[It's a provocative position. I hope my answer is a bit more nuanced. Thinking with a pen, so the views are my own and likely to change as I think about it a bit more.]
The big talking point regarding yesterday's municipal election in London is the free fall debacle in voter turnout. Only 25.5% of eligible voters cast a ballot, a significant plunge from the 40% turnout in 2018 (the BRT election) and from the 2014 high of 43% (the get rid of Fontana and the Fontana 8 election).
This low turnout is seen as the reason for the rather surprising outcomes in some of the words, namely the defeat of three "incumbents."* Incumbents are considered safe bets because they have name recognition and represent the status quo for voters. Generally, the mass of voters in municipal election have little to guide their votes other than name recognition and a desire not to change things up. However, when that "mass" of voters decides not to show up, that generalized support for the recognizable name and the status quo is lost. What is left are the voters who have definite preferences and reasons for voting. These voters are driven by specific issues and or anger regarding the incumbent. They are engaged and mobilized to vote.
The question is: isn't this what we want in our democratic participation? Participants showing up with little knowledge of the issues and candidates makes the election little more than, as on school board trustee hopeful said to me, "a name lottery." With the sort of turnout we saw yesterday, there is the sense that those who showed up to vote were interested in and committed to the process. They were much more likely to have thought about why they were voting; there was clear intentionality. Are we not better served when our representatives are chosen by people who have considered the issues and the candidates platforms and persons?
This has ever been the ambivalence around democratic participation. Going back to Aristotle, there has always been a concern, that the participation of a "generalized mass" of people runs the risk of unreasonable, or worse yet, unpredictable, outcomes. It's like a sausage machine, and the more participants adding ingredients the less control there is in terms of what that final product is going to look like. As some democratic and civic virtue theorists have argued, it is much better and our democracies are much less unruly if participation naturally limits itself to those who are committed and knowledgeable participants. Therefore, lower voter turnout is not such a bad thing.
However, I'm not so sure and never really have been convinced by a position which smacks of elitism. I am also concerned that the shrinking of electoral participation to a core of animated and very engaged voters is possibly more dangerous to democratic integrity than voter unpredictability, even though in the case of London many of the voters who did turn up helped bring about outcomes I am quite personally happy with. There is something to the concerns democratic and civic virtue theorists raised regarding the propensity of democracy to become unruly and unpredictable. However, this is not because of mass participation, but rather because lower/limited participation enhances and gives more strength to strongly held and pursued demands and claims. Lower voter turnout means that there is less participatory noise that diffuses and takes the edge of more extremist positions. Those who are more engaged and intentional in their voting are more likely to be driven by strong and in some cases uncompromising political agendas and views. The lower the turnout, the more likely particular views will be enhanced and given strength. The result is a much louder voice and larger impact on the process. This has the very real possibility of creating much more division and conflict.
This is why I don't see the emergence of the "anti-woke" voices in the school board election as just a simple distraction. The fact that participation in school board elections is spectacularly poor and given to the aforementioned "name lottery," means that it can quickly be dominated by a the committed mobilization of a group of people. This is exactly what has happened in America school boards. While it seems "small potatoes" in the races throughout Ontario this week, there is no reason to suggest that efforts will not grow. Granted school boards do not have a great deal of power, particularly in terms of how schooling is really governed by the province, we should be concerned with the inroads into everyday politic that will "normalize" and make "anti-woke" language an everyday political message. We then end up having to mount a concerted campaign to counter such developments, which itself can be problematic.
What will be the result of increased counter conflict? Greater animated mobilization of particularly engaged messaging means the emergence of different animated engagement to counter. While we can say this is good in terms of building and growing engaged political activity, we also have to be concerned about running the risk of creating harder political divisions that make compromise and civil engagement more difficult. This is part and parcel of the strategy that is being used to achieve political success by some in the far-right: the mobilization of highly engaged often toxic group to take advantage of and overwhelm low voter turnout, while at the same time contributing to and fomenting low voter turnout by turning off less committed and moderate voters. In this strategy turnout is both a requisite and an outcome of this formula. This is unruly politics.
I guess what I am saying is that we need higher voter turn outs and participation because we need the fuzzy, middle of the road, not entirely knowledgeable voter to take the edge off the extremes and divisiveness that is likely to emerge when those of us with strong opinions get the opportunity to have them heard more loudly.
Comments
Post a Comment