Why the people must take control

What does it portend when the people of the West no longer trust their governments? Every year, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) measures political trust among its member nations. The most recent results, published in July, are not pretty for our supposedly democratic political systems.

On average, just 39 per cent of people living in OECD nations trust their own governments. This is alarming enough, but public trust is especially low in the most powerful Western countries.

In the UK, trust has hit rock bottom. Only 26.6 per cent of Britons have high or moderate trust in their government. In a separate survey published by Ipsos in December, a mere nine per cent of UK residents said they trust their political leaders to speak truthfully.

The governments of France and Germany teeter on the edge of popular no confidence. More than half of French people have low or no trust in their government. Almost half of all Germans are likewise disillusioned with their political leadership.

The US did not participate in the latest OECD government trust survey, maybe because the results would be so abysmally embarrassing. Pew has been tracking the bad news for decades and, as of today, a lowly 22 per cent of Americans trust their national government.

Elites condescendingly blame low public trust in government on ‘misinformation’. Even the OECD itself urges Western political institutions to ‘invest in improving perceptions of integrity in daily interactions and complex decision-making’.

Perceptions of integrity? It appears the OECD is proposing a more effective political spin rather than actual integrity. As for ‘complex decision-making’, the implication here is that the public is too stupid to appreciate the genius of its political leaders and government bureaucrats.

Happily, not every OECD nation suffers from a lack of public confidence in its political institutions. Sixty-four per cent of Swiss citizens have high or moderately high levels of trust in their government. Is the Swiss government just better at messaging? Or could it be that the people of Switzerland are in charge of their own political system in ways that the people of the UK and US are not?

The Swiss probably trust their government because Switzerland’s democracy is more decentralised, representative and direct. Political power is kept as close to the people as is practical and most government action takes place at the subnational, canton level. The Swiss people themselves, without the involvement of professional politicians, regularly enact and overturn laws.

This is facilitated by the fact that the Swiss keep electoral districts small. The lower house of the Federal Assembly has one representative for every 44,500 inhabitants. Compare that with the US, where there is one representative for every 760,000 citizens or where one senator is typically supposed to represent millions of people. In the UK, there’s one representative in parliament for every 92,000 Britons.

What the Swiss understand well is that democracy isn’t merely about ordinary people voting. It’s about normal citizens wielding real power in their own communities. Would so many working-class British men be rioting today if local communities in the UK had full policing and prosecutorial powers, like they do in a Swiss canton? A centralised bureaucracy, such as the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service, is an invitation for ideological zealots to play games with justice. Wouldn’t it make sense if locally elected assemblies, rather than London-based bureaucrats, appointed prosecutors and held them accountable?

Western countries also need more direct democracy, for which the Swiss are famous. Brexit served as a powerful example of direct democracy’s utility, but the Brexit referendum required parliamentary approval first. What if the problem was a corrupted parliament itself?

Meanwhile in the US, there’s no possibility at all for any national referendum. Direct democracy is sometimes available at the state and local levels through a citizens’ petitioning process. But even in such cases, overly burdensome signature requirements and the costs of political campaigns can make referendums as much about money as the people’s will.

Political debate today often revolves around the ongoing death match between a populist right and an elitist left. While cultural forces certainly fuel this fight, the people of the West should also focus on the structural causes of the strife, one of which is the underlying failure of our democratic political systems to represent people. Technical questions around how our democracy works may be a bit complicated and unsexy, but they need to be thoroughly discussed and understood.

The stakes are high. A hopeful, free and prosperous future lies not with the global elites, but with the people in control.

Stephen Erickson is executive director of the US-based nonprofit organisation, Citizens Rising. He can be reached at [email protected].