- God’s many mansions Christopher Howse, Spectator
- America, the exceptional? Steve Lagerfeld, Hedgehog Review
- Liberté sans Frontières and ‘Western Guilt’ Jessica Whyte, Radical Philosophy
- Have you paid that poll tax? Rachel Gunter, Not Even Past
voting
You vote is your voice–but actions speak louder than words
On voting day, with everyone tweeting and yelling and spam-calling you to vote, I want to offer some perspective. Sure, ‘your vote is your voice,’ and those who skip the election will remain unheard by political leaders. Sure, these leaders probably determine much more of your life than we probably would like them to. And if you don’t vote, or ‘waste’ your vote on a third party or write in Kim Jong Un, you are excluded from the discussion of how these leaders control you.
But damn, if that is such a limited perspective. It’s like the voting booth has blinders that conceal what is truly meaningful. I’m not going to throw the traditional counter-arguments to ‘vote or die’ at you, though my favorites are Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem and South Park’s Douche and Turd episode. Instead, I just want to say, compared to how you conduct your life, shouting into the political winds is simply not that important.
The wisdom of the stoics resonates greatly with me on this. Seneca, a Roman philosopher, tutor, and businessman, had the following to say on actions, on knowledge, on trust, on fear, and on self-improvement:
- Lay hold of today’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing is ours, except time. On Time
- Each day acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes as well; and after you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested that day. This is my own custom; from the many things which I have read, I claim some one part for myself. On Reading
- If you consider any man a friend whom you do not trust as you trust yourself, you are mightily mistaken and you do not sufficiently understand what true friendship means. On Friendship
- Reflect that any criminal or stranger may cut your throat; and, though he is not your master, every lowlife wields the power of life and death over you… What matter, therefore, how powerful he be whom you fear, when every one possesses the power which inspires your fear? On Death
- I commend you and rejoice in the fact that you are persistent in your studies, and that, putting all else aside, you make it each day your endeavour to become a better man. I do not merely exhort you to keep at it; I actually beg you to do so. On the Philosopher’s Lifestyle
Seneca goes on, in this fifth letter, to repeat the stoic refrain of ‘change what you can, accept what you cannot.’ But he expands, reflecting that your mind is “disturbed by looking forward to the future. But the chief cause of [this disease] is that we do not adapt ourselves to the present, but send our thoughts a long way ahead. And so foresight, the noblest blessing of the human race, becomes perverted.”
Good leadership requires good foresight, but panic over futures out of our control pervert this foresight into madness. So, whether you think that Biden’s green promises will destroy the economy or Trump’s tweets will incite racial violence, your actions should be defined by what you can do to improve the world–and this is the only scale against which you should be judged.
So, set aside voting as a concern. Your voice will be drowned out, and then forgotten. But your actions could push humanity forward, in your own way, and if you fail in that endeavor, then no vote will save you from the self-knowledge of a wasted life. If you succeed, then you did the only thing that matters.
Nightcap
- The socialist manifesto Robin Hanson, Overcoming Bias
- Why Amy Coney Barrett should step down Laura Field, Open Society
- There is no expressive duty to vote Chris Freiman, 200-Proof Liberals
Nightcap
- Race is front and center in French elections Méheut & Onishi, NY Times
- Japan’s new PM is libertarianish Scott Sumner, EconLog
- The values of democracy, and a vote Chris Freiman, 200-Proof Liberals
- Objective fouls and the rule of law Tyler Cowen, MR
Wat’s On My Mind: Immigration and Voting for Redistribution
When COVID first started spreading more widely in the US, I began worrying that this would lead to an upsurge of anti-immigrant sentiment. I worried that people would draw the wrong lesson from this experience and return to the isolationism of the 1920s, closing our borders on a more permanent basis to both people and goods. This would slow economic growth and lead to a poorer nation. It seems particularly ironic that just now Americans are becoming the unwelcome foreign visitors abroad, particularly from my home states of Texas and California.
Nowrasteh and Forrester at CATO discuss some papers by Giuliano and Tabellini on the question of if increased immigration moves the median voter to the left. They also add a few suggestive regressions of their own. Their summary is interesting and nuanced. First, they find that closing the borders to immigrants in the 1920s encouraged much greater government spending (as a percent of GDP) while allowing more immigrants in the 1960s has slowed the growth of government spending. This effect seems to work both ways: American voters are more willing to vote for welfare benefits, etc, when there are fewer immigrants getting them, and the larger the welfare state is, the more concerned voters are about allowing immigrants into the country. So it may not be so much that adding immigrants from more left-leaning countries shifts the median voter as much as it moves native voters further to the right? (See also Rosenthal and Eibner 2005, who also conclude that “a voter of a given income is less eager to redistribute given that redistribution has to be shared with the non-citizen poor.”)
This suggests an interesting line of argument, that these feedback effects can work in the opposite direction as well. I imagine a friend who is very concerned about the size of government and also would prefer to have fewer immigrants. To that friend, I would suggest that allowing more immigrants can help slow or even reverse the growth of government and the welfare state. Using their aversion to one issue could potentially reduce their aversion to the other. <epistemic status: highly speculative>
Or, why I don’t vote
I had been rooting for Senator Klobuchar a bit here at NOL over the past couple weeks. Nothing crazy, but I liked what I read. Now, I must eat my words. It turns out the Senator was a government prosecutor before she became a politician, something I did not know.
So, I am glad she’s out of the race. Being a government prosecutor is how most politicians in Washington start their careers. How many people can you put behind bars? How much “crime” can you prevent? If you’re answer is “LOTS” then you’re well on your way to a seat in federal Congress.
I’m not much of a political junkie anymore. I’ve just come to accept that I’m ignorant of far too many things to waste my time in a voting booth, or listening to politicians promise me stuff.
I understand that democracy is the the worst form of government, except for all the others. But I’m ignorant. When I’m old, and bored, I’ll probably get back into politics. I can think of nothing more intellectually stimulating, actually, than participating in political events as a senior citizen. The crowds, the organizational effort, the sense of belonging. I get it now.
The most heartening, encouraging thing I’ve read about the American primaries is that young people are still staying away from the polls. Liberty is alive, well, and aflame.
Be Our Guest: “What’s the Voter’s Value?”
John Lancaster has a new guest post up. Here’s an excerpt:
Even if one cannot verbally clarify the reasoning behind an action, evidence from said action can be gathered and formulated into a coherent reason. Whatever an individual chooses to do, it provides discernible information about the person behind the action.
This phenomenon of voluntary choice extends to abstention.
Read the rest, and if you’ve got something to say, be our guest and say it!
Nightcap
- Same old story, same old song and dance Johanna Möhring, War on the Rocks
- Why Britain Brexited Tom McTague, the Atlantic
- Is it rational to vote? Julia Maskivker, Aeon
- Large countries and bad government Arnold Kling, askblog
What is clientelism and why we should care about it
In my first post, I would like to share with you part of my work as a scholar of politics.
I study clientelism, which is, in my view, a fundamental but understudied and highly underrated phenomenon in politics. In my book, Clientelism and Economic Policy: Greece and the Crisis (2016), I define clientelism as ‘the distribution of resources by political power through an agreement in which politicians – the patrons – make this allocation dependent on the political support of the beneficiaries – their clients’ (page 12). Clientelism emerges at the intersection of political power with social and economic activity.
Why is this phenomenon important? As Harold Laswell put it, politics is the art and science of ‘who gets what’ in society (1936). This famous phrase epitomizes the nature of politics as a competitive process for power and resources. Because these resources are often excludable and rivalrous, multiple social actors and groups are expected to compete with one another for access to political power and the resources it distributes. In addition, as political power decides how scarce resources are to be allocated, there is competition among political actors who wish to gain power and take control of the distribution mechanism. Either way, participation in political competition is costly and occurs in anticipation of higher benefits for each of the participants. Clientelist exchange occurs when political actors competing to gain political power interact with socioeconomic actors striving to persuade political power to meet their demands and claims.
A ‘political market’ for the allocation of economic resources emerges and has distinct characteristics. On the one hand, it generates informal ‘prices’, for the goods and services provided by the government: there is demand by economic actors for preferential treatment and there is supply by political agents of resources, opportunities and benefits. On the other hand, the terms under which clientelist exchange takes place differ substantially from ordinary market transactions, primarily in terms of bargaining power, the enforcement mechanism, externalities, and selection process.
Power asymmetry characterizes the relations between patrons and clients. Clientelism works as an oligopoly. Few patrons occupy the supply side while myriads of candidate clients inhabit the demand side. Depending on what resources each side trades or possesses for future trade, as well as how long one has been – or expects to be – in a position to trade, power asymmetry can tilt in favor of the patron or the client, as in the case of big donors.
Another distinctive element of clientelism is the fact that, while clientelist exchanges is not legally binding or enforceable before courts, honoring the agreement depends on expectations of reciprocation from each party and, quite often, on fears and threats of retaliation in case one party fails to meet the terms of the agreement. On the part of the political agents involved in clientelist exchange, it is a matter of building trust and reputation over time, which, in the absence of formal sanctions, reduces the perceived risk of breaking the terms of the agreement.
In economic theory, clientelism is linked to the concept of rent seeking. Clientelist exchange is actually a subset of rent seeking. It involves explicit agreements according to which the beneficiary must reciprocate by supporting the agent in the political and administrative authority who has offered them the opportunity to extract a rent.
The conventional approach in economics is to view rent seeking as a distortion of market competition for the externalities it imposes on all other non-participating actors. In the real political economy approach, almost all political decisions distribute benefits and costs. My work focuses on the political implications of clientelism.
The process by which the government distributes clientelist benefits inevitably requires some sort of selection of who would be the beneficiary among a pool of prospective clients. Politicians whose political survival and success depend on getting elected to office have a strong incentive to distribute resources to those who would offer them the most valuable form of political support; not just a single vote, but campaign funding, loyal party membership, activist support or favorable media coverage (Trantidis 2016, 18)
The concept of clientelism is mistakenly reduced to a form of vote-buying. This is a narrow view of a much broader phenomenon. Indeed, clientelism serves politicians as a way to strengthen their chances to win elections but resources for clientelist distribution are scarce and the best way to use these resources is to attract those who could made a campaign contribution. It is difficult to monitor voters’ behavior and it is definitely not economical to use resources indiscriminately to buy individual votes, particularly in advanced economies where voters may be too costly to buy and many may simply refuse to be bought off.
Instead, clientelism works as an indirect way of gaining votes (Trantidis 2016, 19). By allocating benefits strategically to attract the biggest possible campaign contributors, politicians can gain an advantage in campaign resources that would allow them to make a stronger appeal to general voters. In short, clientelism is a strategy for political organization and campaign recruitment that has an indirect effect on voters’ behavior. Resource endowments define the capacity of each party to perform a number of tasks necessary for political survival and growth.
As I explain in the introduction of my 2016 book, the first and typical ‘image’ of clientelism is that of an individual agreement. The second ‘image’ of clientelism is that of a strategy for collective mobilization. Politicians create networks of clients that help them organize a campaign infrastructure with a strong support network.
The second image of clientelism refers to the formation of groups of loyal supporters on a more permanent basis. Clientelism is a way by which politicians and political organizations overcome the famous problem of collective action (Olson, 1965). Collective action does not occur automatically from groups having common concerns or a perception of shared interest. This holds especially if the perceived collective benefit is to be indiscriminately shared by multiple actors in large groups. In that case, there are weak incentives for someone to actively contribute to the collective effort. This logic of collective action applies to political organization too. Political parties need active supporters and campaign resources to be able to compete for votes and, for that purpose, they have to find a way to overcome a free-riding problem. For party leaders, the organization of a coherent and active party basis can be achieved through the distribution of targeted benefits to party members and supporters entering a clientelist network. While it is costly to mobilize political support, available state resources allow political actors to pass this cost on society. In forthcoming posts, I will discuss how this phenomenon could affect the design of public policies.
For the time being, let’s summarize the three key characteristics of clientelism:
- Clientelism is a common form of distribution of resources by political power. It stems from the intersection of two competitive processes: a ‘market’ for political support and a ‘market’ for rents and other government granted privileges.
- Clientelism is more than vote buying. The practice gives preference to those who can make the highest valued contribution to a politicians’ campaign infrastructure and support network: donors, activists, prominent figures, journalists.
- Clientelism generates support networks. It is a way for political agents and organizations to overcome a collective action problem regarding how to mobilize, control and discipline active groups of supporters. This is a valued strategy for political organization that can hardly be eradicated from the political process.
Clientelism is a common, expected and inevitable practice in politics. In the next blogs, I will talk about how this practice should make us reconsider the notions of political participation and representation, rethink how public policies are formulated and reconceptualize democracy as a competitive arena in which authoritarian and democratic governments work to become dominant political forces. Thank you for your attention.
References
Laswell, Harold. 1936. Politics: Who Gets What, When, How. New York: Whittlesey House.
Olson, Mancur. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Trantidis, Aris. 2016. Clientelism and Economic Policy: Greece and the Crisis: London and New York: Routledge.
Nightcap
- Comedy and humor in the Soviet Union Indra Ekmanis, PRI’s The World
- What happened to the children of dictators? Grant Starrett
- The most blasphemous idea in contemporary discourse? Ingrid Robeyns, Crooked Timber
- Are voting ages still democratic? Bill Rein, NOL
Nightcap
- “This was an unprecedented right-wing victory” Michael Koplow, Ottomans & Zionists
- “The problem of disappeared states and regions is that they are still here” Jacob Soll, New Republic
- “The costs have proven steep” Evans, Gandy, and Watts, Aeon
- Thinking through the franchise problem Nick Nielsen, The View from Oregon
Normal Joe and the 2020 Election
Sorry if this is a little disjointed. Summer has finally arrived on the California central coast. So, I have been trying to recover my toxic masculinity for the beach, not smooth sailing!
Mr Biden declared that President Trump poses an “existential threat” to the nation. This is not what bothers me because it’s unlikely Mr Biden understands the word “existential.” His team put it up for him to read or he cribbed it mindlessly from someone else’ speech, the way he does.
I am beginning to get a bad feeling about the Biden presidency for another, subtle reason so, pay attention. It’s not so much the continuing gap in the polls between him and Mr Trump, although that too, but only in the second position of my worries. What’s most disturbing is the continuing gap in the polls between Mr Biden and all other Democrat candidates.
Ex-Vice-President Biden is like a caricature of Mr Nobody. In politics for fifty years, he has mostly demonstrated a talent for being re-elected. His name is associated with few important pieces of legislation and the ones that are remembered are currently causing him problems. One such is the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, of 1994 which, critics from his party say, resulted in the needless incarceration of many black males. Of course, in his two terms as vice-president, he was vastly overshadowed by his boss, Barack Obama. The thought could cross your mind legitimately that he was selected for the post, in large part for his, this talent, a great capacity for being overshadowed.
I think I may be describing precisely the reason why he is thus far outpacing other Dem candidates. Briefly put: You can’t have everything. Mr Biden ‘s main quality is that he is – for a politician – NORMAL to the point of mediocrity. Repeating myself: In this context, mediocrity is another word for normal.
He is an older white man with a well known political track record (with little to see), one unlikely to generate surprises. His face and his voices are familiar, if nothing else because of his two terms as a vice-president. He is famous for his gaffes but that makes him perhaps a little endearing, like the dear old uncle who invariably drops cream cake on his tie at every family dinner. His main liability may well be his propensity to touch others, including children. But, hey, nobody is perfect and, one suspects, other male candidates – most of them or all of them – probably have much bigger skeletons in their closets, doesn’t every guy?
Just compare Mr Biden to the two current runners up – far behind him, Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Elisabeth Warren. The first would, on the surface, also qualify as pretty normal. He looks like a handsome grandfather. He has been married to the same woman forever. He speaks well. He is abnormal mostly in a virtuous way: He did not get rich in office. But, but, most of the time, when he opens his mouth this terrible 1949 narrative comes out of it. (I chose that date because it precedes the death of Stalin and the torrent of revelations about the realities of Soviet socialism that followed it.) Mr Sanders has not learned a freaking thing in 70 years! That’s a lot, even for starry-eyed progressives. It’s a bit much even for millennials who feel existentially cheated (this word again) and thus have their own reasons to consider the absurd.
Or take Ms Warren. Actually, she had an honorable career as an academic. (I checked, little bitch that I am!) She expresses herself clearly. The bits and pieces of her extreme left-wing program make superficial sense, considered out of context, one-by-one. Tell the truth, I am a little frightened of Warren for this reason. However, I cannot believe that independents will forget or ignore the lamentable Pocahontas story. Either, she is a long distance liar who used an imagined ethnic identity to advance her career (and therefore, cheated real ethnic candidates, in the putrid calculus of racial advancement). Or, and this may actually be worse, she fooled herself for all of her adult life into believing that her archetypal WASP face was but a mask covering up strong Native American features. Her reactions on the occasion of the fiasco of her DNA analysis results make the latter explanation credible. She could have stopped publication and quickly changed the subject when it came out that her chances of having Native American genes were about the same as those of a recent immigrant from China. Instead, she dug in her heels. Ms Warren has spectacularly bad judgment. I mean that she is far from normal, that way.
So, I am telling you that Mr Biden’s advantage, perhaps his single advantage, may be that he appears normal, even impressively normal, Central Casting normal, I am tempted to say – but that would be cheap- abnormally normal. That would explain his advance against other Dem candidates in spite of the fact that he violates many tenets of current received wisdom about the Democratic Party: He is a man, an old man, white, heterosexual, (probably, he only sniffs females’ hair), not transgender, not even socialist.
Mr Biden’s normalcy may also explain the polls gap with Mr Trump in a projected one-on-one contest for the presidency. In fact, it’s difficult to think of anything else that explains both the gap between Mr Biden and his Dem rivals and the gap between himself and Mr Trump.
It’s possible that this shift in the electoral game has gone largely unperceived thus far because both left and right commentators are distracted. The pro-liberal media are entranced by the antics of the newest and of the oldest members of Congress. Surely, Bernie Sanders’ 1949 economic and social ideas are more riveting than Mr Biden’s normalcy. Certainly, the many surrealistic pronouncements by the best-looking female member of the House are more exciting than Mr Biden’s normalcy. And then, there is the continuing fascination with the left’s desire to hurt Mr Trump, somehow, sometimes, impeachment or not impeachment.
I, myself, may be typical of a mistake conservatives have been making systematically that would blind us to the importance of Biden’s normalcy. Let me explain. I am not a Trump cultist, not by a long shot. I think Mr Trump is rude, crude, unreliable in his words; I think he often speaks before he thinks, many of the things he asserts are just not true. I decided early in his administration that these kinds of features and mishaps would not bother me. I still think they are unimportant against the background of his successes that liberals don’t like, such as his two Supreme Court appointments, and next to his successes that even liberals ought to like, such as low unemployment and solid economic growth. And then, of course, there is just no way I will miss Mr Trump’s only realistic 2016 alternative, the thoroughly crooked Ms Hillary Clinton.
For the past two years, I have been on kind of automatic exercising my rationalist bias. I have been dismissing the obviously hypocritical mass media and its caste-based hatred of Mr Trump. I have treated lightly the howls of pain of the few liberals with whom I remain in contact. I have been seeing them first as expressing loser’s rage, an especially painful rage because the loss was unexpected. Second, the inability of the few liberals with whom I am still in contact to justify their howling on factual grounds also contributed to making me dismissive. Every time I asked one of them to give a single instance of Mr Trump acting illegally, or unconstitutionally, as they abundantly claimed he did, they failed lamentably. And, of course, I believe that immaturity is one of the sources of liberalism.
But, my approach may be too rational by half. When a liberal accuses Pres. Trump of being a would-be dictator, his words may not matter; he may just be expressing the depth of his indignation within the scope of a limited political vocabulary. He may be simply shouting out his disarray in the face of the abnormality of the current American political situation. His words may not mean what they are supposed to mean; they may simply mean, “I am disoriented and scared!”
So, Mr Trump’s main adversary, in 2020, may not be the uninformed and woolly socialism of the left of the Dem Party. It may not be the climate alarmism of practically all its candidates, which leaves the mass of the American public notably cool. (Yes, that’s on purpose!). It may not be the resonating but hard to pin down claim for greater equality, or “social justice.” In his 2020 campaign, Mr Trump may have to fight the lure of a return normalcy incarnated by Mr Biden. Frankly, the prospect makes me nervous.
If the coming race is all about restoring the republic to normalcy, Mr Trump’s road is going to be rocky. (Strangely, someone in his entourage seems to have such foreboding. The 6/15-16/19 Wall Street Journal describes a markedly conventional organization of the 2020 Trump presidential campaign designed to make the president appear more normal – my choice of word.)
In practical terms, in this context, the strategic questions will be as follows: Are there enough Dem voters who would not otherwise bother who will be enticed to vote by Mr Biden’s conventional looks and actions? Are there enough independents who will take the Trump policy achievements for granted, and who are rebuked by the Democratic Party’s new extremism but who will nevertheless vote Democrat because the Party’s candidate, the colorless, marginally live Joe Biden – seems normal?
And if you are one of those conservatives who airily dismiss polls because of the previous presidential campaign, think again; the pollsters called the popular vote just about right in 2016.
The Centre Holds: European Union Election
Summary
There is no populist right anti-EU surge. Voting participation increased. The old centre-right and centre-left in the European Parliament declined but the centre holds with a stronger role for Greens and Liberals. The European Union is not anti-democratic and does not impose its will on member states. Its decision-making is complex, but that is to achieve consensus, not to eliminate democracy. The EU and the Euro currency are more popular. At least for the moment, the EU’s institutions, democracy, and projects are strengthened.
Turnout
Elections for the European Parliament (the Parliament of European Union) the took place between 23rd and the 26th of May this year. The official results can be found here. The turn out was the highest since 1994 at 51%. This is higher than for the US Congressional Elections of last year, though that was the highest turnout in an ‘off year’ (a year in which the President is not up for election) for over a century. There is no equivalent figure to the President of the United States in the European Union. Roughly speaking the US President is equivalent to a combination of the President of the European Commission and the President of the European Council, neither of which are directly elected, and have a tiny bureaucracy compared with the machine of the United states federal government, at their service. There is no reason then for European Union elections to generate as much voter participation as US elections when the President is elected. Even so, such elections in the United States have only generated marginally more participation than EP elections, 55.5% in the 2016 election. It seems reasonable to conclude that the European Parliament has had some success in establishing itself as a representative institution, even compared with an elected body as old as the Congress of the United States.
Political Groups in the European Parliament
The European Parliament is mostly composed of Members (MEPs) who sit in transnational political groupings, which usually have a transnational party, essentially serving as a framework for co-operation between national parties. The political groups in the European Parliament are prone to change in their political boundaries and composition, but the four biggest groups have existed in a mostly stable way over multiple elections. They are:
- European People’s Party (EPP, also referred to as Christian Democrats, centre-right),
- Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D, often referred to as the Socialists, centre left),
- Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE, also known as the Liberals, containing classical liberals, left liberals, various moderates and centrists),
- Greens/European Free Alliance (G/EFA, often referred to as the Greens, left leaning environmentalists plus leftwing regionalists).
The other groups, which have been less stable so far or have not existed for very long are:
- European United Left-Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL, left socialists, communists and left-wing greens),
- European Conservatives and Reformists (Eurosceptic right),
- Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD, Eurosceptic right and centrists),
- Europe of Nations and Freedom (EFN, nationalist right).
Results
I take results from here, focusing on percentage of seats as the easiest way to understand the proportional support of these groups both within the EP and the EU electorate. It makes comparison with the last Parliament (elected in 2014) easier as the number of seats has slightly increased (from 749 to 751) and most importantly because defections, expulsions and reconstruction within and across groups means that a comparison with the seats for political groupings of the 2014 parliament at the end of its term is easiest. Percentage of seats in the outgoing EP in brackets.
- EPP 23.83 (28.84)
- S&D 20.37 (24.70)
- ALDE 13.98 (9.21)
(This result relies on assuming Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance list in France and and the Save Romania Union will join ALDE though this has not been confirmed. It does seem overwhelmingly likely. )
- G/EFA 9.85 (6.94)
- ECR 8.39 (10.28)
- ENF 7.72 (4.81)
- EFDD 7.19 (5.61)
- GUE/NGL 5.06 (6.94)
(the remainder is composed of non-aligned MEPs)
Stories and Trends
The big story in the build up to the election was whether there would be a populist right/eurosceptic breakthrough. The political groups that could be classified as such are ECR, ENF and EFDD. Their total at the end of the 2014 Parliament was 20.7%. Their total now is 23.3%. There was a swing in this direction, but only of 2.6% of seats which is a good deal less than a breakthrough. It is a long way short of the 30% which might have enabled them, presuming they could co-ordinate, to block the EP from progress in the wrong direction, from its point of view, though the way committee memberships and chairs are distributed. GUE/NGL is sometimes classified as left populist/eurosceptic, though it contains a variety of views. It fell back and if we add it to the right-wing eurosceptic seats, we still only get a total of 28.9%. There is little prospect of the right-wing groups co-ordinating closely and none at at all of close co-ordination of these three plus GUE-NGL.
The big story as the results came in was less the right-wing eurosceptic swing than the swing within the groups which support the EU with as much power as it has now, or movement towards more EU powers.
There was a notable shift from EPP and S&D to ALDE and G/EFA, so from the centre-right and centre-left to the liberal centre, greens, and regionalists.
Generally speaking the EPP has moved from previous domination by a grand coalition of EPP and S&D to a more fragmented or pluralist situation in which a centre ground, pro-EU middle ground requires ALDE for a majority and is also likely to bring in G/EFA, with the place of the Eurosceptic right consolidated.
The Liberal swing is largely based on Liberal Democrat success in the UK and the new Macronist list in France. The Green swing is based in northwestern Europe. S&D remain comparatively strong in Spain and Portugal, with a good result in the Netherlands. ENF is dominated by the League in Italy and the National Rally in France. ECR is dominated by PIS in Poland.
Traditional centre-right and centre-left parties had very bad results in France and the UK. The radical and populist left has fallen back, particularly in France, Spain, Greece, and Ireland.
Misunderstandings
Despite what some reporting might lead you to believe, hard Brexit did not win in the UK and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally did not have a big success in France. The Brexit Party was the single most popular party in Britain, but even if its vote is combined with the United Kingdom Independence Party (from where its leader Nigel Farage came from), the no-deal hard Brexit vote (33.8%) was distinctly less than the combined vote for second referendum and remain supporting parties (39.8%): Liberal Democrats, Greens, Change UK, Welsh and Scottish Nationalists, Alliance Party (Liberal Democrat partners in Northern Ireland). The European trend for the traditional centre-right and centre-left to collapse was heightened by the inability of both the Labour and Conservative parties to find a clear direction on Brexit and achieve internal unity on the issue. UK participation in the election was the result of the failure of the pro-Brexit Conservative government to find a Brexit policy with majority support in the UK Parliament.
In France, despite transforming the National Front into the National rally with the aim of broadening support, Marine Le Pen lost ground compared with the 2014 European election. National Rally was slightly ahead of Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance list, but given Le Pen has not increased her base and given that Macron is clearly ahead of all non Le Pen forces, it is likely that the next Presidential election in France will be between Le Pen and Macron again, with another victory for Macron.
Democracy, Law, and Bureaucracy in the European Union
Two ideas circulate widely about the European Union that cannot both be true, though the same people often state both. 1. The EU Parliament has no power. 2. The European Union imposes over-regulation and bureaucratisation on member states to an oppressive degree. As the European Parliament’s main role is as co-legislator in matters of regulation, it is a major actor in this issue. It co-legislates on regulation with the European Council, an assembly of government ministers from member states varying according to the policy area in question.
The European Council and the European Parliament act under the direction of the Council of the European Union, which is composed of heads of governments of member states and the heads of EU institutions. The European Commission drafts legislation. It has the sole power to initiate legislation, but only under the direction of the Council of the EU and with the agreement of Parliament and the European Council.
Despite what is frequently assumed, the Commission is not an oligarchy of unaccountable permanent civil servants commanding a vast expensive, complex bureaucracy. The Commission is nominated by member states and is very largely, if not entirely, composed of commissioners who have been elected politicians at a senior level and not civil servants. The Commission has to be confirmed by the Parliament which can also forced the Commission to resign. The Commission did resign in 1999 before the Parliament could force it to do so. The Parliament has the right to suggest legislation to the Commission, and since it can sack the Commission, it cannot be ignored. The bureaucracy of the Commission is no greater in numbers than the larger units of local and municipal government in the UK.
The EU structure of decision making is complex and indirect. It is not anti-democratic rule by bureaucrats. Laws and decisions are made by bodies which are either directly elected by the citizens of the European Union or are made up of members of elected governments. The Commission can only exist through the will of elected member state governments and the Parliament. The President of the Commission tends to be the public face of the European Union, though recently that has been shared with the President of the Council of the EU. This public role tends to create confusion and exaggerated ideas about the power of the Commission. Though in EU thinking, the Commission is the civil service of the Union, it also a political body appointed to guard the treaties that have constituted the EU. The role of defending agreed basic law is not obviously an anti-democratic conspiracy, it is surely part of a stability of law necessary to the functioning of any political institution. Clearer lines of decision making would be preferable in some respects, but is difficult to achieve so long as the EU operates on a consensus between member states.
Those who are most hostile to the idea of a fully federalised European Union with strong decision making powers are also those most likely to claim that the EU is a bureaucratised conspiracy against member states, lacking clear and direct lines of political decision making. Decisive decision making by directly elected bodies would go beyond what is politically feasible now or in any feasible future. Such clear decision making would require a far far larger bureaucracy and much more intervention in member states. The EU works by consensus between member states and institutions. Unfortunately at any one time it tends to suit some people to claim that the EU is a conspiracy against member states, or a member state supposedly under siege from other members state, or the Commission turned into some monstrosity of unaccountable power which has no basis in reality.
I would certainly welcome less enthusiasm for regulating from above in the European Parliament and other institutions. The drive to the administrative and regulatory state long precedes the European Union and is a universal phenomenon across the globe of the last two centuries. There is no reason to think the member states of the EU would be less regulatory outside the Union. By creating common regulation, the EU at least ensures that regulation does not impede continent wide trade.
The EU does things to promote trade that no existing free trade agreement has ever done. It has uniquely achieved a single market in services and human capital (that is labour), as well as goods, over a continent, over hundreds of millions of people. The creation of regulation at the EU level is a necessary aspect of this, which still leaves considerable scope for countries to have a relatively less statist approach, with a wide variety within member states regarding the scope of the state in the economy. This can be confirmed by careful examination of the Cato Institute’s Human Freedom Index.
The Political State of the European Union
Despite fears and hopes of a eurosceptic ‘populist’ right surge in the European Union leading to its weakening and possible disintegration, these political forces have stabilised at less than one-quarter elected seats in the EP. Support for the European Union and for the Euro currency (frequently pronounced dead in the past by sceptics) has increased in recent years. The continuing political confusion regarding Brexit in the UK has discredited claims about the benefits of leaving and have made it increasingly uncertain that the UK will leave.
Participation in European level voting has increased. The EU has been strengthened in credibility in recent years. Donald Trump’s enthusiasm for trade wars, and bypassing the World Trade Organisation, has undermined claims that the UK could seek a place in the world after Brexit based on free trade with the US. An EU trade agreement with Japan soon after Trump pulled the US out of the Trans Pacific Trade Partnership, which includes Japan, has undermined the idea that the UK would be better off outside the EU in pursuing world trade. Trumps’s tolerance (along with Congress) of an ever increasing federal deficit in the US looks highly imprudent compared with the fiscal prudence imposed by Euro currency institutions and regulations.
Not everything is great about the EU, there are certainly some things the US does better with regard to innovation and regulation, but the EU is increasingly popular and and weakening or breakup would weaken a single market under a unified, predictable regulatory regime. The concentration of powers in national governments is not advantageous to liberty, as the Framers of the US Constitution recognised when they turned thirteen ex-colonies in a loose confederation into components of a Federation based on balance of powers and consensual decision making across institutions.
Nightcap
- Anti-Semitism from Trotsky to Soros James Sheehan, Commonweal
- How to combat parochialism in philosophy Peter Adamson, Times Literary Supplement
- The era of limited government is over Ross Douthat, New York Times
- The paradox of voting Arathy Puthillam, Pragati
Notes On Liberty 