I appreciate the invitation to be here. I will begin where Professor Farrell left off. Lest I lose the train of thought, let me make the assertion that changing the voting system would not necessarily improve the legislative process. I will explain why I hold this view in a few moments. Before I do and in order to make a connection with what Professor Farrell said, let me say that the Irish political system including its electoral system occurs in a political context. My work from 30 years ago and earlier comes from a tradition of political anthropology rather than a much later emphasis in political science on voting studies. One therefore sees traces in the Irish political system that it has inherited. It reflects a certain amount of continuity in its institutional structures about which Brian Farrell, for example, has written in the past. To some extent people presented this as a benefit, but it also has in the contemporary period some significant disadvantages.
The decolonisation experience in a political institutional sense was not homogenous across the board, even where the same colonising country was involved. An example would be the British relationship to India not being the same as its inheritance to Egypt, Sierra Leone or the mandate in Palestine. In other words consciously the departing power very often had to make a choice between elites in different countries. In the Irish case — in the country that was closest to it — it had inherited a certain kind of structure. The Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898 had changed local politics and had also introduced different groups of people into the political process. It was that process that gave rise to the overrepresentation of shopkeepers and publicans — it comes from that period — for very definite reasons. In that first election in 1898 the contest in rural areas was between grazier shopkeepers and non-grazier shopkeepers.
I do not want my work of 20 or 30 years ago to be misrepresented because I have now changed my position owing to circumstances and historical changes. When writing from those earlier years at the end of the 1960s and 1970s I was writing very much out of a literature that could be summarised under patrons, clients and brokers. I could identify very clearly the role of abuse of credit, for example, in electoral advantage. Today I would describe the literature I wrote then as most useful in terms of brokerage systems.
I will now make my major point. The Irish system is not clientelist now. Quite some time ago corruption defeated clientelism. There have been very few empirical studies dealing with clientelism. It is rather like the Irish suggestion, if I were going down the road of reform I would not begin from here. One needs to be very careful about assuming one will get the effect — one must specify the effect one would get — from reforming the electoral system. The bigger challenge is reforming the legislative process. There seems to be a very dangerous reluctance to deal with this. The inherited cabinet system needs to be looked at. Is it possible to claim to have an effective committee system while maintaining the monopoly of the Cabinet in the introduction of legislation? Is the role of the committee a residual one — one of scrutiny — or is it one to provide a platform for advocacy as in a number of cases? The system, for example, in the Scandinavian countries, is one where committees have the right to initiate legislation, amend legislation and can also block legislation and so forth.
Therefore, the committee system that has been introduced is weak and its weaknesses are not addressed only on other things, because I have done some comparative studies on foreign affairs committees and human rights committees, which are generally underfunded. Our committee system is not separate from the Government in power. It does not have, if one likes, that arms length distance that other committees have. Therefore, there are issues about Cabinet.
There is also an unspoken notion that one must not question the role of the Department of Finance in the Cabinet handbook. Those of us who have had the privilege of being in Cabinet will know that Ministers are required to consult with colleagues in Cabinet, except for the Minister for Finance who does not have this requirement even in the latest version of the Cabinet handbook. In theory therefore, where is the hegemony of the Department of Finance? I can only conclude, even when I look at Professor Fanning's work, that because the Treasury got away with it in former times, it was logical that the Department of Finance would get away with it after independence. The alternative, in Scandinavian terms, would be to make an allocation to a Department, to devolve a great deal of discretion, transparency and accountability, and link committees to it that would have the power of initiation, amendment, reform, blockage and so forth. However, we are not seriously considering this. Therefore, we come to the next part. I will quickly go through what I have distributed in a moment.
When I look at the reforms that are suggested, apart from those on which we have been invited to speak, I see them as technocratic. In a way, there is always a tension in political science between those of us who support the normative theory, which is the way politics should be, and those who follow what one might call the pragmatic rules that Bailey wrote a long time ago — how things get done. There is a collision between how things get done and how they ought to be. If we want to address the political disconnect in the population, we may in fact need to consider strategies of deepening democracy and political participation. I am thinking, for example, of the elections to parents' committees and so on in the United States, which are very much down on the ground. It may be at this level that we should deal with the problem. Otherwise, what is the point? We might well see, coming from the base, political developments that take as their starting point a devaluation of the political representation component. There are already very strong tendencies that devalue politics, for example, the notion of the political class. Very few media people will feel free ever to describe politics in terms of the right or the left. They like to say "the politicians", which is as evasive and cowardly as one might get. There is a problem with the current deep commitment to the notion that representative democracy itself is under attack. I believe it is.
I will quickly run through the headings I have given. When I began writing and teaching in political science, this was the way Professor Chubb approached it in his distinguished contribution. He described the features of the Irish political system as follows. He said that the characters of both the major parties were vertically integrated into class alliances. There is a lack of serious ideological differences between these parties; a comprehensive localism in national politics; a statistically tested extremely low degree of public confidence in the ability of ordinary citizens to collectively influence local or national governmental action; an absence of interest groups or public campaigns in national politics; and a dominance of national and local politics by the personal clientele of politicians. He saw it as something that was on its way to being modernised into something else. I reject that entirely. The modernisation model has no status in the intellectual work of contemporary political science. It had to do with the disposal of resources.
Professor Chubb also wrote a famous article called "Going about persecuting civil servants". That was his first article and it was his description of public representatives at the time. The thing is that everything has changed. I do not believe blocks of voters are the clientele of politicians. There has been widespread use of telephones and so forth. The people who have studied this — for example, Mark Bax in Tipperary — suggest that in the period in which Professor Chubb wrote, he probably had a basis for his suggestions. Paul Sacks wrote about the Donegal mafia. Peter Gibbin and I argued from an anthropological point of view. Something comes out of the work of these people, including Ellen Hazelkorn and Lee Komito. Valerie Kelly did some empirical work in 1987 on the procedures in my own office, and she found that political interventions did help, but only in specific circumstances, such as where the wrong information had been supplied or where the inquiry needed to be directed at the right source. In other words, it was not about pulling strings but rather clarifying the applications. One could say, therefore, that an increase in citizen capacity or in the State's dealings with citizens would help enormously.
What has come out of the other studies? There is much in the work of Komito. There are three phases to the political system. There is an early period in which there are resources in the State that one can affect, and there is evidence that this happened. There are only one or two cases in which a person who was not blind received a blind pension, for example. There are areas in which one could abuse the system, although they are few. One then moves on to where that is vaporising, where we have fictional sources. This is the notion of the person going up to Dublin. I recall a councillor saying to me about my dear colleague Bobby Molloy, "Bobby never came down from Dublin without something for Galway in his pocket." This was her view rather than being based on anything real. Then there is the last, contemporary phase — I have seen this in empirical studies — in which a person holds an enormous number of clinics or advice centres for the sake of keeping up his or her reputation.
Parliaments are weak all over Europe and are sinking in support, with the exception, curiously, of the European Parliament, which is receiving more support. If one is considering weak parliaments, it is probably due to the large number of economic decisions that are now, under globalised conditions, going outside parliament altogether. Then, parliaments have consciously ceded responsibility in a number of areas, so their areas of responsibility are shrinking. Finally, there is the arrival of the predominant market model of the economy, which values private rather than public intervention, namely, the role of the State.
I will finish where I began. If we take the British model of disengagement in terms of how it managed transitions, what it was dealing with was strong, complex societies and weak states. Professor Migdal has written well on this. In other words, the society can defeat the state. In the Irish case there was — Chubb was right about this — a deep distrust of the State. If I was revising my work in 2009 I would be influenced by the work of James C. Scott. I will provide all these references if the committee is dealing with it. There is an awful lot to peasant cunning. People, instead of being dominated by parliamentarians, are, quite cutely and in a cunning way, willing to play along as they did with the landlord in the old song about praising the landlord's daughter's beauty. There is such a notion as strategies of defence, which are all over the place in the anthropological literature about societies dealing with those who represent them.
I warn against the danger of piecemeal reform. The committee should consider improving the legislative process. I would have begun at that end and gone through Cabinet, Parliament, the public service, the local state — the notion, for example, of the patriarchal, hierarchical, inflexible absence of discretion in decision making in the public service is the source of many representations to parliamentarians. Finally, I will give one tiny piece of advice which applies in many cases. If there is a shrinking of democracy in Ireland and a disconnect between people and politics, it is important that those who at least have had the courage to stand for election should not beat themselves up for being the primary source of that. There are many sources.
We have representatives of the media present. There is not a tradition in Ireland — in fact, such a tradition has declined — of essays on politics. It exists in El País newspaper in Spain and in the Latin world, where there are regular discussions of political options. In many cases responsibility for the absence of ideological discussion, theoretical suggestion and political science, in the normative sense, is not the function of Deputies who, admittedly, are excluded from the legislative process by bad machinations. That position exists because the people who discuss and comment on politics have not raised their game.
