"The Search for Democracy" – a 56 year journey

This was the title of a book I wrote in 1977 for community activists trying to understand the new Scottish local government which had been introduced a few years earlier. That’s 56 years ago; since when I’ve had a go at reforming the government systems of a further dozen countries. For the past few years I’ve been working on a book to explain and derive some lessons from that experience of trying to reform bureaucratic systems. It’s been running with the title “Change for the Better? A Life in Reform” but this morning I suddenly realised that a better title is perhaps the one I’ve given this post?  

John Ralston Saul is a Canadian political thinker who wrote in 1992 one of my favourite books 

“Voltaire’s Bastards – the dictatorship of reason in the West” which contained the wonderful 

sentence

"We've spent half a century arguing over management methods. If there are solutions to our 

confusions over government, they lie in democratic not management processes" 

which is now one of the quotations I use on my blog to convey the spirit in which it is written. What I want to do in this post is to convey a sense of how my thinking about democracy has evolved in the past half-century. In a nutshell – as the Saul quote suggests - I've been too fixated on the political aspects of democracy and have totally ignored the economic aspects which Richard Wolff has so brilliantly conveyed in his “Democracy at Work – a cure for Capitalism”

A long 1977 article entitled Community Development – its administrative and political challenge which I had published in a Social Work journal gives a sense of the thinking which drove some of us in our perception of conditions in the West of Scotland - arguing that

Our society is hardly what one would call a participatory democracy. The term that

is used - "representative" democracy - recognises that "the people" do not take 

political decisions but have rather surrender that power to one tor several) small elites 

- subject to infrequent checks  Such checks are, of course, a rather weak base 

on which to rest claims for democracy4 and more emphasis is therefore given to the 

freedom of expression and organisation whereby pressure groups articulate a 

variety of interests. Those who defend the consequent operation of the political 

process argue that we have, in effect a political market place in which valid or strongly 

supported ideas survive and are absorbed into new policies. They further argue that 

every viewpoint or interest has a more or less equal chance of finding expression 

and recognition. This is the political theory of pluralism.
Community development disputes this view of the operation of the policy process. At its 

most extreme - in some theories of community action - it argues that the whole process 

is a gigantic confidence trick. In its more liberal version it merely wants to strengthen 

the voice of certain inarticulate members of society. There is, I would suggest, a relatively 

simple way to test the claims of those who argue that there is little scope for 

improvement in the operation of our democratic process and that any deficiencies 

are attributable to the faults of individuals rather than to the system. It involves 

looking at how new policies emerge.

The policy process
A key question is: How does government hear and act upon the signals from below? 

How do "problems" get on the political "agenda"? The assumption of our society, 

good "liberals" that most of us essentially are, is that

• the channels relating governors to governed are neutral and

• the opportunity to articulate grievances and have these defined (if they are significant 

• enough) as "problems" requiring action from authority is evenly distributed throughout 

• society.

"Problems" emerge because individuals or groups feel dissatisfied and articulate 

and organise that dissatisfaction in an influential way which makes it difficult for 

government to resist. "Grievance" or "dissatisfaction" is not. however, a simple concept - 

it arises when a judgement is made that events fall short of what one has reason to expect. 

Grievance reflects the relationship between “expectations” and “perceived 

performance” – with working-class people being bludgeoned to expect mere crumbs 

and to be grateful.
Community development staff were, in a sense, the shock-troops to help make the pluralist 

system work again.

As we were drafting our first slim attempt at a strategy in 1975, the Labour government was winding down what had become an increasingly critical Community Development Programme – reflected in John Bennington’s Local G vernment Becomes Big Business; (CDP 1976); and Gilding the Ghetto – the state and the poverty experiments (CDP 1977) Little wonder the Labour government regretted opening the Pandora's box of community development! By then, the country was being increasingly assailed with economic problems which are usefully outlined in this article