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Can democracies govern for the long term? (3)

By Alan M. Jacobs (People's Daily Online)    12:58, January 07, 2014
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Yet my research has also pointed to a more troubling source of uncertainty about the future: democratic politics itself. In a democratic system, today’s rulers are, by definition, not necessarily tomorrow’s. So even if today’s government raises taxes to help fund future pension benefits or pay for infrastructure enhancements or smaller class sizes, the next government may decide to spend that very same money on something completely different – on, say, fighter jets or tax cuts. Thus, citizens must sometimes view farsighted policy ideas with a jaundiced eye. They must ask themselves whether, if they make the required sacrifices today, politicians will keep their side of the bargain and deliver the promised benefits tomorrow.

In the face of such uncertainty, public trust becomes a precious resource. In experimental studies, J. Scott Matthews and I have found that citizens’ perceptions of governmental institutions powerfully affect their willingness to trade pain today for gain tomorrow. We have found that people are far more likely to accept costly investments in the long run if they trust their leaders to manage public resources wisely. Politicians’ capacities to manage the future thus depend critically on citizens’ confidence in the political system. If we wish to enhance democracy’s capacity to manage the long term, we need to refurbish public trust in democratic politics itself.

A third and final dynamic might aptly be called the problem of the “pie knife.” We know that investment-oriented policies can make us all better off over the long run: policies that invest in better skills, enhanced infrastructure, and a clean environment can expand the “pie” of national welfare in which all citizens partake.

But what is best for society as a whole is not always what is best for individual groups within society, like specific industrial sectors or economic classes. For narrow social interests, it will often make more sense to reach for the pie knife: to try to cut themselves a larger share of the social pie, rather than to invest in expanding the pie for everyone. The result can be a long-run tragedy of the commons: the pie shrinks as individual groups compete to win the largest share, and no one contributes to the greater good.

Fortunately, certain political institutions can help solve this problem. The specific form that democracy takes matters. The corrosive politics of the pie knife are most likely to dominate in democratic systems that concentrate political authority in a small number of hands. In very centralized regimes – such as the United Kingdom’s Westminster parliamentary system – a handful of ministers wield almost complete policymaking authority. The party in power can do virtually as it pleases, so it designs policies that strongly favor the narrow social groups that put and keep them in office. In such a system, governments of the right are free to redistribute policy goods to business and the affluent, while cabinets of the left can readily shift resources to organized labor. In a winner-takes-all democracy, social groups can simply grab a greater share of the pie whenever their allies arein office. And thus no group, when it wields power, has reason to sacrifice or compromise for the long-run common good.

On the other hand, constitutional arrangements that divide power can help foster a politics of investment. For instance, many European systems – such as Sweden’s, the Netherlands’, and Austria’s – disperse power across political parties in a coalition and between capital and labor in cooperative bargaining arrangements. Similarly, federalism in Germany, the United States, and Canada spreads authority across many central and regional governments. In systems where power is diffused, it is much more difficult for any one group to impose its will on others – to extract its own gains at others’ expense. Where broad consensus is required for policymaking, the fortunes of societal groups are likely to rise or fall together: the pie knife is taken away. If they wish to improve their future lot, then powerful interests in a consensus-based system must contemplate ways of expanding the pie – and this means being willing to accept shared sacrifice today to invest in broad gains tomorrow.

When democracies fail to invest in the future, then, the problem is not that they are too democratic. The problem is that many nominally democratic political systems are not democratic enough – they put too much power in the hands of too few.

Persuading citizens and powerful interest groups to sacrifice for the future is never easy. But nor is electoral democracy an inherently short-sighted arrangement. Elected governments have shown that they can take serious action on even the toughest long-run challenges. Those who want to see the world’s rich democracies take bolder action on behalf of future generations should focus their efforts on enhancing the quality of democracy itself. They should seek to create deliberative and policymaking institutions that more broadly diffuse political influence across society, and that bolster citizens’ confidence in the integrity of the arrangements under which they are governed.

The playing field in a democracy may often be tilted toward the short run, but it is by no means impossible for adept and forward-looking leaders to govern for the long term.

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(Editor:ZhangQian、Yao Chun)

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