The search for democratic renewal: The politics of consultation in Britain and Australia

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Labour in flux

… a state of ‘post-democracy’, a situation where, although the formal institutions of democracy continue and might even be strengthened, the heart goes out of it, there is a wearying of democratic energy.

Colin Crouch, 2007, p. 47

The crisis of democracy comes from it being not democratic enough.

Anthony Giddens, 1998, p. 71

Introduction

Equality is often offered as the defining characteristic of centre-left politics. From the late 1800s labour and socialist parties were established to replace, then overhaul, and latterly, mitigate, the inherent inequalities of capitalism. Yet a survey of Donald Sassoon’s opus, One Hundred Years of Socialism, indicates that perhaps a better claim for the defining trait of the centre-left is revision and change. As Sassoon reminds us, labour and socialist political parties are constantly undergoing periods of renewal and reinvention. Indeed, revision could be a defining characteristic of many centre-left political parties.

This book attempts to understand how two sister centre-left parties – the British Labour Party and the Australian Labor Party (ALP) – have sought to adapt to the modern era and effect changes. What underpin these changes are deep-rooted questions of identity: what do the parties stand for? Who and what do they represent? Do these adaptations even matter? These and other critical dilemmas and problems face both parties.

Since the 1980s and the dominance of neoliberal settings in both countries, these long-standing questions of identity have become more critical and pressing. In the ‘heyday’ of the 1950s and 1960s, when both were mass parties with significant levels of party membership, it was perhaps clearer whom they represented and what they stood for – in stark contrast to modern times, where the Labour¹ parties in Britain and Australia confront the prospect of becoming hollowed-out and lifeless entities. Membership has fallen to record low levels, with an ageing and largely inactive membership, and in Australia swathes of local branches have closed down. The wider labour ‘movement’ is not in an overly healthy state either, with declining levels of trade union density. The modern Labour parties are professionally run, highly sensitive to opinion polls, and increasingly preselecting electoral candidates from eversmaller social bases. Against this backdrop, there are growing concerns that both parties have become disconnected from working people and they are struggling to respond to changing structural patterns of political participation and engagement. Following the defeat of New Labour in 2010 and the leadership changes in Australia since the election of the Rudd government in 2007, there has been renewed soul-searching about Labour’s core mission in the modern era.

In response to these problems of identity, relevance and mission, the Labour parties in Britain and Australia (and elsewhere) have been seeking new ways to engage with stakeholders and the wider public, with a renewed interest in democratic revitalisation – Labour’s search for democratic renewal is inherently bound up with its need to secure wider legitimacy. This book seeks to examine aspects of this democratic renewal agenda and its prospects for the revitalisation of labour politics.

Arguably, the best-publicised variant of British Labour’s attempt to find meaning in current neoliberal settings is the so-called Third Way. Anthony Giddens, often seen (inaccurately) as its architect, and other adherents prefer the term ‘New Social Democracy’ (NSD). The New Social Democracy is a useful descriptor for understanding one strand of revisionist social democratic politics in Britain and Australia. A central part of the New Social Democracy is a call for democratic renewal, or what Giddens terms ‘the democratising of democracy’. Inherent in this call is that the existing architecture of representative democracy is no longer sufficient for meeting the needs of a more fragmented and reflexive citizenry. Proponents of the New Social Democracy in both Australia and Britain argue that the processes of democracy need to be strengthened and indeed augmented by new spaces for public deliberation and debate. While New Labour has been called the New Social Democracy in ‘chemically pure form’, the influence of the NSD is less pronounced in Australia.

There are various strands to Labour’s call for democratic renewal, including constitutional change, electoral reform, a greater focus on government transparency and the strengthening of human rights. In the United Kingdom, far greater attention has been paid to questions of constitutional reform, with the notable achievements of New Labour being the introduction of assemblies in Wales, Scotland and London, the establishment of a supreme court and reforms to the still-unelected House of Lords. In Australia, the Rudd–Gillard governments’ legacy of constitutional reform was minimal, with little movement on the issue of the republic and, despite a wide-ranging consultation, a refusal to introduce human rights legislation.

While Labour’s efforts in relation to these aspects of democratic renewal have received wider attention, this book examines the parties’ attempts to implement new forms of consultation and citizen engagement. Labour governments in both Britain and Australia have sought to create new ‘dialogic’ spaces for citizens and experts, the aim being to inform governance processes and decision-making. While some of these experiments have been critiqued, this book offers a systematic and comparative assessment of attempts to introduce innovative forms of consultation and citizen engagement.

What does this book offer that can’t be found elsewhere? A plethora of books examine consultation and democratic renewal – for example, Stewart’s (2009) fine The Dilemmas of Engagement – but while these books offer important critiques of the policy aspects of various dimensions of engagement and consultation, they often do not have a specific political focus or context. This book’s approach is distinctive, in that it argues that Labour governments are not interested in democratic renewal because it is essentially a worthwhile endeavour or because everyone else is doing it, but rather it is a central defining part of the political narrative about its reinvention.

This book also builds upon a smaller literature which links and brings together British and Australian Labour, building upon the important works by Scott (2000) and O’Reilly (2007). As we shall see these sister parties have much in common, and in recent years there has been significant policy transfer between them. Moreover, Australian Labor tends to be overlooked in the wider story about social democracy; for example, most mainstream accounts focus on social democracy in Western Europe, such as Sassoon’s epic One Hundred Years of Socialism, or Merkel et al.’s (2008) Social Democracy in Power. Yet, as others such as Pierson (2001) rightly point out, there is something very distinctive about Australian Labor which is often overlooked. Moreover, while there is a veritable armada of books about New Labour, the focus of New Labour’s experiments examined in this book is not tackled elsewhere (for example, Bevir’s 2010 Democratic Governance does not cover this territory). The books and works on democratic renewal and New Labour tend to focus on its constitutional changes – an important but limited story. This is a story that encompasses much more than New Labour.

In addition to its comparative focus, this book offers an in-depth analysis of a range of cases; cases which have often been overlooked by more mainstream books on democratic renewal. This approach is in contrast to say, Marsh and Miller’s (2012) recent Democratic Decline and Democratic Renewal, which takes a broad-brush approach to mapping democratic change in three countries. Indeed, Marsh and Miller (2012, p. 116) dismiss two of the initiatives examined in this book, but in doing so they ignore a significant narrative about the tensions in Labour’s search for democratic renewal. This book is unique in recording a hitherto untold strand of a much wider story about how Labour in Britain and in Australia is seeking to reinvent itself.

The book focuses on Britain and Australia for a number of reasons. New Labour is a key choice because it is the archetype of the NSD of all recent centre-left governments in advanced industrial settings. The book focuses on the two countries because to some extent, other comparators either did not aspire to implement an NSD agenda, or were either not in power or did not hold onto power for prolonged periods. For example, New Labour was the leading example of the NSD agenda, and was far more electorally successful than, say, Gerhard Schröder’s ‘die neue mitte’ social democratic government in Germany from 1998 to 2005. In both New Labour and the Australian Labor Party there is a much greater interest in and commitment to the democratic renewal agenda, unlike say, the Dutch ‘polder’ model under the leadership of Wim Kok from 1994 to 2002. The ‘polder’ variant of the NSD was focused much more on an economic reform agenda. As noted above, the focus on Australia is important as this variant of social democracy is often overlooked in more mainstream accounts of centre-left and labour politics. Crucially, at both the federal and state level, Australian Labor has shown a real willingness to experiment with democracy.

Whilst democratic experimentation is not limited to either of these two centre-left parties, there are additional reasons why other possible comparators were excluded from the book. For example, 2007 French presidential candidate Ségolène Royal was something of an innovator in regard to democratic renewal (Clift 2007, p. 285). As part of her candidacy, Royal wanted to spearhead a ‘democratic revolution’, and sought constitutional reforms and a more participatory form of politics (particularly with forms of e-engagement) (pp. 285–6). Yet until the 2012 presidential election win by François Hollande, the French left had been out of power since Lionel Jospin’s single term as president from 1997–2002. Royal’s presidency would have been an interesting case, if she had secured office.

Likewise, the centre-left under Romano Prodi ruled Italy only for short spells from 1996–98 and 2006–8. Overall, in many of the large industrial countries, during the period surveyed in this book, the centre-left was out of favour. There is a case that democratic experimentation has also been taking place in the US, especially since the Obama presidency. Yet, to some extent, the Democrats are a distinctly different ideological and organisational beast to their British and Australian counterparts.

Ultimately, the focus on Britain and Australia is for two key reasons. First, in the literature on comparative politics, both countries fall within the ‘most similar systems’ approach (see Przeworski and Teune 1970). Comparison between the two countries is fruitful because they share more in common. The parties are similar, and with the obvious exception of Australian federalism, the political systems are similar. The two-party system is a historical feature of both countries. Britain and Australia, of course, also share the same Head of State. This approach enables a more meaningful form of comparison than if, for example, the centre-left Scandinavian countries were included. The second main reason for the focus on Britain and Australia is that the book seeks to offer a deep and rich critique of the experiments in democratic renewal, and a more limited focus on these two countries enables this to take place.

The book is organised in the following way. In the second chapter, the context is set for British Labour’s heightened interest in democratic renewal, with the emergence of the New Social Democracy (NSD) described, as well as a critique of the call for the ‘democratising of democracy’. The second chapter identifies and examines a range of drivers for Labour’s desire to experiment and find new forms of citizen engagement. Linked to the influence of the New Social Democracy is the lingering legacy of the new public management (NPM) reforms implemented in the public sectors in both countries. For Labour, democratic renewal is an attempt to secure wider legitimacy in neoliberal settings; similarly, the NSD is also linked to the debates about the perceived shift from government to governance. The NSD has attempted to respond to these debates and in Britain a concerted effort has been made to reformulate the role of the state and, by extension, civil society. Chapter 5 examines how far the NSD has influenced Labour governments in Britain and Australia. While New Labour is often seen as the archetype of the NSD, its influence in Australia is arguably more muted, or at least there is greater reluctance by ALP elites to label and identify the current strands in Australian Labor traditions. The book examines how four NSD-inspired governments – New Labour, the Rann government in South Australia, the Bracks government in Victoria and the Rudd–Gillard federal governments – have sought to use NSD ideas to reinvent a social democratic agenda in the face of the dominance of neoliberalism. What is striking is that what can be broadly termed ‘democratic renewal’ is a key feature of their political narratives.

The third chapter establishes Labour’s interest in democratic renewal, specifically, the role of political participation and civic engagement in the wider context of democratic theory. Given that the New Social Democracy calls for an ‘active citizenry’, this is important. A central motif of democratic theory is an ambivalence about the role of political participation in a modern liberal democratic polity. While Schumpeter offers a ‘realist’ account, with a strident appeal for minimal political participation, more ‘participatory’ accounts, usually drawing from Rousseau, such as Carole Pateman’s, argue for a much deeper engagement of the citizenry. The more recent ‘deliberative’ turn in democratic theory at one level seeks to resolve these debates by institutionalising news mechanisms for enriching democratic decision-making processes and enhancing the quality of public debate. Yet deliberative democracy is difficult to enact in mass societies, and political elites remain wedded to the existing architecture of representative democracy. The cases that comprise this book explore how far New Social Democratic governments in Britain and Australia have been successful in seeking to link new forms of public dialogue to existing democratic decision-making processes in the modern western world.

The further challenge facing supporters of forms of deliberative democracy is the dominance of neoliberalism. Accounts of deliberative democracy largely remain silent on the neoliberal settings in many advanced industrial societies and the existing power structures which shape political decision-making. Here, Chapter 3 revisits the starting point for many accounts of the public realm – Habermas’s theory of the public sphere. Habermas’s landmark study charts the rise of a distinct bourgeois public sphere and its evolution in the development of capitalism. In revisiting the work of Habermas we are reminded that in the modern setting the public sphere cannot be divorced from the advanced capitalist system, which sustains liberal democracy. Further, as explored in the case studies in the book, NSD-influenced governments seek to institute and shape the public realm through their mechanisms for public dialogue. The risk is that these public engagement mechanisms provide weak and anaemic vehicles for a more sustained critique of the structural inequalities and power in advanced capitalist societies. In this sense, the ‘active citizen’ sought by NSD governments is a highly normative one. The NSD seeks ‘active citizens’, but at the same time sets clear boundaries for the ways in which people can participate and engage; the NSD seeks to invigorate and manage public debate, but without enabling it to undermine the modern capitalist system. Following the theoretical discussions, the ‘democratic audit’ framework is outlined as the overall mechanism for understanding and critiquing the initiatives.

At the heart of the book lie a number of case studies exploring a series of experiments in the New Social Democracy in Britain and Australia. What links these cases is that they are all ‘big picture’ consultations and large-scale initiatives designed to bring the citizens’ voice to policy-making. In many cases they claimed to be the largest consultation to have taken place in that polity (for example, the South Australian case) or a world-first – such as New Labour’s People’s Panel. The cases are innovative attempts at consultation that go beyond the more usual ‘single issue’ or ‘one off’ consultations carried out by government departments seeking to gain views on specific pieces of legislation. That said, the cases are ‘halfway houses’ in the search for democratic renewal. While they transcend previous, more limited, efforts at engagement, none is a fully fledged experiment in deliberative or participatory democracy. Yet critics who wish to dismiss such initiatives as ‘talkfests’, fail to recognise the genuine attempts by these Labour governments to find new ways of engaging the public and wider stakeholders. It is only as the cases are examined in detail that the underpinning strengths, weaknesses, tensions and contradictions are revealed, demonstrating that Labour governments on the one hand are keen to find new ways of engaging citizens, yet on the other hand they are ambivalent about the merits of seeking to do so.

In the final chapter, the overarching themes are drawn together and the cases compared. As outlined in the previous chapters, these initiatives, while markers of Labour governments seeking to find new forms of democratic renewal, are a ‘glittering facade’ to a deeper problem: Labour’s weakening attachment to forms of inequality of voice and civic engagement. These cases are ‘thin’ responses to a much ‘thicker’ set of structural problems for Labour in Britain and Australia – the hollowing-out of its membership. Finally, these attempts by Labour governments are contrasted with David Cameron’s call for a ‘Big Society’, an apparent reformulation of many of these themes. While there are differences between the attempts at new forms of civic engagement by the centre-left and the centre-right, it is suggested that Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ draws substantially upon the efforts of the NSD, because while it expands aspects of the public realm, it offers no threat to neoliberal settings.

Note

1  The spelling ‘Labour’ will be used throughout when referring simultaneously to the British Labour Party and the Australian Labor Party and when making generic references to the labour movement.

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Labour, democratic renewal and the New Social Democracy

In Britain and Australia, Labour governments have been experimenting with democratic renewal. Democratic renewal includes a range of diverse activities, processes and mechanisms and can include constitutional reform, increasing the transparency of government decision-making, activating new forms of civic engagement and introducing new spaces for public debate. This book looks at one strand of this search for democratic renewal: a growing willingness by Labour governments to introduce new mechanisms for grand-scale consultation and civic engagement. These more ambitious democratic attempts include citizens’ panels, citizens’ juries, deliberative polls and ‘visioning events’. While some of these are not ‘new’ or indeed unique to centre-left governments, there is a strong case to be made that the centre-left has been driving this agenda forward in modern times.¹

For Labour, there is a pressing need to reconfigure and reinvigorate the relationship between the state and civil society. As New Labour put it, ‘the ballot box is a blunt tool’ (Cabinet Office 1999a) and there is a need to supplement the existing architecture of representative democracy. Government needs to be ‘modernised’ and made more ‘responsive’ to its citizens. Before some of these cases are examined in greater detail, we set the context to account for this focus on enhancing citizen engagement in decision-making processes. Arguably, there are at least four drivers for Labour’s desire to find new forms of citizen engagement. These include:

•  a revitalised interest in democratic renewal as part of Labour’s ongoing process of ‘modernisation’ and revision;

•  Labour’s attempt to recalibrate the role of the state in the face of the interrelated pressures of neoliberalism, the legacy of the new public management and the challenge of the ‘governance’ debate;

•  the deliberative ‘turn’ in democratic theory;

•  changes in structural patterns of political participation.

The first two drivers of Labour’s push for democratic renewal are considered in detail in this chapter. The challenge of deliberative (sometimes discursive) democracy is outlined in Chapter 3, while Chapter 4 considers and outlines the structural changes in patterns of political participation and behaviour that underpin Labour’s attempt to find new ways of engaging citizens.

Labour and the New Social Democracy

At the heart of Labour’s quest for democratic renewal is a more fundamental set of questions about Labour’s identity and purpose in the modern era. What exactly is the Labour party for? Who does it represent and what values does it seek to espouse? There is nothing new about Labour’s identity ‘crisis’. As Donald Sassoon’s One Hundred Years of Socialism reminds us, revision and change is a constant within social democratic and labour politics. In each era, social democratic parties are confronted by new social, technological and economic challenges that exert pressure for the reformulation of their values, mission and policy objectives. In the early twentieth century the central debate was between the socialists and social democrats, while in the late 1960s the emergence of green politics, the women’s movement and other social movements forced a realignment of priorities. The key issue is that change and questions of identity are ongoing concerns in labour politics. In more recent times in the British context the debate centred on what, if anything, was distinctive about ‘New Labour’. After 13 years of a Labour government, Ed Miliband, the party leader, declared that ‘the era of New Labour has passed. A new generation has taken over’ (Telegraph, 26 September 2010). One prism for the more recent debate about British Labour’s identity has been through Maurice Glasman’s notion of rebuilding the party as ‘Blue Labour’ (Davis 2011). In Glasman’s view, British Labour has been far too wedded to a Fabian view of social democracy, with far too great a reliance on state instruments to achieve wider egalitarian goals.

In Australia, the debate about Labor’s identity and purpose is also ongoing. The legacy of the Hawke–Keating federal government (1983–96) remains hotly contested. Most recently, the changes in the party’s leadership since 2007, along with the 2010 minority government – the first minority Australian federal government since 1943 – has prompted further debate about Labor’s identity and purpose.

These debates will continue and are problematic, and it is well beyond the scope of this book to outline them all. My aim is a far more modest one: to examine Australian and British Labour’s interest in one strand of democratic renewal – a desire to create new spaces for public engagement and consultation. A useful way of understanding the changes to both parties and their interest in democratic renewal is to view them as elements of the New Social Democracy, a political project which seeks to ‘modernise’ and update social democracy, particularly in response to the dominance of neoliberalism.

Untangling the overlap and connections between the NSD, the Third Way and New Labour is a useful starting point for a discussion of the origins of the NSD. Before New Labour came to power, and during its first term in office, the ‘Third Way’ was used as a term to describe its overall political programme and guiding philosophy (after a brief flirtation with the idea of ‘stakeholding’ – which involves moving towards a more German-style market economy; see Driver and Martell 2002, p. 68). However, by New Labour’s second term (from 2001 onwards) it had ceased to use the term as the defining motif of its politics (Clift 2004, p. 36). Concurrently, key advocates such as Anthony Giddens adopted the term ‘New Social Democracy’ (NSD), as they argued that the debate about the Third Way label was obscuring the wider aims and ideas that underpin the ‘modernisation’ of social democracy (Giddens 2002; White 2001). The academic discourse has seen some movement toward using the term ‘New Social Democracy’ rather than ‘Third Way’ (Gamble and Wright 1999). For the purposes of this book, the Third Way and the NSD are essentially the same, but the Third Way is the British variant of the NSD more narrowly associated with New Labour. ‘New Social Democracy’ is however a more useful umbrella term for describing a common cluster of ideas which have informed the