6.6.7  Problems in Political Subsidiarity

(This is an archived extract from the book Patterns of Power: Edition 2)

People can have more refined control over how they are governed if they can have political interactions at several layers of governance, both within a country (6.6.2) and externally.  There are problems, though, with making politicians accountable to the people at every level of subsidiarity:

·      The governance framework may be too complicated for people to fully understand, so they find it difficult to vote meaningfully.  At each level of subsidiarity they would need to be familiar with the names of political parties and some individual politicians, and to understand what each level is responsible for and what policy options are available.  Very clear communication is necessary – and the result of complexity can be either confusion or apathy.

·      Some confusion is caused by a misunderstanding of the nature of pooled sovereignty.  Britain isn’t being ‘run by Brussels’, as some politicians allege (6.6.5.4); it has agreed to take some decisions in concert with other countries, on issues where they have mutual interests.  Subsidiarity doesn’t imply a hierarchy, with world government at its apex; it is a segmentation, where each segment of decision-making is controlled at the appropriate level.  People find it easy to understand a hierarchy, which is a familiar phenomenon, but it is less easy to understand segmentation and subsidiarity.

·      People are aware of national political parties and what they stand for, so in practice they tend to vote along party lines even though national issues are not the most important or relevant at local, multinational or global levels.  The 2008 local elections in Britain provided an example of confusion: whilst the votes were for local politicians, much of the media coverage was about the national government’s abolition of the 10p tax rate – yet income tax was clearly a national and not a local issue.[1]

·      If politicians have responsibilities at more than one level of subsidiarity, they cannot be clearly interpreted as having electoral mandates in all their roles.  For example national politicians are normally elected on the basis of domestic political issues, but they also represent their countries in the EU Council of Ministers and in global policy-making (6.6.4.2). 

·      National politicians have to balance their sense of what would be the best policy from the perspective of the international community against what they think would be the short-term reaction of their electors.  And they may prioritise their personal interest in clinging to visible personal power, however ineffective that might be, rather than participating constructively in the relative anonymity of collective external decision-making.

·      Despite the attractiveness of local or regional control, it isn’t possible to have political autonomy and also have economic equality of services and entitlements (3.4.5) – which is a problem that applies between all the levels of subsidiarity.  Some redistribution of tax revenues from wealthy areas to poorer ones will almost certainly be thought necessary to reduce inequality, despite the imperfections in the allocation formulae and the cost of administration. 

The subsidiarity of political control is itself a ‘joystick’ issue (6.2.6) where people have different perspectives: some collectivists tend to prefer centralisation whereas individualists tend to lean towards localism – as exemplified by the contrasting visions offered by the major political parties in Britain.[2]  In some countries, though, it may be difficult to change the status quo: national politicians may be reluctant to relinquish direct control, either upward or downward, despite the likelihood that they would then be able to do a better job and increase the overall acceptability of governance.

Authoritarian governments could allow some level of regional or local control, perhaps by holding democratic elections at those levels, though the transition could be difficult.  As discussed later (6.7.4.2), they might be fearful of creating the conditions for identity politics to emerge – as has happened all too frequently when a strong government was removed.

© PatternsofPower.org, 2014