Social Welfare and the Failure of the State by Roger Hadley Stephen Hatch

Author:Roger Hadley, Stephen Hatch [Roger Hadley, Stephen Hatch]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138611221
Google: Qf3CygEACAAJ
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Goodreads: 39814398
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1981-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Representative Democracy

Britain’s present system of government can be described as representative democracy. It evolved during the nineteenth century out of the oligarchic government of the eighteenth century, as increasing numbers of people obtained the vote. By the early years of the twentieth century, the political parties, Parliament, Cabinet government and local councils had taken a form which has changed surprisingly little since then. But though the political forms remain the same, during the present century the responsibilities of government have extended out of all recognition. Thus largely unchanged political institutions now preside over an administrative system that has grown many times over.

Under this system the essential link between the people and the state is the political parties. They put forward to the electorate a choice of representatives and programmes, and the process of choosing between the parties serves to influence and legitimise the system. Moreover, at any rate in theory, membership of the political parties offers wide opportunities for closer involvement to the more committed or public-spirited. During recent years the role of the parties has waxed rather than waned: in particular, since local government reorganisation there are now few local authorities where anyone not sponsored by one of the main parties has much chance of being elected.

Given this key role, one might have expected that, as the responsibilities of the state expanded, more and more people would have been drawn into active membership of the parties. But in fact the opposite is true. The clearest evidence of declining involvement comes from the Labour Party. Despite its strong democratic, populist tradition the number of individual members of the Labour Party is now only about a quarter of its peak figure of 1 million in 1950; and the active participants in party affairs have become a dwindling band (Fabian Society, 1980). This makes local branches of the party susceptible to takeover by organised minorities, and means that the number of people involved in the key function of selecting candidates for elections is very small.

What has happened is that, as far as the mass of the voters is concerned, the party struggle has turned into a contest between the national leaders conducted through the national media. It is this, together of course with the actual actions of national government, that influences how people vote, to the exclusion of local events and activities. Voters do exercise a choice between the main parties at general elections: they also use local elections, like national by-elections, to pass interim verdicts on the national government. But the result is that because of this nationalisation of party politics, the representative system as it now operates does not give the mass of the population the chance to express a verdict on the activities of its local politicians. An analysis of ward voting which sought to overturn the conventional view that the results of local elections are determined by national issues indicated that about 7 5 per cent of the swing between local elections was indeed attributable to national factors.

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