Is Electoral and Institutional Reform the Answer?

Is electoral and institutional reform the answer?

PRATAP BHANU MEHTA

CONTEMPORARY responses to the democratic experience are marked by a series of paradoxes. On the one hand, democracy, in countries like India, has been a wonderful mechanism for chastening certain kinds of authority, making the structure of political power more fluid and creating an assertive and intensely politicized civil society. On the other, democracy seems to many not to have been an effective mechanism for mitigating the effects of social inequality and for the provision of public goods.

Within a larger global context there is another paradox. On the one hand, liberal representative democracy enjoys unprecedented legitimacy. Many exciting institutional experiments in making democracy more effective are underway in many parts of the world: reservations for marginalized groups, devolution, subsidiarity, decentralization, referendums are being tried with varying degrees of success. On the other hand, the moment of democracy's unprecedented legitimacy is also a moment of great disenchantment with its functioning.

The continued dominance of powerful interests, the distortions introduced in the electoral process by campaign finance, voter apathy in advanced industrial countries and voter cynicism in other democracies, seems to dim the bright light of democratic empowerment. But even more long term and deeper structural changes are forcing us to rethink the effectiveness of representative democracy. One indication of this structural change seems to be that national legislatures in many countries seem to be increasingly weakened. Arguably, non-elected bodies like central banks and judiciaries now have relatively greater power, and the constraints on national legislatures imposed by multilateral agreements and globalization seem to diminish the authority of legislatures considerably. While none of these developments are, in any straight-forward sense, anti-democratic, they do cast doubt on the proposition that national legislatures are straightforwardly the institution through which popular sovereignty can be expressed.

The experience of these paradoxes is the context in which many debates about electoral reform are taking place in India and elsewhere. In India there has been much discussion about electoral reform. I do not intend to go into that discussion in any great detail. Rather, I want briefly to suggest that in these debates many dimensions of the democratic experience are being ignored. Most of the reforms we require, I argue, cannot be introduced by legislative fiat, but require the hard labour of politics and self-transformation. The rush to legalistic solutions, in my view, not only shows contempt for politics, but also misdiagnoses the weakness of our democratic experience. In order to make this case, I will simply lay out, in propositional form, the goods that democracy