The analysis of the causes and consequences of the well-proven trend in contemporary democracies toward growing political disaffection is a vibrant area of research. Whether you think that distrust of politicians and political institutions is good, bad, or indifferent for democracy, there are a wide range of hypotheses that attempt to explain this phenomenon, from politicians' mismanagement of the economy to the growing gap between citizens' demands and the political system's capabilities, as well as the effects on political trust of different types of political institutions. It is thus difficult to imagine something original being added to this literature. But Colin Hay's book achieves precisely that. In this important, rigorous, and well-written work, Hay provides some innovative answers to the problem of the declining levels of political trust in contemporary democracies.
Hay's main argument is that our current cynicism and lack of respect for the very word “politics” has its roots in some (mostly wrong) assumptions, on the one hand, about the preferences of politicians and public officers and, on the other hand, about the magnitude of economic globalization and its supposed effects on politicians' capacity to make autonomous decisions. He distinguishes between “demand side” and “supply side” explanations of the downward trend in political trust. The demand side explanations include most of the well-known theories about the determinants of the declining trust in politicians, among others the theory of “critical citizens” and the social capital thesis. This set of explanations is rendered insufficient (and excessively exculpatory of politicians) by the author. As an alternative, he proposes a supply side explanation. His argument is that public cynicism toward politicians and public officers is the result of the internalization by both the public and the politicians themselves of certain assumptions about human behavior derived from public choice theory and certain ideas about economic globalization.
Public choice theory—considered by Hay an academic correlate of neoliberalism given its preference for the market over the state—assumes in its formal models that political actors are instrumental and self-serving utility maximizers, and that they act without any consideration for the consequences of their behavior to others. In this sense, it is a theory that derives models from assuming the worst about politics and politicians. Correlates of this theory are the “overload thesis,” employed most notoriously by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and the “political business cycles theory,” according to which electoral incentives will lead narrowly rational politicians to irresponsible fiscal policies. The second factor responsible for the rise of political disenchantment is the overestimation of the effects of globalization on the capacity of politicians for autonomous decision making. Politicians have (wrongly, as Hay demonstrates) assumed that economic globalization severely restricts their ability to offer answers to citizens' demands. In other terms, they have come to accept as a fact that economic competitiveness in the global era has a priority over responsiveness to citizens' preferences. To the extent that people's preferences are not taken into account as a consequence of these ideas about the impact of economic globalization on domestic policies, this “globalization thesis” also has an impact on explaining disenchantment with formal politics.
Hay's arguments are clear and stimulating, as is his defense of a more demanding idea of politics than the one currently held in modern political science debates. He also provides some key evidence to sustain a number of his theoretical arguments. He elegantly presents the essential data on the downward trends in various forms of political participation, and the data in the chapter about the overestimation of the globalization thesis are well chosen. The claim that certain assumptions about politicians' preferences could be at the heart of contemporary cynicism about politics also seems intuitively compelling, and it is potentially a pathbreaking idea. Yet the reader has the feeling that there are some missing links in the central argument. The most important problem with Hay's central argument, in my view, is that in the same sense that, according to him, citizens and politicians overestimate the assumptions and the correlates of public choice theory and economic globalization, he overestimates the power and influence of these academic debates on everyday politics. The author considers that public choice assumptions have a more or less direct effect on the views of both politicians and citizens about politics. Unfortunately, he does not prove this connection between academic ideas and public opinions and policies. This is indeed a difficult link to prove (actually, this is the case in all the literature on the effects of ideas on policies, symbolized in Peter Hall's The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism across Nations, 1989), but the author does not make a serious effort to convince us that citizens' and politicians' cynicism toward policies is the consequence of too much reading of public choice models.
This is a flaw in the book's argumentation, but even assuming that there is indeed an influence on public opinion and policies of this set of rational choice ideas about politics and politicians, another problem remains. It is not clear why if citizens internalize the assumptions of rational choice models about politicians' preferences, they do not also internalize the ideas, most of them assumed by rational choice theorists, about the role of elections in shaping politicians' incentives to fulfill their electorate's demands. Indeed, the assumption of self-interested politicians that, according to the author, should lead to growing levels of political cynicism, makes accountability of politicians through participation in elections both more necessary and more possible. It is more necessary because the citizens cannot count on the politicians' preferences to attain their interests, but it is also more possible because if politicians are self-interested (they do not care about specific policies, only about being reelected), they will have to take into account citizens' preferences, in other words, to choose policies that in their judgment will be positively evaluated by citizens, to avoid being punished in the next elections. This rational choice understanding of elections as mechanisms of accountability (based also on an assumption of self-interested politicians) should give citizens an incentive to participate.
These criticisms notwithstanding, Why We Hate Politics is a welcome contribution to a body of literature that is excessively centered on the effects of various characteristics of individuals on political trust. Focusing instead on the flaws of politicians (on the “supply side,” as Hay calls it) is a good new starting point for thinking about the causes of the growing political disenchantment in contemporary democracies.
