Politics without romance? The pursuit of consent in democracy

ABSTRACT

Democratic governance is under increasing scrutiny as a result of waning trust in political institutions, and a widening gap between public aspirations and government performance. The purpose of this paper is to address what is currently diagnosed as a democratic deficit by calling into question the notion of consent, procedures advocated in its pursuit, and its relationship with democracy. To this purpose, the paper reviews seminal works that have investigated the nexus of democracy and consent over time: The Calculus of Consent, The Engineering of Consent and Manufacturing Consent. In this, it presents different understandings of the processes whereby consent is arrived at, and questions whether they support or undermine democratic aspirations.

KEYWORDS:

• Consent
• dissent
• public choice theory
• democracy
• propaganda

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Arianna Bove http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1018-4280

Notes

1 See James Fishkin and Peter Laslett, eds., Debating Deliberative Democracy (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003); Joshua Cohen, ‘Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy’, in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, eds. James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

2 C. B. Macpherson, Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).

3 Pippa Norris, Democratic Deficit: Critical Citizens Revisited (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

4 Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975).

5 Matteo Dogan, ed., Political Mistrust and the Discrediting of Politicians (Leiden: Brill, 2005).

6 David Runciman, How Democracy Ends (London: Profile Books, 2018); Susan Pharr and Robert Putnam, eds., Disaffected Democracies: What’s Troubling the Trilateral Countries? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Russell J. Dalton, Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices: The Erosion of Political Support in Advanced Industrial Democracies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Mariano Torcal and José R. Montero, Political Disaffection in Contemporary Democracies: Social Capital, Institutions, and Politics (London: Routledge, 2006); Colin Hay, Why We Hate Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).

7 For an insightful and fascinating account of the career and politics of James Buchanan, see Nancy MacLean, Democracy in chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (London: Penguin, 2017).

8 J.V. Denhardt and R. B. Denhardt, The New Public Service: Serving, Not Steering (London: Routledge, 2016).

9 A.I. Griffith and D. E. Smith, eds., Under New Public Management: Institutional Ethnographies of Changing Front-line Work (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014).

10 As Rowley and Houser recount, the initial success of the book was so resounding that a centre and an academic journal were quickly established to carry forward the research agenda it proposed. Based at the University of Virginia, this agenda consisted in applying economists’ understandings of markets to the political sphere, specifically, to decision-making dynamics and voting behaviour. Over time, two of the directors of the Centre went on to win the Nobel prize in economics, Buchanan and Elinor Ostrom. Charles Rowley and Daniel Houser, ‘The Life and Times of Gordon Tullock’, Public Choice 152, no. 1 (2012): 3–27.

11 For early definitions of this, see Woodrow Wilson, ‘The Study of Administration’, Political Science Quarterly 2 (June 1887) and Herbert A. Simon, Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization (New York: The Free Press, 1947).

12 James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund Inc. 1999), 309.

13 James M. Buchanan and Robert D. Tollison, The Theory of Public Choice II (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 20.

14 The intervention addresses an important problem discussed at the time, initially raised by Marquis de Condorcet’s voting paradox (1785) and later Kenneth Arrow in his Social Choice and Individual Values (NJ: Wiley & Sons, 1951). Condorcet’s paradox and Arrow’s ‘impossibility theorem’ highlighted the difficulties of translating individual preferences into aggregate social preferences when it came to ranking or ordering outcomes, showing how democracy, failing to maximise individual preferences into aggregates, tends, instead, to produce cyclical results, thus not reflecting the will of the people and producing a system that is inherently unstable.

15 For more on this, see Macpherson, Democratic Theory.

16 Buchanan and Tullock, The Calculus, 37.

17 James M. Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 57.

18 Buchanan and Tullock draw a distinction between the constitutional and operational level of unanimity. Participants decide which realms of human activity they wish to subject to collective choice or place under public management, and what voting rules they wish to adopt to take these decisions.

19 J. M. Buchanan, Freedom in Constitutional Contract (Austin: Texas A & M University Press, 1977), 113.

20 Once Macpherson wrote: ‘The main problem for democratic theory is to reconcile the claims of free market economy with the claims of the mass of individuals to some kind of equality’, decades later, this remains a great challenge. See Macpherson, Democratic Theory, 173.

21 This is an early version of the ‘veil of ignorance,’ see Buchanan and Tullock, The Calculus, 78, and John Rawls was in fact a member of the research circle at the University of Virginia too.

22 Buchanan and Tullock, The Calculus, 48.

23 Ibid., 45.

24 Richard E. Wagner, ‘The Calculus of Consent: a Wicksellian Retrospective’, Public Choice 56, no. 2 (1988): 153–66.

25 I. Vlaev et al., ‘The Theory and Practice of “Nudging”: Changing Health Behaviors’, Public Administration Review 76, no. 4 (2016): 550–61.

26 Toby Clark, Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century. The Political Image in the Age of Mass Culture (London: Orion Publishing Group, 1997).

27 Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Ig Publishing, 1928), 32.

28 Bernays, Propaganda, 54.

29 Sid Blumenthal, The Permanent Campaign. Inside the World of Elite Political Operations (New York: Touchstone Publishers, 1982).

30 Émile Durkheim, Les Règles de la Méthode Sociologique (Paris: Payot, 1894).

31 Bernays, Propaganda, 47.

32 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Transaction Publishers, 1922), xvi. Lippmann too, a liberal democrat, stated that pursuing the ideal of ‘the omnicompetent, sovereign citizen’ was as bad as encouraging ‘a fat man to try to be a ballet dancer’ and believed that democracies would be the rule of public opinion rather than of the people. Lippman, Public Opinion, 39.

33 Bernays, Propaganda, 26.

34 Runciman, How Democracy Ends, 190.

35 Santini et al. ‘Software Power as Soft Power. A Literature Review on Computational Propaganda Effects in Public Opinion and Political Process’, Partecipazione e Conflitto 11 (2): 332–60.

36 Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of The Mass Media (New York: Random House, 2010).

37 Interestingly, the authors had anticipated that if their model was wrong, it might be ignored, but that if it was right, it would surely be ignored. And so it was. Andy Mullen recounts how social scientists marginalised the model and refused to engage with its evidence, ‘Twenty Years on: The Second-order Prediction of the Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model’, Media, Culture & Society 32, no. 4 (2010): 673–90.

38 Peter Wilkin, Noam Chomsky: on Power, Knowledge and Human Nature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997).

39 Robert M. Entman, ‘Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm’, Journal of Communication 43, no. 4 (1993): 51–8.

40 Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Michael Roloff, The Consciousness Industry: on Literature, Politics and the Media (New York: Seabury Press, 1974).

41 Amongst the organised agents of flak is, for instance, the US based Global Climate Coalition, a cartel of fossil fuel and car companies engaged in the systematic attack of climate scientists. Flak generally involves highly critical responses to a media statement, in the spirit of correcting the line, but also more organised practices of astroturf.

42 Jason Stanley, How Propaganda Works (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 135–6.

43 Frank I. Luntz is a political strategist who worked for the US Republican Party and the UK Conservative Party, alongside other prominent representatives of the power elites.

44 Edward Schumacher-Matos, ‘Global Warming vs. Climate Change: Does It Make a Difference?’ NPR, November 17, 2011. http://www.npr.org/sections/ombudsman/2011/11/17/142418671/global-warming-vs-climate-change-does-it-make-a-difference (accessed July 13, 2017).

45 Oliver Milman, ‘US federal department is censoring use of term “climate change”, emails reveal’, The Guardian, August 8, 2017.

46 Lena H. Sun and Juliet Eilperin, ‘CDC Gets List of Forbidden Words: Fetus, Transgender, Diversity’, The Washington Post, December 15, 2017.

47 See David L. Altheide, ‘War Programming: The Propaganda Project and the Iraq War’, The Sociological Quarterly 46, no. 4 (2005): 617–43; Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent; François Debrix, ‘Tabloid Imperialism: American Geopolitical Anxieties and the War on Terror’, Geography Compass 1, no. 4 (2007): 932–45.

48 Arun Kundnani, The Muslims Are Coming. Islamophobia, Extremism and the Domestic War on Terror (London: Verso, 2014).

49 The fact that the leader of the Labour Party in Britain has, in fact, made the connection between terrorism and Western foreign policy time and again has attracted him much criticism. See Juyan Zhang, ‘Beyond Anti-Terrorism: Metaphors as Message Strategy of Post-September-11 U.S. Public Diplomacy’, Public Relations Review 33 (2007): 31–9; Stefano Bonino, ‘Policing Strategies against Islamic Terrorism in the UK after 9/11: The Socio-Political Realities for British Muslims’, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 32, no. 1 (2012): 5–31.

50 The recruitment of Somalis from the US is a case in point. For examples of where this occurs, both in the UK and the US, see Kundnani, The Muslims Are Coming.

51 Arguably, it is also because of this that publishers such as Wikileaks have acquired a prominent role.

52 E. A. Christodoulidis and T. Scott Veitch, ‘Terrorism and Systems Terror’, Economy and Society 23, no. 4 (1994): 459–83.

53 Anastassia Tsoukala, ‘Democracy in the Light of Security: British and French Political Discourses on Domestic Counter-terrorism Policies’, Political Studies 54, no. 3 (2006): 607–27.

54 Richard Jackson, ‘Security, Democracy, and the Rhetoric of Counter-Terrorism’, Democracy and Security 1, no. 2 (2005): 147–71.

55 James Bohman ‘Citizenship and Norms of Publicity: Wide Public Reason in Cosmopolitan Societies’, Political Theory 27 (1999): 176–202.

56 For more on the difference between cognition and affect, see Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Drazen Prelec, ‘Neuroeconomics: How Neuroscience Can Inform Economics’, Journal of Economic Literature 4, no. 1 (2005): 9–64.

57 Steven Pressman, ‘What Is Wrong with Public Choice’, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics 27, no. 1 (2004): 3–18.

58 Daniel Simonet, ‘The New Public Management Theory in the British Health Care System: a Critical Review’, Administration & Society 47, no. 7 (2015): 802–26; Christopher Hood and Ruth Dixon, ‘What We Have To Show for 30 Years of New Public Management: Higher Costs, More Complaints’, Governance 28, no. 3 (2015): 265–7; D. Farnham et al., eds., New Public Managers in Europe: Public Servants in Transition (New York: Springer, 2016).

59 Norman Barry, ‘Unanimity, Agreement, and Liberalism: A Critique of James Buchanan’s Social Philosophy’, Political Theory 12, no. 4 (1984): 579–96, 595.

60 John S. Dryzek and Simon Niemeyer, ‘Reconciling pluralism and consensus as political ideals’, American Journal of Political Science 50, no. 3 (2006): 634–49.

61 Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1957); James M. Enelow, and Melvin J. Hinich, The Spatial Theory of Voting: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); James Weber, ‘How Many Voters Are Needed for Paradoxes?’ Economic Theory 20, no. 2 (2002): 341–55.

62 Stephen Coleman and Jay G. Blumler, The Internet and Democratic Citizenship: Theory, Practice and Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

63 Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (London: Zed Books, 2012); Larbi Sadiki, Routledge Handbook of the Arab Spring: Rethinking Democratization (London: Routledge, 2015); Luis Ramiro and Raul Gomez, ‘Radical-left Populism during the Great Recession: Podemos and its Competition with the Established Radical Left’, Political Studies 65, no. 1_suppl (2007): 108–26; Loris Caruso, ‘Digital Capitalism and the End of Politics: The Case of the Italian Five Star Movement’, Politics & Society 45, no. 4 (2017): 585–609.

64 Paolo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (London, Pluto Press: 2012).

65 Marco Deseriis, ‘The People’s Mic as a Medium in Its Own Right: A Pharmacological Reading’, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 11, no. 1 (2014): 42–51.

66 If Nobel prizes in economics are anything to go by, the recognition of the work of Robert Shiller (2011) on the irrational exuberance of financial markets and Richard Thaler (2017) on the power of the nudge in economic behaviour signals a significant paradigm shift away from rational choice theory and methodological individualism. Edward Bernays’s notion of habits of thought and John M. Keynes’s view of animal spirits are more prescient of this approach to economic science.

67 George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why it Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); George Bataille, La Part Maudite: Précédé de la Notion de Dépense (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967).

68 James M. Buchanan, ‘Politics without Romance: A Sketch of Positive Public Choice Theory and Its Normative Implications’, The Theory of Public Choice II 11 (1984): 22.

69 Buchanan and Tollison, The Theory of Public Choice II, 12.

70 Buchanan and Tollison, The Theory of Public Choice II; Christopher H. Achen and L. Bartel, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

71 Edward L. Bernays, ‘The Engineering of Consent’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 250, no. 1 (1947): 113–20.

72 James M. Buchanan, ‘The Soul of Classical Liberalism’, The Independent Review 5, no. 1 (Summer 2000): 111–19, 113.