Philobiblon

Nation of Devils: Democratic Leadership and the Problem of Obedience by Stein Ringen

I don’t necessarily agree with all of it, but interesting thoughts. The author brings the perspective of being a head of ministerial research and assistant director general in the Ministry of Justice in his native Norway, and of the United Nations in New Work, and has lived and worked in Britain, France, Germany, the US and Sweden, as a political journalist and management consultant. He aims to answer the questions “how can a government dispense necessary rule, and how can the population protect itself against excessive rule.” He’s also very interested in the US, by no means convinced that it is still a democracy, but I was most interested in the British side.

p. 198-199
Britain is not going to get a government better set to rule than New Labour in its good years. But it was unable. America is not going to get a more worthy and able president than Barack Obama. But his promise was ground down by a system that took revenge. No doubt, there are other dysfunctional democracies to pick on, but these are the ones worth confronting. It is right to say that they are dysfunctional. Policy is not made, or if made not in the service of the public good, or if in the service of the public food not implemented. It is right to say that they have gone dysfunctional Until recently, these were normal democracies. In Britain, the constitutional system declined from “order” to “mess” after the 1970s..
In Britain … “what needs to be done is far from revolutionary. The agent of reform is Parliament, which has the power to reform as it wishes….

1. The House of Commons should establish itself as an equitable partner to the government in political decisionmaking and should exercise effective scrutiny in legislative and budgetary decisions. …
2. Political funding should be redesigned to prevent the consolidation in Britain of an overpowering politico-corporate complex.
3. Local government with serious autonomy and responsibility should be constituted as a counterweight to the concentration of political power to London.

p. 201 “First, the necessary funding of parties and campaigns should come from the public purse and all other forms of political money should be considered corruption in law, be it from businesses or unions, from individuals, or from candidates’ own means. This would both provide the funds that are needed and break the link of transgression between the seekers of office and the givers of money. Taxes are what we use to fund public goods. Democracy is a joint matter that we should pay for jointly and equally…. My suggestion is to institute an annual survey of voters to record the distribution of preferences for the allocation of the public allotment to pay for politics … a practical, effective and inexpensive way of putting economic power into the hands of voters.”

p.202 “The British should be given the benefit of some of that ‘municipalization’ that Quinton Mayne found had served the Danish people so well. Local units – municipalities – should be small, there should be more of them, and they should have more power and responsibility. British democracy has too few elected representatives, fewer proportionally than any other democracy in Europe. There are too many Members of Parliament in London but too few elected representatives throughout the country. There is no counterbalance to the concentration of political power in London and Downing Street.”

P. 105 “Do-something pressures come down on governments with relentless force. It comes from their own ambitions. Governments want to do good and are desperate to be of consequence. It comes from their constituents. The moment they are in office, those who have put them there line up to get them to take up their particular causes. It comes from pressure groups. Every cause has a group working for it, and poling on the pressure for government action is what pressure groups do. It comes from the press, day in and day out exposing problems that the government is not up to dealing with. And it comes from the country. Through the government’s window, the society it is responsible for governing looks like a catalogue of problems that cry out to it to be solved… No single government can do all that much. There are infinitely more problems out there than any government can take on, never mind solve. Often there are no solutions to even problems that are obvious, known and grave… Government must chose what problems to take on and they must do that by asking what is practicable and solvable. This is difficult – it really means deciding what problems to neglect – and the pressure and temptation to do more than is manageable is enormous. “

p. 107 “In Scandinavia, the routine is slow decisionmaking… [they] have a high capacity for producing necessary decisions and doing so in time … when the Norwegian parliament in 2009 adopted a comprehensive pension reform, it was the culmination of a process that had started in 2001. … The process towards decisions of this kind follows a fixed procedure that is prescribed in written regulations and establish conventions and which it would normally be unthinkable, except in an emergency, to deviate from. … a problem is identified that calls for some kind of public policy action or reform, and the government gets a nod from the parliament to start planning towards a solution. It appoints a committee of study, usually made up of experts and some constituency representatives (typically of employers and unions) with a relatively precise mandate, to undertake a study of the issue and propose solutions. The committee will typically work three to four years and produce a comprehensive report, heavy on factual study, along with a joint proposal or majority and minority proposals. The next step is for the relevant ministry to distribute the report to interested parties throughout the country in what is known as “a hearing round” with a note of guidance on matters it in particular wants views on. The government will then produce a white paper to parliament based on the committee’s reports and inputs from the hearing round, with a more or less precise outline of the action it thinks should follow… In the parliament the white paper goes first to the relevant select committee, which works it over in detail and prepares a report, which will form the basis of a first plenary debate, again with more or less precise proposals or outlines for action. The parliament then holds a debate, more on principle than on detail. It may at this time bury the matter, but that would be highly unusual. … The report of the select committee and inputs in the debate, with or without a vote or votes, will be taken as instructions to the government for the preparation of legislation. That will take another year or two and culminate in what is known as a ‘proposition’ to the parliament. … again goes to the relevant select committee which works it over and prepares a report, which again is the basis for the parliament to hold a debate in plenary, no culminating in a vote or series of votes to pass legislation. … at any time, a multitude of processes of this kind are in motion at different stages of advances … Most … will not be interrupted by a change of government… in the case of the pension reform, the process started under a minority labour government, was carried forward under a minority centre-right coalition, and was finalised towards legislation under a majority centre-left government. …. Decision making is well prepared solid and participatory, so that in most cases a reasonable consensus has been worked out, which will lend legitimacy to the eventual legislation.”

p. 23 – New Labour “never managed to articulate anything like a clear project of purpose for itself… never able to get down to the necessary prioritising. They slipped up on the first rule of strategy, according to the management guru Miichael Porter: that a sound strategy starts with having the right goal. Therefore they also failed in the ultimate rule: that the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. … inherited a system that Mrs Thatcher had been relentlessly centralising. It was easy to make policy, but there was not enough order to prevent bad ones and not enough obedience to implement good ones … they continued to centralise and condemned themselves to ever harder effort for ever less gain.”

p. 58 “I have argued 1. That the problem is obedience, 2. That governments are up against others who are always reluctant, 3. That the final challenge in good government is implementation, 4. That the turning of power into performance depends on fairness and restraint, 5. That a settlement of order depends on institutions that bind governments and push followers into compliance, and 6. That such institutions reside in culture as much as in rules … governance is also, and always, a people business. Sitting on power does not do governments much good… Power can at best and only sometimes control reluctant others, but not on its own get them into a settlement of willing cooperation. Government can in only limited ways get their will by commanding. For the most part they depend on persuading. What governments need to muster if they are to be effective is authority and leadership. To shore that up, they will want the magic of legitimacy attached to themselves and their doings.”

p. 97 “orders are of two kinds, commands and signals. These are a governments only tools, however powerful it may look. While commands are heavy handed and commanding something ministers can do with success only occasionally, it is the politics of signals that is the great constant in government action, and normative governance – informing, educating, inspiring, leading – that is the secret of the art of ruling. But once you are into the delicate use of signals, into spin, which you cannot avoid, you are susceptible to overdoing it. You cannot make yourself authoritative without spin, but unless you are very surefooted, that same spin will make you look ridiculous.”