In these Papers I have been following the advice that Don Fabrizio Gerbéra, principe di Salina, famously gave to his son when he learned of Garibaldi’s invasion of his beloved Sicilia: “If things are going to remain the same here, they going to have to change.” (de Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo).  The name we have given to that change, faute de mieux, is “alter-liberal” – not illiberal and certainly not anti-liberal.

Having recognized the transformations that earlier liberalism introduced into the practice of democracy in order to make it compatible with larger polities and urban-industrial economies, we are proposing analogous ones to make it compatible with the present context of globalization and finance capitalism – while keeping personal freedoms, citizen participation and ruler accountability constant.

What, then, do we mean by “alter-liberal democracy” (ALD) and how might it be practiced at the level of the European Union?  

The defining principle of liberalism has always been “individual freedom” – defined negatively as the absence of obligations, restrictions or regulations imposed by arbitrary authorities. Individuals are enjoined not to engage voluntarily in behavior that will harm others and citizens may be compelled collectively to pay taxes, serve in the military and, of course, obey the rule of law – but only when the obligations are legitimately imposed and functionally necessary. 

The defining principle of alter-liberalism would retain the criteria of legitimacy and functionality, but stress the positive importance of “collective freedom” or the desirability of inserting obligations, restrictions and regulations that are necessary to attain positive goals (“public goods”) for the polity as a whole and that have been chosen according to the legitimate consent of the citizenry. Democracy would change from being a form of government designed negatively to protect citizens (and, sometimes, denizens) from tyranny to one in which they would be obligated to contribute positively to using public authority for the attainment of goals that would (perhaps, only eventually) benefit them collectively but would not be otherwise produced by market competition or social obligation.

Following a generic definition of liberal democracy as “a political regime in which rulers are held accountable for their actions in the public sphere by citizens acting collectively through the competition and cooperation of their representatives,”[1] I will focus on three key elements: citizens, representatives and rulers. 

Citizens

The formal criteria for this status have become relatively standard across world regions: citizens are ‘national,’ whether by residence at time of birth or descent from a previously national parent,[2] who attain a specific age, regardless of their gender, religion, ethnicity, ‘previous condition of servitude’ or sexual preference – and they have equal political rights.  There are a number of ‘marginal’ issues still to be resolved, such as the exact age of entitlement, the treatment of legal foreign residents (denizens), the voting rights of ex-patriates and, especially in the US, the eligibility of former convicted felons.  None of these, however resolved, is likely to lead to ALD.  What is needed is to provide incentives for citizens to exercise their rights to participate more frequently and consequentially – and not to yield to the temptation to “free-ride” on the contribution of their fellow citizens.

The following are some potential reforms within the EU that might contribute to this objective.[3]

1. Universal citizenship: all persons legally born as citizens within a given territory should be granted the right to vote at the moment of birth, even if this right would be exercised by his/her parent or guardian until the moment of formal/legal maturity.[4]
2. Rewarded Voting: all citizens who have voted consistently in two or more elections to the European Parliament would be awarded a voucher equivalent to the average daily salary in the member-state in which they are voting.[5]
3. Electoral Lotteries: Each citizen upon voting would be given a lottery ticket, the winners of which would be announced along with the winners of the election.  The winning sum would be subsequently contributed by the selectees to public agencies or non-profit institutions of their choice.
4. “Smart Voting:” Citizens should be offered the opportunity to be able to match their preferences on a number of salient public issues with the responses of all electoral candidates for election to the European Parliament.  And, in an expanded version, citizens could be kept informed of the subsequent voting behavior of their elected representatives on these same issues.[6]
5. Postal and Electronic Voting: Citizens should be given the opportunity to vote at home or work by postal ballot or electronic message during a reasonably protracted period which would allow them time to make a larger number of decisions and even to reverse their choices within the allotted time.[7]

Representatives

Under this rubrique, ALD at the EU level could accomplish even more.  It is to this realm of representation that most of the discontent generated by citizen mistrust and anomie can be traced. Whether they are elected, selected or self-appointed, all representatives are subject to the same dilemma, captured by Peter Maier, between being expected to both be responsive to their constituency and responsible to the polity as a whole.[8]  The developments noted above in the context of contemporary liberal democracies have strongly tilted this choice in favor of the latter.  Even more damaging has been the fact that ‘responsible’ policy-making has more and more often been defined in supra-national terms, i.e. by the alleged imperatives of a globalized economic order with its ‘guardian institutions’ being trans-national industrial and financial enterprises along with their protective international organizations: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization – not to mention the innumerable regulatory agencies of the European Union.

The thrust of efforts at improving representation should be devoted, first and foremost, to rendering more equal the access of citizens to a greater variety of forms of collective action; second, to re-establishing the balance between responsiveness and responsibility; and third, to making those elected or selected more accountable for their actions.

1. NOTA Voting: In every EP election, there should be a ‘fictitious’ candidate: “None of The Above.”  Should this candidate win, the result of the election would be nullified and repeated until NOTA loses and a ‘real-existing’ candidate wins.[9]
2. Vouchers for Funding Political Parties: In every EP election, citizens would be offered a voucher for a fixed sum to be paid to the party of his or her choice. Other ‘private’ or ‘public’ sources of funding should be restricted in amount; vouchers for the NOTA candidate would go to a fund for supporting new parties; un-allocated vouchers would be distributed according to the proportions established by the allocated ones.[10]
3. Transferable, Intensity Voting: Citizens should be allowed to express the intensity of their preference for competing candidates.  They could be given, say, 100 points to distribute across the eligible candidates and their preferences for a losing candidate should be transferred to the next most preferred.[11]
4. Shared Mandates: Parties should have the option of presenting two candidates for any single elected position, and they should be free to determine the criterion to apply when making this choice: man-woman, old-young, moderate-radical e così via.[12]
5. Compulsory and equal access to television during elections: As a condition for receiving a license to broadcast on a given frequency, by satellite or by cable, every television or radio station (public or private) would be required to offer free air time to all parties competing in EP elections, with the thresholds, times and frequencies to be decided by normal legislation at each level of government.  These stations would also be prohibited from broadcasting paid party announcements outside of a designated period for campaigning.[13]
6. Obligatory Disclosure: All candidates for elected or selected positions of public authority should be required – under oath – to disclose their income, wealth and tax payment as a condition for initially being eligible for office and, subsequently, if elected or selected, as an obligation upon leaving office.[14]
7.  A European  Citizens’ Assembly: A month-long annual meeting of randomly selected citizens, perhaps, based on the lottery advocated above would be convened to review one or two drafts of bills assigned to it by a dissident group of legislators (say, composed of 1/3 or 1/4 of them) and have the power to reject or, at the least, to suspend the application of these bills.[15]

Rulers and Rules

In this regard, proponents of ALD face a difficult paradox: on the one hand, liberal democratic theory has firmly established majority voting by elected representatives – even in some instances like the EU, “qualified majority voting” – as the appropriate decision rule for approving laws and choosing rulers.[16]  On the other hand, the actual practices of most liberal democracies are replete with non-majoritarian devices. The simple reason for this is that “one person may equal one vote” in principle, but these same persons in practice are likely to have very different intensities of preference for different public choices.  So, citizens with strong preferences (and especially those with greater material resources) form a myriad of associations and movements that intervene in the process of making binding decisions.

One major source of the decline in the role of traditional civil society organizations involved in the protection and promotion of class, sectoral and professional interests – trade unions, business, employer and professional associations – is the growing anomie present in large segments of the population due to the individualization of life (and especially of work) experience.  More and more persons find themselves in “ambiguous interest situations” without any clear reference group to rely upon.  While there are signs of some revival of affiliation and mobilization in social movements advocating public action with regard to some single issue or cause, these rarely address the need for basic reform in rules and practices. Once satisfied (even symbolically), they usually disband or become routinized components of ‘normal’ local, provincial or national politics. Whatever their sometimes exaggerated initial intentions, these movements cannot be expected to contribute much to the creation of an alternative, alter-liberal type of democracy – least of all, at the European level.

1. Freedom of Information Acts: All governing institutions should be required to make public all relevant information about their respective processes of decision-making (including dissenting opinions), and should be required to provide annual reports on the process of implementation of their policies.[17]
2. These institutions – staffed by allegedly independent experts – have increasingly beenassigned responsibility for making policy in areas which politicians have decided are too controversial or complex to be left to the vicissitudes of electoral competition or inter-party legislative struggle. All of these un-democratic agencies: central banks, regulatory agencies, electoral commissions, accounting offices, e così via should submit their annual reports for approval to a special expert monitoring commission at the EU level created jointly by all parties in the European Parliament.[18]
3. This is the indigestible label for a formal-legal practice of the Swiss parliament that was supposed to guarantee that all associations and movements who declare an interest in a given draft policy proposal would not only receive information about the decision-making process with regard to it, but also be entitled to testify before the relevant parliamentary committees. In contemporary parlance, this has been called governance. Under its auspices, there have developed an incredible variety of (usually informal) sites for deliberations and negotiations between public and private actors.  These have been extended to the level of EU policy-making, but their deliberations remain secretive. 

A Problematic Conclusion

Needless to say, not all of these proposed reforms in citizenship, representation and government are equally “alter-liberal” in inspiration or likely impact. They may not even be compatible with each other. The best one can hope for in our “post-revolutionary” era is incremental and piecemeal experimentation, probably beginning at the local level which, if successful, could subsequently be “scaled up” to national and supra-national levels. This might convert the vague spectre of alter-liberal democracy into something more like a credible alternative.

Philippe Schmitter
Emeritus Professor
European University Institute

Comments

Readers are welcome to send comments to egpp@eui.eu. Comments will be reviewed before publication below and will include the name of the author.

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[1] Philippe C. Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl, “What Democracy is and is Not,” Journal of Democracy, Vol 2 No. 3 (Summer 1991), pp. 25-88. 

[2] Plus a few who are “naturalized” subsequently.

[3] Some of these have been developed in the context of a working group of academics and politicians under the auspices of the Council of Europe and are discussed in greater detail in Philippe C. Schmitter and Alexandre Trechsel, eds., The Future of Democracy in Europe” Trends, Analyses and Reforms (Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, 2004).

[4] NB The objective of this proposal would be to correct for the growing demographic bias in contemporary LDs due not just to the relative increase in the proportion of elderly citizens, but their much greater likelihood of voting. It also should encourage inter-generational communication about political issues and (perhaps) transmission of political identities.

[5] NB This would only be feasible if voting were to be become exclusively electronic (Proposal 6), since the citizen’s national taxpayer number would be the one element needed to identify his or her having voted.

[6] NB This has already been implemented on an experimental basis with considerable success in both national and European elections.  It definitely increases interest in the contest and introduces a measure of fun into the electoral process.  The addition of a feed-back option would presumably contribute to holding representatives more accountable.   

[7] NB This is already rapidly expanding in many national and sub-national elections and both seem to encourage higher levels of turnout. Most importantly in relation to several of the other PLD proposals, they would permit citizens to devote more time and thought to the act of voting.

[8] Peter Maier, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy (New York: Verso, 2oi3).

[9] NB The obvious intent here is to encourage participation by those who would otherwise not vote given the absence of any candidate that appeals to him or her. There is some experience with this innovation.  India and Nevada seem to be the leading cases, but in both only a very small percentage of those voting chose this option.  In neither case, however, was it specified that a new election would have been held if NOTA had won.

[10] NB Public-funding for political parties has become a regular feature of many LDs, although it relies on the manifestly oligarchic device of using previous electoral results as its distributive principle.  Placing the funding in the hands of citizens and allowing them to allocate a voucher even to a party or parties that they did not vote for would substantially change the practice. Vouchers that were not earmarked for any existing party would go to a fund for the financing of new ones (upon petition).

[11] NB Under this system, all of the votes cast in a first-past-the post-election would make some contribution to the eventual result.

[12] NB The profession of politician (and it is becoming more and more professional) is very demanding in time and erratic in substance which discourages the recruitment of persons who value retaining a private family or occupational career. Sharing the position (and its salary) might contribute to widening the pattern of recruitment of potential candidates.

[13] NB Something like this already exists in many European countries (par conditio), but without the prohibition from broadcasting privately funded propaganda at any time.  One objective of this proposal is also to bring down the cost of elections as well as to equalize access to mass media.

[14] NB The first aspect of this proposal has become a customary practice in most REDs and a few NEDs, although to my knowledge it is not a legal obligation.  The latter component does not yet exist, but should contribute both to inhibiting corruption and improving the confidence of citizens in the honesty of their representatives.

[15] NB To some extent, the existence of such an Assembly would be a more economical and public-regarding substitute for referendums or initiatives – provided that the ear-marked legislative drafts would reflect the concerns of the general public and not those of the inner workings of representative institutions themselves.

[16] Even though, this is a relatively recent (18^th Century) feature of democracy.  The previous assumption (admittedly, for small scale and homogeneous societies) was that decisions would be made by consensus — even to the point that those who persistently dissented could be banished from participating or simply sent into exile. In the case of the EU, the equivalent would mean an established procedure to for expelling member-states.

[17] NB These acts already exist in many member-states and should become a standard practice in all of them.

[18] NB The concept of ‘guardian institutions’ was invented by Robert Dahl in his Democracy and its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 142. He observed that such deliberately un-democratic institutions have increasingly acquired discretionary action over issues that have a major impact upon the lives of citizens. Even more potentially alienating is the fact that some of these guardians are not even national, but operate at the regional or global level – vide the ‘conditionality’ imposed by the IMF or the EU.  In Peter Mair’s terms, the rise of guardianship has been a major factor preventing representatives from acting responsively to the preferences of their constituents by forcing them to act responsibly to the imperatives of their material environment.