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.

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.