What Do People Want From Politics?

They want their problems solved. And if democracy can't do the trick, they'll consider...alternatives.

Nobody puts baby in a basket. Image source: Samantha Sophia on Unsplash.

Those of us who spend tremendous amounts of time paying attention to politics, who make a life and maybe a living from reading the news, thinking about policy, and fretting about the intricacies of day-to-day politicking, tend to suffer from a common curse: we believe everyone thinks like we do.

I don’t mean this as a slight against those who spend their days hooked to a news IV-drip, though perhaps I should. I certainly don’t mean to insult those who, quite wisely, spend their time disconnected from the up-to-the-minute-news industrial complex. I simply mean to say that we should make it a rule to include in our analysis, by default, the assumption that people are different.

I developed a commitment to political ideology in my high school years alongside a deep interest in politics. I was both a liberal (the ideology) and a Liberal (the political party). I followed the news closely and I rushed home from classes to watch Question Period. Miraculously, I was never stuffed in a single locker.

Today, I’m no longer a Liberal, but I retain some commitments to liberalism, even as a market socialist. As Matt McManus argues, that may not be such a stretch. But that’s for another post. My point is that I’ve long been an exception to the rule, and if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you are, too.

Most people don’t walk around with a coherent ideological framework in their head or a staunch philosophical commitment to one party or another. There are partisans who are committed to Liberals or Conservatives or New Democrats or Republicans or Democrats, for sure. But in many cases, those attachments are less ideological and more sociological or psychological, which is to say that a lot of partisan politics is about belonging to a group as a group rather than ideology or even policy. It can also be an identity.

If you’ve ever wondered how a group can switch from believing one thing to believing another seemingly overnight, it’s often because the cues they take from elites or organizations change. If the leader of your party wants higher taxes, you may want higher taxes, seeking to align your viewpoint with them. If the leader changes and the new one prefers lower taxes, you may find yourself suddenly supporting lower taxes.

It’s not always so cut and dry, but it’s a common occurrence that people will change their preferences to align with those from whom they take their cues. They’ll tend to then conveniently forget their past beliefs or explain them away when challenged.

When I was writing my book about how we make (bad) political decisions, I was surprised to learn that people are less committed to democracy than I thought they would be. I never expected everyone to have a deep and abiding love for self-government, in part because the way we do it is so thin, incomplete, and often unjust. But I was surprised nonetheless to see just how many people are willing to replace democracy with autocracy or military rule or technocracy.

The insight I gleamed from the prevalence of a weak commitment to democracy — gleamed shockingly and embarrassingly late in life, I confess — is that many people, first and foremost, simply want their problems solved. If democracy can solve their problems, democracy it is. If it can’t, well, then they’re willing to bargain. That much should have been obvious to me from a reading of 20th century history. But for some reason the point never clicked in my head until I was well into my 30s.

Last February, Pew Research released a survey of attitudes towards different political systems around the world. While the researchers found “widespread” support for representative democracy in the two-dozen countries they surveyed — with most majorities supporting it in the 70-87 percent range — they also found that confidence in democracy has declined in recent years around the world, a drop that correlates with poor economic conditions and lower incomes.

As confidence in democracy wanes, support for other systems of government rise. In the United States and Canada, 48 and 49 percent of respondents respectively cited technocracy — rule by experts rather than elected officials — as “somewhat good” or “very good.” Again, this tells us that people want their problems solved and are open to different ways of getting that done.

In the US, 26 percent of folks went so far as to say autocracy — rule by a strong leader without courts or legislatures getting in the way — was somewhat or very good, while 19 percent in Canada said the same alongside 31 percent in the United Kingdom. In India, 67 percent(!) support autocracy, which is both deeply disconcerting in the world’s most populous democracy and tracks with the (slipping) popularity of its autocratic prime minister.

Support for military rule was lower than support for technocracy or autocracy, but still found double-digit backing in the US, Canada, Greece, the UK, Poland, Italy, France, Spain, India (72 percent), and elsewhere.

Thee ideological right was more supportive of autocracy and military rule, which tells us there’s a division here that complicates matters and almost certainly has a variety of explanations, including partisanship, psychology, and material conditions. Majorities in most countries surveyed said they do not believe elected politicians care what people like them think, which I suspect accounts for a lot of the support for alternatives forms of governing.

While people may not be ideologically consistent and coherent or up-to-date on every bit of the latest news, they aren’t stupid. People can sense when the system and its stewards aren’t serving them, and that makes them angry, frustrated, anxious, and disaffected. It also makes them willing to bargain with other ways of doing things as they hope for better — a phenomenon that helps explain the rise of American autocracy by way of Donald Trump and the Republicans.

There are plenty of lessons to be taken away from this data, enough for a future, deeper dive. But for now, it’s enough to say that if democracies don’t serve people and their fundamental needs and interests — especially their economic, which is to say material, interests — then democracy itself will end up on the ballot and eventually it will be defeated.

The best way to address this risk is to ensure consistent, broad, and deep democratic representation that brings people into public life, takes their concerns to heart, includes them in self-government, and puts their economic interests first and foremost above all-else.

You might think this is how we do things now. It’s not. But it should be.