Goran Rosenberg: Listening to the Voters – Good Morning World

© Goran Rosenberg

In a week or so, Great Britain will elect a new Prime Minister after Boris Johnson. Or rather, in a few weeks, more than 200,000 members of the British Conservative Party will not elect a new Prime Minister in a country of 67 million people, that is, 0.3% of the population will practically decide who will lead the country. Moreover, it is not a very representative sample even of Tory voters; Older, male, whiter, richer, etc.

Well, now someone says, that’s how it could be in a parliamentary democracy.

The members of the party, whoever they may be, choose the president, and if the party happens to be the ruling party, in practice they also choose the leader of the state.

Thus Magdalena Anderson was also elected by members of the Social Democratic Party, although the parliamentary basis for her formal accession as Prime Minister was shaky.

Which begs the question for me at least; Who are these parties now?

Or rather, who are the party members, who can sometimes decide who will become the leader of the country.

In Sweden, at first, they became less and less. Thirty years ago, the Social Democratic Party, the moderates and the center together had more than half a million members. Today, less than a third is left – and the trend is declining. Fewer and fewer choose to join a political party.

To the extent that political parties were supposed to form a public opinion of different ideas and ideals about how society should be governed, they do so with fewer and fewer members. One could also suspect that fewer and fewer people choosing to join a political party are becoming less and less representative of an increasing number of people choosing not to.

At the same time, the parties are becoming less dependent on their members for their activities and policies. It is true that parties have conferences or meetings where members decide programs and directions, but it is also true that party leaders in their actions and positions are increasingly guided by other considerations. Resolutions of Congress or public meetings that were ignored became part of the political routine.

Instead, we have parties that claim to listen to their voters, which is different from listening to their members. There is, of course, nothing wrong with listening to the voters, who they are, and how to listen to them, but it is almost understandable that parties exist to say what the voters want to hear, which is not what the parties were formed before. to. Parties were once formed to influence the electorate with their ideas and proposals. Anyone who wants to actively influence the ideas and proposals of the party should join it.

It no longer works that way. What the parties say, and their message if you will, seems increasingly influenced by what polls show their voters want to hear. What their voters want to hear, in turn, seems to be influenced less by what parties say and more by all the channels of influence in the digital world – where it is often difficult to know who wants to influence voters what and why.

On the other hand, it is easy to see how it can increase distrust of what the parties have to say, because the parties that think they have to say what the voters want to hear, and are therefore willing to say one thing perhaps one day and another after that, lose credibility. Thus his ability to say something voters do not necessarily want to hear, but might have to say anyway.

The danger in such a development is that the parties may come under the control of forces and opinions that they can no longer influence.

A shocking example is the Republican Party in the United States, which today is dominated by forces and opinions that push party representatives to take increasingly extreme positions, and to increasingly self-defeating declarations of loyalty with an authoritarian leader who fundamentally despises them, but who nonetheless is seen as controlling In the electors who feed on them all and who ride on them all now, and whose every moment threatens to devour them.

In so far as any of what I have said here applies to one or some of the parties which within two weeks will receive their judgment from the Swedish electorate, I leave it to the listeners to decide.