On the cover page of The Liberal Vision one reads, “Democracy rests on an idea of equality, but capitalism breeds inequality. The transgression of economic power into the domain of democratic politics has become so great that people's democracy is being destroyed before our very eyes”.
Stein Ringen was a senior civil servant in Norway before becoming a professor at Oxford. The Norwegians are surely among the most ardent defenders of democracy at the grassroots level, and Stein Ringen has not lost hope in the Western world's usual tenet that democracy can and should be improved. He also believes that a social sciences analysis could be beneficial for professional politicians.
In What Democracy Is For?, the first chapter presents a classification of the quality of democracies based on eight major criteria divided into two tables. In the first table we find the stability of institutions and of the rule of law, freedom of the press and media, the global efficiency of legislative and executive powers, and legal protection from excessive economic power. The second table focuses on the efficiency of democracy from the citizens’ perspective. Two objective indicators are used to evaluate the level of the welfare state and health care. Two further indicators are based on data produced in several opinion polls that investigated the level of trust by citizens in the political classes and in their fellow citizens. The United States, France, Spain and, more surprisingly, the United Kingdom, were ranked largely behind Norway, Sweden, Canada, and Germany. This partly poor rating of the US can easily be explained. As for the UK, the negative weight is due to the sharply declining trust of citizens towards the political sphere in their country, as well as in continental Europe (for similar observations on France, see Y. Algan and P. Cahuc, La société de défiance, 2007). Norway comes out on top. However, according to a very comprehensive national survey, the democratic chain will be broken shortly, and citizens’ trust in their country's institutions and politicians is declining.
Chapter 2, Is Economic Democracy Available?, is a good example of the way in which Ringen, starting from considerations of moral and political philosophy, shows how even limited sociological knowledge could help in developing and implementing incremental reforms. Democracy rests on an individualistic philosophy, namely power to the person. As such, private initiative must be safeguarded. However, economic power creates inequality. Expropriation is not a possibility but redistribution could lead to some sort of solution. Empowering the poor is a first order priority, and progressive taxation a necessity. It means that the middle class, representing the majority of citizens, must pay for the poor but will only do so if the rich pay at least slightly more. At the same time, the country's executive power and parliament must bear in mind that the rich are able to move their capital abroad and that the middle class is concerned that policies which challenge capital could threaten their own prosperity. In societies in which the middle class represents the majority of citizens, its selfishness can oppose policies in favour of the poor. The battle against the irrational fears of the middle class is therefore more important than making claims that “the rich must pay”.
The next chapters raise the following questions: What should the welfare state do? Ringen notes the danger that welfare state provisions disempower the poor while empowering the bureaucracy. Can we eradicate poverty? The relative theory of poverty is a well-meaning concept but it has damaged the cause of rendering poverty unacceptable. What do families do? Not enough, is the answer provided. Without the benefit of an apprenticeship to life within the family, the young – mostly in the underprivileged classes – face the challenges of adult life and the job market with a serious handicap. Where does freedom come from? By and large the democratic states perform quite poorly here, and Ringen goes so far as to say that it is a “tragedy” that many are increasingly losing confidence in democratic rules.
A central point in Ringen's work is the distinction between liberty and freedom. Isaiah Berlin made the case for negative liberty, but real freedom – “the ability to live a life of one's own making” – rests on more than an absence of constraints; it presupposes the use of reason. “Real freedom comes to individuals from the way they are connected to others”, a statement that recalls Spinoza who wrote that the citizen who is obliged to obey the laws of a (good) city is freer than one who lives in isolation and is moved only by individual desires and passions. We can also see some similitude with Habermas’ focus on deliberation. He notes that in the past 50 years, the school of liberty has loudly and successfully promoted a style that poses potential threats to the cause of freedom. The main cause would be an excess of confidence in the technology of choice at the expense of the wisdom of choice.
Extremely lucid, emphasising the need for incremental reforms and taking into account a principle of efficiency, Ringen writes that, “a polity is democratic if its citizens hold the ultimate control over collective decisions”. His diagnosis of a break in the democratic chain between the local and national levels, expressed by interviewees in the Norwegian study, supports the call for a revival of local democracy. Today Britain is a case study “in a top-heavy democracy”, conferring excessive power to the prime minister and his party.
Ringen may indeed be fascinating not in spite of a number of contradictions but because of them. This egalitarian can write that the lords, free as they are from any subordination to the prime minister, are in some ways more democratic than elected MPs. Despite his vigorous defence of grassroots and bottom-up processes, the majority of the problems he analyses are clearly subject to national level decisions, including his appealing suggestion of a public voucher system allowing citizens to fund the party of their choice. Well aware of the pernicious collusion between the rich and the Administration in Washington, he nonetheless claims that the European social model is inferior to the US one, which he considers more optimistic, despite the scandalous levels of poverty that exist in the world's richest country.
The Liberal Vision published less than one year later (at Bardwell, in a new series headed by M. Cherkaoui, P. Hamilton and Bryan S. Turner), with a substantial foreword by Raymond Boudon, is a collection of recent essays and papers, presented under three headings: Reason, Solidarity, and Democracy. The first section does not need further commentary, except to mention a rapid and affable chapter on Boudon who is praised for the link between rationality, freedom, common sense and good reason.
The six chapters on Solidarity, dealing with several social problems, provide an opportunity to test the relationship between Ringen's reformist suggestions and his preference for bottom-up approaches. When analysing the reform of European pension systems he stresses that, “Pension reform comes not only in the form of decision-making but also in the form of an ideological platform to help decisions to stick and endure”. The underlying relationship is that between culture and politics; between a mindset in public opinion and the political agenda. However, it is not clear how cultural change emerges, or how it can be channelled or handled. No doubt Ringen, who as an analyst could be considered to be following in the line of Tocqueville, also demonstrates a certain amount of proximity with a high brow clergyman delivering an address.
The question of equality acts as the link between the second part and the third part, entitled Democracy. He notes that the 2005 riots in Paris’ northern suburbs show that modern societies are not immune from unacceptable levels of inequality. He supports William Julius Wilson's caveat against the combination of relative frustration/deprivation and race-based discrimination. A lively chapter is devoted to Robert Dahl's last works, with a particular emphasis on his critical judgment of the US political system on two grounds: an outdated constitution and the growing transfer of real power into the hands of the rich. This is followed by an important discussion on the place the struggle for power and participation must hold in any definition of democracy. Unsurprisingly, Ringen disagrees with Jan Shapiro's reduction of the core of democracy to the regulation of the struggle for power. However, he agrees with his sheer hostility against the participation called for by recent authors. For him, freedom and equality are the two pillars of democracy, and they do not fit in with participation at the national level because any kind of rally would lack the slightest legitimacy and could easily be manipulated. Returning to the representatives, the main challenge here is controlling or eliminating the huge amounts of private money that corrupt the due process of elections. The solution is to make the campaigns public through a system of vouchers distributed to citizens who can use them to support the candidate of their choice. At the local level, the situation is quite different, and there is room for innovative improvements including participation, if authorised, by small scale and dense networks of personal interrelations.
Two short essays are devoted to the shortcomings of democracies, in the US and the UK respectively, with some suggestions for improvement. All over the Western world, the levels of trust by citizens are in decline because their democracies are “less worthy of trust by rational citizens”. There is a need to protect democratic processes from the undue influence of economic power, without forgetting the efficiency of the public services.
In his foreword, Raymond Boudon considers Ringen as a member of his intellectual family and highly praises his cognitive approach to democracy, noting first and foremost his insistence on the necessary combination between instrumental rationality and axiological rationality in political decisions. Far from the subtleties of constructivism and neo-pragmatism, such modest sociological productions are surely more useful and could also be better grounded than all the discussions on the lost concept of society and so on.
I have just two reservations. One is the contradiction between the rather negative assessment of US democracy and the very positive appreciation of its social model. The second is the discrepancy between his sharp condemnation of the power of money in our democracies and the very gentle tone of the counter proposals he makes.
