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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

democrat deficit « Previous | |Next »
June 30, 2009

In this post at public opinion I wrote:

For the Greenhouse mafia the effective operation of a democratic political system requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups. For them a crisis of democracy can occur when the populace becomes too well-informed about the true goals and motivations of its politicians, government and corporations. Participatory democracy and active citizenship are to be resisted because limits need to be placed on popular sovereignty in order to remove people from decision-making.

The other side of this democratic deficit is the increasing power of the executive branch in contemporary democracies, and the corresponding loss of power by the legislature. Saskia Sassen in The new executive politics: a democratic challenge at Open Democracy says that this trend of the entrenchment of executive power and its deepening asymmetry with legislative authority is evident across western-style liberal democracies, is the result of a deep process at work that begins in the 1980s with the implementation of neo-liberal policies across historic left-right political divides and can be tracked through six longer-term structural trends. These are structural developments within the liberal state resulting from the implementation of a global corporate economy.
The first trend is the growing power of particular state agencies because of corporate economic globalisation: the treasury, the federal reserve, the office of the trade representative, and other agencies in the case of the US. These and equivalent institutions in other countries played a major role in building this global corporate economy - it was not just an achievement of "the free market". Their growing power in turn empowered the executive branch.

The second trend is that the policies associated with this incorporation of national economies into the global corporate economy (deregulation and privatisation):
on the one hand remove various oversight functions from legislatures, and on the other actually add power to the executive branch. This power gain happens through the establishment of specialised commissions for finance, telecommunications, trade policy, and the other key building-blocks of the new economy. In other words, the oversight functions lost by congress reappear as specialised commissions, mostly staffed by people from the concerned industries in the private sector.

The third trend is that intergovernmental networks centred largely in the executive branch have grown well beyond matters of global security and criminality.
The participation by the state in the implementation of a worldwide economic system has engendered a range of new types of cross-border collaborations among specialised government agencies; these focus on the globalisation of capital markets, international standards of all sorts, competition policy, guarantees of contract for global firms, and the new trade order.

The fourth trend is the major global regulators - notably the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation, as well as many lesser known ones - negotiate only with the executive branch.
As the global corporate economy began to grow from the 1980s, these global regulators (pre-existing, or emerging) gained enormous power. This too was a dynamic and self-reinforcing process. By around 2006, when corporate globalisation had been more or less completed, their power was beginning to wane. But the institutional changes that had consolidated the executive branch were in place - and most (such as the specialised commissions referred to above) are there still.

The fifth trend is that a critical component of post-1980s economic deregulation is the privatisation of formerly public functions (such as prisons and the outsourcing of some welfare functions to private providers) The results is to reduce the oversight role of the legislature while increasing that of the executive branch through specialised commissions. The sixth trend is the alignment of the executive with global corporate logics in a range of domains.

Though the neo-liberal model may have been discredited by the financial implosion of 2007-09,it has had profound effects on the internal operations of national states in that our political institutions give the public little, if any, real influence over policy. Colin Crouch argues that we have now entered an epoch of ‘post-democracy', within which the established institutions of democratic representation do not function to represent or to enact effectively the collective will of the citizenry.

While modern democracies are keeping up the facade of formal democratic principles, politics and government are increasingly slipping back into the control of corporate elites in the manner characteristic of pre-democratic times.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:50 PM |