disaffected democrats’ transfer to developing countries?

Let’s examine some examples. One commonly cited cause of anti-politics is the influence of neo-liberalism and its preference for private over public (think the rise of qangos etc.). There is a similar tradition in development studies – this is the Ferguson and Hout line – which critiques how donor’s preference universalised technical solutions for complex policy problems. Local legislatures, for example, are sidelined due to the perception that they are corrupt and self-serving.

A desire to sideline local elites in favour of best practice is, however, not just the purview of the right. Echoing my colleague, development is imbued with a tradition of hyper-urgency (‘one dies every minute’) that favours immediate action over ideology (‘doing something is better than doing nothing’). As such, both traditions have a shared distaste for the messy, contingent and at times painfully slow nature of democratic politics that Bernard Crick’s In Defence of Politics famously described.

Outside economics, the professionalization of the political class in Anglo-European countries is said to be a cause of ‘disaffected democrats’ as politicians are accused of being insulated from the views and experiences of ordinary citizens (the furore over MPs entitlements is a manifestation of this line of argument). Conversely, in many developing countries politics tends not to be dominated by a professional political class but is instead typically characterised as corrupted by patronage-client dynamics. Rather than a problem, in these parts of the world would-be reformers consider professionalization as a cure.

A similar point can be made about the argument that the current malaise stems from a crisis in our civic culture that has left the public disengaged and apathetic about politics. Aspects of this argument resonate with development theory which sees the absence of an active citizenry as an inhibitor of democratic transition. On the other hand, key trends that point to disengagement, like voter turnout and other forms of political involvement, are not universal (think the Arab Spring). Indeed, in the absence of professionalization, public office can retain a level of prestige now lost in Anglo-European countries.

In fact, if there is a sense that civic culture is out of step with democratic ideals in developing countries than the most powerful argument comes from rhetorical appeals to culture or custom (think Asian or African values debates). From this perspective, local practices and a preference for authoritarian leadership is incompatible with western liberal norms. Rather than the new causes of anti-politics mentioned here – neo-liberalism, professionalization, democratic decadence – this points us back to old paradigms; Crick’s defence warned against the dangers of nationalism and totalitarianism in particular.

There is much more to this debate than what I have elliptically outlined here (it certainly doesn’t get at the most recent material on moral panics and folk theories for example). Caveats aside, as we can see, while some of the current theories about anti-politics travel relatively well, others do not.

Disenchantment with democratic politics and the current crop of parliamentarians seems to manifest in some form despite differences in context. And yet, the causes seem to vary when compared temporally and spatially.

There are two ways to respond to this. One is to retreat behind the language of exceptionalism and argue that when investigating such different political contexts conceptual frameworks just don’t transfer. In doing so we leave our core assumptions about anti-politics, in both political science and development studies, unchallenged. The other is to use the questions that drive existing studies of anti-politics – how do people understand and value politics, how are attitudes towards government changing, and why might this be the case – and compare the responses. I hope the brief examples provided here give a taste of the rewards that such comparative analysis might offer.

But, if we want to realise the benefits of this type of inquiry we must broaden our disciplinary and geographical scope. In doing so existing intellectual traditions will be challenged and our understanding of this phenomenon will change.