Bringing Voters Back to the Table
The rise of populism has spawned recommendations from policy analysts on how to re-engage voters and limit the gap between them and political elites. Frances Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro, both political scientists at Yale, offer a counter-intuitive set of policy prescriptions: a strengthening of party authority and a bolstering of governing institutions.
The current crisis of democracy is the result of too much decentralization of power, particularly the increased authority of activists and special interests. Effective governance is best realized via majoritarian systems of rule, not proportional representation-based electoral systems. The UK model, with its tendency to produce strong two-party competition, catering to a wide share of the electorate, is most robust in countering the new, divisive identity politics. But it is an ideal, and UK politics, as the Brexit vote shows, is imperfect. The authors urge enlarging constituencies to encourage greater inclusivity.
The strength of analysis is not only the focus on process and institutions, but also the breadth of comparative coverage: polities including Western Europe, the US, Latin America, Eastern Europe’s incipient authoritarian states and hybrid electoral systems in Japan, New Zealand, Italy and Mexico. Without minimizing the scale of the problem associated with the reaction against globalization and institutional failure, this timely analysis offers practical solutions for a critical crisis of governance.