Transcript of Proceedings
UNIVERSITY OF LONDON SEMINAR
Birbeck College
Political Parties and Trade Unions in the Electronic Age
Saturday 16th March 1996

THEMATIC CONTENTS

1. PRESENTATION: voter volatility / falling participation / the growth in movements and what it means for parties / the fate of parties of representation and parties of integration / the importance of factions to democracy in the party / the confidence gap / the pernicious influence of television /

2. DISCUSSION ARISING: a historic perspective on unions / direct delegate democracy / the reality of trade union democracy / the web the only thing yet to get people away from the TV / telecommunications & information policy / Perot and Belusconi / the demise of the SDP / the electoral system / Goldsmith's Referendum party / the view that organizations can't do very much / problems of structure and problems of information access / the idea of political culture / how many politicians really want mass participation? / the problem with direct balloting / the National Policy Forum / the link between the unions and the party /

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1. There's no question, at least to my mind, and I think the evidence is clear, that we're in a transition period with respect to the nature and character of democratic politics. I've always argued, and so have Schumpeter and others, that the key institution of democracy is the political party, that is to say, no parties -no democracy: that the idea of the Soviets, or union democracy, or individuals choosing delegates and so on, that this cannot and does not work in complex societies. So in order to have stable democracy, you have to have institutionalized parties.
   
   
2. One of the conditions of institutionalized parties is that they have to be linked to basic social cleavages in society. The social cleavage that's best known in the traditional stable democratic world, although of recent it's been declining, has been social class. Back when I did Political Man you could divide up every country by where its parties stood on the axis of class, and in the many different ways of class, not just the economic. Today it's very different. One of the problems of some of the newer democracies in the ex-communist countries is that they have not yet been able to hook into their embryonic party cleavages. The Communists have a particular problem that has never existed before: that the party of the old ruling class is still around, but it is also the party that has an ideology representing the lower class, and given the way the changes have been working out, the old ruling class party is still able to get lower class support! It makes it very difficult to see what the nature of class struggle will be in the post-communist world. But there's no question, you need parties, and parties need social cleavages.
   
   
3. Now if you look around the democratic world today, you will see that while conditions vary from country to country, there are some negative trends that are happening in almost all countries, and it is these I would like to talk about today.
   
   
4. One of them is voter volatility. It used to be that could predict how someone was going to vote from the way they had voted last time, and while you can still do this, you can't do it as reliably as you used to. People shift much more readily from one party to another today. Now you might argue this is a good thing, that people nowadays are more responsive to information about candidates and issues. But I would argue that a necessary condition of stable democracy is that the major parties have an important following of people who are uncritically loyal. If people shifted freely from one party to another at election times you would have parties wiped out. The Republican Party in the United States would have been wiped out in 1932 as the Party of the Depression. Major parties need that 30% of the vote that allows them to go into opposition and begin on the long road back to government again. It's a condition for constituting an institutionalized competitive party system. But suddenly in the last decade we're beginning to see parties that do get wiped out. The most extreme example occurred in Canada in 1993 when the Conservative Party, the founding party of the country, went from a governing majority to 2 seats. In Italy, the two founding parties of post- war democracy, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, no longer exist.
   
   
5. A second trend is that voter participation is falling. It's already very low in America, but it's been declining elsewhere as well. If you look at public opinion data comparatively, there's been an increase in cynicism about democratic politics. A lack of confidence in leadership, an increase in those who say "Politicians don't care about people like me". This undermines the conditions for stable democracy.
   
   
6. At the same time, we've had the growth in movements, the growth in potential competitors to the parties. This has good consequences and bad consequences for parties. The growth of single issue movements cross- cuts party cleavages and raises the issue of how movements should feed into the decision-making process of parties. It also raises a question that is being debated in many countries, of primaries versus organized conventions for the selection of candidates and the airing of issues. In the US we've moved overwhelmingly in the direction of primaries, and now in Israel they're moving in that direction too. On the question of whether this is good or bad, you might think it would be good because primaries are inherently more democratic. But in the US we've found that primaries turn into minority elections, in which the participants are often extremists of various kinds, political and theological, and the rich, so that the outcomes don't look so democratic after all. It's ironic. When you had the old party bosses, one of their jobs was to work out the optimum outcome that would satisfy all the factions and get the party elected.
   
   
7. To jump to another aspect, the question of the nature of party systems. When thinking about party systems political scientists have long distinguished between parties of representation and parties of integration. By parties of representation I mean parties like the American ones, which have leaders but where membership doesn't mean anything, parties which have no base of membership. By parties of integration I mean parties along the lines of the Social Democrats and the Catholic parties in Europe. In the old Social Democratic movement, exemplified by the Austrian Social Democrats, you would go from birth to death within the party. There were leisure organizations, burial societies, cooperatives, medical plans. And the Christian Democrats had much the same.
   
   
8. Now it's these parties of integration that have declined. I don't think there's any Social Democratic party or Christian Democratic party today which has any where near the degree of integration, and degree of civil support for the party, that used to exist. A lot of the functions that the parties used to fulfill are now fulfilled commercially. People don't feel the need to find their leisure activity with the party, they go to a business and buy a service. So parties of integration have increasingly moved toward the methods of parties of representation and have become more like the American ones -and this is where people start talking about primaries, because they face the same kind of problem we do in America, where you have members who aren't very involved in the party, and there's a move to get primaries to generate interest and increase representation.
   
   
9. Many of the same circumstances effect unions. Unions used to have an occupational community to draw on. I wrote about this many years ago in Union Democracy about the printers union in the United States. There were baseball clubs and bowling leagues and veterans organizations, all composed of union printers. Unions used to offer hospital plans and the like, and again, this has declined very greatly, which means that ties to the unions, other than the formal fact of the membership, have also declined. Now there's been some discussion in American unions in recent years of how to revive these ties, of how to generate new functions to link members to the organization.
   
   
10. Now if you then ask what would be democracy in the party? I think - to return to Schumpeter- that it's the ability to chose between competing programs. Except in small units, you need mechanisms by which people can chose between options and there's institutionalized criticism and potential opposition. Now at this point we have to remember Michel's Iron Law of Oligarchy, and the argument that elite domination is inherent in the nature of private organization; voluntary associations, trade unions, political parties, professional groups, are all are basically controlled from the top because of all the advantages that leaders have, in the way of propaganda and so on, overwhelm the case coming from the bottom. In the US, there certainly seems to be an increase in the degree of factionalism, and may be factionalism is a sign that our party system is still getting weaker.
    
    
11. Another mechanism of democratic control for factions in voluntary associations is of course Exit. If members don't like the leaders they can leave. Of course, whether or not they exercise that right is a function of whether it matters to the leaders. I recall a conversation I had with Lane Kirkland several years ago which left me very depressed. Even though union organization was plummeting as a percentage of the labor force, he was denying that there was a problem. They still had 13 million members he said, more than ever before. So the fact that there was a lot of exiting didn't bother him. That may be the reason why he isn't there any more.
    
    
12. Finally, one further point, which is the general drop in confidence and commitment to all kinds of organizations, both voluntary and governmental. In America we call it the "confidence gap" but the same pattern holds for most of the countries I've seen data for. The proportion of people who express confidence in the leadership and in different organizations has been going down steadily. People somehow don't see what professional life, institutional life, government does, or they think it's not doing the kind of job it used to.
    
    
13. Now one factor here -and I think you cannot possibly underestimate this- is the effect of television. Television has made a qualitative difference. One of the things that made for participation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was that people had to entertain themselves - fraternal organizations, sporting clubs, local drama groups, church socials, all of these were what people did in the evening and weekends before there was television. This has all declined enormously and been replaced by various kinds of commercial services, and supreme among them -at least at the moment- is television.
    
    
14. Television has two pernicious effects. One is that it keeps people home, away from participation, and it's very professionally produced, unlike the union meeting you might otherwise be attending. But seco nd, television is the most effective producer of cynicism. The news media of all kinds produce only one kind of news -bad news. The basic bias of the media is not a left or a right bias but a bad new bias. The plane that lands is not news, the plane that crashes is news, kids going to school is not news, what happened up in Scotland is news, I could simplify this ad nauseam. But I think television is a more effective communicator of bad news. If you get it in the newspaper, you know that somebody else is telling you, some reporter or commentator, and if that goes against your prejudices, you can dismiss it. But if you see it on the tube, you see a picture, and people think they are seeing reality, that they're seeing things that are really happening. Now of course, as we all know, it couldn't be easier to doctor an image, but I think that it is this visceral impact of television, together with the bad news bias, that feeds this sense of malaise and unhappiness that pervades public opinion, this sense that nothing works and all the leaders are corrupt. The endless drumbeat that there is no point to anything -it's very hard for politicians to counter that. They're up against extremely powerful structural forces, which are not the product of bad people doing bad things, but are the product of institutional changes that we do not know how to counter. In fact, the only suggestions for countering them have been calls for increased social control, and for censorship, moves to tell the press and television that they can't publish certain things.
    
    
15. It is a real major problem. I don't think we can go back to the town meeting, to the idea of civil society. Whether we can find functional substitutes for it is something for us to discuss. Whether there are electronic mechanisms that are feasible or worth arguing about I'm dubious. But certainly it is because of these technologies that people are asking if we can carry on practicing democracy the same old way. Ross Perot proposes a system for issues and debates and decision by direct vote and argues that you could replace Congress by doing this. There has recently been much publicity in the US about a Public Television project which involved drawing random samples of the population and asking them their opinions of what should be done. Since there is such a serious problem we should not dismiss these things.
    
    

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    2. DISCUSSION ARISING
    
    Richard Flint
    
16. I'd like to respond to what you were saying about unions. I think there is a historic perspective we need to introduce here: that is that parties and unions play certain roles at certain stages of social development. The example I immediately thought of when you mentioned the Austrian Social Democrats in the 20s is the Korean unions today. The big expanding transport union for example, it has over 500,000 transport workers, more than there are in Britain. Every year the Korean transport union has sports days with teams from all over the country. Gala events that are attended by huge numbers of people. In Korea then, the union plays much more of the role that the Social Democrats played in Europe in the 20s and 30s. From what I know of the union movement in certain parts of Africa and India, there are similar kinds of organizations.
    
    
17. The other point I want to make is about representative and direct democracy. I want to go back to my old syndicalist roots here and argue for a third option, a direct delegate democracy, based not on representative elections every 4 years nor referendum every 6 months, but the principle of mass meetings that elect delegates with mandates. So unlike Ross Perot or the TV poll, people do actually have to come to meetings, they have to discuss, decide and deliberate on their position, and the delegate then has to take that position on. And if that delegate turns out to be following another agenda then they can be recalled.
    
    
18. Now those are the principles of trade union democracy. But I think it's fair to admit that it failed, both in this country and in many countries. The turn out at union branch meetings is abysmal. The present National Secretary of the dockers in the Transport & General Workers Union comes from a dockers' family, his father was a docker, his grandfather a docker, and when he was 13 years-old in the 50s, his father took him his first a branch meeting. It was a rite of passage, and it was packed, and people really did debate the issues of the day. Now today, all those people are unemployed any way, but you don't get that kind of turn out or that kind of vitality.
    
    
19. Now within the trade unions we are debating what we can do to bring people back into the movement. We think back to the past. Before television there was radio and radio had a huge impact on politics back then just as television does today. Except of course, that when people were listening to the radio they were listening to the kind of things that get done at meetings, there was discussion, and there was also music too. My argument on television would be that rather than saying television is a bad thing we should be thinking about how we can use televisual elements to encourage people to come back into meetings. That's where the world wide web comes in. The world wide web is the only thing yet invented that will encourage people to turn off the TV. They may be looking at pornography or Star Trek sites, they may be wasting their time as much as they waste it when they watch TV, but what we're actually seeing is people turning off the television and surfing the net instead. And what's really exciting is that the web is only just beginning. You can now do a black & white video conference on the internet. The image isn't great, but we're getting there. I think there's a real chance that through the use of new technology people can be involved in debate and discussion without going to meetings. And I don't mean people who don't want to go out but people who cannot go out at all such as disabled people or people with children. If the technology provides the opportunity for these people to participate then that must be good.
    
    Seymour Martin Lipset
    
20. Now I know we're only in the beginning stages of the web, and the impact that the computer will have on the political process, but what do you say to the observation that the use of the computer is still bound up with class, that the better educated, the more well-to-do have the access. How many of dockers are actually on the world wide web?
    
    Richard Flint
    
21. Funnily enough quite a few of them are! The first industrial dispute to have a web page of its own has been the Merseyside dockers' strike. There's a page on the world wide web about it. Not all the striking dockers access that page of course, but they'll see print outs from it.
    
    Arthur Lipow
    
22. Now this raises the whole issue of national telecommunications & information policy. I agree with Marty about the class bias. Even in the US where the telephone rates are much cheaper and the internet is more widespread, the class bias goes very deep in the adoption of new technologies. But what we have to see is that this is a matter for public policy to effect. Here in Britain we shouldn't have to put up with what BT charge. It's the same with Murdoch and the Americanization of news coverage. It doesn't have to happen. Parties and unions need to be discussing the kind of structure and organization of the media that would promote better public access.
    
    Patrick Seyd
    
23. In terms of the crisis of political institutions and parties, I do think that what has been happening recently with the Perot phenomenon in the US and the Berlusconi phenomenon in Italy is of very considerable importance indeed. As a result of voter volatility and the crisis in institutions, here you have particular individuals, who have access to money and access to the media, and they are able to create what they call parties virtually over night.
    
    
24. Now I don't think we can assume it would never happen here. I was just reading King & Crewe's book about the demise of the SDP. They conclude at the end that the resilience of the established party system was the reason why the SDP failed. They actually say "the SDP was fated to fail". I can't go along with that degree of determinism. To be fair, they do give credit to Neil Kinnock and the way the Labour Party was able to adapt and I think that's right. But what they don't pick up on is the character of the SDP as a political party. It was essentially created as a highly centralized political party that would by-pass political activism. All they wanted was the credit-card paying members. They didn't organize in terms of constituencies, they organized in terms of areas. Look at the way David Owen ended the party, by public announcement in one fell swoop. I'm sure this top-down do-as-you're-told character of the party was a factor in the SDP's fate.
    
    Roland Wales
    
25. I don't think the party system in this country was as important to the demise of the SDP as the electoral system. If we had a different electoral system in this country, then the SDP would not necessarily have disappeared. The other thing to remember is that whilst the SDP has disappeared, a lot of what the SDP stood for has not. Much of what it stood for has come back, and you can hear echoes of early SDP rhetoric in Tony Blair's speeches today. But I think the SDP would have been forced to revisit its structure if you'd had PR and it had done better in elections and posed more of a threat to the Labour Party.
    
    
26. The electoral system is also shaping the outlook for Goldsmith's Referendum Party. This has very similar elements to Berlusconi. Here's a party that's the product of one man, and he's got a lot of money, and he can make the party work. Now if we had a PR system, Goldsmith would be able to win seats in Parliament and promote his agenda that way. But in the UK it works by changing the political debate, and by forcing the major parties to respond to your issue or even to embrace it. And I think that's what we'll see with the Goldsmith party. But at the same time, I think these media parties are an important new feature of politics in the electronic age. We've seen rich men discover that for -what is to them- a relatively small amount of money, you can create your own party. I think this is something we'll see more of and that the major parties will have to adapt to.
    
    
27. Responding to what was said earlier, I'd like to comment on the general theme of changes at work, the end of occupational communities and the atomization of society... I do think that there are some trends that will have to be embraced within a program for democratic renewal, and one is the growth of part-time work. To my mind the biggest challenge to unions today is how to organize such a vast and disparate workforce.
    
    
28. As for television, I think it reflects the changes that are going on in the wider society, the kind of atomizing processes that are so apparent in the family, in the workplace, and in the demise of community. I'm not saying TV can't be beneficial, but right now, its influence is definitely malign. Out there I think there's more and more the view that governments, unions, organizations of all kinds, can't do very much. Well that's nonsense! We know it's nonsense because we've all seen governments make extraordinary changes. Look at what the Conservatives did with monetary policy as a guiding principle in the 1980s. So the fatalistic message of the media is wrong, but it is the one that gets home. We ask why people don't participate and it's because they believe that the people they elect cannot do very much.
    
    
29. Let me make two points about solutions. I think there are two general kinds of problems we have to think about here, and so far we've only mentioned one. The first is the structural problem, which is what was addressed in the presentation, and concerns the crisis of democracy and of parties. There the question is how do you provide mechanisms of participation? and there are a range of proposals, from delegate democracy to referendum and so on. But the other problem is the information access problem. It's one thing to have the world wide web, but we know that much of the information of the web is rubbish, and you have to put an enormous amount of search time into finding good information or pay an enormous fee to an information provider. I think one of the prime opportunities for parties is that they could provide information quickly and efficiently to people. It's especially important to the provision of alternative viewpoints. People have access to the consensus all the time. Unions and parties need to find a way to provide an alternative focus, of finding ways to reflect the real variety of views out there. But it's about more than just content. We have to think about how information is packaged and used. It's striking how much easier it is in this country to find out information about consumer products like washing machines than it is to find about economic or social policy or welfare. For one you go pick up a copy of Which magazine, but for the other you'd have to read books and magazines and articles, to say nothing of all the time on research and analysis. I think this information gap should worry us just as much as what you might call the structural gap.
    
    Peter Skerry
    
30. On the subject of political organization and communities, the Christian Coalition comes to mind. Their experience -as far as I know of it- would seem to counter a lot of this. They're not personality-driven, they're very grassroots, institution-building type organizations. I'm wondering if we really don't have things to learn from them?
    
    Richard Flint
    
31. Yes, and lets us not forget that other religiously-based organization that is having tremendous influence in more than one country -the Islamic Brotherhood.
    
    Quinten Lide
    
32. Well the Christian Coalition do have powerful state organizations that participate in state and local elections. Many of those have a similar structure to Perot. It think it does depend on personalities to drive it.
    
    Arthur Lipow
    
33. My impression is that it's a highly top-down organization. The churches may lend a participatory element to it, but it's not democracy. It's very authoritarian.
    
    Peter Skerry
    
34. But it is congregational. These are not the kind of folks who come together easily. Neither do they take orders very well.
    
    Seymour Martin Lipset
    
35. There's no doubt that strong parties need organizational bases! Look at Europe, look at the US. Where you find the Social Democrats in Europe, where you found the Socialist party in the US, was where the unions are strong. Of course, there was also a heavy ethnic overlay...
    
    Arthur Lipow
    
36. This is where we have to introduce the idea of political culture into the discussion. I think there is still a very strong political culture in this country. As Lewis Meakin argues in his book about the Labour Party conference, Labour is still a movement very much bound up in its grassroots. If those grassroots hadn't been there, then the Thatcherite assault on British labour might have wiped the unions out, as the Reagan assault did in the US.
    
    Roger Hough
    
37. I think we have to be wary about the way we use the term "democracy". We use it to mean so many different things. Take membership participation in union ballots. Ordinary members might get names, photographs, a speel to read. But they have no idea who these people are. The whole game is to read between the lines of the speel to see if these people are who they claim to be -and many of them can't do that because they're not all that clever at reading these things. Now the participation isn't very high and it's very costly, but it does look as if every one's been given the chance to get involved. I wonder if many politicians actually want mass participation to go much further. As they see it, the whole thing is a lottery unless you've got mechanisms to influence people. And this is the way it used to be in party meetings. But going the whole way over to direct mass balloting, I don't think many of them would see that as the answer.
    
    Roland Wales
    
38. The other problem with direct balloting is that you have to have just the right question. Many issues do not lend themselves to easy summary one way or the other. So it's much easier for politicians to have one big referendum on everything with an election than keep going to the people on every issue.
    
    Patrick Seyd
    
39. I was very struck by the work you did Roland with the National Policy Forum. I remember I was fortunate enough to be sitting in on a discussion of the minimum wage in a workshop in Reading. It was a very different kind of Labour Party from the one we're used to. I was in the same group as the leader of the GMB John Edmonds. Here was a heavy weight national union leader, but he wasn't pushing his weight around, he was ready to let people have their say. The quality of debate among the 15 people there was quite extraordinary. That sense of people coming with positions and then modifying them in the cut and thrust of debate was quite exhilarating. I think it's vitally important the Labour Party sustains this. I think that's one of the real dangers in the move toward one-man one- vote. I'm all for the convenience of direct balloting. I like the idea that I get to vote on the membership of the NEC. At the same time, I think there is a very real danger of devaluation of the activist.
    
    Roland Wales
    
40. Yes, the other danger with direct balloting is that it can easily lead to the election of the candidate with the most money. Right now every one has the same space in the booklet that goes to members but they don't have the same space in the local press. I think this kind of direct democracy does lend itself to manipulation by people at the top.
    
    Roger Hough
    
41. Well, there again, in the actual election process, parties spend far more time hassling people to actually go out and vote than they do trying to persuade them to vote a certain way.
    
    Seymour Martin Lipset
    
42. But people at the bottom will never have an equal chance to influence policy! That's what leadership is for. Your only alternative is to go back to the Greek system and the Athenian Senate, and appoint assemblies by random sample.
    
    Richard Flint
    
43. Well I think we have to come back and focus on the links between trade unions and parties. As you say, if you look, the stronger Social Democratic parties -and especially those in Scandinavia- are those which have had the strongest ties to the unions, while the weaker ones -those in Southern Europe- are those that have had weaker ties or have never had ties at all. In this regard, I'm very concerned with what the Labour Party is doing these days, trying to weaken its ties to the trade unions. I think it could be a very dangerous move. Just this last week the party unilaterally tore up the Hastings Agreement (the agreement covering trade union sponsorship of Labour MPs). Now there used to be a rule -not much enforced, but a rule nonetheless- that if you wanted join the Labour Party you had to be a member of a union. In fact, we were debating the merits of it at my branch meeting the other week. I will admit -as most of them would- that we can't go back to the good old days, when I think unions did have too much say through the block vote. But I am worried about rushing too fast to the opposite extreme. Yes, it's true that Labour Party membership is up, but attendance at our ward meetings is not, and believe me, we do try to bring the new members in. The most important point is that parties must be about more than membership, they must be coming to meetings or doing barbecues or stuffing envelopes, because if they lose that culture, if they suddenly become direct debit to Tony Blair associations, then I think we're doomed.