Asimov was inspired by CBS News’s Remington Rand UNIVAC I computer, which correctly predicted a landslide for Eisenhower on election night 1952 after only 3 million votes had been counted and Adlai Stevenson was ahead. It was the first instance of what has become a familiar feature of US elections, to the degree that most people treat the “calling” of the result early in the evening by the networks as the actual outcome of the election.

Asimov’s fantasy was a prophetic reductio ad absurdum of something which has played a steadily increasing role in modern politics: the idea that citizens can be represented by a carefully designed system in which they play no active role. The vogue for citizen juries is an illustration of this, while a number of theorists have gone even further and proposed that actual legislative assemblies should be chosen through some kind of lottery — what is technically termed “sortition”. The processes of voting and elections, on this account, are messy and corruptible: far better to have a system which is genuinely representative of public opinion. And a citizen jury will represent the population better than a committee of elected legislators scrutinising the same material.

It is also the case that politics since 1955 has come to be wholly dominated by opinion polling, to the extent that a great deal of policy is devised by governments to fit in with what the polls say. This is a practical form of daily representation, going far beyond what would have been conceivable to earlier generations. Imagine, for instance, what would be happening at the moment, were we still in the position we were in the 19th or early-20th centuries. Would our politicians be anything like as sure of victory or defeat as they currently seem to be? Would we even be having a general election at the moment, and might Boris Johnson still be Prime Minister?

In reality, however, today’s emphasis polling masks the fact that the general public has played no active part in these decisions; rather, a bloodless and abstract form of representation has replaced the old practices of mass action by citizens which once were used to bring about political change. People can lobby, demonstrate and be activists in other ways, but they cannot take part in the difficult business of decision-making — that is restricted to a small sample of the population.

So far has the assumption wormed its way into people’s heads that it now seems natural to give the vote to 16-year-olds even if they cannot be members of Parliament (allowing them to be members was proposed in Scotland, but nothing came of). Contrast this with what happened when women and working men were given the vote: they almost immediately became eligible themselves to be legislators, and it would have seemed ridiculous to those generations of politicians to have the one without the other. What’s different now is that our background assumptions about representation have shifted, such that elections now look like superior (or possibly inferior) opinion polls — and why shouldn’t everyone with opinions (which especially includes teenagers) have the vote?

More from this author

Keir Starmer: an ungrateful beneficiary of Brexit

By Richard Tuck

Schemes for proportional representation have the same character. PR is often presented as a better form of representation in a parliamentary system than first-past-the-post, but it shares with sortition and opinion polling the feature that an essential decision — the question of who shall form a government — is largely taken out of the hands of the voters and given to their representatives. This was precisely the objection to PR in what is still the most thorough examination of the subject, the report of a Royal Commission in 1910, at a time when many alternatives to the existing British constitution were being touted, including the use of referendums. The Report decided against introducing PR on the grounds that:

“A general election is in fact considered by a large portion of the electorate of this country as practically a referendum on the question which of two Governments shall be returned to power. The view may be right or wrong, but it has to be taken account of in any discussion which turns on the composition of the House of Commons.”

This was a profound observation, with many implications. One of them is that there is a responsibility on great parties to avoid becoming narrow factions, and to present themselves as plausible governments. Another is that there is also a responsibility on citizens who want to think of themselves as legislators to treat their vote as genuinely a contribution to the creation of a government, and not merely as the expression of their feelings. This was the distinction Max Weber made between the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of conviction. As he said, real politics requires the former, a willingness to make difficult choices: “the strong and slow boring of hard boards”. But if we have left those choices to other people, we can be politically irresponsible — with consequences which are all too visible today.

A third implication (though it has seldom been recognised) arises from the fact that in the conditions of modern politics — and arguably those of 1910 — the electorate above all votes for a prime minister. It is the prime minister who personally appoints the government, after all, and whose power rests on MPs who are whipped and committed to a party manifesto. In this respect, the referendum-like character of a general election has been wholly disregarded, and, as we have often seen, prime ministers can be replaced without any fresh recourse to the public.

But what is the point of asking people who they want to have as prime minister, and then disregarding the answer without putting the question to them again? It is clear why MPs and party managers like the ability to do so, but it can be seen as another and very important instance of passive representation: the voters stand idly by while a matter on which they had once given a great deal of thought is decided anew by their representatives.

Like the populists in America, the European Left used to demand that their populations should be allowed to take an active role in politics. The British Social Democrat Federation’s programme in 1884, for example, included “LEGISLATION by the PEOPLE, in such wise that no project of Law shall become legally binding till accepted by the Majority of the People”, while the German Social Democrats at Erfurt in 1891 called for “Authorities to be elected by the people; to be responsible and bound”.

Left Parliamentarians, such as the nascent Labour Party in Britain, were able to disregard these calls only because they believed (along with the 1910 Report) that general elections, at least in Britain, were already referendums of a kind, in which the voters were exercising a genuine power to choose a government, though with many reservations in practice. But they were in complete agreement with the more radical Left that citizens should be thought of as active participants in their politics, behaving like legislators themselves and not as the passive subjects of representative systems. The age of mass parties, which lasted more or less down to the Seventies, was testimony to this: the general population was arrayed on two sides, like the members in the House of Commons, and saw itself as taking a real part in the contests there.

This world has disappeared, killed by a variety of forces, including supranational institutions such as the EU and the disappearance of an old kind of solidarity among fellow citizens, as the circumstances of people’s lives and work have changed. With communities more atomised and removed from power, it is hard to imagine any familiar Left-wing party calling for an increase in active participation on the part of the population, rather than for increasingly elaborate forms of passive representation.

Suggested reading

Nigel Farage's post-democratic revolt

By Mary Harrington

The response to the Brexit vote in 2016 was a particularly stark illustration of this. The Heath government had pushed through the constitutionally far-reaching membership of the EEC on a slim majority (eight on the second reading of the Bill), and with a manifesto which had merely said that “our sole commitment is to negotiate; no more no less”. Partly for internal party reasons, but also for old-fashioned Left reasons of principle, Labour committed itself to a referendum on the issue, obliging any future government to extricate itself from the EEC through the same means. But as we saw in between 2016 and 2019, a large swathe of the governing classes could not stand the idea that they should be given specific instructions by the electorate.

In the end, Brexit was saved in 2019 by a very traditional (and democratic) means: a general election, understood as another referendum. But the politician most associated with this triumph was then removed without any appeal to the electorate — and largely because his colleagues quailed in the face of opinion polls. Citizen juries, votes for 16-years-olds and PR are all now high on the agenda of many political parties, and some of them are extremely likely to be implemented in the near future. Systems of passive representation seem, despite Brexit, to have won the struggle against active participation.

It is widely recognised that this general election is marked by an almost unprecedented degree of hostility to both major parties on the part of the electorate. But who can be surprised at this, given that they were offered the chance of real and active democracy only to have it snatched away from them — and this time, perhaps, for good?

The most perceptive commentators on this phenomenon, such as Wolfgang Streeck, understood that this Continent-wide failure of the Left was in large part the consequence of the straitjacket in which European politics operated — a straitjacket created above all by the economic policies built into the constitutional structures of the EU which made, for example, renationalisation of utilities, state aid to politically important industries and predictable levels of immigration virtually impossible to implement. Socialist politicians had everywhere been reduced to claiming merely that they would be more efficient managers of late-capitalist economies than their competitors, and in the process had become indistinguishable from the various rival politicians on the centre-right.

This was pretty thin gruel to offer their electorates, particularly as the global financial crisis of 2007-8, the European bond crisis of 2008-9, and the thousands of immigrants dying each year in the Mediterranean all conveyed an urgent sense that something way beyond managerialism was required. In these circumstances, the voters’ rejection of the old Left parties came as no surprise, and there was no reason in 2016 to think that, if Britain stayed in the EU, the Labour Party would miraculously avoid the fate of its continental counterparts. As Captain Shotover says in Shaw’s Heartbreak House when the bombs of a European War begin to fall: “Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favour of England because you were born in it?”

This was the general reason to think that departure from the EU might at least give the Left a chance to recover its old position in British politics, if it were bold enough. But there was another more parochial reason, to do with the relationship between Scotland and England.

In the past, when there was a close election (as in 1964 and February and October 1974), a Labour government at Westminster could have a minority of English seats but secure a majority through its reliable base in Scotland. But for the past decade or so, since the rise of the SNP, Labour has effectively had a permanent reduction of 40 seats in its representation at Westminster, compared with previous elections; if, for instance, it had secured as many seats in Scotland in 2017 as it had as recently as 2010, it could have been within striking distance of forming a government.

But what has seldom been appreciated is that the rise of the SNP was intimately bound up with Britain’s membership of the EU: as soon as the SNP dropped its old hostility to the European Union in the mid-Eighties and adopted the stance of “independence within Europe”, it began the climb to its dominance of Scottish politics. The logic behind this was perfectly clear: independence for Scotland if both England and Scotland remained in the EU was virtually costless, since almost everything guaranteed by the Act of Union — above all an integrated economy for the two nations with no trade barriers — would also be guaranteed by the EU treaties. The only stumbling block might have been the currency, but that was unlikely to dissuade Scots at some point from voting for independence, knowing that much of their old life would continue unchanged.

This could not be the case if England were outside the EU and Scotland in it: for the first time for centuries (and arguably for ever), there would be a hard border between the two countries, with immense disruption to every aspect of their lives, and almost everyone who has seriously considered this possibility has recoiled from it. In my 2016 article, I argued that because of this, if Britain left the EU, the cause of independence for Scotland would be dealt a potentially fatal blow, and the Labour Party could begin to rebuild its Scottish base. The fact that the Scots voted (albeit narrowly) to stay in the EU is widely misunderstood. The question put to them was whether the UK should leave the EU, and anyone who wanted a costless independence for Scotland would naturally vote No. But that is a very different question from” Should Scotland stay in the EU if England leaves? The SNP for obvious reasons has misrepresented the result, constantly describing it as a vote by Scotland to stay in the EU — but in fact it was nothing of the kind.

Suggested reading

Britain is Europe's liberal outcast

By Aris Roussinos

It is against this background that we should think about the recent calamities of the SNP. An air of corruption now hangs about it, as it did for many years over the Labour Party in the west of Scotland. But if its leaders still displayed some sense of genuine confidence in the party’s aims, it is probable that the corruption would be forgiven. Rather, the SNP’s real problem is that it is impossible for its leaders to sound convincing, in the face of the enormous challenges that Brexit has posed to their movement. All they can produce are empty platitudes and a refusal to face the obvious facts, and voters can hear the desperation in their voices. It is revealing that John Swinney scrapped the post of “minister for independence” immediately after he became leader of the Party.

I argued in 2016 that in both these respects — the general sense of new possibilities, and the collapse of Scottish nationalism — the Labour Party should be the principal beneficiary. The advantage to it of the changing situation in Scotland was obvious, but the freedom properly to differentiate itself from the tired managerialism of the Conservatives was also important.

Hints of this were already to be found in its surprising success in the 2017 election, when the party was led by someone who was not at all managerial, and when it had not as yet clearly repudiated the result of the referendum. But the signs were always there. The central paradox of EU membership all along was that it buttressed the economic policies which most Conservative politicians favoured — this, after all, was why membership was originally forced through by a Conservative government against the wishes of most of the Labour opposition. As a result, when Brexit was finally delivered, the members of the Conservative government were at a loss as to what to with it, since fundamentally they had been comfortable with many of the EU’s economic policies. They looked rudderless because they were rudderless. As in the case of Scotland, the electorate did not need a conscious analysis of the situation: they simply needed to recognise the symptoms of a political party which no longer had a clear agenda, and which had consequently descended into pointless internal faction fighting.

The Labour Party has duly reaped the benefits. It has risen very quickly from the catastrophe of 2019 — caused above all by what had become its open rejection of Brexit — to a position where it may well hold an absolute majority after the next election, bucking the trend of all other European Social Democratic parties. And it has been able to do so largely because of Brexit.

It is tempting for its leaders to think that it is the party’s official hostility to Brexit which has led to this, but 2019 illustrated that its hostility was a liability; rather, it is the structural changes that have resulted from Brexit, and not Labour’s opposition to it, which have helped it. The worry for sympathisers with Labour, however, is that the party hierarchy has failed to learn this lesson. The timorousness with which Starmer is approaching the current election suggests very strongly that he wants to return Britain to its economic and social identity prior to June 2016; not necessarily in the EU, but so closely aligned with it that Scotland can dream of independence again, and there will be no break with managerial politics.

Suggested reading

The EU is turning into a Remainer nightmare

By Thomas Fazi

Seen in this light, Starmer looks as if he is going to be an ungrateful beneficiary of the Brexit which he struggled so hard to subvert, and which he (probably) intends if Prime Minister effectively to reverse. His ingratitude, however, is not merely morally objectionable: it is also unwise. Suppose that in a few years Britain is once again within the EU, to all intents and purposes — say in a relationship similar to Norway’s. What will stop a resurgent Scottish nationalism, once again wielding the slogan “Independence in Europe”? And what will stop a resurgent radical Right, embittered by the return to managerialism?

By bringing Britain closer to the EU, Starmer would ultimately return the Labour Party to the dismal condition it was in before Brexit. At the moment, it looks as if in Britain — uniquely in Europe — a historic party of the Left is in pole position, and there is no effective standard-bearer for the radical Right. But the uniqueness of the British situation is a product of Brexit, and anything that undermines Brexit will sooner or later undermine Labour too.