Abstract
There often is a curious ambivalence in attitudes towards democracy. From a historical perspective, the great success of democratic decision making is difficult to deny, especially when compared to some of the authoritarian alternatives. From the inside, however, democratic decision making looks anything but promising; it looks like a messy, emotional, and sometimes ill-informed back-and-forth of arguing and haggling, with constant shifts in priorities and exchanges of protagonists. But if real democratic decision making does not inspire confidence, then how can we explain and come to trust the long-term resilience and success of democracy?
This contrast between how democracies look in the short and the long term lies at the heart of David Runciman’s extraordinary combination of analytical history and theory of democracy, The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present.
In his attempt to account for this puzzling ambivalence and to explain what we are to make of it, the author adopts Alexis de Tocqueville as a guide; a thinker whose work shows us a very differentiated picture of democracy. Setting the theme of the book early on, Runciman quotes Tocqueville’s observation about democracy that “its faults strike one at first approach, but its qualities are only discovered at length” (2). Tocqueville and Runciman agree that the main reason for this is that fundamentally, democratic systems are flexible and adaptable; they are “experimental” systems. Flexibility and adaptability of course are characteristics that play out only in the long term, and whose value only becomes evident in retrospect and from a wider perspective. In the short term and from within, flexibility and looseness may come across as fickleness, indecisiveness, dithering, or a lack of seriousness. In the midst of a political crisis, as the author recognizes, these are not the qualities people expect from their politicians. People who are looking for decisive action and inspiring leadership are bound to be disappointed by the democratic process—yet, despite this disappointment, history has shown that adaptability and a willingness to experiment are often precisely what are needed to overcome political crises.
The problem, however, is not only that the public does not appreciate the advantages of adaptation or flexibility; there is a very real danger. Because of their looseness, democratic systems are likely to oscillate between two modes of behavior, which Runciman calls drift and running wild. Faced with difficulty or crisis, democracies will be excessively complacent, even fatalistic, and put off decisive action for a long time. Eventually, when the crisis has become threatening enough, a period of hectic activity ensues, and more often than not, a solution is found.
Sometimes, such a solution even means jettisoning some core values of democracy: examples cited by the author are the decision of the democratic powers in World War I to engage in propaganda and press censorship and the decision by many democracies in the 1980s to relinquish democratic control over central banking. Hence also Tocqueville’s observation, which Runciman frequently cites, that democracies are “untimely.” Solutions are forthcoming, but only after a long period of failure to act, not when the need first arises.
The reasons given why democracies tend to be so untimely are dispersed throughout the text, but not always made entirely explicit by the author: is it the effect of regular elections, of transparency, the direct influence of public opinion on policy, or is it the democratic norms themselves that influence collective behavior? On the one hand, there is the Platonic point that elections force politicians to pander to the public’s preferences, and since the public has no taste for hard truths, complex decisions, or sacrifices, this means that difficulties will be downplayed, decisions postponed, and problems ignored, at least until they become too threatening (7–8). At the same time, the public relishes scandals and may unreasonably fall into panic. Regular turnover means that politicians think exclusively in the short term, until the next election, and favor decisions whose cost will be borne after they leave office. All of this means that “democracies find it much harder than other systems of government to coordinate their actions in the short term: the haphazard and volatile quality of democratic life makes reaching timely decisions difficult” (20).
On the other hand, we may ask whether democratic mechanisms necessarily have those consequences. After all, politicians will pander and downplay risks only if the electorate wants it that way. Democratic systems will be volatile only if people often change their views or if majorities frequently change. Runciman, with Tocqueville, clearly thinks that democratic electorates do typically behave this way, as is indicated by his frequent remarks that democracies do not “learn” (xvi, 19, 29, 129, 143) and do not “grow up” (xv, 16, 212). We may wonder whether this is simply because of the moral hazard of “rational ignorance” when voting (80–81), such that rational individual voters have no incentive to pay attention to important matters, or whether the democratic process as such tends to foster a “childish” (16, 19) character among the people. In any case, “The factors that make democracy work successfully over time—the flexibility, the variety, the responsiveness of democratic societies—are the same factors that cause democracies to go wrong” (xv).
In order to substantiate this thesis, Runciman embarks on an intellectual-political history of emblematic political crises of the twentieth century: crises which illustrate both the advantages and the risks of democratic decision making under pressure. These episodes include the First World War, the aftermaths of the Great Depression and of the Second World War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the multi-crisis year 1974, the end of the Cold War, as well as the Financial Crisis of 2008. These individual chapters combine historical accounts of what happened with running commentary by contemporary public intellectuals. Therefore, some commentators who themselves have at best an ambivalent attitude towards democracy, such as Keynes, Lippmann, Kennan, Hayek or Fukuyama, make a number of recurring appearances.
Some of the chapters illustrate the general argument of the book better than others. The 1918 chapter works especially well, not least because here we can compare the modi operandi of democracies and authoritarian systems at the same time. For most of the war, democratic complacency and dithering meant the Allies were no match for the authoritarian Central Powers, but in the end the democracies’ ability to adapt military and political tactics to unforeseen developments proved, so Runciman argues, decisive in winning the war (54, 57). Other examples, such as 1974 and 1989, fit less readily into the model; especially, it is less clear in what sense those years saw especially democratic crises that compare with the First World War or the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Given the historical account, however, it is a little difficult to see how this amounts to a “confidence trap.” The problem, according to the author, is this: “Democracies are adaptable. Because they are adaptable, they build up long-term problems, comforted by the knowledge that they will adapt to meet them. Debt accumulates; retrenchment is deferred. . . . So democracy becomes a game of chicken. When things get really bad, we will adapt. Until they get really bad, we need not adapt, because democracies are ultimately adaptable. Both sides play this game. Games of chicken are harmless, until they go wrong, at which point they become lethal” (285).
The historical account does show that democratic fatalism on occasion has come close to becoming self-fulfilling. However, the self-correction mechanisms and adaptiveness of the democracies suggest that democratic systems, especially compared to other regimes, do not get trapped by their own complacency. Runciman concedes that so far, democracies have always scraped by, but that there is no reason to exclude the possibility that a crisis—economic, environmental, or military—may come along where the drift finally proves fatal. This does not show, however, that an adaptive and flexible approach is not in principle the appropriate way to address such issues. And indeed, the author states that finding solutions to complex and uncertain problems “is simply more likely to happen under democracy than under any other system of government” (295). In complex situations, as Charles Lindblom has suggested, the unattractive “muddling through” may indeed be a good strategy. That is not trivial, since it means that there really are no authoritarian or other alternatives to the systemically adaptive democratic way of decision making. There is no absolute guarantee that democracies will not get trapped, but neither are they doomed to do so. The institutional mechanisms in place should give us some confidence in democracies’ ability to overcome crises. In the end, perhaps the book ought to be read less as an investigation of the fundamental ambivalent nature of democracy but as a call to think more about how democratic institutions may avoid complacency and moral hazard among the electorate, and how they could facilitate adaptation even before things get really bad.