Polyarchy (from gr. poly ‘many’ and arkhe ‘rule’) is a political system where several different groups compete for power and where a large part of the adult population chooses which group has the highest power for a period.
The reason why this description of the word polyarchy sounds so familiar is, of course, that polyarchy is the variant of political systems that we have in most parts of the Western world. The explanation for the polyarchy concept in the quote above is taken from the Swedish Wikipedia dictionary. The originator of it was the Yale University political science professor Robert Alan Dahl. Dahl used it as a designation for the least developed, and most basic, level of possible democratic governance. At the top of the same democratic scale he put a fully developed, ideal, democracy that would be able render perfectly legitimate decisions.
The limitations of low resolution. Part 1.
Poly, as in the word polyarchy, thus means many and in Sweden we have as many as eight parties in todays Swedish parliament. In the last parliamentary election, in 2018, it was actually a total number of 79 parties that lined up, but since the media, because of the news logic that control it, only reports on the large parties that are considered to have a chance to enter parliament, ordinary Swedish voters usually have an awareness set of only a dozen of the options they have.
This, together with the 4% threshold rule, means that there are, in practice, eight parties competing for power in Swedish general elections. Eight opinion packages to attract voters and represent the political elites who want to have influence in society and the economic flows. Eight funnels, if you will, designed and directed to capture and sort the voters’ preferences. By having the people, in an election, influenceing the distribution of the political power among the various political elites, it is hoped that polyarchy, this very basic form of democracy, will emerge.
As when a large, high-resolution image with millions of pixels is compressed down to a tiny image with only eight pixels, a lot of information will inevitably be lost in the process. It is obviously too much to ask of us Swedish citizens that we should recognize ourselves in this picture of our own opinions when it has been compressed so hard, and neither do we.
Since Swedish democracys solely bases its legitimacy on its ability to correctly reflect the opinions of the people in the country’s deciding assemblies (“all public power in Sweden is based on the people”, as the constitution goes), this low resolution of course means a great restriction on the reachable democratic legitimacy. Polyarchy thus has an inherent limit to it’s legitimacy.
Why polyarchy?
Polyarchies have arisen in different places in different times, but in general it has happened when countries have changed to having an universal suffrage. The democratization processes have simply meant the introduction of representative models of democracy or, as in Sweden, the democratization of an already existing representative system.
An important reason why the development of democracy has yet to go beyond this very first basic level, on the journey towards a more ideal democracy, was the formation of political parties.
At the end of the 19th century there were loosely composed groups of individual, but like-minded, men in the Swedish parliament. They could sometimes come together and call themselves parties but they were not parties in any way that we modern people would have recognized. They had no members, organizations, party programs nor ran any electoral campaigns.
Outside the parliament, the Social Democratic Workers Party, SAP, was formed in 1889. They had the same hierarchical organizational model as their German predecessor and role model – SPD, Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, formed under the name Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein, ADAV, as early as 1863. (As a reminder of that politics can move over an infinitely much larger playing field than the democratic one, it can be mentioned that the SPD was banned by the Nazi Party in 1933. Its members were exiled, imprisoned or murdered. The German Social Democratic Party only emerged again after the death of Adolf Hitler in 1945).
At the beginning of the 20th century Sweden had a majority, first-past-the-post electoral system (similar to the English one) where only the winner in each constituency was allowed to take a seat in Parliament. We also had an income-graded voting for men. That had for a long time meant that the right-wing and nationalist parties had been guaranteed power in parliament but, because of the industrialization and that wages were increased for so many among those who were entitled to vote, there were, at that time, about as many voting on the Right, the Liberals and the Social Democrats each.
The Social Democrats and Liberals wanted to change the electoral system. They wanted to remove the income-graded voting so that all men’s votes would be counted equally. The conservatives understood that if they were to adhere to the majority voting system while doing this, they would soon be completely without representation and influence. So the conservative leader Arvid Lindman suggested a shift to a proportional electoral system. In this way, the conservatives could still continue to be represented in the Riksdag and could gain influence by forming temporary majorities with other parties on various issues.
A suffrage more universal than equal
The new electoral system was introduced in 1909 and the second chamber election in 1911 was the first election in Sweden when voters had only political parties to choose from. The various representatives that the parties would have, the parties themselves had already chosen in advance. The representatives thus represented the political parties, which in turn represented the political elites.
As the political elites formed the political parties at the same time as more people were eligible to vote, the result was that the political elites retained the power over who would represent them. The new voters were only allowed to influence the balance of power between the parties. They were thus exempted from a substantial part of representative democracy, the part of appointing their representatives. The consequence was that, in practice, the vote was still graded. Not based on income but on the degree of affiliation with any of the political elites.
Since the politicians were not elected, or rejected, by the voters but by the parties, the politicians were also responsible to the parties. Not to the voters. The parties, with their nomination monopoly, took power over national politics. “The universal and equal suffrage” that we have had since 1918 when Swedish women too were given the right to vote can, from this perspective, still be said to be much more universal than equal.
The parties take power in the municipalities
In local politics, however, democracy sprouted. In Sweden’s more than 2,500 municipalities, hundreds of thousands of Swedish citizens were involved in local self-government. It was therefore not uncommon for anyone, on any ordinary day, to meet one or more people in the community where they lived who were involved in local politics. The mailman, teacher, cashier in the hardware store or the waiter at the local hotel could be a local politician. This was what it looked like between 1921, when the universal and equal suffrage were put into practice and up to 1952, before the first municipal reform began.
During this period around a quarter of these Swedish municipalities (624) had a system that uniquely combined universal suffrage with direct democracy. Olof Petersson explains this in the book Vår Demokrati (Our democracy): “Matters could be brought both by the chairman or by any voting person. A new question could not be decided until at a subsequent meeting, after due preparation and announcement. Voting concerning the election of persons was decided with a ballot vote. Other voting took place openly, unless someone requested a closed vote.”
After the municipal merging reforms, that took place between 1952 and 1974, there were barely 300 municipalities left. It was a coercive reform from the top. Power had then been centralized and some 2200 communities had lost their local self-government. The old local government, which was built on almost 1,000-year-old parish boundaries, had been broken down. It was not until this time, between 1952 and 1974, that the major parties with their ideologies seriously made their entry into the newly formed municipal councils and replaced the hundreds of thousands of local elected representatives who until then were the ones who looked to the best of the rank and file. The power was taken from the community representatives and given to the party representatives. In 1967, they also decided that they should have a joint election day for National, municipal and county council elections. The idea was that voters would choose the same party with all three ballots. This was called the municipal connection.
The organizational model of the political parties, and the competition between, them soon led to the handing over of power from the party members to the party leadership. The citizens who were involved in the parties therefore withdrew. It was reflected in a huge membership loss during the late 1900s and early 2000s. At the turn of the millennium, the Swedish Democracy Council stated that if membership reductions would continue at the same rate, membership numbers would be down to zero in the year of 2013. That was never the case, but it was not far off either. The number of members of the political parties who are so active that they attend at least one meeting per year is now down to a single percent of the population. Those of us Swedes who are so politically active so that we have any position att all in any political assembly are just four per mille.
Post Democracy
A post-democratic society is one that continues to have and to use all the institutions of democracy, but in which they increasingly become a formal shell. The energy and innovative drive pass away from the democratic arena and into small circles of a politico-economic elite.
If it is not the voters who govern and neither are the members of the parties who govern, then one can wonder who it is that currently controls the political parties and politics. We can find the answer in the condition called “post-democracy”. A term coined by English political scientist Colin Crouch in 2000. The quote above is his definition.
As power in the parties rose to the top, the political elites needed to find new ways to influence the heads of the parties to drive their politics. The solution was to create strong extra-parliamentary organizations, special interest groups, that could influence the parties from outside the parliament. In Sweden, we see the result of that in the post-democratic display window Almedalen every summer. It is at the rosé wine banquets and DJ battles that the political elites’ lobbyists influence the parties to pursue issues that are favorable to their activities.
We see this in the revolving doors that exist between the parties and the lobby organizations. We see this in how a member of the Social Democrats’ executive committee got an apartment from the Municipal Workers’ Union and in how LO (The Swedish Trade Union Confederation) invested SEK 30 million in a Social Democratic election campaign in exchange for better pension terms for LO’s members. We see this in how the bill for how the Swedish Public Employment Service’s closure and privatization as a whole is written by Almega, which organizes staffing companies and presents itself as “Sweden’s largest Employer and Industry Organization for Service Companies”. We also see it in how Swedish municipalities and regions come together and open lobbyist offices in Brussels. The fact that politicians themselves understand that it is more effective to lobby rather than try to influence through the democratic institutions is very symptomatic.
The Municipal Workers’ Union, which, through collaboration with the Social Democrats, got 7 of their own members into the very Parliament after the 2018 election, was not satisfied with the influence that could give and wanted to “review” their union-political cooperation with the Social Democrats. Chairman Tobias Baudin made this statement in the unions’ own newspaper Kommunalarbetaren:
“We want to influence all politicians who are in power, how we can do it in a smarter way, we will now consider.”
Thus, the municipal workers’ union wanted to use the members’ millions to influence more parties than just the Social Democrats. They had obviously figured out that the members’ money would give more power to the members if spent on lobbying from outside the parliament than the members themselves could get from working inside the parliament.
Without any member base left to speak of, the political parties in a post-democracy use pre-packaged political proposals from the lobbyists of the political elites. To find out what their target groups think, they use opinion polls. In order to try to influence voters to want the policy that the political elites have decided on, the parties use “spinning” and “framing” in messages produced by advertising agencies. The reforms that enables welfare companies to make big profits from tax money, originally intended and collected for services to the elderly, the sick and school children, are dressed up in euphemisms like freedom-of-choise-reforms. In a post-democracy, not even the right-wing parties no longer want to lower the taxes, because the taxes are supposed to finance the charter schools and all other freedom-of-choise-reforms that the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise (Svenskt Näringsliv) wants to give to its members to expand their markets.
As consequences of a post-democratic condition it was, at the turn of the millennium, imagined that politicians in the future would ignore the opinions and results of referendums, that we would see an increase in xenophobic and populist parties, that private interests would have gained greater influence over politics and that “foreign powers” would find ways to affect politics in other countries. That description of a political condition may also feel a bit familiar to you.
The limitations of low resolution. Part 2.
According to basic democracy theory, democracy, and the legitimacy that comes with it, basically consists of the combination of two values. Political equality and individual freedoms and rights.
In the diagram above there are two axes. One with political equality where zero means that only one person decides everything and ten means that everyone has equal power. If political power is divided between a number of political elites acting through eight political parties, then we are reasonably much closer to zero than ten on that scale.
When it comes to individual freedoms and rights, however, this is something that polyarchies are very good at distributing to their citizens. Freedoms and rights do not cost the governing as much and they do not feel that it takes any power away from themselves.
However, with the help of the diagram, we get a picture of the limited possible legitimacy of the polyarchy. We can also see that there is plenty of space above. Because the power holders are sometimes so few, decisions cannot (without pure luck or chance) be made above the limit. One possibility, of course, is the use of a referendum on single issues, but after Brexit, the authorities have understood that the referendum as a tool in a post-democratic condition has become far too unpredictable. It will inevitably be used by a large portion as a protest against the establishment. Above all, the politicians would not want to send any signals to the voters that they themselves cannot make decisions on a matter. That is, after all, the unique competence they try to convince us voters in every election campaign that only they possess.
All of this leaves a couple of loose ends. How do we break through the bounds of legitimacy that inevitably comes with polyarchy and who should represent the citizens in a representative democracy?
Folkstyret
Folkstyret is a democratic party. If Folkstyret is elected by the citizens into parliament, Folkstyret will forward each proposal to 1,000 randomly selected citizens. They will receive information about the proposal and then respond to what they think about it on a five-point scale. The Folkstyret Democratic Party finds out the statically normal view of the proposal, the standpoint which most people can agree on, and then vote accordingly in parliament. Each time a ramdom person of the population gets a question about what they think of a proposal, they also get the chance to express whether there is something else they want to put on the political agenda or if they want to back up any other proposal that someone else already has put forward. These proposals are sorted in order of popularity and are converted into proposals by the elected Folkstyrets’ ombudsmen.
The Folkstyret Democratic Party has two built-in auto-rejects, which means that Folkstyret automatically votes against proposals that are not approved by the Council on Legislation. This means that proposals that are contrary to the Constitution, are discriminatory, restricts individual freedoms or are not congruent with other parts of legislation cannot be implemented with the help of Folkstyret. Thus, Folkstyret cannot be used to harm liberal democracy. The second auto-reject is triggered if a proposal or vote has been manipulated so that Folkstyret is not able to produce a legitimate basis for the vote. For example, if the time given is too short or if someone is trying to enforce a decision on a level too far from the affected citizens (that the principle of subsidiarity is not followed).
All in all, this also means that the Folkstyret Democratic Party only needs to have one single election promise in all general elections: To follow Folkstyrets own statutes.
This solution benefits from the fact that we are many in the population. This means that each randomly selected group is so large and versatile that it can reflect the true and well-thought out opinion of the population on the issue. At the same time, and because we are many millions of inhabitants in the country, each of us on average will be selected quite rarely. Folkstyret gives the whole democratic system and its decisions more legitimacy, perfectly reflecting our views on each issue while not disturbing us in our ordinary lives.
Those of us who want to get involved politically can do so as much as we want in raising public opinion and debating, but we, through our own representatives, all have exactly the same political power in the decisions.
Since the Folkstyret Democratic Party does not come up with any policy of its own, but is merely a pure and undistorted channel for citizens‘ opinions on various issues directly into the decision-making assembly, the Folkstyret can crowdsource or arrange citizens’ panels with randomly selected citizens who can tackle more complex political problems, free of prestige , ideological ideas and other barriers. Just let the power of the best arguments lead them on the path to the common good. If it turns out to that a decision that has undergone the democratic procedure in all its steps does not generate the result that was intended, that will soon be corrected as it will be sent through another round in the process. Much more flexible, vibrant and evolving than it is today, when a chosen decision maker, because of prestige, sticks to his decision for another four years before he can be voted out for a new desicion to be taken.
The political parties can then wholeheartedly represent the political elites, whether they are farmers and foresters, the labor movement, the free churches, the environmental movement and so on. At each election, the voters can choose how much influence the political elites should have in relation to the citizens them selves.
With the help of the Folkstyret Democratic Party, we the people can represent ourselves and break through the barrier of polyarchys’ legitimacy and approach the ideal democracy without sacrificing any of our freedoms or rights. We can let our own preferences be reflected in every decision that is made and have a political self-image with an unlimited resolution and depth.
