Utopia, you are standing in it!

Extraordinary. Political junkies don’t realise that there are people out there that have better things to do with their lives than take an interest in politics.

It’s a free society. They are free not to listen, not engage and not vote for anyone. Free speech includes a right not to speak and not to participate. If you disappointed with that political apathy, put forward a party platform that excites them enough to vote. Get out the vote by being worth voting for.

What is more extraordinary is a party that claims to speak for the working class first opposed obligations on welfare benefit receipt regarding looking more intensively for work and paying court fines and so forth, but it is happy to use the same provisions for their own political advantage because they are on the ropes. The New Zealand Labour Party’s party vote at the last election was at record low levels. It is still at the same level in the opinion polls.

As for voter registration drives in working-class electorates, the New Zealand Labour Party has no large donors apart from unions. The reason for this is as their former president, Mike Williams says " if you don’t ask, you don’t get ".

Voter registration is voluntary in the USA and for all its flaws, and I think there are far fewer than people say, Richard Posner could still give an excellent defence of political participation in the USA:

American democracy enables the adult population, at very little cost in time, money or distraction from private pursuits commercial or otherwise, to punish at least the flagrant mistakes and misfeasances of officialdom, to assure an orderly succession of at least minimally competent officials, to generate feedback to the officials concerning the consequences of their policies, to prevent officials from (or punish them for) entirely ignoring the interests of the governed, and to prevent serious misalignments between government action and public opinion.

Too many as Richard Posner has argued well in his writing want to remake democracy with the faculty workshop as their model. Such deliberation has demanding requirements for popular participation in the democratic process, including a high level of knowledge and analytical sophistication and an absence, or at least severe curtailment, of self-interested motives.

Much empirical research demonstrates that citizens have astonishingly low levels of political knowledge. Most lack very basic knowledge of political parties, candidates and issues, much less the sophisticated knowledge necessary to meet the demands of a deliberative democracy.

One reason for these low levels of political knowledge is a large number of people are simply not interested in politics even if they have the time to take an interest.

Because of this political ignorance and apathy, Posner championed Schumpeter’s view of democracy. Schumpeter disputed the widely held view that democracy was a process by which the electorate identified the common good, and that politicians carried this out:

• The people’s ignorance and superficiality meant that they were manipulated by politicians who set the agenda.
• Although periodic votes legitimise governments and keep them accountable, their policy programmes are very much seen as their own and not that of the people, and the participatory role for individuals is limited.

Schumpeter’s theory of democratic participation is that voters have the ability to replace political leaders through periodic elections. Citizens do have sufficient knowledge and sophistication to vote out leaders who are performing poorly or contrary to their wishes.

The power of the electorate to turn elected officials out of office at the next election gives elected officials an incentive to adopt policies that do not outrage public opinion and administer the policies with some minimum honesty and competence.

The outcome of Schumpeterian democracy in the 20th century, where governments are voted out rather than voted in, is that most of modern public spending is income transfers that grew to the levels they are because of support from the average voter.

Political parties on the Left and Right that delivered efficient increments and stream-linings in the size and shape of government were elected, and then thrown out from time to time, in turn, because they became tired and flabby or just plain out of touch.

I wouldn’t revel too much on the higher voter turnout  as as yet another saviour on the horizon to bring the Left over Left back from the political wilderness. The most votes ever won by a political party in the UK was 14 million by John Major’s Tory party in 1992 when the shy Tories came out in force to re-elected the incumbent government much the surprise of the opinion polls.

Higher voter turnout is not necessarily always a good thing in terms of good governance. William Shughart found that voter participation increases in gubernatorial elections in the USA when evidence of corruption mounts. Candidates, political parties, and interest groups have incentives to invest in mobilising support on Election Day.

Those who stand to gain from being office through their corruption invest considerable resources in mobilising voter turnout that is in their favour. Corruption increase the value of winning public office and strengthens the demand-side efforts to build winning coalitions.

In a prophetic article at the dawn of the Internet, Robert Tollison, William F. Shughart II, and Robert McCormick wrote in 1999 about how voting is not the only way in which people express their political preferences effectively.

Observers of American democracy complain that voter turnout and voter registration are low and had been low from 50 years. Tollison, Shughart, and  McCormick reminded these critics that:

Voters now have more political information available to them than ever before, and they are no longer confined to expressing their political preferences at the polls once every two or four years.

Newly available technologies have lowered voters’ costs of becoming informed about political issues and of communicating with their political representatives.

Voter registration and voter turnout is lowest among young people who also happen to be the most Internet savvy. This is not surprising considered the prophetic observation of Tollison, Shughart, and  McCormick in 1999 that:

What is more important, the opinions voters form on the basis of the information available to them can be communicated to policy makers rapidly and effectively.

E-mails, faxes, and phone calls are substitutes for ballots. By the time an election rolls around, politicians and policy makers already know what the voters think and, hence, their wishes have already been incorporated into laws and policies.

Tollison, Shughart, and  McCormick asked why vote when you have already influenced political outcomes through alternative means between elections such as social media:

Having affected policy outcomes, voters are naturally less interested in voting on candidates. Low turnout rates on election day may paradoxically be evidence of greater voter participation in the political process.

In fact, we are fast approaching a return to the town meeting, where individuals register their preferences on specific policy proposals and politicians can assess the intensities of those preferences by reading their e-mail. Indeed, voters can vote as much and as often as they want in the information age.

It is not surprising therefore in this prophetic article that Tollison, Shughart, and  McCormick predicted that politicians would pay close regard to social media, and if they did, democracy works:

As long as politicians are good agents who read their faxes and e-mails correctly, voters will correspondingly have less need to go to the polls.

Voters will vote only when their representatives ignore their electronic opinions. Indeed, that is the implicit threat.

And because voters don’t have to go to the barricades to voice those opinions, political discourse should become more civil and political protests less frequent and disruptive.

HT: Nick Kearney