When the opportunity for direct popular participation is limited, as it is in any representative system, the claim to rule democratically is based upon the idea that, in some way, government serves the people or acts in their interests. Politicians in almost every political system are eager to claim that they work for the ‘common good’, or in the ‘public interest’. Indeed, the constant repetition of such phrases has devalued them, rendering them almost meaningless. Too often the notion of the public interest serves merely to give a politician’s views or actions a cloak of moral respectability. Yet the notion of a collective or public interest has played a vital role in political theory, and constitutes a major plank of the democratic ideal, in the form of ‘government for the people’. The idea of a public interest has, however, been subjected to stern and often hostile scrutiny, especially in the late twentieth century. It has been pointed out, for example, that it is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to distinguish between the private interests of each citizen and what can be thought of as their collective or public interests. In the view of some commentators, the concept itself is misleading or simply incoherent. Moreover, attention has been given to how the public interest can in practice be defined. This has precipitated debate about what has been called the ‘dilemma of democracy’, and led to the suggestion that, though democratic rule may be desirable, no constitutional and electoral mechanism may exist through which it can be brought about.
Private and Public Interests
Political argument often turns on whether a particular action or policy is thought to be in somebody’s interest, with little or no attention being paid to what that interest might be, or why it should be regarded as important. In its broadest sense, an ‘interest’ denotes some kind of benefit or advantage; the public interest is, then, what is ‘good’ for the people. However, what does this ‘good’ consist of, and who can define it? Interests may be nothing more than wishes or desires, defined subjectively by each individual for himself or herself. If so, interests have to be consciously acknowledged or manifest in some form of behaviour. Sociologists, for example, identify interests as the ‘revealed preferences’ of individuals. On the other hand, an interest can be thought of as a need, requirement or even necessity, of which the individual may personally be entirely unconscious. This suggests the distinction, discussed in Chapter 5, between ‘felt’ or subjective interests and genuine or ‘real’ interests which have some objective basis.
The problem of defining interests runs through any discussion of the public interest, shrouding the issue in ideological debate and disagreement. Those who insist that all interests are ‘felt’ interests, or revealed prefer-ences, hold that individuals are the only, or best, judges of what is good for them. By contrast, theorists who employ the notion of ‘real’ interests may argue that the public is incapable of identifying its own best interests because it is ignorant, deluded or has in some way been manipulated. In Political Argument (1990), however, Brian Barry attempted to bridge the gap between these two concepts by defining a person’s interests as ‘that which increases his or her opportunities to get what he or she wants’. This accepts that interests are ‘wants’ that can only be defined subjectively by the individual, but suggests that those individuals who fail to select rational or appropriate means of achieving their ends cannot be said to recognize their own best interests.
What are called ‘private’ interests are normally thought to be the selfish, and usually materialistic, interests of particular individuals or groups. This idea is based upon long-established liberal beliefs about human nature: individuals are separate and independent agents, each bent upon advancing his or her perceived interests. In short, individuals are egoistical and self-interested. Such a notion of private interests is inevitably linked to conflict, or at least competition. If private individuals act rationally, they can be assumed to prefer their own interests to those of others, to strive above all for their own ‘good’. Socialists, however, have tended to reject such a notion. Rather than being narrowly self-interested, socialists believe hu-man beings to be sociable and gregarious, bound to one another by the existence of a common humanity. The belief that human nature is essentially social has profound implications for any notion of private interests. To the extent that individuals are concerned about the ‘good’ of their fellow human beings, their private interests become indistinguishable from the collective interests of all. In other words, socialists challenge the very distinction between private and public interests, a position that inclines them towards a belief in natural social harmony, rather than conflict and competition.
Most political theorists, however, have accepted that a distinction can be drawn between private interests and the public interest. Any concept of the public interest must, in the first place, be based upon a clear under-standing of what ‘public’ means. ‘The public’ stands for all members of a community, not merely the largest number or even overall majority. Whereas private interests are multiple and competing, the public interest is indivisible; it is that which benefits each and every member of the public. However, there are two, rather different, conceptions of what might constitute the public interest, the first of which is based upon the idea of shared or common interests. From this viewpoint, individuals can be said to share an interest if they perceive that the same action or policy will benefit each of them, in the sense that their interests overlap. The public interest therefore constitutes those private interests which all members of the community hold in common. An obvious example of this would be defence against external aggression, a goal which all citizens could reason-ably be expected to recognize as being of benefit to them.
The alternative and more radical notion of the public interest is based not so much upon shared private interests as upon the interests of the public as a collective body. Instead of seeing the public as a collection of individuals, whose interests may or may not overlap, this view portrays the public as a collective entity possessed of distinct common interests. The classical proponent of this idea was Rousseau, who advanced it in the form of the ‘general will’. In The Social Contract ([1762] 1969), Rousseau defined the general will as that ‘which tends always to the preservation and welfare of the whole’. The general will therefore represents the collective interests of society; it will benefit all citizens, rather than merely private individuals. Rousseau thus drew a clear distinction between the general will and the selfish, private will of each citizen. The general will is, in effect, what the people would wish if they were to act selflessly. The problem with such a notion of the public interest is that, so long as they persist in being selfish, it cannot be constructed on the basis of the revealed preferences of individual citizens. It is possible, in other words, that citizens may not recognize the general will as their own, even though Rousseau clearly believed that it reflected the ‘higher’ interests of each and every member of society.
Is there a public interest?
Despite the continued popularity of terms such as the ‘common good’ and the ‘national interest’, the idea of a public interest has been subject to growing criticism. Critics have suggested not only that politicians are prone to using such terms cynically but also that the concept itself may simply not stand up: the public may not have a collective interest. The principal advocates of such a view have subscribed to individualist or classical liberal creeds. Jeremy Bentham, for example, developed a moral and political philosophy on the basis that individuals sought to maximize what he called ‘utility’, calculated in terms of the quantity of pleasure over pain experienced by each individual. In other words, only individuals have interests, and each individual alone is able to define what that interest is. From this perspective, any notion of a public interest is bogus; the interests of the community are at best what Bentham called ‘the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it’. The notion of a public interest as shared private interests therefore makes little sense simply because each member of the community will strive for something different: a collection of private interests does not add up to a coherent ‘public interest’.
Individualists suggest that the issues over which all, or even most, citizens would agree, such as the need for public order or for defence against external aggression, are few and far between. Even when there is general agreement about a broad goal, such as maintaining domestic order, there will be profound differences about how that goal can best be achieved. For instance, is order more likely to be promoted by social equality and respect for civil liberty, or by stiff penalties and strict policing? Bentham’s views contrast even more starkly with Rousseau’s alternative notion of the public interest as the collective interests of the community. The idea of the general will is meaningless quite simply because collective entities like ‘society’, the ‘community’ and the ‘public’ do not exist. The nearest Bentham came to acknowledging the public interest was in his notion of general utility, defined as ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’. However, this formula merely accepts that public policy should be designed to satisfy the ‘greatest number’ of private interests, not that it can ever serve the interests of all members of the public.
Similar ideas have been developed by modern pluralist theorists, who view politics in terms of competition between various groups and interests. The emergence of organized groups is explained by ‘rational choice’ or ‘public choice’ theorists in terms of rational, self-interested behaviour. Individuals who may be powerless when they act separately can nevertheless exert influence by acting collectively with others who share a similar interest. Such an analysis, for example, can explain the emergence of trade unionism: the threat of strike action by a single worker can be disregarded by an employer, but an all-out strike by the entire workforce cannot be. This interpretation acknowledges the existence of shared interests and the importance of collective action. However, it challenges the conventional idea of a public interest. Interest groups are ‘sectional’ pressure groups, representing a section or part of society, ethnic or religious groups, trade unions, professional associations, employer’s groups and so on. Each sectional group has a distinctive interest, which it seeks to advance through a process of campaigning and lobbying. This leaves no room, however, for a public interest: each group places its interest before those of the whole society. Indeed, the pluralist view of society as a collection of competing interests does not allow for society itself to have any collective interests.
Despite growing criticism, the concept of a public interest has not been abandoned by all theorists. Its defence takes one of two forms. The first rejects the philosophical assumptions upon which the individualist attack is based. In particular, this questions the image of human beings as being resolutely self-interested. It is clear, for example, that Rousseau regarded selfishness not as a natural impulse but as evidence of social corruption; human beings are, in Rousseau’s view, essentially moral, even noble, creatures, whose genuine character is revealed only when they act as members of the community. Socialists uphold the idea of the public interest on the same grounds. The concept of the public interest, from a socialist perspective, gives expression to the fact that individuals are not separate and isolated creatures vying against one another, but social animals who share a genuine concern about fellow human beings and are bound together by common human needs. Nevertheless, it is also possible to defend the concept of the public interest from the perspective of rational choice theory, without relying upon socialist assumptions about human nature.
The notion of a public interest can only be dispensed with altogether if there is reason to believe that the pursuit of self-interest genuinely works to the benefit of at least the ‘greatest number’ in society. In reality, there are persuasive reasons for believing that the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest tends ultimately to be self-defeating and that a society guided by private interests alone is doomed to frustration and unhappiness. This can be explained through reference to what economists call ‘public goods’, goods or services from which all individuals derive benefit but which none has an incentive to produce. Environmental concerns such as energy conservation and pollution demonstrate very clearly the existence of a public interest. The avoidance of pollution and the conservation of finite energy resources are undoubtedly public goods in that they are vital for both human health and, possibly, the long-term survival of the human species. Nevertheless, self-interested human beings may rationally choose to despoil the environment or waste vital resources. Private firms, for example, may pump poisonous waste into rivers and the sea on the grounds that it would clearly be more expensive to dispose of it in an environmentally friendly way, and also because each firm calculates that its waste alone is unlikely to cause serious damage. Obviously, if all firms act in the same way and for the same reasons, the result will be environmental devastation: the seas and rivers will die, disease will spread and everyone will suffer.
The idea of public goods thus highlights the existence of public or collective interests that are distinct from the private interests of either individuals or groups. It could be argued that these constitute the ‘real’ interest of the individuals concerned rather than their ‘felt’ interests. However, following Barry, this can perhaps be seen as a case of individuals and groups demonstrating that they do not recognise their own best interests. All people acknowledge the need for a clean and healthy environment, but, left to their own devices, they do not act to secure one. In such circumstances, the public interest can only be safeguarded by government intervention, designed to curb the pursuit of private interests for the collective benefit of the whole society.
Dilemmas of Democracy
The drawback of any concept of the public interest derived from an abstract notion like the general will is that by distancing government from the revealed preferences of its citizens it allows politicians to define the public interest in almost whatever way they please. This danger was most grotesquely illustrated by the ‘totalitarian democracies’ which developed under fascist dictators such as Mussolini and Hitler, in which the democratic credentials of the regime were based upon the claim that ‘the Leader’, and the leader alone, articulated the genuine interests of the people. In this way, fascist leaders identified a ‘true’ democracy as an absolute dictatorship. In reality, however, no viable form of democratic rule can be based exclusively upon a claim to articulate the public interest – that claim must be subject to some form of public accountability. In short, no definition of the public interest is meaningful unless it corresponds at some point and in some way to the revealed preferences of the general public. This correspondence can only be ensured through the mechanism of popular elections.
One of the most influential attempts to explain how the electoral process ensures government in the public interest was undertaken by Anthony Downs in An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957). Downs explained the democratic process by drawing upon ideas from economic theory. He believed that electoral competition creates, in effect, a political market, in which politicians act as entrepreneurs bent upon achieving government power, and individual voters behave rather like consumers, voting for the party whose policies most closely reflect their preferences. Downs believed that a system of open and competitive elections serves to guarantee democratic rule because it places government in the hands of the party whose philosophy, values and policies most closely correspond to the preferences of the largest group of voters. Moreover, democratic competi-tion creates a powerful incentive for the emergence of a policy consensus, in that parties will be encouraged to shift their policies towards the ‘centre ground’, in the hope of appealing to the largest possible number of electors. Although the ‘economic theory of democracy’ does not contain an explicit concept of the public interest, it is, nevertheless, an attempt to explain how electoral competition ensures that government pays regular attention to the preferences of at least a majority of the enfranchised population. This, indeed, may serve as at least a rough approximation of the public interest.
Downs’s model of democratic politics was not meant to be an exact description of the real world, but rather, like economic theories, a sufficiently close approximation to help us understand how such a system works. Nevertheless, it has its limits. In the first place, it assumes a relatively homogeneous society, forcing parties to develop moderate or centrist policies that will have broad electoral appeal. Clearly, in societies deeply divided on racial or religious lines, or by social inequality, party competition may simply ensure government in the interests of the largest sectional group. Furthermore, as a general tendency, it could be argued that party competition shifts politics away from any notion of the public interest since it encourages parties to frame policies which appeal to the immediate private and sectional interests of voters rather than to their more abstract, shared interests. For example, parties are noticeably reluctant to propose tax increases that will discourage the use of finite fossil fuels, or to tackle problems like global warming and ozone depletion, because such policies, though in the long-term public interest, will not win votes at the next election.
Downs’s model may also be based upon questionable assumptions about the rationality of the electorate and the pragmatic nature of electoral politics. As discussed in the previous section, voters may be poorly informed about political issues and their electoral preferences may be shaped by a range of ‘irrational’ factors like habit, social conditioning, the image of the party and the personality of its leader. Similarly, parties are not always prepared to construct policies simply on the basis of their electoral appeal; to some extent, they attempt to shape the political agenda and influence the values and preferences of ordinary voters. The workings of the political market can, for instance, be distorted as effectively by party propaganda as the economic market is by the use of advertising. Finally, the responsiveness of the political market to voters’ preferences may also be affected by the level of party competition, or lack of it. In countries such as Japan and Britain where single parties have enjoyed long periods of uninterrupted power, the political market is distorted by strong mono-polistic tendencies. Two-party systems, as exist in the USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, can be described as duopolistic. Even the multi-party systems of continental Europe can be seen, at best, as oligopolistic, since coalition partners operate rather like cartels in that they try to restrict competition and block entry into the market.
A further, and some would argue more intractable, problem is that no constitutional or elective mechanism may be able reliably to give expres-sion to the collective or public interest. Downs’s ‘economic’ version of democratic politics operates on the assumption that voters only have a single preference because traditional electoral systems offer them a single vote. However, in the complex area of government policy, where a wide range of policy options are usually available, it is reasonable to assume that voters will have a scale of favoured options which could be indicated through a preferential voting system. The significance of such preferences was first highlighted in the field of welfare economics by Kenneth Arrow, whose Social Choice and Individual Values (1963) discussed the problem of ‘transitivity’. This suggests that when voters are able to express a number of preferences it may be impossible to establish which option genuinely enjoys public support. Take, for instance, the example of an election in which candidate A gains 40 per cent of the vote, candidate B receives 34 per cent, and candidate C gets 26 per cent. In such a situation it is clearly possible to argue that no party represents the public interest because none receives an overall majority of votes – though candidate A could obviously make the strongest claim to do so on the grounds of achieving a plurality, more votes than any other single candidate. Nevertheless, the situation may become still more confused when second preferences are taken into account.
Let us assume that the second preferences of all candidate A supporters go to candidate C, the second preferences of candidate B favour candidate A, and the second preferences of candidate C go to candidate B. This creates a situation in which each candidate could claim to be preferred by a majority of voters. The combined first and second preferences for candidate A add up to 74 per cent (40 per cent plus B’s 34 per cent); candidate B could claim 60 per cent support from the electorate (34 per cent plus C’s 26 per cent); and candidate C could claim 66 per cent support (26 per cent plus A’s 40 per cent). In other words, an examination of the second or subsequent preferences of individual voters can lead to the problem of ‘cyclical majorities’ in which it is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to arrive at a collective choice which could reasonably be described as being in the public interest. Although A’s claim to office may still be the strongest, it is severely compromised by the majorities that B and C also enjoy. Arrow described this as the ‘impossibility theorem’. It suggests that even if the concept of a public interest is meaningful and coherent, it may be impossible to define that interest in practice through any existing constitutional or electoral arrangements.
The implications of Arrow’s work for democratic theory are profound and depressing. If no reliable link can be made between individual preferences and collective choices, two possibilities are available. The first option, proposed by James Buchanan and Gordon Tulloch in The Calculus of Consent (1962), is that the range of issues decided by collective choice should be extremely limited, leaving as many as possible in the hands of free individuals. Buchanan and Tulloch propose that collective decisions are appropriate only where policies elicit unanimous agreement, at least among elected representatives, a position which would be consistent with only the most minimal state. The alternative is to accept that, since election results cannot speak for themselves, politicians who use the term ‘public interest’ always impose their own meaning upon it. All references to the public interest are therefore, to some extent, arbitrary. Nevertheless, this latitude is not unlimited because there is the possibility of calling politicians to account at the next election. For this point of view, the democratic process may simply be a means of reducing this arbitrary element by ensuring that politicians who claim to speak for the public must ultimately be judged by the public.
Summary
1 A number of models of democracy can be identified. The principal distinc-tion is between the classical ideal of direct democracy, in which people literally govern themselves – government by the people – and more modern forms of representative democracy, in which professional politicians govern on behalf of the people – government for the people.
2 The most successful form of democracy has been liberal democracy, founded upon the twin principles of limited government and popular consent expressed at election time. The strength of liberal democracy is that by upholding individual liberty and making possible a high degree of popular responsiveness it is able to maintain political stability.
3 Representation means, broadly, acting on behalf of others, but opinions differ about how this is best achieved. Some argue that representatives should think for themselves, exercising their own wisdom or judgement; others believe that representatives have a mandate from the voters to fulfil their election pledges; still others think that representatives must resemble or be drawn from the group they aim to represent.
4 All notions of democracy are based, to some degree, upon the idea that government can and does act in the public interest, the common or collec-tive interests of society. But individualists and pluralists have questioned whether there is any such thing as public interest separate from the private interests of citizens. Others have doubted if there exists an electoral or constitutional mechanism through which the public interest can in practice be defined.
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