Big Thinkers: David Runciman on Crisis and Democracy - in conversation with Jesse Norman MP

Big Thinkers: David Runciman on democracy and crisis

As part of the Institute for Government’s Big Thinkers series, Professor David Runciman discussed the ideas in his latest book The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War 1 to the Present.

Runciman was joined in conversation by Jesse Norman, Conservative MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire, and author of Edmund Burke: Philosopher, Politician, Prophet. Their discussion was followed by questions from the audience, chaired by Peter Riddell, Director of the Institute for Government.

Our Big Thinkers Series is aimed at expanding the Institute’s range of public debate beyond its main focus on improving government effectiveness to broader questions about the nature of government and democracy.

The ubiquitous crises of democracy

David Runciman started writing The Confidence Trap in 2008 amid frantic commentary on the economic meltdown following the collapse of Lehman Brothers. He noted the near-apocalyptic crisis talk at this time, but also reflected on the very ubiquity of such crisis talk across developed democratic countries and throughout the past hundred years – hyped up by journalists, politicians, academics and activists. In every decade of the 20^th century you can find a ‘crisis of democracy’ literature, a vivid discourse on the existential threats to established democratic government. But in retrospect, while it is clear that some of this talk reflected genuine crises, it was rarely clear at the time which ones were the false alarms. The very fact that democracy ‘muddled through’ the genuine as well as the over-hyped meant few questions were asked about which was which.

Runciman drew on the work of Alexis de Tocqueville, who’s landmark study, Democracy in America, had highlighted the tensions between the messy, fractured surface of democratic politics and its underlying stability. Tocqueville recognised that many groups in a democracy have the incentive to talk up potential crises, and also that democracy has the great virtue of being adaptable when crisis does strike. These features, however, led the 19^th century aristocrat to fear for the complacency of democratic societies.

With this in mind, Runciman set out three elements that constitute the ‘confidence trap’ into which he warns that democracies are prone to fall:

Hysteria. The ubiquity of crisis talk in democracies creates a lot of political ‘noise’ in which it is difficult to distinguish the genuine dangers from hysterical decoys.

Muddling in. While the public, commentators and political leaders are preoccupied by this noise, the underlying causes of crisis are allowed to develop and democracy is too slow to take these seriously or to address them. As a result, Runciman says, ‘democracies make a lot of mistakes’.

Muddling out. The strength of democracy, however, is that while it may not be timely it is flexible, and just as democracies create a lot of problems, they also solve a lot of problems. Runciman’s central contrast is between democracies and autocracies: in an autocracy the government is often ‘stuck with their mistakes’ because of the political weakness implied by changing course.

This is where complacency sets in for democracies. They ‘squander their victories’ because they decide too soon that crisis has been averted; the messy process of adaptation that is crucial to their survival rarely goes deep enough, so leaves unaddressed some of the underlying causes. This sets the scene for a future crisis – a pattern that Runciman draws out in his book through the cycle of seven crises spanning the last century.

However, Runciman does not believe that history works in cycles – or at least, not for long. The confidence trap has a deeper dynamic, in which developed democracies become ever more hysterical about the imminence of crisis, yet ever more complacent about the underlying conditions that give rise to them. He offers two examples where the traditional ‘muddling through’ of democracies may not be enough:

• the environmental crisis, in which the feedback loops from our current actions are too long, and the scope to muddle out may be curtailed by the accumulation over a long period of irreversible damage to the climate; and
• the impacts of technological change, in which developments are too rapid, their implications too hard to grasp while they are happening and so the signals even harder to separate from the noise.

Jesse Norman took up the themes of the talk to address two particularly pressing questions that he saw for developed democracy.

First, he considered what the traditional strengths of democracy in muddling through means for the increasing ‘rationalism’ of British politics, in which political argument is reduced to economic calculation and decisions are made on utilitarian grounds. Does rationalism make democracy less flexible? Furthermore, he questioned whether democracy may have become too self-absorbed: do we need to bring back to modern democracy some of the ‘aristocratic virtues’ that Tocqueville saw clinging on in America that turned democratic politics away from the individual and towards notions of duty, honour and virtue?

Second, he asked whether autocracies might be doing rather better than we once thought? In modern China, we have seen greater stability in passing power between leaders than has traditionally been the case in autocracies, in which rulers left power by death or revolution and struggles ensued for who was to take over.

Discussion

The discussion that followed began with the challenge from China. David Runciman considered it ‘early days’ to judge whether China was bucking the autocratic trend of instability. In particular, a big test will be how they adapt to a change of leadership in less stable, peaceful conditions than they have experienced in the last few decades. He also commented that while China offers a clear alternative model to liberal, capitalist democracy not seen since the USSR, there are very few Western commentators who suggest we adopt it.

A further focus of the discussion was on the challenge of democratic engagement in Britain. Jesse Norman remarked upon the apparent paradox that trust in politicians is declining substantially yet citizens do not seem to be less willing to accept the authority of the state.

David Runciman described fears over voter turnout and government legitimacy as an example of crisis talk, and suggested that our political system is not so close to the brink as is widely supposed. He also observed that the promise of technology to enable wider or more direct citizen involvement in democracy had gone largely unfulfilled, with most people bypassing politics. The apparent appetite for issue-based politics poses a risk for democracy, because if the public only engage occasionally and narrowly in politics they leave the field to the professional politicians, who will inevitably be more adept at working the system.

Questions from the floor:

• Are we lucky or unlucky that the British system of government is relatively autocratic?
• How do we persuade those who may be attracted by the autocratic model that democracy is precious?
• Is there really a separation between the way things are and public opinion about them, given that many crises are caused by changes in the way people think about the situation?
• Should we be optimists or pessimists about the prospects for the spread of democracy?

The questions gave rise to further points from David Runciman who noted that a risk for British democracy is that professional politicians may be too isolated from the stresses and strains of democratic life which allow democratic government to adapt. He also warned that far from dismissing the arguments of commentators like Russell Brand, we need to recognise that if you disengage from politics you won’t bring down the politicians, you leave the field to open to them.

Jesse Norman praised the evolutionary nature of the British constitution and its ability to flex at critical historical points. He warned against the temptation to create a more rational system, because these can often work less well and have less room for adaptation. Norman said that the people of developed democracies should celebrate the joys of a life lived in conditions of freedom, but that government’s must not get too optimistic and should know when to ‘take away the punch bowl’ from the public.