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This article forms part of a series, Radically rethinking our democracy, in which we asked contributors to propose bold answers to the question: how can we fix our democracy?
The problem is easy to state, but tricky to solve. Turnout in elections and referendums is often so low that the legitimacy of the result becomes open to question. When the United Kingdom voted three years ago to leave the European Union, Brexit was backed by 52% of those who voted – but just 37% of the total electorate. Should a major constitutional change be waved through without the explicit approval of almost two thirds of us?
Now consider the last general election to have produced a majority government. In 2015, David Cameron’s Conservatives secured an overall majority of 12 with the support of 37% of all voters – and just 25% of all electors. A combination of low turnout and our first-past-the-post system for electing MPs meant that three quarters of us were ruled by a party for which we had not voted.
The arguments about our voting system are discussed elsewhere in this series. So my concern here is the issue of turnout. How can we persuade more people to vote, and therefore to imbue the result of any electoral contest with greater legitimacy?
The most obvious answer is to make voting compulsory. Just as jury service is an obligation that we have as citizens if we are summoned to do it, so voting in elections and referendums could be considered a similar compulsion. This is the case in about 20 countries – the precise number depends upon how one classifies countries where compulsion in theory is seldom enforced in practice.
The case for compulsion is clear. It is not just that turnout would rise sharply, though it would. Going by the experiences of countries that have already introduced compulsory voting, it would rise from less than 70% in each of the last five UK general elections, up to something like 85-90%. (It is never 100 per cent: the electoral register is not perfect; electors die, fall ill, face family crises, are stranded away from home, or have some other legitimate reason for not voting; and some people are happy to risk the modest fine that might, or might not, be levied on non-voters.)
There is, though, more to the case for voting compulsion in Britain. Parties these days are more anxious to be generous to older folk such as myself – because we vote – than to young adults, because they are more likely to abstain. Poorer families living in bad housing with lousy local schools would get more attention and public money if they voted in similar numbers to comfortable middle-class home-owners.
More generally, a higher turnout would incentivise parties to campaign with more integrity. Elections today are largely cynical, mechanical exercises in mobilising each party’s base – aimed at firing voters up to make sure they vote rather than discussions on the country’s future in any meaningful sense of the word. If millions more people were certain to vote but were not sure how to go forward, the pressure on parties would be to devote their energies more to political conversion, which would require at least some element of proper, authentic, debate.
Against all this there exists one powerful argument that cannot be ignored. We live in a free country, and many would argue that the freedom not to vote should command as much respect as any other freedom does. True, people in compulsory-voting countries can spoil their ballot paper: the law dictates that they turn up to vote, not that they mark their ballot paper in an approved way (or, indeed, at all). But if someone wants to stay at home rather than trek to a polling station, should they not have the freedom to do so without breaking the law and incurring a fine?
All of which leads me to my proposal to square this particular circle – to secure the benefits of compulsory voting but without the compulsion. I propose inverting the financial incentive inherent in compulsory-voting countries. Instead of fining people for not voting, provide them with a cash incentive to play an active part in their democracy. The financial “cost” of not voting would be the same, but it would be a foregone payment for exercising the right not to vote, not a penalty imposed by the state for breaking the law.
Let’s put some numbers to this. A £10 voucher would be roughly the equivalent to the penalty for not voting in Australia (it is AUD$20 for first-time non-voters). Assuming a turnout of 90% in a UK general election, that would represent a cost of slightly more than £400 million to the British government. It would be a relatively modest outlay to improve our democracy – an increase of well below 0.1% in government spending in general election years.
However, there is a good chance that even this outlay could be reduced, even eliminated. Here’s how. Invite big companies to fund the vouchers – say Tesco, Lidl, Boots, Marks & Spencer, Amazon, and BP (for use at their filling stations). Given the beneficial publicity that companies could attract for participating in the scheme, it might even make the government a profit. For example, it could be granted to one company in each sector through an auction. Tesco might compete with Sainsbury’s, Boots with Superdrug, BP with Shell and so on. Given that many people going into a retailer to spend their voucher will spend a lot more, the true cost to each company will be far less than the initial outlay of £10 per person.
The process of issuing the vouchers would be relatively simple. Each ballot paper would have a tear-off voucher attached. After casting their vote, each voter would write their name on the voucher. The retailer could, if they wished, verify the identity of the voucher-holder. In any event, by restricting the use of the voucher to one per transaction, it should be fairly easy to minimise misuse.
One further possibility would be to allow vouchers to be donated to a charity. This part of the cost would be borne by the government, unless a major bank, or consortium of financial businesses, stumped up, again in return for the public-spirited publicity they would receive.
These details are not designed to be prescriptive, but to illustrate some of the possibilities that would open up if we used our imaginations and recognised that the practical benefits of such a solution would far outweigh the drawbacks that could offend purists. Once we agreed that this was worth exploring, a host of detailed options could be investigated.
Let us address one likely criticism head-on. We shall be told that this would be a bribe, and that bribery has no place in a democracy. To which my response is this: what on earth are election campaigns all about anyway, if not a proffering of competing bribes in the form of promised policies?
There is a more principled answer. Many people, especially among the less well-off sections of the electorate, abstain from voting because they perceive little benefit to them. Whether you call my idea a payment, incentive, compensation or bribe, the result of this reform would be to encourage millions more of our fellow citizens to engage in our political process, taking more interest in the choices placed before them.
These citizens would, to a large extent, be those who most needed our politicians to enact laws, levy taxes and direct public spending in ways that reduced inequality and increased social harmony. At stake is not merely the legitimacy of our election and our referendum outcomes, but also the quality of the decisions that flow from those outcomes. It could deliver a more meaningful future for those with the least prospect of one.
Click here to read our series of answers to the question: how can we fix our democracy?
Peter Kellner is the former President of YouGov. He has also been a political commentator, and an election analyst.
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SubscribeAn interesting article but I don’t buy the premise.
Macron, Angela Merkel and Justin Trudeau are not Nietzscherian rulers. Macron and Merkel are both from the school of managerial politics that Nietzsche would sneer at, though Macron has begun to move away from this, and Trudeau; he is a high priests of all that Nietzsche despised, an advocate of a servile, victim based culture, seeking to level society though “equity”.
More importantly, Nietzsche saw the Übermensch as bringing about a cultural golden age. I don’t think anyone today believes our culture nadir is anything to be proud of. If anything culture has less autonomy than it had in the Middle Ages, when at least Christian cultural hegemony produced sublime art. Christianity allowed art a certain freedom in its expression of the Divine, contemporary art by contrast, is allowed to convey nothing but the approved ideology and is devoid of any kind of soul.
It’s true that children of neo-liberalism may still be in power but Nietzsche does not applaud all who triumph.
“… in the Middle Ages, when at least Christian cultural hegemony produced sublime art. Christianity allowed art a certain freedom in its expression of the Divine, contemporary art by contrast, is allowed to convey nothing but the approved ideology and is devoid of any kind of soul.”
Brilliantly put Matthew.
Although the point of this article is they don’t actually believe it. Their disdain towards the slave masses is shown by how their manipulative words don’t match their actions. That this nadir is the darkness that will slowly be tin apart until neo-feudalism or a new slave economy which will lead to a new cultural golden age. He was of course wishing to bring back the social hierarchy of antiquity – but perhaps more harsher and with harder manumission. He saw the slave morality as pre-Christian (but given a great impulse by Christianity) latent in aspects of Socrates, Platonism, Euripedes, cynicisn, Epicureas and even Stoicism. Classical Republicanism and city states were also suspicious if they were nothing but a facade.
Nietzsche would surely dislike Trudeau, but equally he’d dislike any populist trying to get ahead by appeals to the mob, except if it was a clever ruse designed to screw them over. As the article states it is an ooen question who is best manipulating them. According to Nietzsche Ubermensch sees the masses as nothing more than a toy at best, rubbish to be cruelly eliminated at worst. Nietzsche would have despised the biological mysticism of the Nazis but woild habe admired how they manipulated base humanity and sent into them into meat grinder for the glory of the leaders. Because the masses are not to be goaded to ‘greater things’ because they are subhuman objects incapable of that and but to be humiliated into servility and used as pawns who are sacrified without a moments thought. Complaining, resentiment, instead of individual heroic action, is just inverted slave morality, and in that sense this article notes many of the ‘very online’ are more products of what Nietzsche disliked than men of the workd who have seized power by whatever means possible. The fact youtubers and social media people tend to have no real ability to dominate in the real world is weakness to Nietzsche. After all this was the moral order of pre-Christian west, where nothing was thought of infanticide, mass prostitution, cruel treatments to slaves and so on.
People tend to shy from the extreme harshness of Nietzsche’s vision to justify themselves when more than likely they are part of the disposable crowd.
There are some of us writers, artists and musicians in the hinterlands who are attempting to break through both barriers–the neutered politically correct, and the will-to-power manipulators– to reach, anew, to the rare-earth of art and the ethereal realm of music.
I, for instance, wrote and published an historical novel, the objective of which was to reach beyond that devoid kind of soul mentioned above, and bring forth an awareness of the King of Soul.
Furthermore, I had previously written and published an historical novel, set in London and in France in 1937, the purpose of which was to penetrate the smoky veil of time and to see more clearly through the Smoke of nazi extermination of all that is sacred and dear to humanity.
As Ferrusian Gambit also explains, I think the argument here is that all the ingredients of a Nietzschean subversion of liberal democracy are here with us today in the Neoliberal movement. Like the death of Stresemann in Weimar Republic, perhaps all that’s needed is the passing of the current crop of leaders (like Merkel), and Macron may find himself better suited to run as a superman – especially given he clearly doesn’t like the Woke either.
The emasculation of Liberalism today (with preference for Wokeism), given the right conditions which aren’t that unlikely, can give way to a Huxleyan or Orwellian nightmare Nietzsche would be proud of – and it looks like Macron is being encouraged to create one.
I don’t believe that Nietzsche saw value in a hierarchical society alone. The presented vision of a neo-liberal triumph looks more like the dystopian “men without chests” he prophesied but certainly did not approve of.
You may have a point – it’s been a long while I read Nietzsche or about him. But my recollection of Nietzsche is about noticing his disgust at gifted individuals being stopped from reaching their potential in particular due to petty ethical or social concerns, in his view, which of course he derided. Today’s unfettered Neoliberal system, at least as it exists today in US even in its Woke form, is about giving deserving individuals unlimited wealth and influence – given it’s not done in a racist/sexist/ableist/you name it way. Hence my agreement with the article.
I am Untermensch, through and through, but I couldn’t care less if our political leaders display “Magnificence, grandeur, courage, virility”. (Boris scores one out of four, which is one better than Macron.) I simply want them to show a bit of backbone and get issues such as illegal immigration under control.
Thank you for the early morning quick quiz question. I am going to go for number 4.
Wow, I’m impressed! I see, now, that I must up my game in order to provide a challenge worthy of Unherd’s readership.
Wow, we need a *this made me laugh* button SO MUCH. Really did nearly fall off my chair. (With tears in my eyes, I thank you.)
p.s. — I vote 2.
YO! UNHERD! You are the polling people! Give us a vote widget on this webpage so we can all vote on this one!
I hoped for #3, but was disappointed.
Trudeau as the Super-bugman, I see it.
But I always think of Neitzche more of a cross of cruelty, despair, and Nihil, in which had to construct a superman as there was nothing else but darkness otherwise.
“Since the advent of neoliberalism under Thatcher, Reagan, and Mitterand, the welfare state has, as Nietzsche predicted, given way to the growing power of corporations and to an international elite untethered by historical identities, religious pieties, or Christian ethical scruples.”
He may think them Supermen, I see them as evil, and the way for evil to rule is to remove ethics, Virtue, Nobility, Honour, and Self Sacrifice. And that is what the International Elite are doing so effectively with the tools he gave them, Perspectivism, Nihilism, Master and Slave Morality , honed into Post Modernism with Marx and Freud. I actually do not believe a-morality can exist. Once Morality is gone there is not a vacuum, but rather Evil is what remains. And this is what I feel his philosophy is.
“Rather it would be one made in the name of liberalism, whose promises of autonomy and equality have been perverted by elites who are already far “beyond good and evil”.”
Liberalism of the Christian tradition. Now Liberal means anything goes except traditional Christian Liberalism, and is part of the post – good and evil.
I think Macron is just a minor International Elite and a jerk.
Nietszche wrote wonderful words and his writing is a pleasure to read. Interpreters have been around for about 120 years and tend to cast his works in the world of today, whenever today was.
He was anti-Christian because he lived in a Christian world but he would probably be anti-religious today. His Ethics countered the English ideas of Bentham, Hume (Scottish), Mill and he saw that moral good did not mean doing charitable work. He believed that 99.9% of people were followers, the herd, and the 0.1% were thinkers or artists who would make the world better – we say, the UnHerd.
So the world needed excellent men to lead, not by charity but by stirring up the herd to better work.
All is this falls when the Internet is around. You no longer have to read because you have podcasts; you don’t have to think because your group tells you what to do. So the Internet means that the Unherd has expanded to about 10%. Anybody can say or do anything and it is all pretty meaningless. Women have arrived and there is no way they are going to obey male leaders any more. This site, UnHerd, is entertaining but it represents about 0.0001% of the world and is meaningless.
Meanwhile Macron will get re-elected, whatever is said here.
“This site, UnHerd, is entertaining but it represents about 0.0001% of the world and is meaningless.”
It is all meaningless, us all merely poor actors on an empty stage…..I am off to my study with a tumbler of whisky and revolver.
Although – Unherd is entertaining…..
As are u
No.
Vive Zemmour.
Dear UnHerd, I so enjoy your articles, best of journalism… However, I am disappointed you describing Emmanuel Macron as banker. Anyone who is not so knowledgeable in the world politics gets the idea that he became president from the world of banking. That is not so. He was in civil service at the time. Only 2 years early in his professional life he was an investment banker by Rothschild. That does not make him a banker.
ossibly a anker
Interesting and thought provoking. But Merkel, Trudeau and Macron as exemplars of the new Übermensch?! what about Trump, Farage, Putin, Xi, Orban, Zemmour? They are not mere backward looking right wing reactionaries – they are not afraid to stick their heads above the parapet, to say the unsayable. And while I’m at it, Musk and Bezos too. I’m sorry there are no women in that list, I can think of lots I know who fit the bill, several of them here, but none right now are on the stage, as it were.
Bezos maybe but Musk? A conman living of government subsidies and hawking ever more ludicrous vapourware (whilst reinventing the tunnel – now with strip lighting!) is not an ubermemsch.
as I am communicating with you via Starlink (courtesy E Musk) and actually saw several of his satellites being parked, back in November in the pre-dawn, he is not vapourware. A distraction or a blind alley, perhaps, but he does do stuff. And may even get to Mars
Exactly. It’s the loss of liberalism that’s endangering us all. It was the same situation 100 years ago with Nazis and Communists fighting each other around d a collapsed centre in Europe. Those in the two extremes had a lot more in common, with many former Commnuists becoming Nazis later on.
That’s why it’s wholly counter productive to call the Woke “liberals”..
They are not Liberals, but as a poster used above – Post-liberals. Like Post Modernists reject ‘Modernism’ – of all intellectualism of the Modern times (Renaissance to Modern) to decide that all which can be known is dialectic, and all discussion is combative, and thus all is oppressor/oppressed, and thus all are Identities of oppression and oppressed – Post Liberalism rejects the classic Liberalism of individualism, freedom, equality and instead goes with collectivism tempered by the oppressor/oppressed thing of postmodernism and Neo-Marxism. And so is what Woke is. A sick philosophy.
There’s certainly something to be said about the depletion of Liberalism and dissatisfaction with it. I found this article interesting on that: https://quillette.com/2021/07/22/the-rise-of-post-liberal-man/
He’s just a very naughty boy
While not wishing to comment on the article, “ Hugo Drochon, one of the French President’s most important intellectual supporters” is somewhat far fetched at least in France where he is famously unknown. A good benchmark to this is that he only shows one entry on Amazon France and UK and the book is in English and is absent from the Social Science Network so I would question his influence and him being an important intellectual the latter word being another word misused ,debased and abused . People of the calibre of Nietzsche, Burke, Hayek and many others being what I would call important intellectuals not just any scholar whatever his merits.
I disagree in believing that he is a super-idiot.
Bilge from start to finish. To give an example: the welfare state has not retreated. It is bigger than ever and only depends on corporations because they pay the tax. If it is overstretched it is because of design flaws inherent to top down centralised state monopolies. It is also because advances in medicine – not its state delivery – mean that there are millions of old with chronic conditions; millions of prematurely retired citizens, in terms of current lifespan and millions of new suppliants thanks to “open borders”. As for the suggestion that Macron represents anything more than posturing pretences tempered by opportunistic reversals, it is unworthy of this website.
This seems to explain the rise of the deep state.
Do we know Macron’s position on the utter degradation of Paris under the leftist Hidalgo regime? We never hear anything. But from his Eurotrash renovation of the Elysee I suspect he doesn’t notice.
In the last paragraph, substitute “liberalism” for “Post-liberalism”, and your article goes into my top 10 this year.
Good point, ‘Post Liberalism’ has taken over; the refutation of Liberalism’s Individualism and equality and freedom, and replacing it with collectivism and at the same time Intesectionality and Identity Politics. Not very Neitzcheian, but the same ending up as Fas* ism.