To the question "Who's in charge?" the Financial Times of London replied "Who knows?" on Monday.[1] -- Certainly not us. -- "[V]oters . . . no longer believe that they have any real influence over their governments and are progressively losing interest in helping decide who should be elected to office," observed Sue Cameron in reviewing a new academic study entitled Power: Where Is It? -- "What [voters] may not realize is that politicians themselves have less and less control while our great institutions -- parliaments, parties, civil service machines -- have been steadily hollowed out." -- COMMENT: One can only marvel that it is possible to write a review of this nature without once using the word "corporation." ...
1.
Books
Non-fiction
IT IS NO LONGER CLEAR WHO' S IN CHARGE
By Sue Cameron
Financial Times (London)
August 16, 2010
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/969bb3d4-a898-11df-86dd-00144feabdc0.html
[Review of Power: Where Is It? by Donald J. Savoie (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). Hardback RRP$95, paperback $29.95.]
Where does power lie in modern Western democracies? Certainly not with voters, who no longer believe that they have any real influence over their governments and are progressively losing interest in helping decide who should be elected to office. What they may not realise is that politicians themselves have less and less control while our great institutions -- parliaments, parties, civil service machines -- have been steadily hollowed out.
The result is that finding who to blame for political or economic disasters is becoming ever harder in an age of globalization, the new media, and the rise of largely unaccountable think tanks, tsars, partisan advisers, task forces -- described as modern-day witch doctors because they are never wrong.
So says Donald Savoie, whose book *Power -- Where Is It?* is both compelling and depressing. A fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and professor of public administration at Canada’s Université de Moncton, he searches out power in the Westminster-style democracies -- Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand -- and in America. Yet his quarry proves all too elusive.
He says our political institutions “have come off their moorings” and his analysis makes gripping reading. He describes how political parties are no longer elected to make public policy. Instead, a handful of individuals around party leaders craft policies “for the purpose of getting elected.” Meanwhile, politicians have become part of a nation’s soap opera.
“Representative democracy is slowly being replaced by opinion surveys, focus groups, pressure groups, lobbyists, and powerful individuals pursuing their own economic self-interest,” he says. “Citizens are left on the outside watching a game called politics on TV screens and seeing an over-mighty executive restrained only by unelected judges . . . and journalists.”
Civil servants who would once have seen it as their job to challenge government must now “fall in line or fall out of favor.” The mandarins are also hamstrung by oversight bodies -- none of which has to agree with any other -- and by endless demands for transparency. Here Professor Savoie quotes Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s great 19th-century chancellor and a man who knew a thing or two about power. “To retain respect for sausages and laws,” said Bismarck, “one must not watch them in the making.”
A latter-day Canadian Treasury official bemoans freedom of information saying: “I cringe when I write an e-mail because I never know whether it will appear on the front page of a newspaper six months down the road . . . we can no longer have the luxury of engaging in a frank and honest debate, of saying on paper -- be careful minister, there are problems with what you want to do.”
Civil servants in Whitehall’s Ministry of Justice in London will say Amen to that. Last week, details of their budget proposals were leaked to the press complete with admonitions to “keep secure the details of our bid to HM Treasury so we do not compromise our negotiations.” Yet the result of greater openness has been to encourage secretive sofa government.
As for the markets, they muddy the waters of power further. They punish governments that do not follow market-inspired economic policies. Yet there is no guarantee that market-inspired policies will provide immunity to economic meltdown, as the 2008-09 financial crisis so clearly demonstrated. Somehow profits are always privatized while losses have to be picked up by the public sector.
Prof .Savoie reckons that if power lies anywhere it is with a small number of individuals: presidents, prime ministers, and business leaders who have become stars of the private sector. Yet political leaders are constrained by globalization, “a new anonymous and stateless power, at once intoxicating and fearsome.” Meanwhile, the difficulties in locating power make it easier for those who wield it to sidestep responsibility.
Prof Savoie’s book has its flaws. It is sometimes repetitious and he produces only sketchy evidence for his contention that it is individuals who are filling the power vacuum left by the decline of democratic institutions. Yet the sheer scope of his canvas is impressive, as is his detailed, anecdotal knowledge of Anglo-American governments and their inadequacies. His thought-provoking account of the state of Western democracy pinpoints what must be a fundamental weakness. We now have a cacophony of centers of influence all vying to be heard, and it is increasingly difficult to find out who is in charge.
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