IN 1944, French women finally obtained the right to vote, more than 150 years after the first attempt at universal manhood suffrage was introduced in 1792.
It was not until 1948 that the United Kingdom abolished “university seats,” which had given the privilege of a double vote to graduates at the most prestigious universities.
Although in 1870, ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution guaranteed on paper the right of Afro-Americans to vote, it is only since 1965 that all black voters in the United States have been able to exercise their democratic rights. But even today those rights are sometimes limited, since many states disenfranchise anyone who has had dealings with the judicial or penal system, and this hits the black community particularly hard.
The first constitution establishing genuinely universal suffrage in Brazil, with no restrictions for education or literacy, was finally adopted in 1988.
And in Saudi Arabia, suffrage became universal (inclusive of women) only in 2015.
The history of universal suffrage has been bumpy and recent, just like the modern history of representative democracy. As for attempts to regulate the relationship between money and politics, their ancestry is even shorter. France, for example, had to wait until the turn of the 1990s to see the first real law on the funding of election campaigns and political parties, and even that is only a rough outline that deserves to be almost entirely rewritten.
What we are promised is democratic equality: “one person, one vote.” The reality is quite different, and popular dissatisfaction with all the muddling through is plain to see. But it is possible to do much better; precisely because the history is recent, we can act upon it, change its course, become players ourselves. We cannot be fatalistic. We can and must use this unfinished history to rethink democracy and to dream wide awake of a better world. Such is the message of this book.
In the previous chapters, I highlighted the dangers of an oligarchic distortion of democracy in these early decades of the twenty-first century. And I proposed some solutions. These take their inspiration from two centuries of hopes, experiments, and failures to regulate the dangerous liaisons between private money and political democracy all around the world. My aim has been to give some historical truth to the idea of “permanent democracy,” not in its (numerous) philosophical foundations, but in its practical application. To take one example: a referendum resulting from a people’s initiative is a fine idea only if it goes together with strict regulation of campaign expenses—otherwise, private donations will ultimately decide the fate of this new expression of the people’s will.
So, in this book I have closely examined the quantitative aspects of political funding and the attempts to regulate it through legislation. Unfortunately, as things stand today, the health of democracy is sometimes measured by the thermometer of private funding, and it has to be said that the fever is rising. I could mention a few of the key findings that have punctuated these pages. I could repeat that in 2016 the French government spent as much money on support for the political preferences of the top 0.01 percent—through direct or indirect political funding, and particularly tax relief on donations—as it did for those of the least advantaged half of the population. I could tell you again that in the United States in 2016 more than 5.4 billion euros of private funding were spent on election campaigns; that the UK Labour Party now relies more heavily on donations from corporations and wealthy individuals than on membership contributions (even if there has recently been something of an improvement); or that in the United States and Italy, two pioneers in the public funding of democracy in the early 1970s, the victories of populist parties—Donald Trump in the presidential election of 2016, the Five Stars Movement and the League in the legislative elections of 2018—occurred simultaneously with the final blow to the public funding of campaign expenditure.
In my view, the key point of which the reader should be aware is that new tools of direct democracy or a marginal change in voting systems would not be sufficient for our democracies to become genuinely representative. Unless the core issue of the funding of democracy is resolved beforehand, such innovations will yield no more than an illusion of greater representativeness and a further increase in frustrations.
The main difficulty is that the funding question is ignored in most countries, and that where academics and politicians do give it some attention they have failed to place it at the center of public debate. In the United States, Lawrence Lessig and Bernie Sanders are exceptions in this respect, as their election campaigns have highlighted the need to limit private donations. In practice, however, when the funding question has forced its way into the media, it has mostly prompted calls for the elimination of any kind of public subsidies. This is a particularly dangerous demand. What we hear from some is that it is high time to end the squandering of public money on a discredited political class. Special mention should be made here of Italy’s Five Stars Movement, whose populist criticisms have finally borne fruit and put an end even to any partial reimbursement of election spending.
Well, I hope to have convinced you by now that the public funding of democracy—so long as it gives equal weight to all citizens—is more necessary than ever. We should reclaim this profoundly political measure and decide together how much we wish to be allocated to it. I have proposed seven euros per citizen, in the shape of Democratic Equality Vouchers. A little more might be in order, of course, but much less would not be desirable. Democracy has a price: it does not have to be exorbitant, but in the end it must be paid. What I have tried to show in this book is that it is preferable—for the representation of all citizens’ preferences—that the cost is borne by public subsidies, rather than by the checkbooks of a few wealthy private donors.
The point is not only to advocate the public funding of democracy—direct subsidies to parties in accordance with precise rules, which today usually link them to past election results, but which in my proposed model follow an annual choice by all citizens—and to contrast this with private funding. More fundamentally, the debate counterposes the idea of “public democracy” to a drive to privatize the key forces of democracy, particularly the allocation of the public good. This drive is apparent, for example, in the numerous attacks on public broadcasting services, with the same underlying intent that one finds in speeches supporting privatization of the public health and education systems, and so on. It is as if the state no longer had a full role to play in deducting contributions, organizing redistribution, and guaranteeing access to fundamental public goods such as education, health, and information—as if it no longer had a role to play as a welfare state protecting everyone against the hazards of life.
These attacks against the redistributive state go together with an explosion of economic inequalities. In the past few decades, the richest sections of society have greatly profited from policies of privatization and deregulation: the value of private assets has been continually rising, while in many countries net public assets have entered negative territory. Now the super-privileged, who have benefited from economic privatization, would like to privatize politics as well. How? Once restrictions are lifted, all citizens can donate as much as they want—which means a very high concentration of donations—and candidates can spend to their heart’s content. The end result is that the traditional parties of the Left stop defending the interests of the working classes. Following the conservative parties—but hiding behind the supposed constraints of globalization—they promote a lowering of corporate and wealth taxes, in favor of higher consumption taxes that place an increasing share of the burden of public spending on the shoulders of the least advantaged.
So, political inequalities continuously fuel economic inequalities, which in their turn foster economic inequalities, and so on. What is a positive escape route from all this? I would like to end by repeating my message: do not be afraid to allocate a few euros a year in public money to the funding of democracy! You already do this without knowing it. Or rather, most countries have a system whereby fiscal expenditure and tax relief for private donations mobilize the taxes paid by the majority so that a tiny privileged minority can use their wallets to bolster their political preferences. The first prerequisite for the regaining of democracy is to put an end to this “fiscal capture.” With my proposals, the sums of public money spent for democracy—and especially for political parties—would not be greater than what is spent today in countries such as France, Spain, or Germany. But the sums would be equally spread among citizens. Democratic Equality Vouchers mean “one person, one vote.” In countries such as the United Kingdom or the United States, where public funding is virtually nonexistent today, new public money would be disbursed for the functioning of political democracy. But at the same time, there would be much smaller sums of private money. To put it succinctly, it seems preferable to tax high incomes and to use the proceeds for the equal public funding of democracy, instead of leaving a handful of multimillionaires to use the same sums in support of candidates who will defend their economic interests.
I also think there should be an end to all the tax relief associated with donations to political foundations, or at least, to begin with, that they should be replaced with tax credits or a system of matching contributions, which would make all citizens equal from this point of view. As we have seen, there is an inherent contradiction in the idea of philanthropy in a democracy. But what if it was just collectively decided to make the highest earners (or largest owners) pay the most, instead of naïvely assuming that they will themselves contribute to the collective effort through the mechanism of philanthropy? What if it was decided to embrace public funding of the public good, instead of private funding of a public good that has in effect become privatized?
Naturally I understand people’s distrust of political parties, and much of the evidence presented in this book shows that it is not without foundation. But this should not lead to a rejection of parties as such. My aim has not been to fuel the growing disenchantment with democracy or to hammer the traditional parties, but rather to dissect the past in order to prepare for the future. Nor is it a solution to write off democracy or the party system by throwing ourselves into the arms of right-wing populism. The only way forward is to rebuild the public funding of democracy, while tightly restricting private funding so that it is unable to capture democracy. A 200-euro ceiling on political donations may appear rather extreme, but it is the only viable solution in the long run. This is what we have learned from the little tour of the world that we have just completed.
With Democratic Equality Vouchers and a drastic curtailment of private funding, politicians who today heed only the preferences of the rich (that is, of their financial backers) will tomorrow respond to the preferences of the majority who elect them. But the crisis of democracy is such that we need to go beyond the question of funding alone. To solve the representation deficit, it will be necessary to ensure that elected deputies are more representative of the population. This is the thinking behind a mixed assembly: to ensure that there is a significant proportion of working-class people in Parliament, with some elected under a PR system on lists embracing social parity. This should lead in turn to the emergence of new political movements, more popular in their composition and more aware of the reality of people’s daily lives. The proposal will strike some as radical, but the truth is that it addresses today’s radical exclusion of the popular classes from the political process. To revolutionize political democracy is also to take inspiration from social democracy—for example, from the fact that roughly half of union representatives are themselves blue-collar workers or employees. Why not also introduce time off from work for political representatives, in line with the model of union representatives? For, apart from the funding issue, time is one of the major problems facing working-class people who want to become involved in politics.
What position will be taken on all this by the labor unions, the traditional government parties of the Left, the new horizontally connected political movements, and, more generally, all the social and civic organizations that have emerged in recent years? I dare to hope that they will choose the path of a democratic revolution. I remember the figure of Colin Smith in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, that young English delinquent oppressed by authority figures who try to dictate his life. They say they want to raise him in the image of Ruxton Towers, the juvenile detention center to which he has been sent, and the governor there offers him the chance to gain privileges by excelling at competitive running. But the governor is self-interested: his motivation is not that Smith should succeed in life, but that the reformatory should win a sports competition against Ranley, a nearby private school. Colin Smith is a fine runner and is capable of coming first; he proves this by reaching the finishing line well ahead of the rest. But then he stops a few meters short and makes a bow as he lets the Ranley runner cross the line. Why? By voluntarily losing the race, Smith asserts that he is a free agent. He has demonstrated his talent, but he refuses to bend to the will of the powerful people who demand his victory.
The reader is in two minds, tempted to applaud Smith’s splendid, uniquely forceful gesture in thumbing his nose at the authorities, but also well aware that he misses his opportunity by asserting his freedom in this way. In the end, Smith’s decision leaves power in the hands of those who already have it. Stripped of privileges and returned to the machine shop, he even loses any possibility to protest. It is his mistake. It should not be repeated today. The working classes need to reenter the terrain of politics and electoral democracy. And the unions, new political movements, and citizens’ organizations should help them by supporting the idea of a mixed assembly that allows them to present their own candidates to sit on its benches.
The refounding of democracy concerns the whole planet. Although we have made a few ultra-brief side trips to Brazil and India, this book has essentially referred only to Western Europe and North America; it is one of its major limitations. Yet the lessons I have drawn from Western failures have a worldwide bearing: the new democracies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America will play at least as great a role as those of the West in constructing tomorrow’s democratic ideal. And in many cases, responding to crises of their own, they may well take inspiration from historical experiences elsewhere, which are like an open book providing material to imagine a better world.
The corrupting role of money has just burst into the light of day in Latin America, for example. Of course, it is not as if no one was previously unaware that corporations could offer kickbacks to politicians; we need only look a few years back at scandals in France and Italy. Today, politicians are crashing to the ground. But what reforms will follow? The greatest democratic promises have always been built on the ground of crises. The proof is that Brazil has just taken a first step toward the public funding of its democracy. Let us hope that this will open the way for others.
I would also have liked to speak more of Africa, a major absence in these pages but not in the debate on forms of representation. The “price of a vote”: many are the books that seek to understand what links corruption, ethnicity, public goods, and election results in various countries, and I would have needed much wider knowledge to dare to address this question. But it seems to me that, in a number of imperfect democracies, there is already an urgent need to think ahead and envisage an ambitious system of funding democracy. I have given much thought to this question in the case of the media. Of course, in countries where the government itself puts journalists behind bars, how can anyone think that the solution is to create a variety of political foundations? And in a country where the government controls who is allowed to run in elections, how can anyone imagine that the future of democracy hinges on public subsidies to parties and state funding for election expenditure?
Yet public funding is, in my view, the only path that will lead to the recovery of democracy. It is a path strewn with pitfalls, on which it will be necessary to fight both against private lobbies eager to preserve their financial electoral privileges and against a Far Right that has abandoned all hope in electoral democracy. But it is a path leading toward democratic equality: to one person, one vote. At last—and, let us hope, for a long time to come.