Closing the gap

This is the first section of a longer piece intended for publication. It will be followed by sections on: the need to express policy in terms of outcomes; and Social Policy Bonds

The gap between politicians and public 

There’s a large and growing gap between politicians and the people they are supposed to represent. This has always been true in autocratic countries, but it is now also a feature of democracies. I believe this stems from the increasingly opaque ways in which government works, such that the only people who can follow policymaking closely are politicians themselves, lawyers, well-off corporations or their lobbyists. Our policymaking process is so obscure, so unknowable by ordinary people that the alienation between politicians the public is inevitable. Whether this is intentional or not, is not the point; more important is that no politician wants to make it more transparent. Such a system is ripe for gaming and manipulation, but even when working according to the letter of the law, it inherently favours those who have the time and inclination to involve themselves - or their paid agents - in the minutiae of the policymaking process. Any link between what politicians say, and what ordinary people actually experience is undetectable.
Knowing this, we are reduced to choosing our representatives on the bases of their campaign promises, looks, ability to produce superficially convincing soundbites or, perhaps most portentous of all: identity. That is, those of the electorate who can be bothered to turn out to vote; the rest of us have taken on the learned helplessness that is characteristic of subjects that come to believe that their lives can neither be improved nor avoided. The result is clear, even in democracies: disenchantment with our leaders, mistrust and cynicism, and the disturbing drift toward authoritarianism and demagoguery.

I believe this his happening because our policymaking system focuses on concerns that have little obvious relevance to members of the public: institutional structures and funding arrangements, law changes, and macroeconomic abstractions. Oracular pronouncements of lofty goals are sometimes heard, but nothing can be pinned down and nobody takes them seriously. It is almost as if political systems the world over, whatever their origins, ere purposely designed to alienate the public. It’s hardly surprising then that there’s a strong demand for the sort of sloganeering that is often inflammatory and dishonest, but does at least express ordinary people’s concerns in language we can understand. 

The system’s complexity makes it difficult to share policy decisions and dilemmas with non-members of the political caste. As with any profession, as specialisation increases, so does the difficulty of communicating with the public. This matters more with politics than other professions with politicians, because their decisions affect all of us. The mistrust is mutual and self-perpetuating, so that now the most fundamental notion of policymaking - that all policy choices will create winners and losers - is never communicated to the public, because we’d see it as a lie or a self-serving admission of incompetence. We don’t trust politicians, we don’t understand their language, so why should they bother us with unpalatable truths? 

It’s essential, I believe, to close the trust gap, mainly because doing so would increase our buy-in to the policy decisions made on our behalf. The trust gap would narrow if people other than politicians, wealthy corporations and lobbyists could follow and have some say in the policymaking process. But the policymaking system’s opacity and complexity make it unattractive to people who work outside it. And one big reason for that, I believe, is that policy is formulated in terms that are of little interest to non-specialists.