Jose Angel Garcia

PhD Researcher, Department of Politics

University of Sheffield.

A couple of weeks ago Matthew Wood wrote an interesting post about what seems to be the contemporary “crumbling” in confidence in democracy around the world; a disenchanment fuelled by a “ceaseless government accountability”. Wood’s point is similar to Flinders’ argument in Defending Politics, which states that societies around the world are living in an era of high governmental accountability which, ironically, has produced the unintended effect of a generalized and increasing political distrust among the population. In other words, more information creates more questions. This constant skepticism or “corrosive cynicism” towards politicians has a twofold effect; on the one hand, citizens with increasing demands, bigger expectations, but less willing to cede rights or give more power to politicians. On the other hand, politicians locked in a “no-winning” game, where political competition, finger-pointing and a major public scrutiny, has forced them to inflate their political promises, giving more opportunity for future political disappointment.

Nevertheless, it is undeniable that accountability is a necessary condition for the development of a healthy –and I would argue, more effective democracy and a major confidence in politics. As noted by Helvia de la Jara (http://inicio.ifai.org.mx/Publicaciones/Transparencia_y_Confianza14.pdf, trust; therefore, political trust can only flourish in a society free of fear, where uncertainty is at its lowest possible level, and where political institutions demonstrate their capacity to act. Then, it is only through accountability processes that it is possible to establish and determine the levels of confidence over institutions, ensure their compliance with their socio-political objectives, and guarantee their institutional consolidation, even continuity. By knowing the what for, for whom and how, society and government can decide over the existence and efficiency of institutions, and identify and penalize any of their possible deviations, which otherwise would be detrimental for a country’s democratic development. Several cases can be analyzed to demonstrate both the positive and negative political effects of an “over accountability”. Nonetheless, I will limit myself and refer to the Mexican case.

Mexico, which became an “internationally accepted” democracy in 2000, has been recently recognized for its Institute for Transparency and Accountability (IFAI). With an increasing number of public information requests, from an average of 24,097 in 2003 to almost 110,000 in 2013, this federal institute is now fully autonomous and has one of the biggest budgets in the sector in the world (almost £24,000,000). Although it has become a precedent in government openness and accountability, the situation in Mexico is not quite different from other countries where, paradoxically, a major accountability tends to be accompanied by a major disenchantment or distrust in politics.

As the OECD states, trust is a very subjective issue, but key for the functioning of any government and the efficiency of its public policies. Therefore, it is important to make a distinction between politics, politicians and what people consider “the” government in general. Regarding politicians in Mexico, in 2000, three years before the creation of the IFAI, 3% of the population trusted the Congress “a lot”, 18% “more or less”, 34% “a little”, 44% “nothing” and 1% “didn’t know”. By 2011 there were less people trusting the Congress than 16 years before, but more people who trust on it since the beginning of the Mexican accountability era in 2003.

Although the peaks in public confidence in Congress match the declines in the number of information requests, it would be too simplistic, even unscientific to establish a correlation between –a possible over– transparency or accountability and public confidence in the Congress. As Flinders points out, too many external forces have an effect over societies’ perceptions and demands, such as economic crisis, increasing education levels, media negative or positive over-coverage, etc., which can augment or reduce public confidence in politicians, government institutions, democracy and politics itself. This is why promoting the understanding of politics by the population has been considered a necessary condition for the development of stronger and more efficient democratic institutions. But how to do it? How to trigger their interest in understanding politics? This is precisely why effective accountability processes are important. With a more available, up to date, and validated information, citizens can participate in the public sphere. Open and public debates incentivize a major interest in the daily socio-political events in which each one of the members of the society is immersed or affected by. Furthermore, it is through the identification of the contemporary social, political and economic issues that an informed, participative and challenging civil society, capable of working in synergy with the government, emerges.

The existing accountability process in Mexico is far from perfect; in fact, there have been some corruption claims inside the institution. However, in such a maturing democratic system, it has allowed government and society to improve, or at least attempt to progress in the provision of public services, apply a fairer system of justice, and provide or demand a better (and achievable) level of life, something unimaginable just years ago. It is due to this accountability policy that the Mexican society now has a clearer, unfortunately still not perfect, knowledge about the number and names of drug traffickers caught (http://bigstory.ap.org/article/mexico-releases-list-top-arrested-narcos), or even corrupt practices inside government agencies, such as the use of public funds to buy expensive towels by a former president (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1399825.stm).

This, therefore, make us think that accountability can promote political punishment or cynicism from the population; but also, an opportunity for improvement of political processes.  With major, but mostly, efficient levels of accountability, it could be possible to envisage a political where politicians do not feel the need, but more importantly, cannot make unfeasible promises; and where more informed citizens shift from being passive recipients or consumers of public goods, into politically responsible actors.

Dr Jack Corbett

Australian National University

Historians, a colleague of mine is fond of saying, do not predict the future, they only predict the past. History should, in theory, provide lessons for the future but as David Runciman’s latest offering The Confidence Trap illustrates, democracies aren’t very good at learning their lessons; when it comes to crisis democracies tend to support that other cliché about history: it repeats (although not always in the ways we expect).

Aside from being eminently readable, The Confidence Trap is a timely contribution for all the obvious reasons. As outlined recently by Matt Wood on this blog, public confidence in democratic government has reached record lows. On the back of the 21^st century’s first major crisis – the GFC – and in the face of one of its greatest challenges – climate change – this shouldn’t really come as a surprise. We are all anxiously watching and waiting to see how things pan out. Can democracy meet these challenges? Can we find a way out of this mess? Will democracy emerge from this ‘moment of truth’ triumphant or defeated?

If history is an accurate guide – and Runciman is cautious about whether it should be – the answer is neither. Democracies, he argues, don’t face ‘moments of truth’; this is why they are durable. They sidestep them, wriggle through them, lurch from one extreme to the other in order to avoid them and ultimately, in the absence of a grand strategy or any propensity to learn from their mistakes, they muddle through. This is both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of democracy: its flexibility enables it to find a way but in the long run (over)confidence in the capacity of that same flexibility to meet any challenge breeds complacency, which means we are left unprepared for the crisis moment. It is the recurrence of this cycle that is the essence of the ‘trap’.

This view of democracy in crisis flies in the face of much conventional wisdom (if you don’t want to read the whole book you can find a summary of the main arguments here). Since antiquity, the assumption has been that democratic government, with all its talk of freedom and equality, only has superficial appeal. Underneath the surface it is chaotic, irresponsible and prone to the worst excesses of mob rule. Runciman turns this argument on its head. Democracy isn’t seductive on the surface; on the surface it is all the things its detractors claim: messy, petty, without a clear sense of where it wants to go or how it might get there. On the surface, democracy is a ‘confidence trick’ and its inability to respond decisively to crisis exposes this endemic failing. But, he argues, there is much more to democracy than what the humdrum of day-to-day politics permits us to see. History tells us that democracies aren’t bad at responding to crisis, they are actually very good at it, and it is this capacity to muddle through against all the odds that illustrates this perverse strength (although exactly how it does so remains somewhat of a mystery as politicians in particular tend to stumble on the right choices for all the wrong reasons). And yet, the very muddled way that democracies deal with current crisis sows the seeds for future calamity: the upshot is that democracies tend to win the day but miss the lesson.

The Confidence Trap makes this argument through a series of case studies drawn from the last century starting with 1918 (the end of the First World War) and ending with 2008 (the GFC). Along the way we take in 1933 (the World Economic Conference), 1947 (creating the post Second World War world order), 1962 (the Cuban Missile Crisis and others), 1974 (inflation, economic uncertainty, political unrest) and of course 1989 (the end of the Cold War). No doubt some political scientists will question the case selection – defining what constitutes a crisis, Runciman argues, is part of the problem for democracies who are faced with a cacophony of competing naysayers – which focuses almost exclusively on politics in the ‘great powers’ (predominantly America but Russia, Britain, France, Germany, India, China and Japan all get a moment in the sun), just as some historians will no doubt take issue with his brief treatment of the crisis events themselves. But, this misses the point of the book and in particular the freshness of the argument.

To guide us through this history of crisis Runciman relies on Tocqueville. It is Tocqueville, he claims, who best understood the paradoxical nature of democratic government. When he first arrived in America, Tocqueville observed much in the day-to-day practice of democratic politics to satisfy the worst fears of its critics; everybody was living in the moment with little care for the future. But, he changed his mind once he peered beneath the surface. Democracy wasn’t a ‘confidence trick’. It was the real deal, and would remain so as long as people had faith in what democracy could achieve. The problem is that once that faith was established democracies tend to become fatalistic and overconfident. The capacity of democracy to consistently survive crisis emboldens its populations who believe that, when the time comes, they will find a way through anything, leading to complacency and inertia.

So what does the confidence of democracies in a crisis tell us about the crisis of confidence that currently besets many democratic regimes around the world? The answer, in short, lies with the promise of history. Where much of the current literature on democratic disenchantment focuses on what is new about anti-politics in particular, this book provides an insight into what it constant. To that end, its contribution sits with other recent works – John Kane and Haig Patapan’s The Democratic Leader and Stephen Medvic’s In Defence of Politicians for example – which also focus on the traps and paradoxes endemic to this way of governing. We are naive, these authors tell us, if we think we can avoid crisis of confidence, as this type of hypercritical introspection is one the perverse strengths of democracies: it shakes up the system without breaking it. The best we can hope is that this knowledge can afford us some perspective (although The Confidence Trap even remains sceptical about this).

Runciman, we can infer, would see much of the current disenchantment with democracy as a typically democratic problem: it’s a symptom of the ‘trap’. We have every reason to be confident in democracy at the very point in history when it appears to have seen off its greatest rival (the autocracy of the Soviet Union) and is on the march around the globe. And yet, paradoxically, we remain anxious and uncertain. That’s the problem with muddling through: democracy is never confronted with its ‘moment of truth’. This means it is never defeated, but it never really wins either. We may have survived yesterday’s crisis but, the naysayers claim, this success is setting us up for the next fall.

The emphasis on muddling through won’t be unfamiliar to many readers of this blog. In many ways this is the argument that Bernard Crick (who curiously doesn’t rate a mention in The Confidence Trap) is most famous for. Perhaps the reason for his omission is that whilst Crick consciously sought to defend democratic politics, Runciman does not. In this sense his analysis lays claim to being clear-eyed, albeit in a slightly resigned way. But ultimately his equivocality about the future prospects of democracy lets us draw our own conclusions. History is, after all, better at predicting the past.

MPs from the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee will be meeting at the University of Sheffield this month as part of a public evidence session to examine the potential benefits of carbon capture and storage (CCS).

Senior industry figures and specialists will be questioned by the Select Committee in this oral evidence session, which will focus on:

• Alternative ways of capturing carbon
• Safety, climate change and public perceptions about CCS

Evidence gathered at this event will inform the Committee’s current inquiry into carbon capture and storage.

The public session takes place on Thursday 23 January 2014, between 2pm and 4pm, in the Sheffield Select Committee Suite, ICOSS, University of Sheffield, 219 Portobello, Sheffield, S1 4DP.

Places are very limited so to register for this free event, email or call 020 7219 1650. Please be aware that the session will start promptly at 2pm.