DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Charles Stross points out some inconvenient truth.

Our representative systems almost all run on a party system; even pure PR systems like that of Israel rely on a party list. (I could take out Israeli citizenship and run for the Knesset, but I’d be running as “the Charlie Stross Party”, not as myself: if I was a runaway success I’d need to find some extra representatives to tag along on my coat-tails.) Parties are bureaucratic institutions with the usual power dynamic of self-preservation, as per Michels’s iron law of oligarchy: the purpose of the organization is to (a) continue to exist, and (b) to gain and hold power. We can see this in Scotland with the SNP (Scottish National Party) — originally founded with the goal of obtaining independence for Scotland and then disbanding, the disbanding bit is now nowhere to be seen in their constitution.

Per Michels, political parties have an unspoken survival drive. And they act as filters on the pool of available candidates. You can’t easily run for election — especially at national level — unless you get a party’s support, with the activists and election agents and assistance and funding that goes with it. (Or you can, but you then have to build your own machinery.) Existing incumbent representatives have an incentive to weed out potential candidates who are loose cannons and might jeopardize their ability to win re-election and maintain a career. Parties therefore tend to be self-stabilizing.

A secondary issue is that professionals will cream amateurs in any competition held on a level playing field. And this is true of politics as much as any other field of human competition. The US House of Representatives is overwhelmingly dominated by folks with law degrees (and this is not wholly inappropriate, given they’re in the job of making laws). The UK’s Parliament is slightly less narrowly circumscribed, but nevertheless there’s a career path right to the top in British politics, and it’s visible in all the main parties: you go to a private school then Oxford or Cambridge, participate in student politics (if you’re on the left) or debating societies (if you’re on the right), take a post as researcher or assistant for an MP or (less commonly) run for a local council office, then run for parliament. There are plenty of people in every democratic constitutional system who have never held a job outside of politics — and why should they? Such a diversion would be a waste of time and energy if your goal is to make a difference on the national stage.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2014 at 14:29 and is filed under Think about it.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.