Gridlock, consensus, cynicism, cooperation… obtaining the ‘consent of the governed’ by proxy…? Koli Mitra looks at some unexpected implications of coalition governments.
There was a time, not so long ago, when monarchies and theocracies were the norm and ‘democracy’ was a historical anomaly, a peculiar experiment tried out in antiquity by a statistically insignificant number of people – and not very thoroughly. It was a thing of curiosity, an absurd utopian fantasy – or even a dystopian one, from the perspective of most people who had the leisure and erudition to be able to afford to sit around pondering such things.
Now, just a handful of centuries later, it’s hard to even imagine such a world. Though plenty of undemocratic governments exist, it is almost universally taken for granted that ‘democracy’ – rule by popular consent – is the only legitimate form of government (except among anarchists and extreme libertarians, who hold that any form of ‘government’ is illegitimate by definition). Even ruthless dictators feel obliged to stage periodic ‘elections’ to rubber stamp their tyrannies with a manufactured show of popular approval and to insert the word ‘people’ or ‘democratic’ into the official name of their fiefdom.
Yet, while academic theories about how governments are to acquire and maintain this kind of legitimising ‘consent’ abound, most of us have stunningly muddled ideas about the form and substance of that consent, to speak nothing of the relationship between the two. If you take a random survey and ask the question ‘what is democracy’ you are likely to find an apparently broad consensus on the answer ‘majority rule.’ Those of us with a weakness for theoretical precision probably would say ‘consent of the governed’ but to most people, ‘majority rule’ is the practical expression of that consent, and therefore an acceptable shorthand. But then if you ask the same people to describe what democracy looks like in concrete terms, most will rattle off a list of things (like civil rights and liberties, equality of citizens under the law, autonomy in life choices and economic transactions, due process of law, government accountability and transparency, etc.) that don’t necessarily have anything to do with majority rule, except tangentially. If you pay close attention, the underlying concern in almost every concrete outcome people associate with ‘democracy’ has to do with the ability of individuals to live lives free of undue restraints and coercion while balancing this against the danger that any one person’s unfettered liberty poses to the liberty of others; it really has less to do with being governed than with being free from being governed, and defining the contours of the amount of governance we will accept; it is really a description of the ‘consent of the governed’ as if it were meant to be obtained on a case-by-case basis, rather than in the aggregate (as in ‘majority rule’). In other words, the process we associate with democracy is only very loosely or remotely related to the outcomes we associate with democracy.
However, I’m not about to go over the familiar (and admittedly very important) litany of the problems of majoritarianism. Nor am I about to broach the issue of what oligarchical forces actually dictate policy after the people have chosen their policy makers (although this, too, is a matter of grave concern, as suggested by the Princeton University study published in April, 2014, which found that the concentration of power in an elite class in the United States is so severe that the country – the oldest and historically the most robust democracy in the world – has ceased to operate as a functional democracy). Still, for the purposes of this essay, let’s just stipulate that – all other factors being equal – the greater the number of people whose actual consent is registered in a particular exercise of power over a general population, the more legitimate that power (assuming there are constitutionally reserved protections in place against potential abuse of discrete and insular minorities as well as certain institutional/procedural checks and balances to prevent governments from exercising arbitrary or ultra vires powers).
But even at this rather basic level of analysis, the calculus of adequate consent gets very messy. The world’s two largest democracies – India and the United States – have both been struggling with a bit of a crisis of representation for at least the last couple of decades. Many voters in the United States feel that the entrenched duopoly of the major political parties precludes meaningful voter choice. Meanwhile, Indian voters seem to have had their choice frustrated by the opposite problem: so many regional and niche parties that appeal to so many highly tailored sets of views, that no one party can hope to have enough clout with a significant enough portion of the population to be able to claim a mandate from ‘the people.’ Government by coalition is a fact of life in Indian national politics and despite the election campaigns based on party platforms and particular ‘visions’ and ‘records’ that are supposed to recommend a candidate or a party to the electorate, the new government in May will almost certainly be one cobbled together out of several parties, none of whom really has a ‘mandate’ to implement their particular ‘vision’ or replicate the ‘record’ of their previous achievements at the state level.
For example, people tout the much-hyped ‘Gujarat model’ of development, which is supposed to be an argument for promoting the Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi to the prime minister’s office, but implementing policies based on this model will not be something left up to Mr. Modi’s sole or primary discretion as it may have been in Gujarat – a fact that should perhaps give some comfort to those voters who either don’t buy into the myth of the Gujarat miracle or those who are unwilling to pay the high ecological and human cost of that particular brand of economic growth (I have no words of comfort, I am afraid, for those who have a quirky distaste for genocide).
Interestingly, politicians who do not have the wide base of support needed to win majorities and who owe the tremendous powers they wield almost entirely to coalition politics, also seem to find coalitions to be convenient excuses for ineffectiveness. Candidate Modi has been asking voters to elect his party in every regional poll so as to give him a solid mandate so that he can carry out his grand campaign promises without being beholden to coalition partners who may not see eye to eye with him (a clever trick to preemptively trump any criticism of possible future failures, just scapegoat the coalition partners). Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, for his part, has also blamed the unwieldy nature of a coalition team for his government’s inability to rein in corruption.
From voters’ perspectives, though, are the limitations of coalition rule any worse than those of majority party rule? After all, what is representative government but an attempt to comply with an approximation of the popular will? No matter how much of a ‘clear mandate’ a politician is able to muster up, there will be many, many people subject to his/her decisions who did not give that mandate and who, therefore, by definition, did not specifically consent to be governed by those decisions.
In fact, in this respect, a coalition government may be more accountable than a majority party, which only needs to serve the constituents who voted for it while imposing its will on vast numbers of other people without their consent. By contrast, members of a coalition government must repeatedly consult and satisfy the representatives of many people who voted against them, which means they must obtain consent – albeit by proxy – from those other voters in a way that majority governments are never compelled to do.
Minority parties forced to work together to build consensus is a closer approximation of how direct, grassroots democracies – like community meetings – work, wherein no one has overwhelming authority and all the members bring together their competing interests and agendas and have to find common ground. Of course the problem with having consensus building as a prerequisite to getting anything done is that it tends to mire an organization in gridlock and inertia. A common complaint people all over the world have against their legislatures is their ‘inefficiency’. But then again, a certain amount of ‘inefficiency’ is a feature and not a bug of a system that is meant to grapple with highly complex, often contentious policies that have extraordinarily wide impacts on people who have no direct input in how the policy is designed or executed. These kinds of decisions should take a little time and some deliberation. When lawmakers have to accommodate vastly divergent needs, preferences and views – even those that may undercut the preferences of their own supporters – the end result is often a compromise that everyone can live with, though it may only rarely fit anyone’s ideal solution. It would be great if elected leaders would have the statesmanship to engage in this sort of deliberation as a matter of principle, but that failing, it may not be so terrible to have it foisted on them by circumstances.
Another interesting aspect of coalition politics is that it empowers state and regional parties, and as such, it might be thought of as more authentically reflecting the federal system of government. However, the jurisdictions of the national and state governments in a federal system are concerned with very distinct areas of policymaking and administration, and therefore, there is a profound difference between the preoccupations of the national voter and those of the state voter, even though they are obviously not two separate sets of people. Moreover, one of the most useful aspects of the federal structure is a layering of powers such that each insulates the people from the potential transgressions of the other. If the Central government is really nothing more than a committee of state government agents and affiliates who have no authority to force each others’ hands on local issues (for fear of stepping on each others’ toes and being dropped from the governing coalition), then there is no longer any real buffer (from the Centre) between the state government and the people that can be called upon in case of emergency such as the rise of a tyrannical state government.
Ultimately, though, whatever the merits or demerits of governing by coalition, most of the candidates – despite valiantly keeping up the charade of distinguishing their parties’ philosophical ‘positions’ – are revealing (perhaps inadvertently) their resignation to a sort of domestic realpolitik that lets them engage in backroom dealings and petty power mongering with the strangest of bedfellows not only in the spirit of compromise and common ground, but often in the most cynical and craven strategies for maintaining power. They are equally likely to turn around the next day and unceremoniously dump any one or more of the aforementioned bedfellows.
If nothing else, there’s certainly a value in demystifying the process.
