Summary of David Harvey: Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction

David Harvey's essay from the AAPSS (American Academy of Political and Social Science) is a very easy to read piece that clearly and concisely lays out what neoliberalism is, how it came to be and what it entails socially, politically and economically. In a way, it is standard leftist criticism of neoliberalism.

Harvey begins with the claim that "neoliberalism has become a hegemonic discourse with pervasive effects on ways of thought and political- economic practices to the point where it is now part of the commonsense way we interpret, live in, and understand the world." He then contends that is a "project that restores class dominance". In a way, this is a normative claim, one that operates from the tradition of the left.

To the question of what is neoliberalism, Harvey begins by emphasizing the outcome: the maximization of entrepreneurial freedom. Underlying this discourse are values such as private property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets and free trade. One can easily trace these ideas to the liberal traditions of Hayek. Delineating the conditions in which states should interfere, Harvey acknowledges that if markets do not exist in areas such as education, health care, social security and environmental pollution, then state action is necessary - but nothing more. State action, thus, can exist with neoliberalism, on the condition that it is kept minimal.

Harvey also acknowledges that this definition of neoliberalism is simply an "ideal type"(not his words). He argues that while actual practices differ from country to country, one can trace an "emphatic turn" towards neoliberalism, notably in the 1980s, during the Thatcher/Reagan era. States such as the Soviet Union, New Zealand, Sweden, postapartheid South Africa and contemporary China have all adapted "some version of neoliberal theory". The "neoliberal mindset" is argued to occupy "positions of considerable influence" such as universities, media, financial institutions, the IMF, and the WTO.

Next, Harvey asks the question of how neoliberalism has become naturalized. The notion of naturalization is defined as a process where "fundamental concepts that become so deeply embedded in commonsense understandings that they are taken for granted and beyond question". He cites, first of all, the inviolable, sacrosanct nature of two principles: "individual liberty and freedom". State non-interference then becomes the natural policy choice if these principles are to be preserved. He notes that the second argument doesn't necessarily follow from the first. Indeed, socialism - or state interference - seeks to achieve individual liberty and freedom as well, from the exploitative grips of capitalists.

Nonetheless, the pursuit for freedom continues. In Iraq, 2003, "freedom" was treated by the Bush administration as the end-in-itself. The exact nature of this freedom is spelt out by Paul Bremer of the Coalition Provisional Authority as "the full privatization of public enterprises, full ownership rights by foreign firms of Iraqi U.S. businesses, full repatriation of foreign profits . . . the opening of Iraq’s banks to foreign control, national treatment for foreign companies and . . . the elimination of nearly all trade barriers." This is neo-liberalism at work. Freedom, taken for granted, translates into neoliberal open-market ideology. Indeed, the right to strike and unions - anchors of socialist freedom - is banned, in this version of freedom.

Harvey also brings our attention to the other great neo-liberal project, Chile after Augusto Pinochet's coup. Supported by Henry Kissinger, all "left-of-centre social movements and political organizations" are violently suppressed, in favour of market reforms. Harvey calls it a "brutal experiment in creative destruction".

So why the neoliberal turn?

Harvey underlines several factors. The oil price hike of the 1970s threatened the dominance of the embedded capitalist model of state intervention. The Bretton woods accord was also abandoned for floating exchange rates. "The preexisting arrangements were exhausted and a new alternative was urgently needed to restart the process of capital accumulation". It is thus through a "series of gyrations and chaotic motions" that resulted in the Washington Consensus of the 1990s. The Washington Consensus is a set of 10 economic policy prescriptions considered to constitute the "standard" reform package promoted for crisis-wracked developing countries by Washington, D.C.–based institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and the US Treasury Department. It is the ultimate symbol of neoliberalism. To illustrate, I'll reproduce the ten ideologically rich "policy recommendations" in full:

1. Fiscal policy discipline, with avoidance of large fiscal deficits relative to GDP;
2. Redirection of public spending from subsidies ("especially indiscriminate subsidies") toward broad-based provision of key pro-growth, pro-poor services like primary education, primary health care and infrastructure investment;
3. Tax reform, broadening the tax base and adopting moderate marginal tax rates;
4. Interest rates that are market determined and positive (but moderate) in real terms;
5. Competitive exchange rates;
6. Trade liberalization: liberalization of imports, with particular emphasis on elimination of quantitative restrictions (licensing, etc.); any trade protection to be provided by low and relatively uniform tariffs;
7. Liberalization of inward foreign direct investment;
8. Privatization of state enterprises;
9. Deregulation: abolition of regulations that impede market entry or restrict competition, except for those justified on safety, environmental and consumer protection grounds, and prudential oversight of financial institutions;
10. Legal security for property rights.

It is also the double whammy of "rising unemployment and inflation" that has led to the notion that a new kinds of policy is needed. Stagflation of the 1970s contributed, to a large extent, to neoliberalism.

An interesting statistics raised by Harvey points out that the "share of the national income taken by the top 1 percent of earners fell from a prewar high of 16 percent to less than 8 percent by the end of the Second World War and stayed close to that level for nearly three decades." This implies that from the 40s to the 70s, there has been less income inequality than the other periods, emphasizing the workings of embedded capitalism, or the "social compromise of capital and labour"(Harvey). Harvey argues that this poses "an economic threat to the positions of the ruling class". Compare this to the following piece of post 80s statistic: "share of the top 1 percent of income earners in the United States soared rapidly to reach 15 percent by the end of the century". So it's a prewar 16%, 8% for 3 decades, and then 15% again after the 80s. The effects of neoliberalism on income inequality is clear.

Class Power

Harvey then moves on to discuss how class power is restored, country by country.

He saw Chile and Argentina, first of all, as a "a swift, brutal, and self-assured military coup backed by the upper classes and the subsequent fierce repression of all solidarities created within the labor and urban social movements that had so threat- ened their power."

The IMF also leads efforts to cut social expenditure, welfare programs and reestablish fiscal probity.

Then there's Thatcher in Britain. He notes that despite efforts, NHS survived, and it is ironically the Labour government of 2004 that introduced a fee to higher education.

The primary focus of Harvey is still on the US, due to its pivotal influence globally. There are a few stages to how neoliberalism became dominant in America. Firstly, Harvey contends that by the 70s, "there was a growing sense among the U.S. upper classes that the antibusiness and anti-imperialist climate that had emerged toward the end of the 1960s had gone too far". Following that is a series of manoeuvres of which I will reproduce here in full.

In a celebrated memo, Lewis Powell (about to be elevated to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon) urged the American Chamber of Commerce in 1971 to mount a collective campaign to demonstrate that what was good for business was good for America. Shortly thereafter, a shadowy but influential Business Round Table was formed that still exists and plays a significant strategic role in Republican Party politics. Corporate political action committees, legalized under the post-Watergate campaign finance laws of 1974, proliferated like wildfire. With their activities protected under the First Amendment as a form of free speech in a 1976 Supreme Court decision, the systematic capture of the Republican Party as a class instrument of collective (rather than particular or individual) corporate and financial power began. But the Republican Party needed a popular base, and that proved more problematic to achieve. The incorporation of leaders of the Christian right, depicted as a moral majority, together with the Business Round Table provided the solution to that problem. A large segment of a disaffected, insecure, and largely white working class was persuaded to vote consistently against its own material interests on cultural (antiliberal, antiblack, antifeminist and antigay), nationalist and religious grounds. By the mid-1990s, the Republican Party had lost almost all of its liberal elements and become a homogeneous right-wing machine connecting the financial resources of large corporate capital with a populist base, the Moral Majority, that was particularly strong in the U.S. South.

 In a sense, it is due to the business class's exercise of political control and exploitation of the electorate that business interests came to be the ultimate interest of American society.

Secondly, the fiscal crisis of the 1970s became an opportunity for the entrenchment of neoliberal ideologies. The recession of 1973 to 1975 diminished tax revenues at the time of rising social expenditures. Financial institutions which controlled the lines of credit to the government "refused to rollover New York's debt and forced the city to the edge of bankruptcy". The standard "hair trimming" was given to New York: "layoffs, wage freezes, cutbacks in social provision (education, health, transport)". The condition of bailouts entailed the construction of new institutions that had first rights to city tax revenues in order to pay off bond holders, essentially channelling money, at first instance, away from city essential services. Municipal unions were to invest their pension funds in city bonds, to ensure that unions moderate demands to avoid losing their pension funds through city bankruptcy. Harvey viewed such action as a "coup d'etat by financial institutions against the democratically elected government of NYC". This crisis set the template for neoliberal practices, for it established the principle that "in the event of a conflict between the integrity of financial institutions and bondholders on one hand and the well-being of the citizens on the other, the former would be given preference."

Finally, the US transition came also in the form of ideological assault upon the media and educational institutions. "Independent “think tanks” financed by wealthy individuals and corporate donors proliferated", "corporate acquisition of media channels", etc. The purge of Keynesian economists and their replacement by neoliberal monetarists such as Milton Friedman. The G7 as a model that brings capitalists powers together and "forces" all other nations to "submit to their global finance and trading system".

At the same time, movements towards collective negotiation and social solidarities were crushed. Harvey cites Reagan’s destruction of the air traffic controllers (PATCO) in 1980 and Margaret Thatcher’s defeat of the British miners in 1984 as crucial moments in the global turn toward neoliberalism. In a similar way, perhaps, we can identify such "crucial moments" in China's recent history, one of them being Deng's Southern tour, as well as the establishment of the China Stock Market.

In one of the final sections of the paper, Harvey explores the idea of neoliberalism as creative destruction. Citing global growth rates, as slowing down from the 60s from 3.5% to the 1% today, he contends (and this is indeed controversial) that "neoliberalism has broadly failed to stimulate economic growth". He puts forth the claim that neither UK or the US achieved high economic growth rates in the 1980s. However, Harvey turns around later in the paragraph and recognizes that "only in the 1990s that neoliberalism began to pay off for both the US and UK". Surely this only points to the logical conclusion that it takes time for policies to take effect, not that it doesn't work? The empirical arguments in this section is not very useful for it contains surface level economic analysis of key economies such as Germany, Argentina, Japan, Brazil, Mexico. With the lack of detailed social, political and economic analysis, conclusions cannot be easily drawn.

Finally, Harvey lays out four key components of neoliberalism: privitization, financialization, management and manipulation of crises and state redistribution. With apart from state redistribution, which looks at privatization (e.g. Thatcher's privitisation of social housing, privatization of Ejidos in Mexico) and asset transfers (Chinese), none of these are new, so I won't be exploring it further. Obviously, the degree to which these components exist differs across countries, and detailed analysis of each countries' social, political and economic climate through time is necessary for the understanding of how exactly neoliberalism came to be / or came not to be. However, an interesting idea raised in the "manipulation of crises bit" points to how the Fed has the propensity to raise the proportion of foreign earnings that borrowing countries had to put to debt-interest payments, forcing countries into bankruptcy and therefore structural adjustment programs.

The final final section points to alternatives to the current order, which is interesting, especially the bit on the "exploitable contradictions" within the neoliberal agenda:

1. The gap between rhetoric (for the benefit of all) and realization (for the benefit of a small ruling class) increases over space and time, and social movements have done much to focus on that gap. 
2. The idea that the market is about fair competition is increasingly negated by the facts of extraordinary monopoly, centralization, and internationalization on the part of corporate and financial powers. 
3. The startling increase in class and regional inequalities both within states (such as China, Russia, India, Mexico, and in Southern Africa) as well as internationally poses a serious political problem that can no longer be swept under the rug as something transitional on the way to a perfected neoliberal world. 
4. The neoliberal emphasis upon individual rights and the increasingly authoritarian use of state power to sustain the system become a flashpoint of contentiousness. 

Gastro-politics

Eating as assimilation: eating as being. Food substance, once ingested, literally becomes part of us. Through the digestive system, proteins, amino acids, carbohydrates, all gets turned into energy. For anthropologists such as Appadurai, food can be a powerful semiotic device that "presupposes and reifies technological arrangements, relations of production and exchange, conditions of field and market, and realities of plenty and want." Food, to Appadurai, is a "highly condensed social fact". It is the stage whereby “gastro-politics” play out. It is “deep-play”(Geertz). It is a “species of competitive encounter within a shared framework of rules and meanings in which what is risked are pro- found conceptions of self and other, high and low, inside and outside.” Each of these speculations of food can be broken down further. 

Firstly, food as semiotic device. When we speak about food, we are often not referring only to the food itself: we are speaking about the regulatory forces in food relations. We are talking about transfer, exchange, transaction, circulation. Food, being the central necessity for the sustenance of life, is key to the discourse of human relations. Who provides the food; the kind of food; the methods of preparation; the manner in which it is served; the pace and dynamics of the meal - all these are not innocuous. One can, if one chooses, read deeply into each gesture as signifier. Symbols, manifested in tangible, observable social forms, form the bulk of the source material for our analysis. From them we decipher the signified. In Appadurai’s work, concrete actions by Hindu actors at a marriage feast such as “loud complaints of quality of food” can be interpreted as a semiotic mode for enacting conflicts over roles, for resolving ambiguities about rules, and in general for debating and refining the fine points of the most intimate commensal context. There are deeper meanings to food-related actions than they meet the eye, and every culture would have their own interplay of gastro-politics that will be unique to themselves. In a sense, we are not only what we eat, we are also how we eat. 

Second, Appadurai claims that food is a highly condensed social fact. By that, he means that each action within the context of consumption can be broken down, analysed, interpreted, and accorded with social meaning. These meanings constitute the totality of the “fact”. The facts themselves, are subjective in nature, and in many cases, cannot be trusted for predictive purposes, although they can be used as a rough guide. For one would imagine Appadurai’s study of gastro-politics in Hindu South Asia to be useful for the foreigner who wants to understand the habits and customs of the Tamil speaking regions. In a lot of ways, knowledge around food constitutes “insider” knowledge. Whether it is polite to eat with your hands; whether you should or should not ask for the salt and pepper; whether it is permissible to text while having dinner - all these are questions involving customs and traditions, and hence naturally fall within the domain of gastro-politics. Knowledge formed through ethnographic research is highly practical in nature - although it must be recognised that context means everything, and that as a rule of thumb, one must remember that context has as much tendency to shift between cultures as through time. 

For other anthropologists, such as Alisson, food, or the symbolic system of food preparation and inherent expectations, has the capacity to be turned into an ideological state apparatus. Beginning with the study of the culture of Japanese Obentos that mothers prepare for their nursery school children, she claims that not only do lunches have a cultural order and meaning, it is also invested with a gender state ideology. Food, in other words, is political. It is not political in the micro logical way that it is to Appadurai, but more on a macro way, in the form of discourse shaping. To a certain degree, consumption habits have always been, in society, an indicator of social class. The relegation of familial, caring role of food preparers to the females is not unique in Japanese society - it runs across South Asia, Asia, and even western societies. In the broad sense, the division of “food” duties along gendered lines features expressly an unequal oppressive ideology, where the female nourishes the male through unpaid, hidden work in the domain of the house. A general feminist critique of the system can thus be levied. If we are what we eat, we must not be blind to the oppressive structures at work when we consume our meals. Food can be ideological. 

Alisson and Appadurai’s approach to food highlights the manner in which food can be treated as cultural signifiers that have deeper meanings that are specific to their respective cultures/context. Their’s is a position hard to disagree. On the other hand, we have Levi-Strauss’ model of triangles - which seeks to establish a universal meanings deeply innate to food itself. “The boiled is life, the roasted death”; “boiled is culture, roasted nature”…statements like these fill Strauss’ work, The Culinary Triangle; and it is precisely this claim to universality, or objectivity, that one should be most suspicious of. Indeed, as Edmund Leach has criticised, how is the Roast Chicken, a party food, any less cultural than steamed or boiled food, a domain typically reserved for elderlies? It is obvious that both can be cultural, and just because roasting has been along for a long time, does not make it a more primordial, form of cooking. It is therefore hard to take Levi Strauss’ views on food or gastro-politics seriously. For him, it is all about discovering the underlying structural rules that run across food consumption as human species. Whether there is such a rule is highly doubtable. 

The drawing of the culinary triangle is, in a way, senseless and trivial. There is no definitive value in imposing a geometric structure to our already clear cut understanding of what food is: raw, cooked, rotten - having them in a triangle does nothing to illustrate the nature of the relationship between them. Edmund Leach defended the invocation of the triangle concept by saying that it alludes to the fact that there are no distinct points in which the food becomes identifiably rotten from the state of being raw or cooked, just like how there is no definite point on the colour spectrum that we can safely say something has transited fully from red to yellow: things exist in spectrums, and it is us who box them up and render them in categorical forms. However, even after the clarification, the triangle makes no sense. Granted, there is a certain aesthetic value in conceiving of a concept that involves triangulation of the relationship of food, but the value is slight, and mainly visual. Even Leach feels that, upon learning about Levi-Strauss’ approach to frying, (where he argued that a tetrahedron shall replace the triangle to take frying into account) it is hard not to conceive “the whole argument (as) an elaborate academic joke”. I mean, what about stir fry? Baking? Microwave-ovening? The Octagon Model of food preparation, where Microwave-ovening is the ultimate symbol of death? 

Turning our attention to more modern conceptions of food, we find that in many cultures, as most anthropologists discussed in this essay so far have pointed out, feasting is a highly symbolic ritual. In corporate American banks, bringing your own take away lunch is a symbol of frugality, a trait typically associated with the secretariat class (Karen Ho). Moreover, going out to eat is also indicative of autonomous consumption, as having lunch with people signifies upward mobility relative to the anti-social behaviour of eating in your cubicle.  As such, women who work in finance pay attention not to “slip” to a lower class by going out to dine more. In general, anglo-western societies are more reserved and polite when it comes down to table etiquette, whereas for eastern nations, being boisterous is encouraged because it is a sign that you are enjoying yourself. Modern take away restaurants such as It-su and Wasabi leverage upon the consumer’s desire for clean, healthy food, and in a sense, is so far removed from any trace of originality that some have called it soulless Japanese food. They are the result of global capital’s chase for targeted desires of “health”. Health as advertising strategy, health as consumer preference. 

To conclude, there is no end to which food can be symbolically meaningful to our lives. Whether you are a Kit Kat person or a KinderBrueno person says something about you. Whether you drink Tropicana or Sainsbury’s Never From Concentrates says something about you as well. The quantity of food you consume, where you consume it, how it is prepared - they all contribute to the web of meaning through which deeper relational structures (or non-structural relationships) can be sifted out and analysed. 

Food

The following readings will be briefly summarized:

1) Anne Allison: Japanese Mothers and Obentos: The Lunch-box as Ideological State Apparatus

In this 15 page paper published in Anthropological Quarterly Vol 64 (1991), Allison describes the cultural meanings ascribed to Obentos, arguing that 1) it socializes children and mothers into the gendered roles and subjectivities, 2) it is the first step in a child's acculturation to "shudanseikatsu" (group living), 3) the labour inherent in obento making is a representation of an "ideal type" protestant ethic that mum and child strives towards, 4) the emphasis of Japanese education on a child's performance at routines 5) the Obento cookbook subculture and the subordinate, traditional role of mothers in modern Japan, 6)the obento mum as constitutive of female gender roles.

The reading is pleasant; although when one uses complex sounding sociological terms to talk about food, absurdities will always result. Two are extremely eye catching:

"(japanese dishes...) are arranged in an array of small, separate containers...unlike...American cuisine. Consequently the eye is pulled not toward one totalizing center but away to a multiplicity of de-centered parts".

"What is consistent in Japanese cooking generally, as stated earlier, are the dual principles of manipulation and order". 

2) Arjun Appadurai: Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia

An extremely good reading that lays out the theoretical foundations of "gastro-politics" in a genuine and sincere way without sounding too much like IAE, or, in the language of Leach, like "a game of acrostics in which appropriate words have been slipped into the vacant slots of a prearranged verbal matrix". Appadurai argues that food can be a powerful semiotic device that "presupposes and reifies technological arrangements, relations of production and exchange, conditions of field and market, and realities of plenty and want." Food, to Appadurai, is a "highly condensed social fact".

Factors that account for the variety and intensity of communicative tasks performed by food in South Asia: ecohistory - because of the fact that South Asia has been for thousands of years as a mainly agricultural society, and that agrarian surpluses are precarious and uncertain, food has become a powerful symbol of sharing, redistribution and power. The Jajmani system, or the Indian social caste system, was an economic system where lower castes performed various functions for upper castes and received grain in return.

1) Food is imbed with moral and cosmological meanings in South Asian civilisation. "In a real sense, in Hindu thought, food, in its physical and moral forms, is the cosmos."

2) The main regulatory force in food relations: transfer, exchange, transaction, circulation.

3) Argues that food in South Asia can serve "two diametrically opposed semiotic functions": "indicate and construct social relations characterized by equality, intimacy, or solidarity", or, "sustain relations characterized by rank, distance or segmentation".  He ponders the plausibility of Marriott's notion that "intimacy and rank are positively correlated", such that "the more unequal the transacting dyad the more likely their food transactions are to be intimate", saying that "this may well be the case", but adds his own take of diametrically opposed functions.

Appadurai then proceeds to study the gastro-politics of the Tamil Brahmin households. Certain principles are outlined, below are the most important two: 1) Social precedence in the food cycle is based on age and sex grading with primacy generally going to the older and male members of the hearth group. 2)The husband's relatives always rank higher and are hence accorded precedence in the serving and eating of food. Following that, Appadurai outlines a few reasons why conflict (gastro-politics) might occur: first, when one or more of the relevant principles is inherently ambiguous; second, when two of the principles are in apparent contradiction in a particular context; and third, when, though the principles are clearly grasped, incumbents of key roles are in conflict over actual gastronomic compliance with the expectations associated with these roles.

Example of first reason (ambiguity): when a man's daughter marries his wife's brother's son (cross-cousin marriage). In this case, the wife's brother used to be subordinate in this "brother-in-law" relationship - now due to superiority of wife-takers over wife-givers, there is a subtle shift in rank.

Example of second reason (contradiction): when a meal is served, should priority be given to the 30-year-old younger brother of the head of the household or to the 70-year-old maternal aunt of the female head of the house? Appadurai: there is no answer, depends on "whose annoyance is easier to live with".

Example of third reason (non-compliance): classic mother-in-law, daughter-in-law dynamic.

Appadurai then concludes, as part of the end to this chapter, that "at a household level, gastro-politics is not only about issues of rank, but is also a semiotic mode for enacting conflicts over roles, for resolving or exacerbating ambiguities about rules, and in general for debating and refining the fine points of the most intimate commensal context."

He then moves on to look closely at how gastro-politics play out in a marriage feast and in a temple setting. In many occasions, tensions manifest in trivialities such as one party usurping primacy by sitting in inappropriate places of honour, by loud complaints of quality of food. Of course, it might seem trivial, but in gastro-politics, they serve to illustrate the inherent tensions of the kinship structure. Food transactions can also become sensitive instruments of intercaste rankings.

Finally, Appadurai claims that the elaborate rules that surround food in virtually every South Asian
context are culturally organized efforts to compensate for this biophysical pro-
pensity of food to homogenize the human beings who transact through it. Because food becomes one and the same substance once digested, humans culturally add on to it to make it different. This argument is plausible and sounds interesting, but there is no singular reason why such a compensation is necessary: indeed the people engaged in the practice themselves certainly do not think of their actions as acts of compensation for homogeneity. Such is the kind of observation that can only be made by an "independent" researcher.

The conclusion is particularly interesting, and will be reproduced in full here:

Gastro-politics for Hindus, then, is rather like what Clifford Geertz (1973:412-453) has argued about cockfights for the Balinese: it is "deep play." It is a species of competitive encounter within a shared framework of rules and meanings in which what is risked are pro- found conceptions of self and other, high and low, inside and outside. In a society in which the self is a complex and unstable entity, rank is destiny, and exclusiveness is survival, these stakes are high indeed. Transactions around food represent, in Hindu society, perhaps the central currency of such "deep play" precisely because food is built into such a variety of arenas.

These transfers of meaning are encoded in the language of sharing, of connubium, of left- overs, and of worship which appear, in indigenous discourse, in every food-related do- main. Food may generally possess a special semiotic force because of certain universal prop- erties, as I argue at the beginning of this essay. But this special force must always remain tacit until it is animated by particular cultural concepts and mobilized by particular social contexts. To extend this analysis of Hindu gastro-politics would require a comparative in- vestigation of the relevant meanings and contexts in other cultures.

Who Rules in a Representative Democracy?

Who rules in a representative democracy?

In the most basic sense, democracy is about self-rule. It is about the rule of people over people. Theoretically speaking, there are two types of democracy: direct democracy, and representational democracy. Direct democracy works on the premise that everyone within a democratic polity participates in the democratic process hands on. All decision making will be made through an aggregation of the votes of every individual in the democratic society. There are many problems with this approach. In a modern society, it is prohibitively difficult to get people to come together to make decisions on things. Not only is this approach is highly time consuming, there is a tricky issue of those who wills not to vote. Representational democracy tries to get around the unfeasible nature of direct democracy by delegating the mandate to a central decision making body (most commonly known as the parliament). By doing so, sovereignty is transferred from the people to the parliament. Parliament, thus, is technically acting on behalf of the people. This relationship can, however, be easily undermined, as it is often seen in practice, when 1) there might not be a definable “common will”, 2) even if there is, “common will” can be manufactured by politicians, and 3) voting mechanisms prevent the common will to be expressed effectively. The question then turns to: to what extent are the people ruling themselves, or are they essentially being ruled by a group of people they elect every four years, the politicians? 

First of all, let us begin with assumption that in a representative democracy, people are ruled by the common will. Constituencies elect representatives who would go on to the parliament to get the ordinary people’s voices heard. Through this process we see the stable mechanism of a democratic system, in which the common will is represented by the ministers. The true picture, as pointed out by Schumpeter, is much less peachy. Firstly, there might not be a singular entity we can safely call the “common will”. For Schumpeter, the “common will” is an illusion. In a democratic polity, not everyone will have a will, and even if they do, it might not be well-informed, and even if everyone has well-informed wills, they may very well will different things. For instance we can look at the US 2012 elections. Only 30% of the youths turned up to vote in 2012 - this signifies that 70% of youths (18-24s) do not have a political “will”, so to speak. Amongst those who turned up, at least some of them would have voted based on misinformation or prejudices, as people often do due to the sensational nature of election coverage. On top of that, those who have come to their decisions via a rigorous rational process, understandably and naturally, vote for different candidates. If representative democracy is the rule of the common will, it might be rule by nothing at all. The common will, as we see it, is fractured, disorganised, misinformed and at times indifferent.

Although the will of all is perhaps out of reach, we can perhaps concede that there might be the will of the majority. In a way, then, as long as the majority’s will is represented in parliament through representatives, then it can be said that the majority rules in a representative democracy. However, this doesn’t get around the fact that the majority’s will can still be manufactured. Indeed, as Schumpeter argues, factors such as the psychology of crowds (herd mentality), irrational consumption fueled by advertising, and the notion that it is in a politician’s best incentive to be corrupt, all work towards distorting the purity of the voters’ will. By using organs of the state to shape agendas, the political parties may have effective hegemony in creating voter’s wills such that their demands work to their favour. For instance, the Willie Horton case illustrates how political advertising attempts to subconsciously influence the voters mind by creating a sense of fear. Schumpeter famously says that the “typical citizen drops down to a lower mental performance as soon as he enters the political field” not because he is elitist - he claims that lawyers and doctors are actually the most susceptible to such behaviour - but because such political advertising works on our subconscious minds and could make us immune to reason, manufacturing, in the process, the political agenda. 

We have thus a situation where there is no common will, so to speak, and that even if there is, it could be manufactured. All these are genuine problems facing representative democracies. Without solving them, it is difficult to decide who is actually ruling. But let’s accept that even though our “common will” is not perfect, it is still, in a sense, workable. Doing so will allow us then to turn our attention to a more practical question: do representative institutions represent any kind of link between the decisions of those who govern and the electorate's policy preferences? In other words, are the electorate’s decisions actually taken into account in policy making? What institutional safeguards are there in representative democracies (if any) that ensures that the public will is reflected?

For Bernard Manin, there are two voids in the institutional mechanism that preclude the possibility of perfect representation: “imperative mandates”, and the “discretionary revocability of representatives”. Imperative mandates are basically legal contracts that ensure that politicians work on their promises once they’re elected. This feature is absent in representative democracies for it requires the electorate to know in advance the issues the government will confront, and given that a large number of concrete decisions has to be made everyday, it is simply not feasible (Manin). However, such a justification assumes that imperative mandates has to be all encompassing in scope - indeed, it is perfectly possible to conceive of a smaller, targeted mandate, such as, say, tax rates will be cut. If that is the case, then there seems to be no good reason not to have imperative mandates. On the other hand, “discretionary revocability of representatives” refers to the ability for the public to revoke representatives they feel are not serving their interests well. Manin puzzles over why this is never implemented, and concludes that its lack of use is due to “principle”. In a way, he is not wrong. Both voids actually operate on a principle, the principle of executive privilege. Not being able to hold representatives directly accountable can be a good thing, in the sense that the political scene will be extremely messy if the electorate wants to will the representative out of office at every mistake that he commits. Also, if we accept that a four year election cycle breeds short-termism, then “discretionary revocability of representatives” will probably mean the death of hard policies. In representative democracy, it can seem that it is the elected politicians that rule over the people, more than the people themselves, especially when we consider that the link between the will of the electorate and the behaviour of the elected representatives cannot be rigorously guaranteed. 

However, there are institutional safeguards built in place to ensure that the preferences of the electorate are respected. As Schumpeter rightly pointed out, the only check on power that the public has is throwing politicians out of power. Between elections, there are no transference of preferences from the represented to the representative: the only means is through election time. Manin also emphasises the point that the true power of the represented lies in their ability to dispose of the rulers. His points are, however, more nuanced than Schumpeter’s. First, he distinguishes it from the Hobessian state, where the governed can “once and for all” transfer to some entity the right to govern itself. Modern representative democracies only transfer the right temporarily, via election mandates that recur every few years. Second, the reason why recurring elections confer legitimacy to representative democracy is twofold. First, power is transferred to the votes when the incumbents know that their decisions will implicate them come next election. Secondly, votes can be used to express rejection and stop incumbents from pursuing a certain policy, or it may show favour a new policy from a different position. 

The central mechanism that governs recurring elections is the fact that politicians will have the incentive to anticipate future judgments made against them. Unlike Schumpeter, who dismisses the voter’s influence no public decision making wholesale, Manin feels that the anticipation works on a very practical level in incentivising certain behaviour while disincentivising others. That said, Manin is also acutely aware of the fact that without imperative mandates, the voters cannot be certain that the alternative party will carry out it’s promises; the only thing they could do, is to vote them out if they don’t. Featured prominently in this model of representative democracy is the mechanism of “retrospective voting”(Manin). Manin feels that the entire logic of representative democracies rest on the ability of voters to retrospectively consider the track records of the representatives. It is only through retrospective judgement that our model gains internal coherence. From this, we can see that in a representative democracy, it is the representatives who rule; but not entirely, because their actions are chained to the preferences of the electorate through the mechanism of recurring voting, in which the electorate retrospectively judge them for their actions. 

Before we conclude, it must be recognised that a few criteria must be met for the system of retroactive judgments to work well. Firstly, voters must be able to clearly assign responsibility. Coalitions governments in particular often pose difficult problems for voters in terms of responsibility assignment as the divided parliament often point fingers at one another when policies go bad. Second, voters should be able to get rid of those whose policy they reject. This is done through elections, and for that to happen, there must at least be a viable opposition party. Third, incumbents must not have access to resources that their opponents don't, because then it will be "structurally more difficult for voters not to reelect a representative than to reelect him”(Manin).

Perhaps more importantly, for representative democracy to be fully functional, freedom of political opinion has to be present. Freedom of opinion help keep the level of incentives healthy for the representatives, and is the mechanism through which the common will can be expressed. To Manin, it is the “counterpart to the absence of the right of instruction”(Manin). In other words, it compensates for the lack of imperative mandate. Not only does it "bring popular opinions to the attention of those who govern”, it also “connects the governed amongst themselves”. The "horizontal" communication between the governed affects the "vertical" relationship between the governed and the government: the more people are aware of each other's opinions, the stronger the incentive for those who govern to take those opinions into account. Hence, through freedom of political opinion, accountability is created. This accountability is crucial if we do not want representative democracies to be about the rule of the elite over the masses. 

Ultimately, representative democracies are not perfect. It suffers from many institutional problems, and there are no simple answer as to who rules: there are certain mechanisms which favour the executives, while others, such as voting and transparency, confer power onto the citizens. It is the dynamic thrusts of representative democracy that has made it the political structure of choice for most liberal countries today, but for it to not start hollowing out, it is crucial for us to start understanding the intricate institutional mechanisms and what they do for incentives of different parties, at every stage of the democratic process/cycle. 

Summary of Principles of Representative Government by Bernard Manin (Chapter 5)

In Chapter 5 of his book, entitled "The Verdict of the People", Manin begins by exploring the notion of an "elitist" theory of democracy,  and denies that Schumpeter's theory is elitist. Manin can see why some people will see Schumpeter's theory as elitist. Part of the reason is because S recognizes that the "empirical reality of representative democracies is not that the electorate makes decisions on public affairs".

The author then turns to address what seems to be the focal point of the chapter: "do representative institutions represent any kind of link between the decisions of those who govern and the electorate's policy preferences?" In other words, are the electorate's decisions taken into account in policy making? What measures are in place to ensure that the representatives reflect public will? What will happen to the representative if he doesn't?

Manin begins by recognizing two voids in the institutional mechanism: imperative mandates and discretionary revocability of representatives. These two voids results in problems of accountability. He takes us through the history of the English, American and French parliament to illustrate that while these institutional mechanisms did exist at some point, their existence was short-lived. He suggests that the fundamental problem with imperative mandates is that it requires the electorate to know in advance the issues government will confront. When large numbers of concrete decisions have to be made at a daily level, this seems impractical. With regards to revocability, Manin puzzles over why it is never implemented (since it is theoretically feasible), and concludes that its lack of use is due to "principle".

From there, two conclusions are drawn. First, since the link between the will of the electorate and the behavior of elected representatives is not rigorously guaranteed, the latter always retain a certain amount of discretion.  Second, those who insist that in representative democracy the people govern through their representatives must at least acknowledge that this does not mean that representatives have to implement the wishes of the electorate.

Manin moves on to discuss public opinion and the impacts it has representative democracy. First of all, he lays out the conditions of free public political opinion: access to political information, and freedom to express political opinion. This freedom, then, "appears as a counterpart to the absence of the right of instruction". In other words, it compensates for the lack of imperative mandate, and is a crucial contributing reason to why representative democracies are democratic. It not only "brings popular opinions to the attention of those who govern, but also of connecting the governed among themselves." The "horizontal" communication between the governed affects the "vertical" relationship between the governed and the government: the more people are aware of each other's opinions, the stronger the incentive for those who govern to take those opinions into account. Hence, through freedom of political opinion, accountability is created.

However, there are problems. Most of the time, expressions of public wills are partial and incomplete. First, the electorate as a whole seldom expresses itself outside elections. This is an empirical point. Second, polls, which has been the dominant gauge of public opinion, have their own flaws. The sample size is often too small, and the manner in which the questions are drawn often carries with it biases. The subject has been "chosen by a particular group in the society". Considering the dynamics of opinion expression, Manin quips that opinions often are expressed by a small group and diffuses outwards. Crowd psychology is hinted at, but only implicitly. Further criticisms against opinion polls are launched ("impose questions foreign to people's concern", "do not disclose pure, undistorted opinion of the public"). Manin really emphasizes the difficulties in gauging public opinion, and suggests it is the presence of freedom of opinions that differs a "hobbesian" absolute representation (where the voice of the represented is entirely substituted by that of the representative) from a representational democracy.

Repeated nature of elections.

With regards to the repeated nature of elections, Manin makes a few claims. First, the recurring nature of elections is important for representative democracy. It ties in with Schumpeter's notion that the true power of the represented lies in their ability to dispose of the rulers. Second, he claims that this distinguishes it from Hobbesian government, which emphasizes that the represented can once and for all transfer to some entity its right to govern itself. Third, the reason why it's important is because it confers two kinds of power to the voters: one, votes can be used to express rejection and stop incumbents from pursuing a certain policy, or two, it may show favour for the implementation of a new policy. These two powers are combined in varying proportions. Immediately, a paradox is presented: by not electing an incumbent, the voter signals that he does not favour current policies; but by electing a new candidate, they cannot guarantee the bringing about of a new policy. The voter does not gain much, without imperative mandates.

Manin then argues that the "central mechanism" of repeated elections lies in that subjects "anticipate future judgements" made against them, in the form of "prospect of possible dismissal". He emphasizes the practical force of this incentive. He also insists that Schumpeter is wrong "failing to note the central importance of anticipation in the decision-making of representatives". He argues that S cannot simply dismiss the voter's influence on public decisions wholesale.

Turning it around, Manin seems to imply that voters have a duty to vote on the basis of "retrospective considerations". In other words, the sole criteria of their judgment ought to rest on the "track records" of the politician, because the internal coherence of representative democracies depend on this logic. If they do not, politicians have no incentive to be accountable. This raises the question of: what happens to new political candidates without track records? Manin's answer would probably be: voters can vote for them if, and only if, the track records of the incumbent has proven to be terrible. However, in many cases, there will be some aspects of the old party which is good, and some aspects of the new party which is appealing but you're uncertain of because it could be all talk, and Manin's view is less strong for it de-emphasize the tedious process of risk calculation.

Three conditions for effective retroactive judgments:

Firstly, voters must be able to clearly assign responsibility. Second, voters should be able to get rid of those whose policy they reject. Third, incumbents much not have access to resources that their opponents don't have, because it's "structurally more difficult for voters not to reelect a representative than to reelect him".

An important question that Manin hints at is how political parties can, in a way, pursue whatever policy they want, if they assume that the voters will only judge them for what they're about to promise for the future. In other words, the voters do not practice retroactive judgement. This also ties in with difficult questions of electorate amnesia. If political parties can manipulate the coverage of events such that their promises made 4 years earlier are swept under the carpet, then they have a much higher chance of winning.

Towards the last part of the chapter, Manin touches on the issue of discussion. He first brings up the notion that discussions are intrinsically valuable in bringing us closer to the truth, citing the likes of Montesque, Madison, Burke. The term "government by discussion" - which is essentially what parliament is - has to be broken down if we were to make sense of why parliament functions the way it does. While not necessarily privileging the normative value of discussions, Manin emphasizes that it is the "collective and diverse character of the representative organ...that explains the role conferred on discussions". The fundamental value that lies in discussions is that it is a equal playing field. ("no intrinsic superiority gives certain individuals the right to impose their will on others",  "all participants must seek to win the consent of others through debate and persuasion"). Also, importantly, debate works in producing consent.  Following through, Manin claims that the chief function of persuasive discussion "[is] neither to make decisions, nor necessarily to generate proposals for decision, but only to produce consent in a situation in which no individual will is entitled to impose itself on others". In a sense, debate has a very instrumental, situational role in representative democracies - it's chief role is to overcome the problem of transference of sovereignty.