When do democrats suspend democracy?

Boris Johnson has prorogued Parliament in order to facilitate leaving the European Union with no deal or — perhaps alternatively — to force the EU’s hands in reopening talks. The move has been widely condemned as undemocratic. There has also been suggestion that Johnson’s team are considering even more controversial moves, such as refusing to resign after a vote of no confidence or advising the Queen to not give Royal Assent to any Brexit-delaying legislation.

Although scare-mongering should be avoided — especially calling it a coup, which is if anything insulting to the many actual coups around the world — the suspension of existing democratic institutions to force the passage of a particular policy outcome is not normal. And most people agree that it is not acceptable.

Yet many of those that do think it’s acceptable would also, at the same time, likely hold very pro-democratic beliefs. The 52% of Conservatives that support prorogation are unlikely to be antidemocratic, in the sense that they are probably not willing to replace democracy with a non-democratic regime. Perhaps more confusingly, they are probably likely to be in favour of representative democracy, rather than direct democracy for instance. I’d bet that they’d also have a lot positive to say about Westminster too.

So why are these democrats willing to suspend the institutions that are in place to preserve their democracy? One answer is that they do not really care about democracy. At the other end is that they care more for fulfilling the ‘will of the people’ as expressed in the referendum than for representative democracy. Both of these could be true, but let’s assume for the minute that the people who are supportive of prorogation are also generally supportive of democracy and would in most circumstances not want the executive to override the legislature. At what point are these people willing to suspend those beliefs?

An article by Matthew Singer provides an interesting argument:

I propose that citizens who perceive benefits under the current balance of powers are those most likely to support the further consolidation of power and influence in the executive to prevent these gains from being eroded. Citizens who see the sitting executive as a representative of their interests or who observe positive policy outcomes under him or her may thus be less tolerant of the rights of opponents who would rock the boat and endanger the current prosperity while seeing few disincentives to empowering a leader that they support to override opposition from other branches of government.

He goes on to specify particular conditions that make this more likely:

This is especially true when the stakes of competition are raised by weak democratic institutions or high levels of polarization and when the president has been in office long enough to develop a credible record

In the current UK context, his argument is clear, and commonsensical: people are willing to suspend democratic institutions and empower the executive if the executive is seen as working in their interests, and is more likely with high levels of polarisation.

In the conclusion, he also provides a warning:

[D]emocracy requires winners be willing to exercise forbearance and self-restraint […] But the data in this article remind us that aspiring electoral autocrats may find ready pockets of public support for attempts to bend the system to their personal advantage.

Being less supportive of how democracy is working, and more likely to suspend its working, would usually be expected when a group isn’t getting their own way. For instance, it could be expected that if the referendum had been simply brushed away, leave-voters would be in favour of suspending existing institutions. Remainers may now be in favour of doing so as they face leaving without a deal.

This is where the real future problem lies: an executive and ruling elite not shy to subvert the usual workings of democracy buttressed by ‘pockets of public support’, and a Remain opposition likely to do so if it works to overturn the current programme or take No Deal off the table. All in a polarised environment, with, it seems, little way forward.

The only positive to take from the situation is that it also opens up an opportunity to renew British democracy, which is painfully and unavoidably outdated and unfit for the complexity of the modern world (having said this, Anthony King was arguing this in 1975). There are a raft of think tanks, like Involve, advocating moves to a new form of democracy, which seems inevitable. But to get there requires using our existing institutions — and defending the rules of the democratic game without eroding the norms of democracy.