I first thought of this word 2-3 years ago when I was thinking about democracy. I knew someone else would have thought of it too so I googled it immediately. It came back with some hits but only in academic papers. I don’t know in what sense they were using it but there were very few hits anyway.

The suffix –cracy can be used in two ways to mean either a class of people or a system of government…

Aristocracy normally means the class of people and democracy normally means the system of government. However both can also be used in the other sense too.

An article in The Spectator  in 1997 talks of the politocracy as “a new social class which puts conviviality above confrontation, sociability before socialism”. Alice Miles here was talking of Labour and Conservative activists who basically shared the same interests and thus were able to socialise together despite being in opposing camps.

An article in Praxis International (a Marxist humanist journal) in 1989 by Bogdan Denitch (an expert in the political sociology of the former Yugoslavia) says, “I think the best way to describe these systems is as politocracies, that is systems in which the political elites, ruling through the single communist party, control the state and the economy and through those the society.”

My definition written a few weeks ago…

A POLITOCRACY is a political form of government that emerges in multi-party systems where the politicians work for the party, not the electorate, the raison d’etre of such a system is to get the party elected by using more scientific methods to win elections. Typically there is a convergence towards the mid-point of the political spectrum, hence little difference in policy between the main parties. The political class become self-serving thus divorced from objective governance.

Interesting to note that he uses the term in the context of a single party system and I use it where convergence has taken place in a multi-party system where the main political parties are very similar policy wise. Hence the multi-party system has become a single party one in effect.

I popped down the the library to consult the Oxford English Dictionary to see if the word has been officially recognised, it hasn’t. I have submitted a request to the OED that it be included in our lexicon.

Google ‘politocracy’ now and this blog is on the first page!

Posted in Politocracy. Tags: Politocracy. 1 Comment »

I’m going to place a bet on Betfair that the turnout at the up and coming general election will be less than or equal to 60%.

Now the voter turnout in the country is on the decline. Have a look at this graph here. It reached a peak in 1950 at 83.9%, in 1992 it was 77.7%. The biggest drop was from 1997 at 71.4% to 59.4% in 2001. That’s a drop of 12%. The second highest drop was 6.3% from 92 to 97.

In the last election the turnout hit 61.4%.

I believe the following reasons to be pertinent…

1. Distrust of politicians in general (exacerbated by the expenses fiasco)
2. Lack of separate identity of political parties due to midpoint convergence on the political spectrum
3. The reality doesn’t measure up to the rhetoric. Grandiose promises of a new future under labcon are never realised.

The steep decline in recent voter turnout in other words is due to despair with politocracy. 1 is due to a political class who are like salesman,  never admit mistakes or wrongdoing and are only concerned with their own survival and the good of their party. As a result of 2 policy difference is small hence does it really matter who wins. 3 is due to the necessity to oversell to win an election. As policy difference between the main political parties has declined the importance of making great speeches to motivate the electorate seems to be more important. Great Orators do well don’t they? Tony Blair and Barack Obama spring to mind. What else can they do? Well Tony Blair is a busted flush and Obama is following in his footsteps quite nicely. We don’t seem to evaluate our politicians on their decision-making capability.  Politocracy seems to be numbing the brains of the electorate.

The only intangible is the possibility of a hung parliament.  Will that encourage people to vote? I don’t know!

60% or fewer currently trading at 3.9.

Posted in Politocracy. Tags: elections, Politocracy, turnout, voting. Leave a Comment »

A liberal democracy is a representative democracy which emphasises individual liberty. A representative democracy is that where the people elect those to govern on their behalf. This in modern times means multi-party elections in which a political party is elected and holds the seat of government. People understand a democracy as where you have a choice of parties to vote for.

In the UK political parties have been around since the mid-nineteenth century. The Conservative Party represented the landed gentry and the Liberal Party the industrialists. The Labour Party evolved in the beginning of the twentieth century as the left-wing party.

Today it would be fair to say the three main parties have broadened their appeal somewhat.

It seems to me that there are three phases that have occurred in democracy since the mid-19th C.

1.The Early Game

The political parties form around representing distinct sectors of society or focused on an ideology. Their policies spring from this narrow focus. The parties develop a strong separate identity with little in common.

2.The Mid-Game

This occurs with a realisation that in order to win an election you have to occupy the centre ground. It’s mathematics you see, the party in the centre WILL pick up more votes. Thus any party way off centre has a lot of work to do to get back to the mid-point of the political spectrum. The Labour Party began this process under Neil Kinnock in the Eighties.  If you can occupy the centre first you can force your opponents to move away from the centre to get a separate identity but lose votes in the process.

3.The End Game and the Emergence of Politocracy

This is where we are now!

The mid-point of the political spectrum is not a constant but changes in time. Thus a lot of work needs to go into determining where it is. In addition the use of focus groups, the importance of winning marginal seats and winning over swing voters are part of the process. The whole process of winning elections has become a science in itself.

All the main political parties occupy the centre ground so in effect the multi-party system is now an illusion, it’s a one party state of sorts. However, choice here is a red herring anyway.

Here the personality of the leaders of the parties is more important as policies only differ marginally. In the USA this is most obvious.

Peter Oborne in his book The Triumph of the Political Class charts the rise of a political class who are in essence a dictatorship who are cut off from real world, manipulate the truth, enrich themselves at the tax payers expense. The political parties no longer represent the interests of the public but serve as vehicles for personal ambitions. This is in contrast to the establishment of yesteryear who may have been snobbish but had strong values of public service.

A Politocracy is a political government whereby a professional political class has evolved whose loyalty is to their political party which is in turn the vehicle for their own success. Thus this phase is distinctly different to the previous two. In a representative democracy (phase 1 and to a certain extent phase 2) the focus is on representing the people (or at least the people the party represents) , in a politocracy the focus is on what’s best for the party and that means how to win elections.

We have now reached the end-point of the party political system. It has hit the wall. Something has to give.