Here’s Andrew Moravcsik – a real political scientist explaining why (pdf) the EU don’t need no steekin referenda to have legitimacy with the people (h/t Henry Farrell, with whom I actually agree today – see his quote at the end of the post)…
The draft European constitution sought to legitimate the EU by inducing more popular deliberation about Europe’s future. This strategy was doomed to failure because it is inconsistent with basic empirical social science about how advanced democracies work. Salient political rhetoric and increased opportunities to participate do not, as a rule, generate more intensive and informed public deliberation or greater public trust, identity and legitimacy – particularly where the issues in question are not highly salient. Two conclusions follow. First, the failure of constitutional reform is, paradoxically, evidence of the success and stability of the existing “European constitutional settlement.”
The rhetoric of federalism has not changed to reflect this new reality. Second, prescriptive analysis of real-world constitutional reform requires that normative theorists draw more heavily on empirical social science in order to ascertain to what extent institutions actually have the consequences ideally ascribed to them.
In other words, creating opportunities for public discourse and obtaining the consent of the people as a pre-requisite for government really doesn’t matter all that much.
Because the people – they are pretty happy with their leaders. Ask any political scientist and they’ll let you know (just don’t ask a pollster).
This diagnosis fails to heed the fundamental lessons of the five-year constitutional detour. The effort to generate participation and legitimacy by introducing more populist and deliberative democratic forms was doomed to failure because it runs counter to our consensual social scientific understanding of how advanced democracies actually work. There is simply no empirical reason to believe, as the advocates of constitutional reform clearly believed, that opportunities to participate generate greater participation and deliberation, or that participation and deliberation generate political legitimacy. These social scientific errors are the focus of my analysis below, but before turning to them I want to underscore two broader implications, one for EU policy analysis and one for political philosophy.
The political philosophy position is especially risible:
For political philosophers engaged in normative analysis of real-world constitutional systems, the implication of this episode is to counsel skepticism toward those who recommend politicization, deliberation and mass plebiscitary democracy as panaceas to promote political legitimation and effectiveness. Even in a “politicized” environment, there is no reason – particularly, as we shall see, when dealing with the sort of issues the EU handles – to assume that increases in opportunities to participate necessarily generate participation, deliberation, legitimacy, or popularity. Nor is there any normative reason to favor such arrangements. All modern constitutional systems politicize some functions and depoliticize others, and they do so for deliberate reasons that are normatively, as well as pragmatically, justifiable. In arguing for constitutional reform in real-world constitutional democracies, therefore, the critical challenge is rarely how to increase our adherence to some ideal of participatory democracy. Instead it is how to design institutions that politicize and depoliticize politics functions in a way that generates more accountability, more desirable outcomes, and more long-term popular support – a set of goals that have real normative weight (Majone 2005; Moravscik 2002: 613-614; Pettit 2004; Grant/Keohane 2005). From this perspective, I assert, the existing European constitutional settlement is not just pragmatically more successful, but also normatively more desirable, than politicization through “democratic” reform.
Part of me wants to ask if the guy has read Habermas, part of me just wants to snark: I guess that when the peasants start bringing tumbrels to Brussels, they’ll start paying attention.
Here’s Ferrell, speaking much more articulately:
But there are, in my eyes, clear indications that Moravcsik’s preferred model of legitimation doesn’t work either. People don’t understand the EU – but as best as I can make out, their trust in the guidance of political elites has waned dramatically too. The argument that mainstream politicians are representing Ireland’s best interests is meeting with decided skepticism. The No side have been hammering home again and again the argument that pro-Treaty politicians are anti-democratic – they don’t trust voters to decide on this Treaty anywhere except in Ireland where they have to. The empirical claim (if not necessarily the anti-democratic bit) seems to be resonating with the public, for the simple and obvious reason that it’s undeniably true.
What, exactly, do you find “risible” about the long quote? In particular,
bq. in a way that generates more accountability, more desirable outcomes, and more long-term popular support
makes a lot of sense to me. I agree with the basic thrust that in reality, people don’t care that much about _participatory_ democracy. The features quoted directly above seem much more in line with what the citizenry finds more compelling. It’s the Linux vs. Windows fallacy again — the claim is made that people want to tinker, want to get involved, want be active, but really they just want something that works without having to think too much about it. The peasants advance not when they’re silenced but when the system crashes on them too often.
My view is that the failure in analysis you quote is that the approach being used to promote the EU legal framework is violating every one of those precepts, not that it’s un-democratic.
Annoying Old Guy: I think that there is some truth to that, but I also think that I don’t think too much about the government when it is doing the things that I want it to do. Maybe that is the part about ‘more desirable outcomes’, but I don’t think of ‘more desirable outcomes’ to merely mean I have a job with a good wage – something I don’t really mentally make the government responcible for. I have particular social and policy goals I would like to see implemented, and I think that I’m not unusual in this. The whole ‘family values’ movement on one end of the culture war is proof that ordinary people have social and policy goals. They don’t just want the trains to run on time, they want thier society to have a certain character that appeals to them.
The question at hand isn’t really what causes ‘the peasants’ to go into armed revolt, but what causes ‘the peasants’ to want to participate in a Democracy. It seems to me that the really pertinant attack on Moravcsik’s thesis is that all the votes of ‘no’ probably reflect a widespread rejection of the character of society that the EU constitution is intended or appears intended to achieve. You can’t really separate a people’s institutions of government from thier culture. Part of that cultural character that is most evident and I think most vociferously rejected is precisely the lack of Democratic institutions that Moravcsik claims are unnecessary for a functioning Democratic state. In other words, ‘the peasants’ aren’t rejecting the EU constitution because the percieve that it would fail to provide basic services, but because among other things they value living in a society that is more populist and has more deliberative democractic institutions than the one the EU constitution appears to create irrespective of its claimed effectiveness.
Likewise, I think it likely that the average European is far less willing to give up thier national identity than the European aristocracy.
Likewise, based on surveys of the European public on such things as the acceptability the death penalty, I think there is a rather salient difference between the culture of the society that the EU is attempting to create and the culture still broadly accepted in by the European public.
I think that Moravcsik is certainly right in that most people in functional Democracy’s have no interest in participating in governance and do not particularly see active participation in governance to be a touchstone of the legitimacy of the government so long as they feel that the government is acting according to thier will and desires. But the key point is that people are probably voting ‘no’ specifically because they don’t feel that the government is acting according to thier will and desires, and so Moravcsik’s point is rendered entirely irrelevant. It makes no real difference that government can act without the overt consent of the people in a legitimate manner; when the government acts against the overt dissent of the people it certainly isn’t acting in a legitimate manner and won’t be percieved as such.
The claim that the EU constitution will in fact lead to poor governance, poor accountability, less desirable outcomes, and less popular support over time while certainly true, is less important to questioning the legitimacy of the EU constitution than the fact that it is being rejected right now.
Interesting, let me break this down a little:
This implies four interesting things:
1. If democracy is defined as participation of the people in governmental policy and/or organizational decision-making, then democracy confers no legitimacy to government.
2. If people don’t participate in any given aspect of a democracy, then they do not want to participate in any aspect of a democracy.
3. Since they did participate last time, by voting down the EU constitution, and Moravcsik seems to think that implies that they did not engage in “participation and deliberation,” than “participation and deliberation” must be defined as rubber-stamping the preferences of social and political scientists and of the elite generally.
4. Given all of the above, democracy is not an acceptable way to govern.
Stated more bluntly: democracy sucks; put me in charge. And put that way, is it any wonder that the elites pushing these changes keep finding public opposition?
_”people don’t care that much about participatory democracy.”_
I can’t put my finger on it, but there is something terribly wrong with that statement. Isnt non-participatory democracy a contradiction in terms?
Lets look at this as an economic problem: If only X percent of the population finds value in voting, does that imply that democracy is not valuable to most consumers? I dont think so- we have a lot of free riders in our democracy that absolutely rely on the good sense of the conscientious citizens that do regularly turn out to keep things on the up and up.
So if voters DO turn up to voice their displeasure at a _particular_ piece of legislation, its hardly just to cast aside their decision because they haven’t lived up to the elites arbitrary threshold of participation to be ‘good citizens’.
This guys article has every indication of backwards reasoning. He had his conclusion and he produced his rationale for it.
celebrim;
You think you disagree with me, but you don’t. I don’t presume that “desirable outcomes” is purely economic. I certainly consider it to include social outcomes such as “generally free to speak my mind”. I think most people would be fine with living in a benevolent dictatorship *as long as* it remained benevolent and, as you note, their desirable social outcomes were mostly achieved (cf. Singapore). I support liberal democracy not because it’s politically participatory, but because it seems the best long term mechanism for achieving the desiderata of the citizenry, and certainly “more accountability, more desirable outcomes, and more long-term popular support”. My point is that, IMHO, by and large people judge government and its legitimacy more by these desiderata than its level of democracy. As far as I can tell, that’s your point and view as well.
P.S. I am not agree with Moravcsik, I think he has it wrong, but I don’t find his comment “risible”, just faulty (i.e., he’s not seeing the bidirectional causality between what he disdains and what he wants to achieve).
Mr. Buehner;
No, because “participatory” democracy is generally taken to mean an expectation of active participation beyond voting, such as obsessively reading and commenting on political weblogs like this, going to town hall meetings, working for candidates, etc. I think most people (not unreasonably) view such participation as a manual override, to be used when things go wrong, rather than a desirable and expected thing to be done in the normal course of their lives.
This is a Constitution we are talking about. I don’t care much about the Sanitary Sewage Board because every morning I flush the toilet and it works. Tommorow I expect the same. Most of the issues involving sewage are technical and most people have the same interest in the outcome of sewage and in any event, criminal laws restrict the proper handling of sewage waste.
It seems like Moravcsik is extrapolating that sort of intelligent indifference to the small crap to the document that defines the very relationship between the people and the government. Do they teach social contract theory any more?
Annoying Old Guy: I didn’t think I was disagreeing with you so much as saying that you didn’t go far enough.
“My point is that, IMHO, by and large people judge government and its legitimacy more by these desiderata than its level of democracy. As far as I can tell, that’s your point and view as well.”
While I agree with you that there is no reason humanity in general would be uncomfortable in a benevolent dictatorship that largely achieved thier desired social outcomes, and that people largely judge thier government more by these desiderate than anything else there is a step further that I was trying to go than that.
I don’t think most people are intellectuals. I don’t think most people support democracy because of its well considered social and political utility. You and I can talk about “more accountability, more desirable outcomes, and more long-term popular support” as why you support democracy, but most people don’t operate in this mode unless forced to. Rather, I think most people who support democracy support it because they’ve come to believe that it is a normative good. That is to say, the loyalty of the people to democratic institutions is primarily cultural and emotional rather than intellectual.
People who have some democratic cultural tradition might well be comfortable in a benevolent dictatorship that largely achieved thier desired social outcomes, but they would prefer to live in a society with democratic institutions even so (even if they were largely content not to participate in them) because thier cultural values include having democratic institutions. In fact – and I think here Moravcsik would agree with me – people from a democratic cultural tradition could seek to overthrow a benevolent dictatorship either unreflectively or at the risk of obtaining a net less desired social outcome. In other words, I readily admit that I’d support a bad democracy over a good dictatorship and that I do so probably more on the basis of my biases, than I do on intellectual grounds however well argued I think them to be. And I think that this is far more true of the vast body of people, who tend to be less intellectual than I am.
What Moravcsik is observing is part rational self-interest on the part of ordinary Europeans, but it is part recognition that thier democratic culture is in danger of slipping away and they are rejecting that regardless of how benevolent the promised government is said to be.
As an aside, as I percieve it, the big failing of multiculturalism is the failure to percieve that preferred systems of government, standards of civil behavior, notions of morality, and so forth are the really important meat and bones elements of a people’s culture, and things like artwork, music, dress, and food are largely superficial. The multiculturist makes the argument that we suffer no harm and recieve much good by welcoming diverse artwork, music, literature, modes of dress, and food into our society. To this I can readily agree, but its not the inclusion of these easily transportable, generally subjective, and readily integrated trappings of culture that bother me about multiculturalism. It’s that if I have a cultural preference for democracy, and you have a cultural preference for benevolent dictatorships we pretty much are never going to be able to make a functioning society.
Prithee, which is it, my lord? Basic empirical fact and consensual understanding are two entirely different things.
Is “political legitimacy” some kind of electromagnetic energy that can be generated and measured? If it was, I think the meter would be reading zero.
There’s a classic hierarchal analysis of political legitimacy by Weatherford, that uses a lot of polling data, suggesting that it’s a complex formula… but the critical element of participation is “efficacy” (whether elected reps actually produce results that make day to day life better). On a more theoretical level, Robert Dahl’s argument for elections (polyarchy) is not that it always produces better results, but that it maintains political legitimacy by providing a non-catastrophic way of “throwing the bums out.” That doesn’t produce more legitimacy. It produces consistent legitimacy and stability over time.
No one has really improved on Weber’s three sources of legitimacy, roughly in chronological order: charisma, tradition, and legal-rationalism. Electoral/representative politics best maintains a legal-rational order because it allows for non-catastrophic change, allowing correction of the inevitable waning of legitimacy for administrations as they encounter, and fail to deal with, reality. But it also can, when necessary, incorporates both charisma and tradition as corrections.
Or, to put it more simply, it’s a good idea to give folks an exit without asking them to actually vacate the premises.
AOG, what he’s proposing is ridiculous on its face. He’s suggesting that the populations’ well-being can be measured and modeled and that some kind of ’empirical’ social/political state thus obtained.
The problems with this are twofold; morally, it removes the concept of citizen as political actor and replaces it with citizen as consumer of services – and as the subject of a kind of corporate state.
But you don’t even have to get there. His measurements are a joke and his models onanistic exercises built on jokes. Yes, data is useful, and yes, so are models. But they are useful indicators, not instruments to fly a polity with.
Go look at Mandelbrot’s ‘Misbehaviour of Markets’ – we have _great_ data about economies compared to social/political data. And we can’t begin to measure, model, or manage them with any massive success. The last guy who was sure he could model risk in markets started Long Term Capital Management, and we all know how _that_ turned out.
A.L.
Several comments, but in the main I agree with Celebrim, above.
One thing I find troubling is this passage in particular:
bq. Instead it is how to design institutions that politicize and depoliticize politics functions in a way that generates more accountability, more desirable outcomes, and more long-term popular support – a set of goals that have real normative weight
Without reading the work cited, this seems to me to be putting the cart before the horse. It’s a very short walk from that passage to attitudes I’ve always considered charicatures of the left, or attitudes only of the farthest left: It’s not important what people _vote_ for, we know what they really _want_. Silly me, I thought that’s what votes were intended to resolve in the first place. They may be diluted and time-phased in various ways to prevent a complete melt-down, but the purpose is still there.
And on that note, yes, Moravcsik and other commenters are entirely correct– there are a vast number of issues about which the electorate does nto require a direct say. Direct democracies, with votes on everything, do not work. Look at California. We don’t really have direct democracies, we have republics, or parliamentary systems, or variations on those themes, and we trust these representative forms with extreme amounts of power, up to and including treaty ratifications.
Even so, permanent structural changes in constitutional form are usually a little more difficult. It’s possible to get the US constitution passed with direct voter participation, but even there, a series of supermajorities are required even to propose one, and then an overwhelming supermajority of state-level majorities must occur before it is ratified. I don’t know what the processes are for the various European states, but I do note that for ratifying the actual US Constitution (as opposed to amendments) state conventions were involved.
And this does seem to be the level of change we’re talking about, change not easily undone by voting out the current crop of politicians if they transgress or exercise bad judgement.
_”No, because “participatory” democracy is generally taken to mean an expectation of active participation beyond voting, “_
Ahh, i see your point. My problem is that whoever is making that subjective distinction is likely to have a good deal of personal incentive to make the case that the citizenry doesnt want or need true democratic (or even representative ultimately) representation.
In other words, aside from your professional intellectual, the people apt to make this determination are the people most likely to benefit from it. Our own system was set up to avoid just this type of dilemna (and we seem to have spent 200+ years systematically unravelling it).
The fascism of the left invariable meets the road where the good of the people outweighs their need for representative government (rightist fascists evolve differently). This is an argument that can _always_ be made, due to the nature of the universe and the human condition.
The proprietor of the Garden of Eden could have made a strong argument that the presence of talking snakes is fair reason to restrict democratic decision making, particularly vis-a-vis agriculture. We might take a lesson that that particuarly proprietor let free will play out.
The ‘its for your own good’ argument is everpresent, everseductive, and we should remember we rejected it long ago for very good reasons. It is self-perpetuating, which makes it dangerous if not potentially eternal (think of Orwells steel boot).
“No, because “participatory” democracy is generally taken to mean an expectation of active participation beyond voting,
Except this clown is apparently defining “participatory” democracy as the act of voting for the very nature of government. I’m curious as to what is left to vote for that would constitute a non-participatory democracy? Euro-vision songs? Precisely what is the difference between his pushed government form and an outright aristocracy?
Actually, this is just the most academic phrasing of the ‘sheeple’ world view I’ve ever seen.
My personal fave
from page 16
Those in favor of more participatory EU institutions often claim that citizens who voted no in the referenda must have thus been opposed to the specific content of the constitution. Hence more participatory institutions are required. [cf. Zürn in this volume] Yet there is no empirical evidence that this is the case. Instead, what is most striking about individual voting behavior in the referenda is that the pro-constitution,
pro-EU majority did not assert itself for reasons that had almost nothing to do with the constitution’s content or, for the most part, with the EU at all. This “disconnect†between
issue preferences and electoral behavior has been consistently true of support for or opposition to the EU, and there is good reason to view it as inevitable in any situation where the issues handled by the institution are not highly salient.
He keeps making this same mistake of working backwards through the logic. A majority of Europeans support membership in the ‘EU’ therefore if they vote down the constitution this is because apparently aliens kidnapped all the pro supporters leading to the no votes winning. He never even manages to raise the question of whether or not they voted it down because while they support the EU, they don’t support this particular EU. Increased participation and deliberation would of course result in the public supporting what is presented to them. If the public does not support what is presented to them, it is because the public does not really care after all leading to somehow them inadvertently wandering into a voting booth and, completely by accident, pushing the no button.
Of course, if they were informed and had time to deliberate the referendum, they would have opposed it.
We have seen that the social scientific propositions linking the European constitution with increased legitimacy and trust via expanded participation and deliberation are empirically dubious. Bad social science makes bad public policy. The collapse of the constitutional project – above all, its failure, even before it collapsed politically, to promote engaged deliberation – was entirely predictable. This should be a sobering lesson for those who would promote yet another attempt to politicize the EU issue by pressing for ratification of this or any other European constitution.
His evidence that is failed to promote engaged deliberation seems to entirely be the low turnout at EU elections. He never gets around to examining whether or not the toothless nature of EU elected officials might have something to do with that.
And the topper, down in the conclusion section…
In practice, what this means is that pragmatic constitutional reforms should be submitted piecemeal for ratification by the member states, with deliberate efforts to depoliticize the subsequent debate. Surely a proposal to centralize European foreign policy – particularly if it were not presented as creation of a “foreign ministerâ€, as was
done previously, but (more accurately) as a bureaucratic redesign of the relationship between the Commission and Council – will not rouse masses of Europeans into the
street to debate or defeat it. If ratification was secured in this manner, rather than by politicizing the public through constitutional rhetoric, the EU’s lack of salience wouldwork for it rather than against it. In this regard, the EU’s greatest tactical advantage is that it is, in a word, so boring.
“will not rouse masses of Europeans into the
street to debate or defeat it.”??? WTF? He’s outright admitting here that the proposed EU constitution wasn’t simply ignored, it was outright democratically opposed and the proposed cure is to sneak it past the public when they aren’t paying attention.
In other words, not only does the democratic process not grant legitimacy, explicit democratic rejection also does not remove legitimacy either.
and it keeps giving…
In this sense, the European constitutional
project rests not only on invalid political science, but on invalid political philosophy. More precisely, it rests on invalid political philosophy because it rests on invalid
political science.
So, in his professional opinion, the project is complete and total crap, based on bogus science and philosophy. How do we know this? Because it was voted down by the general public, who should have voted for it because it was in their best interest, somehow, in spite of being based on invalid political science and philosophy (and presumably being advanced and run by people with a bad grasp of the above).
My circular logic detector just exploded…
Don’t forget footnote 20 which implies that the EU’s legitimacy can be tied to meeting the “ideological challenge to social democracy posed by President Bush’s America.”
Er, *we* still have elections . . .
Hmm, I guess we’re just being evil paternalistic utopianists…
There is a paternalistic utopianism about the continued insistence by advocates of pan-European democracy that citizens should pay these high costs, even though they do not share the dedicated EU policy wonk’s enthusiasm for the EU’s relatively arcane and obscure set of concerns.
How dare we burden the average citizen with the burdens of having to make decisions best left to a dedicated EU policy wonk (I wonder how you get that title, is there a Department of Policy Wonkery one can apply for a license?).
European social democracy has had its sorry ass kicked by every ideological challenge that it’s ever faced, so they’re now trying their luck against imaginary challenges.
Anyone know why that is paternal utopianism and not maternal utopianism? Is expecting people to make political decisions beyond their capability only a masculine attribute? Optimism can’t be a feminine trait?
Is this that male-controlled intellectual hegemony that oppresses womyn-kind I keep hearing about?
“…ideological challenge to social democracy posed by President Bush’s America.”
I’m glad to see we are doing something right. May we always present an ideological challenge to European Monarchies, National Socialists, People’s Republics, and Orwellian ‘Social Democrats’.
God bless the USA.
Moravcsik’s stance should be well understood. Please, take into account the Socialist welfare state, which might be the main characteristic of a what he thinks for an “advanced democracy”. In his view, the State provides work and wealth for a good percentage of the population, but that population has no longer right to complain, especially when the Brussel’s elites, that “sect of secular Cardinals”, as Mr. Ganly “put it”:http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2029897/posts , have already decided what is going to be done.
Unfortunately, that model of no-democracy is well rooted in Continental Europe, probably due to the tradition from the Ancient Regime itself and, later, Socialism and National Socialism, but it has also been fostered very successfully in countries coming from dictatorships, such as Portugal, Spain and Greece.
Laugh if you will, but the same sort of ‘reasoning’ lies behind defenses of the legitimacy of informal constitutional ‘amendment’ here in the US: They have to circumvent Article V, because amending the Constitution has become impossibly hard… As demonstrated by the fact that the sort of amendments they implement informally wouldn’t be ratified if the states were ever permitted a shot at saying “No!”.
By the way, is there any procedure for getting OFF Akismet’s “do not fly” list?
“Laugh if you will, but the same sort of ‘reasoning’ lies behind defenses of the legitimacy of informal constitutional ‘amendment’ here in the US: They have to circumvent Article V, because amending the Constitution has become impossibly hard…”
In America, in practice, the way you amend the Constitution in a fashion that if put up to a vote would never be accepted, is you find some activist judges and you get them to say that the document says things that it quite obviously doesn’t. In this way, the document can be continually amended without actually getting the voters involved. Combine that with the sledgehammer of the 14th ammendment, and a document originally meant to create limited government becomes a mechanism of limitless government mandate.
Compared to amending the constitution, this is extremely easy. And for legislators, it’s doubly great because not only do they not have to do the work, they don’t have to stick thier necks out and take a stand on anything which might upset the voters. It renders the whole job getting earmarks for your political supporters, taking bribes, and grandstanding on C-SPAN so you’ll have some 5 second soundbites.
What a great job! No wonder people are willing to spend millions to elect someone whose issue based stands are practically inseparable from thier opponents.
Again, the issues are efficacy and exit. Regardless of how amendments are created, if they don’t solve real word problems people will backtrack. Plus, if a particular shift in interpretation makes impossible demands on people, isn’t it acceptable that they can simply leave? As a brief example, if the court imposes interpretations that devalue the institution of marriage, making it unattractive to people intending to raise families, can they simply invent a new institution, leaving the old one behind? Or is it necessary to amend the constitution in order to define marriage in the way it has been historically understood for eons: an issue of child-rearing rather than personal fulfillment? If most people crave the former, but are frustrated by the courts who prefer the latter, then their sovereignty as been undermined and subordinated. They have no option but to define marriage in ways that circumvent the legal definitions. In other words, the courts have precipitated a constitutional crisis.
Of course, if it doesn’t matter whether child-rearing or personal fulfillment is taken as the appropriate standard then people will be able to live with either course. But in neither case is a simple majority vote necessarily dispositive.
Benevolent or expert-led dictatorships are unacceptable to many or most people because even at their best they come date-stamped, “Best Before”. The lifespan of the Benevolent One, and even the durability of his benevolence, are limiting factors.
And the experts are by necessity self-selected, and that way lies direct descent into gang takeover. Never mind that experts, even when in consensus, are frequently in error and will be replaced in about a generation with new experts who contemptuously or condescendingly reject the previous ones’ opinions.
They don’t work even with guaranteed benevolent rulers. All central command systems have the same issue, regardless of the effectiveness of the central controller.
The problem is out where the rubber meets the road, and people attempt to apply centralized directives to their particular circumstances. You end up with 4 basic choices:
1) You provide an expert everywhere to dictate everything.
2) You write a rule book so vague as to be indistinguishable from no direction at all (except with a nasty post-hoc gotcha possibility).
3) You write a rule book that attempts to jam everyone into the 80% normal case and breaks the 20% variant cases.
4) You write a rule book that attempts to cover all possibilities, which makes the rule book enormous, clumsy, in effect requires an expert just to keep up with, and still can’t handle new situations.
How benevolent, well designed, or functional a tyranny is is irrelevant. They still either break or accept massive inefficiency due to the above problem. Until someone solves this they will never work as well as the more chaotic but adaptive freedom based systems.
And that’s without considering the ‘clone’ solution problem, wherein if everyone is using the same solution to the problem, and something changes and that solution breaks, everyone breaks. In a free system, chances are there is more diversity to problem solving (with various degress of efficiency) and less chance of everyone breaking at the same time.
The closest thing to an actual benevolent dictatorship was the British rule of Hong Kong; The ‘dictator’ occupied the government field, keeping everybody else out of it, and then largely refrained from actually dictating. Worked out great until the British government decided to sell the residents of Hong Kong to the Chinese government, (Which in practice, IIRC, included preventing their escape, by stripping them of their former right of travel throughout the UK.) at which point as subjects of a dictatorship, there wasn’t anything they could do.
Benevolent dictatorships CAN exist, but even when they do there’s no reason to be confident they’ll continue to be benevolent.
“And that’s without considering the ‘clone’ solution problem, wherein if everyone is using the same solution to the problem, and something changes and that solution breaks, everyone breaks. In a free system, chances are there is more diversity to problem solving (with various degress of efficiency) and less chance of everyone breaking at the same time.”
This is the reason I strongly support the Federalist model. If we force all of our communities to adhere to the same standards, its like planting all of our fields with the same strain of wheat. It might work ok until the first outbreak of disease or hardship, at which point we lose the whole crop.
By allowing a diverse crop of communities we encourage healthy diversity as well as healthy experimentation with new ideas without risking the larger community. New ideas can be tried out on a small scale and be allowed to fail or succeed, before being adopted on the larger scale. The system can even work organicly, as communities that prosper expand at the expense of communities that make poorer social choices.
#27: The Hong Kong Model is also the way the British controlled Egypt:
“We don’t really ‘RUN’ Egypt, but we control those who do,” a British Foreign Office sub-Minister once said. And, agreeing with Treefrog@#26
I would direct you to Albert Speer’s memoirs where he advanced the argument that his experience as Hitler’s Minister of Industrial War Production showed totalitarian, top-down systems superficially look like
models of efficiency (and are promoted as such superior approaches to be emulated say critics of democracy) until the system is disrupted by dysfunctional events(such as war) at which time the dynamic flexibility of democratic systems prove far superior in coping with chaos and rapid change–as he himself, as an insider at the nexus of power, thought his first-hand experience in WWII clearly demonstrated.