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Democracy, Compromise and the Representation Paradox: Coalition Government and Political Integrity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2013

Richard Bellamy
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Abstract

Coalitions are often condemned as undemocratic and unprincipled because of the compromises they involve. Politicians are accused of betraying the commitments they made during the election. Paradoxically, proponents of this view suggest that if compromises are to be made they should be pragmatic and based on policy rather than principle. This article disputes this thesis and defends compromise as both principled and democratic. The first section distinguishes a shallow compromise based on the maximal satisfaction of exogenously defined preferences from a deep compromise resulting from reasoning on principle, and argues it proves impossible to avoid the latter. The second section suggests that the obligation to compromise forms part of the ethos of democracy, whereby citizens must agree despite their disagreements. The third section concludes by showing that while representatives will almost certainly betray their electoral mandate if obliged to make only shallow compromises, they can legitimately engage in deep compromises for their voters when they reason as they do.

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Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 47 , Special Issue 3: Politics as Compromise , 2012 , pp. 441 - 465
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2012.

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References

2 There are 650 seats in the UK Parliament. The Conservatives won 307 seats (with 36.1% of the national vote), Labour 258 (with 29%), the Liberal Democrats 57 (with 23%), the Democratic Unionist Party 8, the Scottish National Party 6 and Others 14 (with 11.9%). For details see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/election2010/results/.

3 As McLean, Iain, ‘ “England Does Not Love Coalitions”: The Most Misused Political Quotation in the Book’, Government and Opposition, 47: 1 (2012), p. 8 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, notes, the mean duration of minority governments in the UK is 17.9 months compared to 43.4 for coalitions and 50.5 for majority administrations.

4 See McLean, ‘ “England Does Not Love Coalitions” ’, p. 7.

5 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971 (first published 1864–65), book 1, chapter 11, p. 179.

6 See A. Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy, New York, Harper and Row, 1957, p. 156.

7 Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, pp. 179–80. Though, to be fair, others also see merit in the arrangement – see M. Duverger, ‘Which is the Best Electoral System?’, in B. Grofman and A. Ljphart (eds), Choosing an Electoral System, New York, Praeger, 1984, p. 33.

8 e.g. J. Morley, On Compromise, London, Macmillan, 1896, pp. 226–8.

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13 e.g. Nick Clegg's speech to party workers at the National Liberal Club, ‘One Year In: Coalition and Liberal Politics’, 11 May 2011, http://www.libdems.org.uk/latest_news_detail.aspx?title=One_Year_In:_Coalition_and_Liberal_Politics_-_Nick_Clegg's_speech_to_mark_the_first_anniversary_of_the_Coalition'pPK=b06a3476-8433-42d4-83f7-cbcba784f4b5, where he seeks to rebut ‘the “broken promises” charge’ against coalition politics ‘that parties will be unable to deliver the policies in their manifestoes, because of the necessary compromises that take place’ (i.e. we have delivered some Liberal Democrat policies and stopped some Conservative ones). Likewise, Prime Minister David Cameron deployed the negative view in answering criticisms from his own side of the first year of the Coalition government by remarking, ‘we've all had to make compromises’ (i.e. Liberal Democrats and not just Conservatives), BBC interview, 20 June 2011, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13847445.

14 Significantly, the one reference to compromise in the Coalition Agreement itself is to deny the negative view and to appeal to the positive, where the leaders state in their joint preface that ‘we have found in this coalition that our visions are not compromised by working together; they are strengthened and enhanced’, in The Coalition: Our Programme for Government, at http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/sites/default/files/resources/coalition_programme_for_government.pdf, p. 7.

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19 As will be clear in the third section, I think this is the practical result of the more general paradox Hannah Pitkin noted in the very concept of representation, which seeks to re-present those who are not present. See H. Pitkin, ‘Commentary: The Paradox of Representation’, in Roland J. Pennock and John W. Chapman (eds), Nomos X: Representation, New York, Atherton, 1968, pp. 38–42; and Runciman, D., ‘The Paradox of Political Representation’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 15: 1 (2007), pp. 93–114 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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23 Philippe Van Parijs, ‘What Makes a Good Compromise?’, in this volume, pp. 466–80.

24 I have adapted the notion of ‘deep’ compromise from H. S. Richardson, Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning About the Ends of Policy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, chapter 11, who contrasts it with a ‘bare’ compromise on p. 146. His contrast is more or less the same as the one I drew in Liberalism and Pluralism: Towards a Politics of Compromise, London, Routledge, 1997, chapter 4 between ‘traders’ and ‘negotiators’, but involves a highly fruitful notion of reasoning about ends that I have sought to develop here. The ‘shallow’/‘deep’ distinction also corresponds in many ways to Margalit's distinction between ‘anaemic’ and ‘sanguine’ compromises, Margalit, On Compromise, p. 39.

25 It is sometimes doubted that exchanges such as these, where no principles are involved, are compromises (e.g. Lepora, ‘On Compromise and Being Compromised’). For example, suppose I go into a shop and see three hats – one costing £10, another £15 and a third £20. I may wish to pay £10 for the £20 hat. However, if I settle for the £15 hat I have not compromised so much as decided that given my bank balance and hat preferences a £15 is the best hat for me. In my market example, though, I am assuming that the buyer still thinks the hat is ‘really’ worth only £10 and the seller that it is ‘really’ worth £20 – in settling on £15 both experience regret, but one they feel they can live with.

26 E. Burke, ‘Speech on Conciliation with America’ (March 1775), in I. Hampshire-Monk (ed.), The Political Philosophy of Edmund Burke, Harlow, Longman, 1987, p. 126.

27 Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan (1893) Teddington: The Echo Library, 2007, Act 3, p. 90.

28 J. Rawls, Political Liberalism, New York, Columbia University Press, 1993, pp. 146–8.

29 Ibid., p. 161. For a critique see Bellamy, Liberalism and Pluralism, pp. 52–66.

30 David Laws, 22 Days in May: The Birth of the Lib Dem–Conservative Coalition, London, Biteback, 2010, pp. 117–18, describes the bargaining and trading as being remarkably easy, but it emerges from his narrative that this depended on considerable moral agreement in these areas, with ‘bottom line’ commitments lying largely outside the deals.

31 Laws, 22 Days, pp. 101–2.

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36 P. Singer, Democracy and Disobedience, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1974, p. 32.

37 May, ‘Moral Compromise’, p. 585.

38 Joseph Carens, ‘Compromise in Politics’, in J. Ronald Pennock and John Chapman (eds), Nomos XXI: Compromise in Ethics, Law, and Politics, New York, New York University Press, 1979, p. 135. See, too, Dobel, Compromise and Political Action, p. 80.

39 May, ‘Principled Compromise and the Abortion Controversy’, pp. 339–40.

40 Ibid., pp. 340–2.

41 T. Nagel, Mortal Questions, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979, pp. 128–41. See too Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 56–7 and Bellamy, Liberalism and Pluralism, chapter 1.

42 Bellamy, Liberalism and Pluralism, chapter 5.

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44 P. C. Ordeshook, Game Theory and Political Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 245–57.

45 A. Weale, Democracy, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999, p. 137.

46 R. Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1997.

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48 M. B. Vieira and D. Runciman, Representation, Cambridge, Polity, 2008, p. x.

49 T. Christiano, The Rule of the Many, Boulder, CO, Westview, 1996, p. 218.

50 E. Burke, ‘Speech to the Electors of Bristol’ (1774), in Hampshire-Monk (ed.), The Political Philosophy of Edmund Burke, pp. 108–10.

51 John Adams, quoted in H. F. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1971, p. 86.

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57 See Bellamy, R., ‘Dealing with Difference: Four Models of Pluralist Politics’, Parliamentary Affairs, 53 (2000), pp. 198–217 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.