It is time to put some holy constitutional cows out to pasture. The traditional liberal reform agenda remains necessary, but it is no longer enough to reanimate our democracy. Too many of its solutions remain insensitive to how class and demography intimately shape how our political system operates; structural political inequalities in who participates and has voice will not end with a codified constitution and a more proportionate electoral system. Liberals of all party stripes and none need a new political agenda squarely aimed at reversing ingrained political inequality, a phenomenon that threatens the integrity of British democracy.
Last week, President Obama said: “it would be transformative if everybody voted. If everyone voted, that would completely change the political map in this country.” He’s not wrong. “The people who tend not to vote are young, they’re lower income, they’re skewed more heavily towards immigrant groups and minority groups,” he said. “There’s a reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls.” America is already a divided democracy, and the UK is headed in the same direction.
Political inequality is where despite procedural equality in the democratic process, certain groups, classes or individuals nonetheless have greater influence over and participate more in political decision-making processes, with policy outcomes systematically weighted in their favour. As such, it undermines a central democratic ideal: that all citizens, regardless of status, should be given equal consideration in and opportunity to influence collective political decision-making.
IPPR’s new report, Political Inequality: Why British democracy must be reformed and revitalized, shows the scale of the problem: class and age powerfully structure who participates and who feels they have influence politically in the UK. For example, our polling suggests only one in four DE voters believes democracy addresses their interests well, a 20 point difference compared to AB voters. A striking 63% think it serves their interests badly, while less than one in ten think politicians understand the lives of people like themselves.
Perceptions that democracy is rigged in favour of the rich, the powerful and the well connected arguably underpin growing electoral inequality. For example, in 1987, there was only a four-point gap in the turnout rate between the highest income quintile and the poorest; by 2010 this had jumped to 23 points. Meanwhile just 44% of 18-24-year-olds voted in the 2010 general election, compared to 76% of those aged 65 and over, almost double the gap from the 1970s. What’s more, the warning signs are flashing: polls are currently predicting very substantial turnout inequalities by age and class again in May.
Political inequality is, of course, a broader phenomenon than just turnout inequality. Yet as our report makes clear, the same pattern repeats itself. Whether it is in who funds political parties, who participates in political activity more broadly, who is represented in elected office, or who has access to political decision-makers, the young and less well-off are systematically under-represented. By contrast, wealthier and older citizens enjoy disproportionate influence over the political process.
As political inequality becomes more entrenched then, the old fear of liberal democratic theorists, that democracy would lead to the tyranny of the majority, has increasingly been replaced by a fear of the tyranny of the minority; we have gone from Mill to Piketty, from a fear of the masses to the problem of the 1 per cent as the chief threat to democratic equality.
In such a context, we will need more than discrete constitutional reform of the institutions and practices of representative democracy to reverse political inequality. If each citizen is to have the ability to exercise and influence political power in the ballot box but also beyond it, reform cannot stop there. Countervailing democratic institutions and practices that are more participatory, deliberative and powerful will also have to be experimented with that can better disperse and democratise political power, both within but also beyond the channels of representative democracy.
Similarly, reform must be far more attentive to redressing class and age-based inequalities of influence. This might require radical institutional intervention, such as compulsory first time voting, to substantively boost the influence of the presently politically excluded. It could also involve political parties becoming far more porous and pluralistic, being willing to be led by civic society, not constantly trying to lead it.
There are many options to explore. A second IPPR report in spring will set out a strategy and a series of explicit recommendations which will suggest which avenues would be most effective to pursue. However, what is clear based on the evidence presented in our new survey report is that regardless of the outcome in May, reversing political inequality is central to broader democratic renewal. It will not be easy. Nonetheless, the problem of political inequality makes the task all the more vital if democracy is to live up to its ideal.
* Mathew Lawrence is a Research Fellow at IPPR