Transcript of Proceedings
UNIVERSITY OF LONDON SEMINAR
Birbeck
College
Political Parties and Trade Unions in the Electronic Age
Saturday
16th March 1996
Dr. Chris
Toulouse
Department of Sociology & Anthropology,
Hofstra
University, Hempstead, NY. 11550
104E Heger Hall, (516) 463
6366
urbsoc@idt.net
FIRST PRESENTATION
Seymour Martin Lipset (George Mason University,
VA)
THE CRISIS OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY
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transcript cover sheet
THEMATIC CONTENTS
1. PRESENTATION: voter
volatility / falling
participation / the growth
in movements and what it means for parties / the fate of
parties of representation and parties of integration / the
importance of factions to democracy in the party / the
confidence gap / the
pernicious influence of television /
2. DISCUSSION ARISING:
a
historic perspective on unions / direct
delegate democracy / the reality
of trade union democracy / the web the
only thing yet to get people away from the TV / telecommunications
& information policy / Perot and
Belusconi / the demise of
the SDP / the electoral
system / Goldsmith's
Referendum party / the view that
organizations can't do very much / problems of
structure and problems of information access / the idea of
political culture / how many
politicians really want mass participation? / the problem
with direct balloting / the National
Policy Forum / the link
between the unions and the party /
After you go to any of these links you can use the Back command
on your browser to return to the Thematic Contents.
1. PRESENTATION : S.M. LIPSET
- There's no question, at least to my mind, and I think the evidence is
clear, that we're in a transition period with respect to the nature and
character of democratic politics. I've always argued, and so have Schumpeter
and others, that the key institution of democracy is the political party, that
is to say, no parties -no democracy: that the idea of the Soviets, or union
democracy, or individuals choosing delegates and so on, that this cannot and
does not work in complex societies. So in order to have stable democracy, you
have to have institutionalized parties.
- One of the conditions of institutionalized parties is that they have to be
linked to basic social cleavages in society. The social cleavage that's best
known in the traditional stable democratic world, although of recent it's been
declining, has been social class. Back when I did Political Man you could
divide up every country by where its parties stood on the axis of class, and
in the many different ways of class, not just the economic. Today it's very
different. One of the problems of some of the newer democracies in the
ex-communist countries is that they have not yet been able to hook into their
embryonic party cleavages. The Communists have a particular problem that has
never existed before: that the party of the old ruling class is still around,
but it is also the party that has an ideology representing the lower class,
and given the way the changes have been working out, the old ruling class
party is still able to get lower class support! It makes it very difficult to
see what the nature of class struggle will be in the post-communist world. But
there's no question, you need parties, and parties need social
cleavages.
- Now if you look around the democratic world today, you will see that while
conditions vary from country to country, there are some negative trends that
are happening in almost all countries, and it is these I would like to talk
about today.
- One of them is voter volatility. It used to be that could predict
how someone was going to vote from the way they had voted last time, and while
you can still do this, you can't do it as reliably as you used to. People
shift much more readily from one party to another today. Now you might argue
this is a good thing, that people nowadays are more responsive to information
about candidates and issues. But I would argue that a necessary condition of
stable democracy is that the major parties have an important following of
people who are uncritically loyal. If people shifted freely from one party to
another at election times you would have parties wiped out. The Republican
Party in the United States would have been wiped out in 1932 as the Party of
the Depression. Major parties need that 30% of the vote that allows them to go
into opposition and begin on the long road back to government again. It's a
condition for constituting an institutionalized competitive party system. But
suddenly in the last decade we're beginning to see parties that do get wiped
out. The most extreme example occurred in Canada in 1993 when the Conservative
Party, the founding party of the country, went from a governing majority to 2
seats. In Italy, the two founding parties of post- war democracy, the
Christian Democrats and the Socialists, no longer exist.
- A second trend is that voter participation is falling. It's already
very low in America, but it's been declining elsewhere as well. If you look at
public opinion data comparatively, there's been an increase in cynicism about
democratic politics. A lack of confidence in leadership, an increase in those
who say "Politicians don't care about people like me". This undermines the
conditions for stable democracy.
- At the same time, we've had the growth in movements, the growth in
potential competitors to the parties. This has good consequences and bad
consequences for parties. The growth of single issue movements cross- cuts
party cleavages and raises the issue of how movements should feed into the
decision-making process of parties. It also raises a question that is being
debated in many countries, of primaries versus organized conventions for the
selection of candidates and the airing of issues. In the US we've moved
overwhelmingly in the direction of primaries, and now in Israel they're moving
in that direction too. On the question of whether this is good or bad, you
might think it would be good because primaries are inherently more democratic.
But in the US we've found that primaries turn into minority elections, in
which the participants are often extremists of various kinds, political and
theological, and the rich, so that the outcomes don't look so democratic after
all. It's ironic. When you had the old party bosses, one of their jobs was to
work out the optimum outcome that would satisfy all the factions and get the
party elected.
- To jump to another aspect, the question of the nature of party systems.
When thinking about party systems political scientists have long distinguished
between parties of representation and parties of integration. By
parties of representation I mean parties like the American ones, which have
leaders but where membership doesn't mean anything, parties which have no base
of membership. By parties of integration I mean parties along the lines of the
Social Democrats and the Catholic parties in Europe. In the old Social
Democratic movement, exemplified by the Austrian Social Democrats, you would
go from birth to death within the party. There were leisure organizations,
burial societies, cooperatives, medical plans. And the Christian Democrats had
much the same.
- Now it's these parties of integration that have declined. I don't think
there's any Social Democratic party or Christian Democratic party today which
has any where near the degree of integration, and degree of civil support for
the party, that used to exist. A lot of the functions that the parties used to
fulfill are now fulfilled commercially. People don't feel the need to find
their leisure activity with the party, they go to a business and buy a
service. So parties of integration have increasingly moved toward the methods
of parties of representation and have become more like the American ones -and
this is where people start talking about primaries, because they face the same
kind of problem we do in America, where you have members who aren't very
involved in the party, and there's a move to get primaries to generate
interest and increase representation.
- Many of the same circumstances effect unions. Unions used to have an
occupational community to draw on. I wrote about this many years ago in Union
Democracy about the printers union in the United States. There were baseball
clubs and bowling leagues and veterans organizations, all composed of union
printers. Unions used to offer hospital plans and the like, and again, this
has declined very greatly, which means that ties to the unions, other than the
formal fact of the membership, have also declined. Now there's been some
discussion in American unions in recent years of how to revive these ties, of
how to generate new functions to link members to the organization.
- Now if you then ask what would be democracy in the party? I think -
to return to Schumpeter- that it's the ability to chose between competing
programs. Except in small units, you need mechanisms by which people can chose
between options and there's institutionalized criticism and potential
opposition. Now at this point we have to remember Michel's Iron Law of
Oligarchy, and the argument that elite domination is inherent in the nature of
private organization; voluntary associations, trade unions, political parties,
professional groups, are all are basically controlled from the top because of
all the advantages that leaders have, in the way of propaganda and so on,
overwhelm the case coming from the bottom. In the US, there certainly seems to
be an increase in the degree of factionalism, and may be factionalism is a
sign that our party system is still getting weaker.
- Another mechanism of democratic control for factions in voluntary
associations is of course Exit. If members don't like the leaders they can
leave. Of course, whether or not they exercise that right is a function of
whether it matters to the leaders. I recall a conversation I had with Lane
Kirkland several years ago which left me very depressed. Even though union
organization was plummeting as a percentage of the labor force, he was denying
that there was a problem. They still had 13 million members he said, more than
ever before. So the fact that there was a lot of exiting didn't bother him.
That may be the reason why he isn't there any more.
- Finally, one further point, which is the general drop in confidence and
commitment to all kinds of organizations, both voluntary and governmental. In
America we call it the "confidence gap" but the same pattern holds for
most of the countries I've seen data for. The proportion of people who express
confidence in the leadership and in different organizations has been going
down steadily. People somehow don't see what professional life, institutional
life, government does, or they think it's not doing the kind of job it used
to.
- Now one factor here -and I think you cannot possibly underestimate this-
is the effect of television. Television has made a qualitative
difference. One of the things that made for participation in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries was that people had to entertain themselves - fraternal
organizations, sporting clubs, local drama groups, church socials, all of
these were what people did in the evening and weekends before there was
television. This has all declined enormously and been replaced by various
kinds of commercial services, and supreme among them -at least at the moment-
is television.
- Television has two pernicious effects. One is that it keeps people home,
away from participation, and it's very professionally produced, unlike the
union meeting you might otherwise be attending. But seco nd, television is the
most effective producer of cynicism. The news media of all kinds produce only
one kind of news -bad news. The basic bias of the media is not a left or a
right bias but a bad new bias. The plane that lands is not news, the plane
that crashes is news, kids going to school is not news, what happened up in
Scotland is news, I could simplify this ad nauseam. But I think television is
a more effective communicator of bad news. If you get it in the newspaper, you
know that somebody else is telling you, some reporter or commentator, and if
that goes against your prejudices, you can dismiss it. But if you see it on
the tube, you see a picture, and people think they are seeing reality, that
they're seeing things that are really happening. Now of course, as we all
know, it couldn't be easier to doctor an image, but I think that it is this
visceral impact of television, together with the bad news bias, that feeds
this sense of malaise and unhappiness that pervades public opinion, this sense
that nothing works and all the leaders are corrupt. The endless drumbeat that
there is no point to anything -it's very hard for politicians to counter that.
They're up against extremely powerful structural forces, which are not the
product of bad people doing bad things, but are the product of institutional
changes that we do not know how to counter. In fact, the only suggestions for
countering them have been calls for increased social control, and for
censorship, moves to tell the press and television that they can't publish
certain things.
- It is a real major problem. I don't think we can go back to the town
meeting, to the idea of civil society. Whether we can find functional
substitutes for it is something for us to discuss. Whether there are
electronic mechanisms that are feasible or worth arguing about I'm dubious.
But certainly it is because of these technologies that people are asking if we
can carry on practicing democracy the same old way. Ross Perot proposes a
system for issues and debates and decision by direct vote and argues that you
could replace Congress by doing this. There has recently been much publicity
in the US about a Public Television project which involved drawing random
samples of the population and asking them their opinions of what should be
done. Since there is such a serious problem we should not dismiss these
things.
2. DISCUSSION ARISING
Richard
Flint
- I'd like to respond to what you were saying about unions. I think there is
a historic perspective we need to introduce here: that is that parties
and unions play certain roles at certain stages of social development. The
example I immediately thought of when you mentioned the Austrian Social
Democrats in the 20s is the Korean unions today. The big expanding transport
union for example, it has over 500,000 transport workers, more than there are
in Britain. Every year the Korean transport union has sports days with teams
from all over the country. Gala events that are attended by huge numbers of
people. In Korea then, the union plays much more of the role that the Social
Democrats played in Europe in the 20s and 30s. From what I know of the union
movement in certain parts of Africa and India, there are similar kinds of
organizations.
- The other point I want to make is about representative and direct
democracy. I want to go back to my old syndicalist roots here and argue for a
third option, a direct delegate democracy, based not on representative
elections every 4 years nor referendum every 6 months, but the principle of
mass meetings that elect delegates with mandates. So unlike Ross Perot or the
TV poll, people do actually have to come to meetings, they have to discuss,
decide and deliberate on their position, and the delegate then has to take
that position on. And if that delegate turns out to be following another
agenda then they can be recalled.
- Now those are the principles of trade union democracy. But I think
it's fair to admit that it failed, both in this country and in many
countries. The turn out at union branch meetings is abysmal. The present
National Secretary of the dockers in the Transport & General Workers Union
comes from a dockers' family, his father was a docker, his grandfather a
docker, and when he was 13 years-old in the 50s, his father took him his first
a branch meeting. It was a rite of passage, and it was packed, and people
really did debate the issues of the day. Now today, all those people are
unemployed any way, but you don't get that kind of turn out or that kind of
vitality.
- Now within the trade unions we are debating what we can do to bring
people back into the movement. We think back to the past. Before
television there was radio and radio had a huge impact on politics back then
just as television does today. Except of course, that when people were
listening to the radio they were listening to the kind of things that get done
at meetings, there was discussion, and there was also music too. My argument
on television would be that rather than saying television is a bad thing we
should be thinking about how we can use televisual elements to encourage
people to come back into meetings. That's where the world wide web comes in.
The world wide web is the only thing yet invented that will encourage
people to turn off the TV. They may be looking at pornography or Star Trek
sites, they may be wasting their time as much as they waste it when they watch
TV, but what we're actually seeing is people turning off the television and
surfing the net instead. And what's really exciting is that the web is only
just beginning. You can now do a black & white video conference on the
internet. The image isn't great, but we're getting there. I think there's a
real chance that through the use of new technology people can be involved in
debate and discussion without going to meetings. And I don't mean people who
don't want to go out but people who cannot go out at all such as disabled
people or people with children. If the technology provides the opportunity for
these people to participate then that must be good.
Seymour Martin
Lipset
- Now I know we're only in the beginning stages of the web, and the impact
that the computer will have on the political process, but what do you say to
the observation that the use of the computer is still bound up with class,
that the better educated, the more well-to-do have the access. How many of
dockers are actually on the world wide web?
Richard Flint
- Funnily enough quite a few of them are! The first industrial dispute to
have a web page of its own has been the Merseyside dockers' strike.
There's a page on the world wide web about it. Not all the striking dockers
access that page of course, but they'll see print outs from it.
Arthur Lipow
- Now this raises the whole issue of national telecommunications &
information policy. I agree with Marty about the class bias. Even in the
US where the telephone rates are much cheaper and the internet is more
widespread, the class bias goes very deep in the adoption of new technologies.
But what we have to see is that this is a matter for public policy to effect.
Here in Britain we shouldn't have to put up with what BT charge. It's the same
with Murdoch and the Americanization of news coverage. It doesn't have to
happen. Parties and unions need to be discussing the kind of structure and
organization of the media that would promote better public access.
Patrick Seyd
- In terms of the crisis of political institutions and parties, I do think
that what has been happening recently with the Perot phenomenon in the US
and the Berlusconi phenomenon in Italy is of very considerable importance
indeed. As a result of voter volatility and the crisis in institutions, here
you have particular individuals, who have access to money and access to the
media, and they are able to create what they call parties virtually over
night.
- Now I don't think we can assume it would never happen here. I was just
reading King & Crewe's book about the demise of the SDP. They
conclude at the end that the resilience of the established party system was
the reason why the SDP failed. They actually say "the SDP was fated to fail".
I can't go along with that degree of determinism. To be fair, they do give
credit to Neil Kinnock and the way the Labour Party was able to adapt and I
think that's right. But what they don't pick up on is the character of the SDP
as a political party. It was essentially created as a highly centralized
political party that would by-pass political activism. All they wanted was the
credit-card paying members. They didn't organize in terms of constituencies,
they organized in terms of areas. Look at the way David Owen ended the party,
by public announcement in one fell swoop. I'm sure this top-down
do-as-you're-told character of the party was a factor in the SDP's fate.
Roland Wales
- I don't think the party system in this country was as important to the
demise of the SDP as the electoral system. If we had a different
electoral system in this country, then the SDP would not necessarily have
disappeared. The other thing to remember is that whilst the SDP has
disappeared, a lot of what the SDP stood for has not. Much of what it stood
for has come back, and you can hear echoes of early SDP rhetoric in Tony
Blair's speeches today. But I think the SDP would have been forced to revisit
its structure if you'd had PR and it had done better in elections and posed
more of a threat to the Labour Party.
- The electoral system is also shaping the outlook for Goldsmith's
Referendum Party. This has very similar elements to Berlusconi. Here's a
party that's the product of one man, and he's got a lot of money, and he can
make the party work. Now if we had a PR system, Goldsmith would be able to win
seats in Parliament and promote his agenda that way. But in the UK it works by
changing the political debate, and by forcing the major parties to respond to
your issue or even to embrace it. And I think that's what we'll see with the
Goldsmith party. But at the same time, I think these media parties are an
important new feature of politics in the electronic age. We've seen rich men
discover that for -what is to them- a relatively small amount of money, you
can create your own party. I think this is something we'll see more of and
that the major parties will have to adapt to.
- Responding to what was said earlier, I'd like to comment on the general
theme of changes at work, the end of occupational communities and the
atomization of society... I do think that there are some trends that will have
to be embraced within a program for democratic renewal, and one is the growth
of part-time work. To my mind the biggest challenge to unions today is how to
organize such a vast and disparate workforce.
- As for television, I think it reflects the changes that are going
on in the wider society, the kind of atomizing processes that are so apparent
in the family, in the workplace, and in the demise of community. I'm not
saying TV can't be beneficial, but right now, its influence is definitely
malign. Out there I think there's more and more the view that governments,
unions, organizations of all kinds, can't do very much. Well that's
nonsense! We know it's nonsense because we've all seen governments make
extraordinary changes. Look at what the Conservatives did with monetary policy
as a guiding principle in the 1980s. So the fatalistic message of the media is
wrong, but it is the one that gets home. We ask why people don't participate
and it's because they believe that the people they elect cannot do very
much.
- Let me make two points about solutions. I think there are two general
kinds of problems we have to think about here, and so far we've only mentioned
one. The first is the structural problem, which is what was addressed
in the presentation, and concerns the crisis of democracy and of parties.
There the question is how do you provide mechanisms of participation? and
there are a range of proposals, from delegate democracy to referendum and so
on. But the other problem is the information access problem. It's one
thing to have the world wide web, but we know that much of the information of
the web is rubbish, and you have to put an enormous amount of search time into
finding good information or pay an enormous fee to an information provider. I
think one of the prime opportunities for parties is that they could provide
information quickly and efficiently to people. It's especially important to
the provision of alternative viewpoints. People have access to the consensus
all the time. Unions and parties need to find a way to provide an alternative
focus, of finding ways to reflect the real variety of views out there. But
it's about more than just content. We have to think about how information is
packaged and used. It's striking how much easier it is in this country to find
out information about consumer products like washing machines than it is to
find about economic or social policy or welfare. For one you go pick up a copy
of Which magazine, but for the other you'd have to read books and magazines
and articles, to say nothing of all the time on research and analysis. I think
this information gap should worry us just as much as what you might call the
structural gap.
Peter Skerry
- On the subject of political organization and communities, the Christian
Coalition comes to mind. Their experience -as far as I know of it- would seem
to counter a lot of this. They're not personality-driven, they're very
grassroots, institution-building type organizations. I'm wondering if we
really don't have things to learn from them?
Richard Flint
- Yes, and lets us not forget that other religiously-based organization that
is having tremendous influence in more than one country -the Islamic
Brotherhood.
Quinten Lide
- Well the Christian Coalition do have powerful state organizations that
participate in state and local elections. Many of those have a similar
structure to Perot. It think it does depend on personalities to drive
it.
Arthur Lipow
- My impression is that it's a highly top-down organization. The churches
may lend a participatory element to it, but it's not democracy. It's very
authoritarian.
Peter Skerry
- But it is congregational. These are not the kind of folks who come
together easily. Neither do they take orders very well.
Seymour
Martin Lipset
- There's no doubt that strong parties need organizational bases! Look at
Europe, look at the US. Where you find the Social Democrats in Europe, where
you found the Socialist party in the US, was where the unions are strong. Of
course, there was also a heavy ethnic overlay...
Arthur Lipow
- This is where we have to introduce the idea of political culture
into the discussion. I think there is still a very strong political culture in
this country. As Lewis Meakin argues in his book about the Labour Party
conference, Labour is still a movement very much bound up in its grassroots.
If those grassroots hadn't been there, then the Thatcherite assault on British
labour might have wiped the unions out, as the Reagan assault did in the
US.
Roger Hough
- I think we have to be wary about the way we use the term
"democracy". We use it to mean so many different things. Take membership
participation in union ballots. Ordinary members might get names, photographs,
a speel to read. But they have no idea who these people are. The whole game is
to read between the lines of the speel to see if these people are who they
claim to be -and many of them can't do that because they're not all that
clever at reading these things. Now the participation isn't very high and it's
very costly, but it does look as if every one's been given the chance to get
involved. I wonder if many politicians actually want mass participation to
go much further. As they see it, the whole thing is a lottery unless you've
got mechanisms to influence people. And this is the way it used to be in
party meetings. But going the whole way over to direct mass balloting, I don't
think many of them would see that as the answer.
Roland Wales
- The other problem with direct balloting is that you have to have
just the right question. Many issues do not lend themselves to easy summary
one way or the other. So it's much easier for politicians to have one big
referendum on everything with an election than keep going to the people on
every issue.
Patrick Seyd
- I was very struck by the work you did Roland with the National Policy
Forum. I remember I was fortunate enough to be sitting in on a discussion
of the minimum wage in a workshop in Reading. It was a very different kind of
Labour Party from the one we're used to. I was in the same group as the leader
of the GMB John Edmonds. Here was a heavy weight national union leader, but he
wasn't pushing his weight around, he was ready to let people have their say.
The quality of debate among the 15 people there was quite extraordinary. That
sense of people coming with positions and then modifying them in the cut and
thrust of debate was quite exhilarating. I think it's vitally important the
Labour Party sustains this. I think that's one of the real dangers in the move
toward one-man one- vote. I'm all for the convenience of direct balloting. I
like the idea that I get to vote on the membership of the NEC. At the same
time, I think there is a very real danger of devaluation of the
activist.
Roland Wales
- Yes, the other danger with direct balloting is that it can easily lead to
the election of the candidate with the most money. Right now every one has the
same space in the booklet that goes to members but they don't have the same
space in the local press. I think this kind of direct democracy does lend
itself to manipulation by people at the top.
Roger Hough
- Well, there again, in the actual election process, parties spend far more
time hassling people to actually go out and vote than they do trying to
persuade them to vote a certain way.
Seymour Martin Lipset
- But people at the bottom will never have an equal chance to influence
policy! That's what leadership is for. Your only alternative is to go back to
the Greek system and the Athenian Senate, and appoint assemblies by random
sample.
Richard Flint
- Well I think we have to come back and focus on the links between trade
unions and parties. As you say, if you look, the stronger Social
Democratic parties -and especially those in Scandinavia- are those which have
had the strongest ties to the unions, while the weaker ones -those in Southern
Europe- are those that have had weaker ties or have never had ties at all. In
this regard, I'm very concerned with what the Labour Party is doing these
days, trying to weaken its ties to the trade unions. I think it could be a
very dangerous move. Just this last week the party unilaterally tore up the
Hastings Agreement (the agreement covering trade union sponsorship of Labour
MPs). Now there used to be a rule -not much enforced, but a rule nonetheless-
that if you wanted join the Labour Party you had to be a member of a union. In
fact, we were debating the merits of it at my branch meeting the other week. I
will admit -as most of them would- that we can't go back to the good old days,
when I think unions did have too much say through the block vote. But I am
worried about rushing too fast to the opposite extreme. Yes, it's true that
Labour Party membership is up, but attendance at our ward meetings is not, and
believe me, we do try to bring the new members in. The most important point is
that parties must be about more than membership, they must be coming to
meetings or doing barbecues or stuffing envelopes, because if they lose that
culture, if they suddenly become direct debit to Tony Blair associations, then
I think we're doomed.
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