When the low turnout at the 2001 general election first brought the issue of political disengagement into focus, it was often said that this was an aberration: a product either of voters' basic contentment with New Labour, or more likely of the Conservatives' unelectability. Neither condition is now present, yet only the most optimistic foresee a return to politics as it once was.
The final report of the Power inquiry, published in March, carefully chronicled the depth of this disengagement. The report takes aim at a political system "significantly out of step with the values, expectations and interests of the individuals and many groupings that make up British society."
Power's comprehensive description of this disengagement has made it a rallying point for those concerned about British democracy at the end of the Blair era. David Cameron's enthusiastic response to the report—"the Power inquiry is one of the most important initiatives we've seen… for many years"—was similar to the way some Labour modernisers latched on to Charter 88 two decades earlier.
By assembling in one place so many of the recent critiques of British democracy, the Power report tilts our focus towards some much more fundamental questions about the nature of democracy itself. This is enough to make it an important contribution, but, paradoxically, it is also what makes it disappointing. By investing so much time and effort in trying to describe the situation definitively—duplicating a lot of work done by others—the inquiry spent far too little time considering what conclusions should be drawn from the wealth of evidence it generated. Its recommendations—proportional representation, state funding of political parties, concordats between local and central government and tweaks to the parliamentary select committee system—therefore bear little relation to the scale or character of the "crisis" to which they purport to be a solution.
Two particular failings stand out. The first is the lack of a credible account of where the energies for change are likely to come from. Historically, reform has proceeded through a series of bargains forced on the political establishment by the emergence of powerful currents of ideas and activism in wider society: the choice has been to accommodate these currents or risk being swept away by them. Yet Power implies that the institutions most implicated in its critique of contemporary democracy are the only ones capable of its salvation. For a document that claims to be about giving power to ordinary people, it is remarkably quiet on what those people can do to take power for themselves. As the community engagement specialist David Wilcox said, "I looked… at the inquiry's recommendations to see if there was just one thing where I could do something to make a difference. Nothing. The whole package depends upon the current power-holders changing the way things work."
The second failing is the lack of any discussion of the relationship between representative politics and more participatory forms of democracy. Despite having done some innovative work of its own on new forms of participation, the Power report sidelines any discussion of what role they might play in revitalising politics. It dismisses the argument of some promoters of participatory democracy who say that "the formal processes and institutions of democracy should be allowed to wither on the vine until they are replaced with something new." But this is a straw man. The issue is not whether we choose between representative or participatory democracy, but how we design the relationship between them.
After failing to find an answer to the demo-cray problem in the Power analysis, I read Paul Ginsborg's recent book, The Politics of Everyday Life. Ginsborg shares Power's dismay at the state of democracy in rich countries, but he believes that citizens themselves must take responsibility for the alternative: "We need to start with ourselves. We have to rethink the choices we make on a day-to-day basis, the ways we use our time, the family lives we live, the sorts of things we consume, the quality of democracy we are able to exercise."
Ginsborg envisages a world in which by each of us living our lives better in small ways, we expand the possibilities of democratic politics. Whereas Power deals mainly with representative democracy, Ginsborg's concern is with the informal modes of participation that surround it—the stuff we do outside the 72 minutes we spend in the course of our lives voting, as he puts it.
There is something in Ginsborg's premise that democracy needs a more "everyday" quality. But his prescription is unconvincing: families should watch less television, government should invest more in car-sharing schemes, shoppers should buy more fair-trade goods, and citizens should go to more committee meetings—but only if they want to.
The flaw in Ginsborg's account is the mirror image of the Power report's. Power expects representative elites to reform democracy, but says nothing about the role of participation in bringing this about. Ginsborg wants a mass of everyday participation to transform democracy, but lacks a plausible account of how such participation will be seeded, or how it will get traction on the formal institutions through which crucial elements of governance still need to take place. Neither satisfactorily helps us to understand the relationship between representation, participation and the wider political culture, how this relationship has changed over recent decades or how it can credibly be redesigned for today's needs.
In their landmark 1963 study The Civic Culture, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba wrote, "The participant role in Britain is highly developed." Trade unions, churches and other civic organisations were closer to people's lives than political parties could ever be. But they sustained parties and the wider democratic system by persuading their constituencies that to achieve change they needed to mobilise in the formal political arena. They were recruiting sergeants for formal politics.
Much of our contemporary problem stems from the breakdown of this relationship between formal representative politics and more informal participation. Pollsters routinely report that people are as interested in politics as ever. But their interest is no longer being converted into action, or even trust in the system itself. The fault lies on both sides. Many of the older civic organisations that once cultivated the participant role are in decline. It is true that a wave of new civic organisations has emerged, notably NGOs and single-issue movements. But it is wrong to look at the buoyant membership figures of Greenpeace and the RSPB and infer, as many commentators do, that Britain's civic culture is healthy and only its formal politics is broken. In the first place, as the American sociologist Theda Skocpol has argued, civic groups have switched "from membership to management" over the last few decades. They are more professionalised, relying on media campaigns and lobbying rather than mass participation. Second, because they are issue-based and depend heavily on targeting national government through the media, these organisations tend not to have strong local roots or to offer their members the same training in the civic disciplines of organisation, negotiation and coalition-building. The effect is that their relationship with their members is closer to that of retailer and consumer than citizen. For many, direct debit, not direct action, is the extent of their participation. Third, organisations based on an appeal to people's social values rather than their underlying class identities tend to be more purist, less willing to compromise, and more swift to cry "betrayal." The cumulative effect of these changes is an active citizenry, but one composed of what Gerry Stoker in these pages christened "immature democrats" (Prospect, January 2006).
As for the political parties, it is clear from the succession of embarrassing "listening exercises" they have undertaken in recent years that they are ill-equipped to do the job of engaging citizens directly. For one thing it is not clear what they have to offer. When class and party marched in lock-step, party identification and membership were more about lifestyle than policy. Today, the raison d'être for parties as membership organisations is less clear. Although the parties have been trying to make their members feel more valued—see David Cameron's recent party plebiscite on his "Built to Last" statement—they are understandably reluctant to take the risk of devolving real influence over policy formation to memberships that are unrepresentative of the voters. Yet the chance to influence the platforms on which candidates campaign for public office is one of the few reasons to become a member of a party.
In short, the traditional "participant role" has faded away, but so too have the forces that gave rise to it. Our challenge is to imagine a model of political citizenship fit for our own times, and to create the institutions and relationships that will bring it to life.
I do not claim to know exactly what this model should look like, but I do know that it needs to start from a more honest account of two important facts about participation. First, a lot of people are interested in civic and political life, but relatively few choose to actively participate in it. According to the government's biennial citizenship survey, only about 2 per cent of us are really active civic participants. Second, this doesn't necessarily matter. The most celebrated example of renewing politics through participation is the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. Through its "participatory budgeting" process, local people take part in forums to determine how a significant chunk of the municipal budget will be spent. But as Paul Ginsborg himself explains, only about 2 per cent of the city's 1.3m population actually get involved. That such low levels of participation can produce a sense of democratic renaissance illustrates an important point: small groups of people can do wonderful things if the details of institutional design and accountability are right.
Several other features of the Porto Alegre model stand out. One is the attention paid to political efficacy and trust. Participation lacks the transparency and simplicity of voting in elections, so public trust in the process is harder to earn. That's why in the early days in Porto Alegre, the only projects that could be approved were ones that could be delivered quickly, so that people could see a connection between their involvement and results on the ground.
Another is the importance of locality. Participatory budgeting takes place at progressively higher levels—from neighbourhood to city-wide—but it is the neighbourhood forums that are key. They are where most people choose to participate, because they are closest to the things they care about.
The third is that participatory budgeting combines new and old forms of representation in mutually supportive ways. Elected representatives may still be called upon to make tough decisions and trade-offs, but they are forced to do so in public rather than behind closed doors.
Could Britain do a Porto Alegre? We already have the main raw material: a small core of committed people. For the last 20 years, governments have been busily increasing opportunities for citizen participation. The role of school governors has been greatly enhanced. Tenants have been given the right to manage. Regeneration schemes have been put under the direction of boards of local people. Health and care services have made provision for citizen voice. At a rough estimate, in England about 400,000 people are involved in these kinds of arrangements—about 1 per cent of the adult population.
But clear evidence from a recent study by the think tank Demos, with which I was involved, suggests that we are not getting nearly as much democratic value from the energies of this 1 per cent as we might, because the lessons about how to combine representative and participatory democracy have not been learned. Local councillors, council officials and public service managers tend to be suspicious of community participants, deriding them as "the usual suspects." Because the legitimacy of participants is questioned, many participatory bodies have too little power—for example, the record on patient involvement actually influencing health provision is limited. This further exacerbates the tendency for them to be dominated by only the most dedicated, or those with axes to grind. Other bodies, by contrast, have had too much power too soon—expecting deprived neighbourhoods to know how to spend £50m overnight is one of the reasons for the disappointing performance of the government's New Deal for Communities. Decision-making structures are often confusing, and depend on a "committee literacy" that many people find alienating. Moreover, opportunities to participate at the neighbourhood level in Britain have historically been very patchy; the lowest tier of government here is several orders of magnitude larger than in comparable countries.
We cannot legislate for greater participation. But we can make the best of the participation we have, and so convince more people that it is worth getting involved. This suggests three priorities for reform: securing and strengthening people's right to participate, making that participation count when it comes to real decisions about resources and priorities, and ensuring that the right checks and balances are in place to preserve accountability. Together, this mix represents what I call the "1 per cent solution."
The government's recent local government white paper, "Strong and Prosperous Communities," was a missed opportunity to put the 1 per cent solution to the test. Although it included some interesting proposals, including plans to give more power to parish councils, it did not go far enough. A bolder document would have been designed as a package of entitlements to participate—a community bill of rights—to sit alongside existing forms of representation. Foremost among these would be a right for local people to set up neighbourhood councils and draw down funds from their local authority to spend on improving their area. These neighbourhood councils would have a right to participate in the planning process of the local authority, so that overall priorities and spending reflected local wishes. Because it is the "cleaner, safer, greener" issues that most exercise people, they would be given significant direct influence over neighbourhood policing teams and environmental improvement programmes. Communities would have the right to take control of parks and community centres, provided the people involved can pass some simple tests of managerial capacity. Finally, a "right of initiative," allowing citizens to petition for an issue to be put on the agenda of the local authority, or in extreme cases to a local referendum, would create new channels of influence for those frustrated by stonewalling from councillors or officials.
Would this package fix Britain's democratic malaise? No, but it would begin to change the political culture that is its ultimate cause. Part of our difficulty in understanding the state of democracy is that the timescales we use are too short. A good deal of Britain's constitutional history over the last 200 years has been about perfecting the constitutional principle of majoritarianism. Today that principle is reaching the limits of its usefulness—fewer citizens are willing to engage in formal politics and fewer still are willing to offer their unconditional consent to any one institution or set of representatives—so our task is almost as tough: to grant people the right to a more direct say in how they are governed without succumbing to idealised myths of an engaged citizenry. We should not, therefore, be surprised if it takes at least a generation before the outline of a different approach comes into view. The task of reformers is to open up the space for new currents to reshape the way we do politics from without, rather than waiting for politicians to change it from within. By giving the 1 per cent the power to make a difference, we might start to build such a current. As Margaret Mead said: "Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
