Paul Taylor, a contributing editor at POLITICO, writes the Europe At Large column.
PARIS — Citizens in the smartphone era are falling out of love with democracy.
Partly, that’s due to the failure of governments and political systems to deliver solutions to rising inequality, social disruption wrought by globalization and uncertainty over the future of work, welfare and the planet.
But it also reflects a growing gulf between the instant gratification connected consumers take for granted and the ponderous pace of local, national and European governance: The faster life moves, the more exasperatingly slow politics seems.
The internet generation finds it hard to grasp that they can order a home-delivered meal on their cellphone, share opinions instantly on social media, friend and unfriend people with one click and zap between hundreds of films — but only get to elect their leaders once every four or five years.
This gap has made the political establishment appear even more remote — and populists peddling eye-catching, quick and dirty “solutions” to complex problems even more attractive. That, in turn, makes implementing long-term structural reforms to employment, welfare, health, pension and asylum systems ever more difficult, given that they normally take years to yield results.
In many of the world’s largest and most advanced market economies, public discontent with democracy stands at record levels.
“The digital revolution doesn’t automatically lead to a democratic revolution, but it creates that expectation,” said French journalist Francis Brochet, author of an incisive 2017 essay, “Démocratie smartphone” (“Smartphone democracy”).
‘Zone of despair’
Indeed, in many of the world’s largest and most advanced market economies, public discontent with democracy stands at record levels, according to The Global Satisfaction with Democracy Report 2020, published by Cambridge University’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy.
Nearly 60 percent of EU citizens were dissatisfied with democracy in 2019, the survey shows, after a decade of malaise over the eurozone crisis, the influx of refugees and migrants and a perceived erosion of national and local identity.
The report identifies a “zone of despair” englobing France and Southern Europe, and a “zone of complacency” across Scandinavia, western Germany and the Benelux. Central Europeans have grown happier with democratic institutions since the mid-1990s, except in Romania.
A participant wearing a Guy Fawkes mask takes a selfie as members of the Yellow Jacket movement demonstrate in Paris | Philippe Lopez/AFP via Getty Images
The happy few who are still overwhelmingly satisfied with democracy reside in small, wealthy countries such as Switzerland, Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway, Ireland and the Netherlands.
Citizen participation
France’s current confrontation over pension reform, hot on the heels of last year’s Yellow Jacket protests, is emblematic of the political mismatch between short-term pain and promised long-term gain.
While the government seeks to ram the unpopular pension reform through parliament, President Emmanuel Macron is simultaneously trying to show he has taken on board the concerns of the Yellow Jackets and has created a so-called citizens’ convention — made up of 150 randomly selected people — to come up with proposals to make the process of reducing carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2030 as fair as possible.
This unelected assembly, representative of the adult population by age, gender and region, has taken testimony from climate experts and is due to produce proposals in April for how to manage and fund the climate transition.
Given the national culture of protest and widespread opposition to Macron’s plans, it remains to be seen whether this method will ease public acceptance of painful but necessary increases in fossil fuel prices, construction of wind turbines or the closure of carbon-intensive factories.
Other countries are experimenting with other forms of citizen participation to fill the gap left by declining collective intermediaries such as big-tent political parties, trade unions, religious communities and “old” media.
French President Emmanuel Macron poses for a photo | Etienne Laurent/AFP via Getty Images
Some towns in the Netherlands, for example, set aside part of the municipal budget for citizens to allocate. In Italy and Spain, radical populist parties have experimented with online policy votes among members, while Macron based his presidential campaign platform in part on a door-to-door questionnaire conducted by his young followers on the basis of an algorithm analyzing voting history in 67,000 polling stations, correlated with population, income and employment statistics.
Democracy and its disconnects
However, grassroots democracy requires careful handling. It is vulnerable to being hijacked and manipulated by minorities of determined activists.
In Switzerland, for example, a popular initiative signed by as few as 100,000 citizens can force a national referendum on issues as varied as banning the construction of minarets, curbing immigration or subsidizing farmers who don’t dehorn livestock. A 2014 vote in favor of immigration quotas, carried by a knife-edge 19,000 majority, has caused a prolonged diplomatic crisis with the EU.
Italy offers another cautionary tale: There, the populist 5Star Movement operates with a radical system in which roughly 100,000 registered party members take all major policy decisions in online votes via the Rousseau participatory platform. But they are not necessarily representative of the 10.7 million people who voted for the party in 2018. Nor do they define the questions.
In France, where anti-Macron protests have cast a shadow over the president’s proposed reforms, public efforts to involve citizens may not be enough to turn the narrative.
Social scientists also warn that these types of democratic experiments tend to attract middle-class professionals, rather than low-skilled workers or the unemployed, and therefore don’t address many of the root causes of public discontent.
In France, where anti-Macron protests have cast a shadow over the president’s proposed reforms, public efforts to involve citizens may not be enough to turn the narrative — and could even backfire.
“The worst thing would be to have people meet and deliberate and for it to lead to nothing,” said Brochet. “So it will be crucial to see how the climate convention’s recommendations are translated into policy.”
Failure would be bad news for Macron — and for democracy. It would prove once again that in our age of smartphones, the political messages that break through are the easily digestible, tweet-ready soundbites. And that, for now, is a game best played by populists who aren’t shy about promising easy answers.