Masses be damned, their wishes never mattered!

Why it is that democracy as a system of governance has such an incredible appeal to most people? Is it simply because that after centuries of tyranny, genocide, warfare and colonisation, a democratic political framework promised to champion rule of law and individual rights?

Perhaps, we have came to admire its relative superiority over monarchy or autocracy because we believe that such political arrangements are better guarded to protect the interest of communities and masses instead of serving specific individuals or elites.

What is the exact promise of democracy?

A difficult question to answer but a sincere reflection of such inquiries will help us understand what a democratic system of governance ought to be.

Democracy: the theory and the ideals!

At the heart of its core promise remains the predominance of rule of law and individual rights, and the fine balance between the freedoms that citizens avail and the liberties that they submit to the nation state for benefiting from social order, security and public goods.

The focus on individual rights is central as democracies should always ensure that it never transforms into the 'tyranny of majority'. But the promise of democracy does not stop here. The very idea is also instrumentally concerned with empowering citizens with the power to decide not only who governs, but how they govern.

On the question of who governs, Karl Popper perhaps best illustrated what democracy should have: a political arrangement where the people can oust their leader without the need for a revolution.

And on the question of how people in charge govern, two issues have dominated theoretical discourse. Firstly, democracies must put in place safe guards so that those who are in charge of the republic are accountable by law plus checks and balances.

Montes ques doctrine on the separation of power sought to achieve that end by ensuring no organ of the state enjoys absolute power. Secondly, democracies must ensure that those who are in charge of the government articulate laws and policies that best represent the will of the masses. Thus, the economic system that must be either supported or facilitated by a democratic political order should ensure that the interest of the many overrides the interest of the few.

Of course, this system of governance, envisioned to distribute power more broadly and aimed to offer average citizens an influence on laws and policies that shaped their lives, faced two distinct threats overtime.

Elites become grumpy!

The first obvious threat came from an organised coalition of elites who, frustrated with their limited influence on state craft, re-imposed the old tyrannical order through their collective military and financial strength. The annals of history, in this context, have documented far too many episodes where numerous republics were crushed through coup d'état or civil war, and were replaced with constitutional monarchy or autocratic military regime. The most infamous historical example is the eventual death of the Roman Republic and the subsequent emergence of the Roman Empire under Emperor Augustus.

The second source of threat to democracy is, however, more nuanced, which remains difficult to both identify and rectify. It typically emerges from the powerful quarters of the society, who are not interested in overthrowing the representative political order.

Rather, they are interested in manipulating the institutional arrangement in a way that the representative political order produces socio-economic outcomes that favours the elites over the interest of the masses.

In fact, it is a fallacy to imagine that democracy only faces threat from organised power who tries to replace the 'representative political arrangement' with an authoritarian entity.

The contemporary threat to democratic politics, especially within consolidated democracies, is more subtle and given the unique nature of the threat, it is not necessary that those entities who are trying to dominate the political space are trying to overthrow a representative or an elected political system.

If the charade of people power work then…

Hence, ordinary citizens are more likely to be misguided and manipulated into thinking that they have a voice in their political system, when in reality they effectively live within captured polities.

An obvious indicator to measure or infer an understanding of the extent elites have captured a political institutions is to see how inequality or concentration of wealth has evolved over time. Late US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis perhaps best explained this idea when he famously noted, "…we may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both".

For obvious reasons, there is a need to urgently evaluate if the extreme level of inequality that we see across Europe and North America (especially in the United States), which is not only categorised as an oasis of democracy but also the summit of economic prosperity, is a product of state capture by groups with whom economic wealth is concentrated or not.

Also a scientific examination of policies that are preferred by the economic elite is needed. We need to scrutinise if policies that are favoured by the majority find more traction in electoral democracies, given (theoretically) electoral politics should compel any political class to give voice to the majority in deciding the overall economic policies that are eventually chosen.

This inquiry is pertinent since there is a genuine concern that the institutional environment within a large set of consolidated democracies predominantly favour the economic elite, silently ignoring voices that call for greater equity or social justice. Some evidence also validates this concern.

In US, for instance, a path-breaking study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page – Professor of Politics at Princeton University and Professor of Decision Making at Northwestern University– of more than 1750 policies that are preferred by different groups (average citizens vs. economic elites) and their subsequent adoption by US Government between 1981 and 2002 – notes that, 'ordinary citizens get what they want from government only when they happen to agree with elites or interest groups that are really calling the shots'.

In fact, their examination shows (detailed out in figure-1) that even if every 'average citizen' in the sample displayed their preference for a particular policy, it carried only a 30% chance of being adopted. On the other hand, if none of the 'average citizen' in their sample preferred a policy, that (least liked) policy too had a 30% chance of being adopted by the US government. Broadly speaking, the evidence underscores that policies that benefit from majority preference had no additional traction in the US Government, and (on average) benefited from no superior likelihood of being considered for adoption.

In contrast, figure-1 also shows that if a particular policy is preferred by all members of the economic elite (in the sample), then it has an approximately 60% chance of being adopted. Further, if no one within the economic elite prefer a policy, then it has almost nil chance of being adopted. On the whole, the authors argue that their, "analysis indicates that economic elite and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."

These political dynamics also correspond well with the economic reality of US, where economic inequality has persistently increased over the last three decades, and at present – the top 0.1% (yes, top 0.1% and not 1%) owns as much wealth as bottom 90% (Figure-2).

The mind-boggling social disparity!

Of course, US is not the only political space where one can question if electoral politics is coexisting with mass disenfranchisement. The current degree of inequality in the world (and also across Europe, India, and etc.), where according to Oxfam 8 people have more wealth than 3.6 billion people – poses the question if global and national institutions are manipulated and captured by corporations and organised economic elite to create a 'policy eco-system' that only favors the survival of policies that are designed and advocated by them.

Furthermore, there is an urgency with which we must recognise this new kind of predatory corporate capitalism radically challenging our political system. The noted decay in the political system and the lack of voice people have in their respective countries cannot be viewed in isolation.

This mass disenfranchisement in the West and across many consolidated democracies is largely engineered by 'organised power' that constitutes three crucial actors – the "advanced financial industry", the old guards within the "extractive industry", and the "industrial military establishment"– forming the unholy trinity.

Thus, those who are concerned with the quality of politics in consolidated democracies must understand that the world is no longer only facing the simple, old rivalries of US vs China or West vs Islam and etc. but the competing interest of transnational and national corporate oligarchs and how they disenfranchise masses in so called 'advanced democracies'.

Hence, the challenge for us is to understand this 'new threat' and identify the exact nature of an 'effective political system' that can best protect us from its' infinite thirst for power and wealth.

Unfortunately, most of us do not really understand this new world that we have created, and this lack of understanding has fueled the endurance of this dismal political phenomenon that we are witnessing.