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May 10, 2007
Democracy depends on enlightened and educated citizens if it is to function properly. In a liberal democracy it is not necessary for the Commonwealth government to base policy on the democratic will, however enlightened. The government is not a delegate of the people, however much legitimacy is grounded on popular sovereignty.
Liberal democracy is premised on Joseph Schumpeter's understanding of democracy as ‘that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote’. According to Murray Goot in his paper Public Opinion and the Democratic Deficit: Australia and the War Against Iraq in the Australian Humanities Review:
On Schumpeter’s view, voters elect the government and, come the next election, can re-elect it if they choose. The idea of an election as some sort of transmission belt for the voter’s will on almost any issue, including issues of war and peace, was one that Schumpeter dismissed out of hand: ‘national and international affairs’ that lacked a ‘direct and unmistakable link’ with ‘private concerns’, he argued, were matters on which, typically, even the best educated citizens lacked interest, were unqualified to judge, and failed conspicuously to apply the rules of reasoning that governed other aspects of their lives.
Were Australian citizens incapable of judging whether or not to go to war in Vietnam or Iraq? They did not consider themselves to be judging from the polls at the time. There was a public feeling or mood that we citizens were experiencing a decaying of democracy. This is one that is deemed to occur in both the quality of representation of the MPs and the engagement of citizens in government processes.
Mark Garavan says that one way to understand this mood is in terms of the dominance in public discourse of a certain version of economic rationality.
This rationality elevates the functioning of a theoretically imagined free market economy to be the epitome of sound social behaviour. Concepts such as competition, efficiency, free choice, privatisation and many others have been elevated to a non-problematic status as guarantors of prolonged economic growth and social well-being. The logic of the free-market is asserted to be the most rational logic available – anything else becomes, ipso facto, irrational and potentially dysfunctional. The claim made is that each individual pursuing his or her own maximum utility results in optimum social well-being. The State’s role is merely to ensure the best environment within which this rationality can proceed. The consequence however is that the concepts of a particular economic language game have overwhelmed our ability to speak politically in any other credible way. Those who attempt to do so can be charged with being unreasonable, unrealistic, and even dangerous. The effect on public discourse of this ascendancy has been to close down the capacity of public representatives to speak credibly in any other categories.
This neo-liberal rationality contributes to the growing loss of belief in liberal democracy as it delimits the space for citizen engagement at a time when the formal channels of exercising democratic power grounded on votes exercised by citizens has become outflanked by informal channels of influence, resting on financial power and political funding (licit and illicit), by the big corporations.
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