Can our democratic institutions – designed when national populations were much smaller – still work?
The population boom over the past five hundred years here on Earth has been staggering. Homo sapiens is on the brink of a monumental great leap forward as a species. It is not only that our number is unprecedented, at 7.6 billion, it is also that this is accompanied by growing life expectancy, education and living standards – and twinned with an explosion in the depth and reach of technology. As Princeton astrophysicist J Richard Gott said earlier this year: we are either on the brink of annihilation or colonisation of the stars.
Global population growth over 12,000 years: from 243 million to 7.6 billion, from Our World In Data
It is in this context that it is worth remembering that the sacred ideas and governing institutions of the West were established in an era of very different technological capacity and significantly smaller populations.
When Columbus set sail to discover the Americas in 1492, the world’s population was 461 million: fewer than the current populations of Brazil and Indonesia combined. The UK was approaching 4 million, the size of Los Angeles today.
There are more evangelical Christians alive today, 600 million, than the entire global population at the start of the Reformation 500 years ago (500 million).
There were only 800 million people on the planet in 1776, when the US, with a population of 2 million, declared independence from the 7.5 million strong Great Britain – where a staggering proportion, one million, lived in London, a figure which is now dwarfed by the 2.9 million employed in the UK’s central government.
At the time Rousseau was publishing “The Social Contract” in the 18th century the global population was almost one tenth of what it is today.
In other words, at the time Rousseau was publishing “The Social Contract” in the 18th century the global population was almost one tenth of what it is today. Rousseau wrote his cornerstone theory describing our mythical consent to be governed while sharing France with only 40% of the number of citizens he’d be sharing France with if he were alive today.
From the mid-1850s on, when most of our political institutions and customs were developed, Britain had half of today’s population, and the post Civil War population of the US was a mere 1/8th of today’s 323.1 million.
Even as recently as the Post-War Consensus, the global population was just one third of today’s.
So, are yesterday’s ideas and institutions of government-over stretched by today’s much larger populations?
The dilution of representation
When populations grow but institutions remain static, power becomes more concentrated.
For example, the 1910 Asquith ministry in Britain had 21 Cabinet members: 1 Cabinet minister to 1.4 million citizens.
In 2017, Theresa May’s Cabinet has 23 members: 1 Cabinet Member for every 2.8 million citizens.
Not only does this dilute representation, but it also makes power harder to come by.
If student numbers are an indication of the size of the elite, the 1910 British elite was proportionally much smaller than today’s, making it easier for a member of it to have access to power.
In 1910, there were under 5,000 students obtaining first and higher degrees in the whole country. Now, there are closer to 500,000. That is a growth from 238 students to 1 Asquith Cabinet Minister to 21,739 students to 1 Theresa May Cabinet Minister.
The US founding fathers can’t possibly have imagined that the Federal Government would one day be responsible for over 300 million people. Similarly, the EU has created a citizenry of 508 million people who are governed by 28 ministers in the Council of the European Union.
Pre-Industrial philosophy, adapted to Industrial age institutions, is now applied to today’s vast populations. The pace of 20th century technological development has allowed governments to cope with such accelerated population growth (and 21st century technology will only increase capacity and efficiency to govern). So it’s not the capacity to govern that poses a problem – but rather the capacity to represent it, since a proportionally ever-smaller elite of the mega-rich and the mega-powerful govern mega-populations.
Out-of-date institutions
The symptoms of democratic malaise, the discontent of swathes of the population under-represented by yesterday’s institutions, can be seen everywhere.
The shock Brexit result in 2016, for example, was in large part won by those who, having never voted before, turned up at the polling booth to revolt against the mega-elite. Trump harnessed a bloc who had felt under-represented by existing institutional apparatus.
Many other contemporary policy concerns are often a result of institutions being forged from eras of smaller population sizes; ballooning societies battling to celebrate diversity of race and culture are increasingly unable to celebrate a diversity of opinions.
The recent clamour for ‘safe spaces’ and revisionist history is simply the result of millennials bumping into institutions and structures for populations that lived 150-300 years ago. Fighting for the dismantling of the patriarchy is to look at the telescope the wrong way round.
The recent clamour for ‘safe spaces’ and revisionist history is simply the result of millennials bumping into institutions and structures for populations that lived 150-300 years ago. Fighting for the dismantling of the patriarchy is to look at the telescope the wrong way round.
Rather than look backwards and demand a statue be pulled down or a book be banned, we should be looking forward and clamouring to erect new statues, fighting to expand the curriculum’s canon. Expand the capacity of institutions to grow, rather than try and shrink everything in to it the existing mould.
If we want greater social diversity in Oxbridge, we should make more Oxfords, we should create a new Ivy League.
Yes, the House of Lords is bursting-at-the-seams, but that’s because the upper chamber was proportioned for a Victorian population and sociology.
We have a choice.
Either accept the deteriorating capacity of mega-populations run by mega-elites to do representative democracy. Or create new democratic units giving people access to smaller, less powerful elites.
Twenty-first century political theorists could decide what it looks like. Unless it is decided for them. Because while our populations have never been so large, nor have they ever been so hyper-connected – by mainstream media, trans- national popular culture, and social media.
Social media is bypassing current representative structures. The #metoo campaign tackled institutionalised sexism much faster than writing to your elected representative.
This same technology could spur a radical change of democratic representation. It could one-day result in countless micro-referenda with the casual frequency of an instagram update. For now, social media is a 21st century technology outpacing 19th century institutions. But for how long will the latter attempt to keep up with the former.
While we have grown in population, life expectancy and technological competence, the very democratic ideals and institutions that have made much of that growth and prosperity possible are about to hit their ‘best by’ date. So will our species be ready to harness the changes it precipitates to allow a great leap forward, or will we let it contribute to our species’ eventual demise?
