Our undemocratic democracy; being represented by unchallenged ideas

The prior has happened since 1994 and the latter nobody seems to care about, so what is voting based upon and should the law step in?

I’ve been following the UK election and Brexit with some delight. It’s great to see the powerful ones take a bit of strain, until you see the rand struggling against both the pound and euro, but it appeals to my epicaricacy all the same.

One comparative factor that caught my attention, seeing as we had an election this year, was that those guys actually have debates … and good ones; ones that can be converted into YouTube “x times x destroyed x” videos and solid newsworthy soundbites … all from the same debate. We have nothing of the sort here, but why?

I’ve dug deeper into election debates around the globe and it does not seem like any jurisdiction I can find actually legislates the necessity/obligation to have debates. They merely happen. What’s prevented it in South Africa then?

Before that, I need to address my assumption that political debates are actually a good thing. I can’t exactly seem to back that up tangibly. I don’t believe anybody can. Sure, they’re great to watch and, perhaps for some, that would be enough to justify them as being considered a good thing – but how many people actually engage with them? Well, in 2016, the United States ratings show that the three “official” presidential debates caught between 66 million and 84 million viewers. That’s between 20% and 25 % of the total population at the time. That’s pretty significant, though whether those numbers would translate in South Africa is a different issue.

I don’t think they would. While both the UK and US systems have their benefits, they also have a number of flaws. One key distinction between them and us is that they have significantly more focus on the individual personalities, which is why there is keen interest in seeing individuals debate. However, we like to speak of movements here in South Africa. Sure, we have faces on billboards and T-shirts, but whose faces those are matter tremendously less here than they would up north and west.

So what function do those debates serve? Well, they create some good content for media houses but also open up the political players to peer scrutiny prior to an election. Supposedly this helps voters make decisions based on ideas that can be directly challenged, as opposed to our system where the only way to oppose ideas is through negative campaigning … ugly business that.

“But what about debates in the legislature?” I can hear you ask. Two things about those: firstly, they are engaged upon post-election, thus do not empower parties to challenge one another’s manifestos to influence voters and, possibly more importantly, who cares? When last have you watched a parliamentary debate?

Back in 2011, Gareth Cliff managed to get people to watch the state of the nation by creating a drinking game and, from 2014 on, the EFF managed to get people glued to see how fast they could interrupt proceedings. Other than that, there’s very little appeal to watching parliament, so even though debates may happen there, they’re largely lost on the population.

We seem to care less about individuals here and talk more along party lines. Perceptions of parties do not change when the leader changes, it would appear.

It seems like a given that in order for democracy to thrive, people must know what they are voting for and it’s largely been assumed that debates are a manner of ensuring that, though I hardly think it’s the case. I think it could happen if voters were (on the whole) more engaged, but as we see dwindling voting numbers in South Africa, we can reliably estimate that, for now, voter engagement isn’t terribly high.

This is where the philosophy gets intriguing. Because we value democratic principles, we should have mechanisms that require parties to indicate their various positions. We may not need those to be actively challenged, though it would probably be ideal. What we cannot do is prescribe to voters how they should engage with that which the parties are offering, other than granting them a vote.

That’s tough, because we’re telling voters to vote even though there’s no obligation on those they are voting for to tell them why they should be voting for them … and even if that obligation were put in place, who are we to tell others how to campaign? At best it will be an imposition on what we believe is best for both party and voter.

So we sit with this philosophical conundrum: do we compel political parties to do more on the campaign trail to empower voters to make better decisions and, if we do, how do we determine what is the “more” we are looking for?

In truth, it seems like this is something the law should stay out of as much as we may wish it not to. It just seems so enlightening about the quality of our national politics when voters aren’t demanding political engagement. Worse yet, it doesn’t leave a pretty picture for the future when the best ways we get voters to engage with existing debate are through liquor and disruption.

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