Chapter 3: The Democratic ProcessReykjavik and Belfast; Numbers and golden means; Sweden’s three city regions; Sofa Recliners Party; ‘Islandia’ fourth political market; States and megastates; Election mechanics; Votes don’t get things done; Women and voting; Participatory democracy unpopular; Thatcher phenomenon; Representation as specialization; Politicians, baby-sitters and incentives.
Of course there are still a few backwaters around the world which have managed to avoid the attention and subsequent embrace of one or other of our world’s current crop of treacherous warlords.Up until quite recently, Iceland fell into this category. A population the size of the Borough of Greenwich and with 140,000 of the 250,000 population in the capital town of Reykjavik. Iceland could have talked directly to Belfast, their economies are nicely compatible, without being abolished but somewhat foolishly chose to fight a Cod War with the British Empire instead. But there’s still time.
And small countries can change their collective minds in ways that are quite outside the realms of possibilities for the megastate. Where there’s life there’s hope.
And then there’s Sweden. Like Iceland, Sweden is not really a rural country in the sense of having people in isolated farmhouses all over the country. Only ten percent of Icelanders live in communities with less than two hundred inhabitants. Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, is the size of Uppsala, Sweden’s fourth largest city. Just as Reykjavik takes sixty percent of Iceland’s population within its gates leaving forty percent outside, so Sweden has sixty percent of its population in its three city regions.
Perhaps there is some modern rule of the golden mean to be discovered here, because all the indications suggest that Sweden without its three reg-ional capitals comprises a loosely knit confederation of regional Icelands each with its sixty percent regional centre, its ten percent of rural folk and its thirty percent small village towns of two hundred people or more.
Hence, from a mass politics viewpoint, Sweden can be segmented into four ‘vote markets’ in which the political parties compete for ‘market share’ with the party that Swedes call the ‘Sofa-recliners Party’. The SRP members are those who do not vote. A very large party in the United States of America and in some of Great Britain’s inner cities, but as yet of no great consequence in Sweden.
Stockholm in the east of the country looks out across the Baltic to Riga, Helsinki and St. Petersburg. Referred to as the Venice of the North, it is a city of islands with the feel of a capital city that only the trappings of monarchy and aristocracy seem able to bring.
Gothenburg in the west sits on the eastern seaboard of the North Atlantic Ocean at the historic entry past Kristiansand and Oslo into the shallow waters of the Baltic. Sensible people stay overnight if they have business in Gothenburg but the yuppies from Stockholm’s financial centre will go there and back in a day just as your Scottish equivalent will think little of his Edinburgh to London trip.
Malmö, meanwhile, retains the pride of a former imperial capital; disdain for both Swedes and Danes who have historically jostled and fought for her allegiance, and patriotic to Skåne with their own Skåne Party as potentially a ‘spoiling party’ in similar ways to the Scottish Nationalists in Scottish by-elections. A day’s journey to Stockholm and just short hop across the waters to Copenhagen, Malmö has little need of Stockholm either for commerce or culture. But, by the same token, as Swedish and not Danish speakers, they have little time for the affections of the Danes either.
So in Sweden we have our four ‘political markets’: Stockholm, the Regional Control Tower for the Megamachine’s commercial interests; Gothenburg, the ‘We try harder’ Number two city region; Malmö, the former rich provincial city; and, for want of a better name, Islandia, our confederation of small tribal regions, geographically dispersed throughout the country but thinking and acting similarly to each other as essentially rural interests against the urban interests of their local city region.
Insulated by a common language from the undue influence of outside propaganda, elections in a little country like Sweden are not the same enterprises as those media dominated happenings encountered in our fifty million megastates, such as a France or a Great Britain. And they are a far cry from the cynical exercises in mass manipulation that pass for ‘national elections’ in such continental megastates as the United States of North America, Europe, Soviet Socialist Republics or what have you with their hundreds of millions.
Sweden can be reached with energy. Representatives can still almost be knowable by those they presume to represent. Olof Palme, remember, really was strolling back from the cinema when he was shot.
Sweden’s political culture is still small enough to be visible. Somebody’s sister will hear about the way somebody else’s husband pulled the wool over the eyes of the representative from Gotland and he will feel obliged to plough back the excess profit he made on the harbour reconstruction work at Visby - or at least share it around a bit.
So there we make our first batch of distinctions when we study this peculiar modern phenomenon we call ‘General Election’. And here we will disregard the continental megastate and keep our attention fixed on The Right State with the good sense to divide and devolve when its population even begins to approach the ten to fifteen million mark.
But now we need to get slightly more technical and look with some discernment at the rules for electioneering and representation in sensibly sized states. There are elections and elections.
The semi-literate politically aware person in Great Britain is nowadays aware that their vote does not go towards getting anything done, but goes to choosing somebody to represent them in the corridors where things are done, at least to the extent of deciding to appropriate money with which to persuade other more practical people to get them done.
This process is particularly appealing to women who have never had as much success as they would have liked in persuading their own menfolk to do something. The men often told them which lake to jump into. Governments and their representatives tend not to say that. Instead they go away and either do nothing or arrange for somebody else to be working on doing something.
This too has a peculiar appeal to women who have traditionally adopted the maxim of our of sight out of mind as their particular mechanism for getting through the calls of the day.
The champions of participatory democracy and direct democracy seem often to forget that half the population wants nothing less than participation and time-consuming personal direction. What they want is to tell somebody else to do the first thing that occurs to them, and to do it without a lot of silly backchat.
The Thatcher Phenomenon has to take account of this factor and the split in her majesty’s loyal opposition, before it can begin to discuss such matters as policies and personalities. This rarely seems to happen.
Representation is specialization. The elected politician is a hired gun paid to do a job of work just like the baby-sitter or the train driver. The idea behind it is efficiency. By lots of people doing one thing a week well, everybody has time to do lots of other things badly.
Now that is not the whole picture, but it is the part of the picture that is too easily forgotten. Shareholders elect a Board of Directors and they in turn appoint a chief executive officer for precisely the same reasons. They also fire him when he fails to deliver and reward him generously when he succeeds, often building these incentives into his contract through share options and the like.
Perhaps there is something here for Democracy to think about. If the company’s representative then spends all his days in bed with his secretary and neglects the job he has been appointed to do, then eventually he is kicked out and somebody else has to do it.
By the same token, if the baby-sitter spends more time on her boyfriend than on her baby, then she too eventually gets found out and gets replaced. In the interim the company or the baby may be placed at considerable risk and often this will go unobserved. It is after all in the nature of risk that the insured for event should happen much less often than it does not happen. But neither company bosses nor baby-sitters belong to parties. The politicians do.