Thursday morning as I was sitting having my coffee I was listening to CBC's
Daybreak North.
Just before 8 a.m. the anchor posed a question to the audience: "Is politics broken?" As a political scientist you can imagine my delight in having this meaty question sent out into the community. I decided that I would wait to look at the responses to the question until I took a shot at answering it myself.
So here I go with my thoughts on this.
Is politics broken? Well, I guess it depends on how you define politics. There are lots of good academic descriptions but I suppose the most well-known is Harold Laswell's definition: "who gets what, when, how."
The popular introductory text book written by Dickerson, Flanagan and O'Neill, says: "In Laswell's view, politics is the distribution of the good things of earthly life, such as wealth, comfort, safety, prestige and recognition." This definition allows us to "operationalize" a concept and measure outcomes by some set of criteria.
So we would break down this description of politics by first asking: "who is the 'who' that we are studying? It could be a whole range of actors: political parties, citizens, corporations, activists, the courts, etc. Then we would ask "what do they get?"
Here again we could quantify many things: power, influence, money, rights, etc. Finally, we would set out criteria for the other two categories. We would ask: "when and how?"
For example: is the gain a reparation for a past injustice; did it result in the gain or loss of a long term contract or benefit or subsidy or a short-term infrastructure project; and, we would ask, was the gain (or loss) achieved through protest or influence or by a shared or divergent ideology?
As Dickerson et. al say: "There is certainly much merit in this approach, in that it is draws attention to the fact that the winners in a conflict - that is, those who succeed in mobilizing support for their projects - usually allocate to themselves and their followers a generous share of material and social benefits."
By this definition and process of evaluation, one might argue that politics is not broken. Every day, there are winners and losers in the political process. Our system provides many ways to enter the public debate about "who gets what, when and how."
Those who feel that they, or the groups they support, are not getting what they want will sometimes claim that politics is broken but if politics is working in your favour then you are likely to think it is working effectively. It is not necessarily a financial advantage that will give a political actor a sense of "winning" in the political game. It could be that the current outcomes of government action just sit well with an individual's belief system. This view rests on the assumption that politics is a game to be played.
Now if I use a different definition like the one Dickerson et al. employ that says that: "Politics is a process of conflict resolution in which support is mobilized and maintained for collective projects... Politics has been called the art of the possible and the art of compromise because it must resolve disagreements among people with different opinions and desires... Political problems rarely have a satisfying solution; usually the best that can be obtained is a settlement - that is an arrangement that makes no one perfectly happy but with which everyone can live."
This definition might lead me to a different conclusion about politics. Elements of the current political system and political culture make the possibility of compromise challenging. Our electoral system can, and often does, lead to a government without a majority of the popular vote.
It is also true that Canada's system of elite accommodation (where compromise is worked out by political representatives) has declined as a result of the rise of an individual rights orientation in the political culture. Also, we have seen the rise of a particular kind of rhetoric that has diminished the role of government and the use of taxes for supporting "collective projects." This definition assumes that politics has a broad collective purpose and that compromise and empathy will guide the process.
So, is politics broken? Well, I guess it depends on your definition of politics.
