Notes on Voting, Representation and Democracy
If voting changed anything they’d make it illegal.
Anarchist graffiti, 1979
In a modern democracy the vote is the principal form of mass participation in politics. However, arguments concerning democracy have long disputed the ‘fatal drollery of representative Government’ (Disraeli), as a poor substitute for active participation in the democratic process. In Democracy and Participation, J.R. Lucas argues that to give a man a vote ‘is to enfranchise him as a citizen and to make him into a person who counts’.1 The vote, therefore, has a symbolic value enabling people to identify with society and involve themselves in the running of the country. Nonetheless, Lucas contends that voting remains a ‘minimal form of participation’ and is therefore ultimately passive: ‘Votes... are stylised answers to standard questions. Voting is therefore a somewhat passive activity. Other people propose, and voters can do no more than dispose.’2 Other political commentators have also perceived a disparity between voting and democracy:
Voting is merely a handy device; it is not to be identified with democracy, which is a mental and moral relation of man to man.3
In practice, voters are offered a handful of candidates and must make compromises with their beliefs before they ever get to the polls. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to see what content there is to the platitude that elections manifest the will of the people.4
Elections offer the illusion of participation in exchange for political quiescence. In sum, they limit and constrain our interactions with our government - substituting subordination for the promised liberation of participatory democracy.5
This situation stems from the deeply held conviction that decisions concerning those we vote for and the issues we vote upon, have been decided by others than ourselves and with minimal consultation. As has been suggested, there is no satisfactory reason to believe that voting adequetely represents the will of the people.
This passive quality attributed to voting, allied to a lack of trust in MPs, leads to a situation where there is an increased division between the electorate and their representatives:
Once permanent ‘representatives’ are present, political authority, activity, and initiative are expropriated from the body of citizens and transferred to the restricted body of ‘representatives,’ who also use it to consolidate their position and create the conditions whereby the next ‘election’ becomes biased in many ways.6
For reasons such as these we have witnessed, in Britain at least, a decline in the number of people participating in elections. This was demonstrated by low turn–outs at the Scottish Parliamentary elections, the English Regional Council elections and, most recently, the European Parliamentary elections. Although these instances of mass abstention are frequently put down to inclement weather, or a lack of interest or understanding in affairs of state, they are more likely the result of apathy and disillusion with party politics. In a recent lecture, Anthony Giddens has commented upon this erosion of participation as ‘the paradox of contemporary democracy’:
Why are citizens in democratic countries apparently becoming disillusioned with democratic government, at the same time as it is spreading around the rest of the world?... People have indeed lost a good deal of the trust they used to have in politicians and orthodox democratic procedures. They haven’t lost their faith, however, in democratic processes... What they are, or many of them are, is more cynical about the claims politicians make and concerned about questions that they feel politicians have little to say about. Many regard politics as a corrupt business, in which political leaders are self–interested, rather than having the good of their citizens at heart.7
Many of those people interviewed expressed both cynicism and idealism in equal measures. Yet, overall, there remained a deep distrust of politicians, government and officialdom. Such alienation, disaffection and disenfranchisement from society is institutionalised by absence from the electoral register. However, as we have seen, voting alone is hardly to be viewed as a panacea for the inequlities which plague society. Instead of simply encouraging good voting habits by installing electronic voting systems in supermarkets and shopping malls (the privatisation – as opposed to realisation – of public space), perhaps we should pay attention to the lack of faith in contemporary democratic procedures which the current level of non-voting implies. As Mark P. Petracca concluded:
Electoral involvement does not necessarily empower its participants; rather it tends to create power over them... Perhaps instead of trying to compel their involvement as voters we would be well advised to heed their potent message about the apparent distribution of power.8
On Representation
– A Note on Methodology
Ideally,
democracy is a system in which political power rests with the people:
all citizens actively participate in the process of self–representation
and self–governing, an ongoing discussion in which a multitude
of diverse voices are heard.
Group Material
Whilst working on this project, we were continually aware of the fact
that to represent someone is to hold power over them: over their speech,
their expression and their identity. Therefore, it was not our intention
to represent those people excluded from the voting system; rather we
sought to question the act of representation in both the political and
the aesthetic arenas. The act of representation, it has been argued,
far from constituting democracy, can often serve to undermine it:
Benjamin
Constant did not glorify elections and ‘representation’ as
such; he defended them as lesser evils on the grounds that democracy
was impossible in modern nations because of their size and because people
were not interested in public affairs. Whatever the value of these arguments,
they are based upon the explicit recognition that representation is
a principle alien to democracy.9
It is for similar reasons that the act of representation - of speaking
on behalf of others – has come into question since the 1960s:
with projects such as Michel Foucault’s Information Group of Prisons
(1960s), which intended to create the conditions of self–representation
for prisoners; and Martha Rosler’s phototext work, The Bowery
in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974–5), which indexed
the misrepresentation of down–and–outs in the Lower East
Side of New York. In the light of this, we aimed to dispute Marx’s
famous dictum, ‘they cannot represent themselves, they must be
represented’. Having questioned voting as a means of placing power
in the hands of a political elite, we did not wish to endorse ‘the
indignity of speaking for others’ (Deleuze). Instead, through the
limited format of an interview, we endeavoured to create a space for
self–representation.
This collection of interviews has made no claim to be an exhaustive
survey of the attitudes of young people towards voting or the new Scottish
Parliament. In sociological terms, it is situated somewhere between
a ‘quantitative’ and a ‘qualitative’ analysis. However,
we did not set out to conduct a sociological survey. In other words,
as a document it exists between sociological and artistic categories,
in much the same way that many of the individuals we interviewed exist
between (and therefore destabilise) the categories of individuals recognised
under law.
On
Democracy
Democracy
is a clear loser in the process of globalisation. With every step of
deregulation, nations are signing away their powers of self-governance
to unaccountable transnational corporations and investors.
John Pilger
The subtext of this project has always been an investigation into the
condition of contemporary democracy and the enablement of access to
democratic processes. Yet what was encountered was the paradox, or rather
the contradiction, of contemporary democracy, its other which is also
itself: a realm of exclusion, alienation, disillusion and disenfranchisement.
The contradiction of contemporary democracy arises if we acknowledge
that the devolution of power to the Scottish Parliament should enhance
the possibilities for change within those social and economic conditions
that lead to situations of exclusion in Scotland. However, whilst the
devolution of power gives people the illusion that they are more closely
involved in shaping the political process, the impact of economic globalisation
demonstrates that the social and economic policies of national governments
are increasingly controlled by multi-national business.10 This situation
further compounds individual feelings of isolation and disenfranchisement
from democratic procedures. As a result, economic globalisation is both
the condition of contemporary democracy and its ultimate threat. Perhaps,
as Jean–Jacques Rousseau concluded, democracy is a system too
perfect for men. Or possibly, as an anarchist would argue, democracy
is simply an illusion. Whichever argument we elect to represent our
view, all we can hope for, as Alfred Samuel Smith remarked in 1933,
is that all the ills of democracy be cured by ‘more democracy’.
Ross
Birrell and Dominic Hislop, June 1999.
1 J. R. Lucas, Democracy
and Participation, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 170.
2 Lucas, p. 166.
3 G.D.H. Cole, Essays in Social Theory, (1950). Quoted in A Dictionary
of Political Quotations, compiled by Robert Stewart (London: Europa,
1984), p. 40.
4 Robert Paul Wolf, In Defence of Anarchism, (New York: Harper &
Row, 1970), p. 33.
5 Mark P. Petracca, ‘Elections offer only an Illusion of Participation’,
Democracy: A Project by Group Material, Edited by Brian Wallis, Dia
Art Foundation: Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Number 5 (Seattle:
Bay Press, 1990), p. 122.
6 Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy’,
Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy, Edited
by David Ames Curtis, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 108.
7 Anthony Giddens, ‘Runaway World: Lecture 5 - Democracy’,
1999 Reith Lectures (http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/ english/static/events/reith_99/week5/week5.htm
page 1)
8 Petracca, p. 122.
9 Castoriadis, p. 108.
10 ‘Today, 52 of the top 100 economies are transnational corporations
rather than nation states.’ Tony Clarke, ‘Twilight of the
Corporation’, The Ecologist, Vol. 29 No 2/3 May/June 1999, p. 158.
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