Charlemagne | Ask a silly question | Economist.com
The commissioner charged with “communicating Europe to citizens”, Margot Wallstrom, has unveiled proposals for opinion polling to be used “strategically”, so the wrinkles of pan-European opinion are not just taken into account when selling finished laws and directives to the public, but during the cut and thrust of policy making. On paper, the commission’s aim is straightforward: to respond to citizens’ concerns about big, trans-national phenomena such as climate change, migration or globalisation, and convince them that action at the European level is the answer. Tantalisingly for Eurocrats, Eurobarometer polls tell them that voters like European-wide action on all sorts of issues (fully 81% say they want joint European action against terrorism). Yet national governments can point to other Eurobarometer polls showing that among the very same citizens, support for the EU is not that high. Across the club, support for EU membership has hovered stubbornly around the 50% mark for years (the most recent poll showed 58% support, a 13-year high).
To some officials, supportive opinion polls offer a form of quasi-democratic mandate. One Brussels official admits that his commissioner “absolutely” uses poll data to browbeat reluctant governments, in private and in public. With the new Lisbon treaty about to create the first full-time president of the EU council (the bit of the machine that represents national governments), the same Brussels official says the commission must become more political and “open” to survive, “especially if we get some fantastic Mr Blair-type as president of the council.”
There are several problems with relying upon polling and other (hopefully) representative forms of gathering citizens’ opinions to guide public policy. First, if you truly wanted going to incorporate popular will into a current decision, you should have a general election or referendum. Second, it implies a failure of representative democracy, with the people’s elective representatives either lacking the knowledge or sense of national opinions or without enough legitimacy to create the public policy they were elected to make. Part of this may be attributed how politicians are elected. When elections are contested within a narrower and narrower range of policy prescriptions and related to this a desire to highlight just seemingly dramatic policy differences with one’s opponents, it becomes more and more likely that victorious politicians will encounter political issues that they have not discussed on the campaign trail and thus have little established popular support for their solutions.
Giving the desire to be everything to everyone both during and after elections (and under the ‘permanent campaign’, there is apparently no distinction anyway), it is not surprising that recent politicians have been the most aggressive in their polling. The Blair government in the UK perhaps institutionalized it the most with the e-petitions website.
One criticism of polling that is somewhat easier to dismiss is that it inordinately favors special interests passionate enough to take them time to stand and be counted. But this is also true in every country where voting is optional (ie everywhere but Belgium and Australia), for in both cases the opinions of the apathetic will not be taken into consideration. That being said, there is a significant difference between hearing from 1000 people in a survey and from the 122 million who voted in the 2004 US presidential election.
While polling and may seem democratic, direct democracy it is not. Instead it is really nothing more than what the Chinese are calling consultative democracy – nicer than simple authoritarianism, for sure, but smacking of superficial openness rather than true acceptance of popular will.
