I’ll begin with a shocking statistic about the state of democracy in the United States, the first of our modern constitutional democracies to emerge (a few years before the French) and for more than two centuries a beacon of democracy in the world. In a wide-ranging study done at Princeton University,[1] the authors conclude:
The American government does respond to the public’s preferences, but that responsiveness is strongly tilted toward the most affluent citizens. Indeed, under most circumstances, the preferences of the vast majority of Americans appear to have essentially no impact on which policies the government does or doesn’t adopt.
[2]
What the majority thinks has “essentially no impact”? That’s most definitely not democracy either. And that’s despite the fact that their political system is better regulated than ours.
You can read an article on the study here if you’re interested.
And the US is not an isolated case. Although I’m not aware of such comprehensive studies for other democracies, I have little doubt that the pattern described in the study repeats itself to a lesser or greater degree for the majority of democracies. Transparency International’s estimate for the number of people involved in lobbying the European Parliament, for example, is 37,351.[3]
The European Parliament building in Strasbourg, France: 50 lobbyists per parliamentarian on average. Credit: European Union 2015 – European Parliament. (Click here to enlarge)
That’s for 751 parliamentarians, an average of roughly 50 lobbyists per parliamentarian – the majority of them highly qualified individuals paid for by elite, moneyed interests, and coming with bags of money, favours and lucrative job offers on behalf of their employers.
“So what are you complaining about then?” you may ask. “We’re nothing special. Democracies are captured all over the place. What we’re witnessing with the Guptas could be nothing more than a changing of the guard, as the captors claim. Perhaps we were, after all, no less captured in 1994 than today?”
I’ll respond in two parts.
2.3.1 Two wrongs
First, as I’ve indicated, there’s no doubt that democracies all over the world find themselves in trouble at the moment. Or more accurately, thanks to the increased access to information that the internet has brought, democrats now begin to realise how little their votes actually count (the data in the Princeton study goes back to 1982, and the pattern of influence was roughly the same then).
I’ll say more about the causes in the next part, but for the moment the point I want to make is this:
Even if the whole world was captured worse than us (and it isn’t, as I will argue shortly), would that mean that we have to accept a clearly undemocratic form of government?
There can be no democrat in SA who doesn’t feel a profound sense of shame to be ruled by what seems very much like a bunch of small-time criminals elevated to the national stage of a key African country.
2.3.2 Brick in the face
My earlier references to democracies in the US and EU left out one crucial detail: the reason those voters still place a certain amount of trust in their political systems is that those systems still provide a narrative that largely conforms to democratic values, even if most voters have less of a say than what they believe.
It’s important, because having to pretend that there are no bosses in a democracy apart from elected leaders, puts serious limits on how far the other bosses can go.
In the same way, there were “other bosses” in our democracy in ’94 too, but the influence they exerted respected the democratic narrative – the research report commissioned by the Electoral Task Team a few years after our first elections indicated high levels of satisfaction with our political system.[4]
In this period of our history, however, the capture is like a brick in your face. There’s just no way in which one can bend the democratic story to include the examples I’ve mentioned in Part 2.1.
Protestors demand that the president step down, Pretoria, April 12, 2017. Credit: Ihsaan Haffejee / GroundUp
By the way, I can to some extent understand how the Guptas can make the error of assuming a brick-in-the-face attitude towards South Africans – they started arriving from 1993[5] and have therefore never really seen SA democrats in action.
What surprises me as that the president can make that mistake. Maybe he’s been in exile for too long. Or maybe, confronted as he and his fellow-captors are with the crumbling edifice of their audacious state capture project, he’s just so desperate to stay out of jail that he no longer cares, driven to ever more audacious stunts to stay one step ahead of the law.
Go back to Part 2, or proceed to Part 3: The main problem – political funding
Footnotes
Click on the footnote number to go back to where you were.
[1] Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens
[2] From the introduction to the book Affluence and Influence – Economic Inequality And Political Power In America by Martin Gilens, one of the two main authors of the study, 2012
[3] How many lobbyists are there in Brussels?
[4] Report of The Electoral Task Team, 2003, p. 7-8
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