(Bloomberg Opinion) -- After almost three years of wrangling and gridlock following the 2016 European Union referendum, more than half of British voters say they long for a strong leader. It’s not an unreasonable demand in the current bleak situation.
The 2019 “Audit of Political Engagement” by the Hansard Society (a group co-led by the speakers of the two houses of the U.K. parliament) shows that opinions of the country’s system of government are at their lowest point in 15 years and that 54 percent of Britons say the U.K. needs “a strong leader who is willing to break the rules.”
At first sight, this finding signifies a major shift compared with 2017, when Pew Research reported only 26 percent support for leadership “without interference from parliament and the courts” in the U.K. – a lower result than in most countries globally, though relatively high for an established democracy. But I wouldn’t jump to conclusions.
In academic literature, support for strong leadership or for democracy is often seen as a zero-sum game. In a 2017 paper, Roberto Stefan Foa from the University of Melbourne and Yascha Mounk from Harvard University described disappointment in democratic government as a global trend. Young people in Western societies no longer consider it essential to live in a democracy, and the latest wave of the World Values Survey, conducted in 2010 through 2014, showed a noticeable shift in support for a strong leader “who doesn’t have to bother with elections.” The wave doesn’t include data from the U.K., but in the U.S., for example, as many as 34 percent would support such a leader, up from less than 25 percent in 1995 through 1997.
Foa and Mounk also cited national polls that appear to show a growing preference for authoritarian rule in old democracies as evidence of what they call “deconsolidation” – a thinking that democracy isn’t the only game in town and other methods of government can be acceptable, too. They described it as a “very serious warning sign,” but concluded that “whether democratic deconsolidation will one day be seen as the beginning of the end for liberal democracy depends in good part on the ability of democracy’s defenders to heed the warning and to mount a coherent response.”
The best response, however, might be to acknowledge that support for democracy isn’t necessarily antithetical to a desire for strong leadership. There’s no way to gauge what a nation means by “a strong leader” by asking a simple question or two. Brexit Britain is a good example of this non-zero-sum complexity.
If a yearning for an enlightened dictatorship were the actual results of the post-Brexit years, people would show a willingness to hand off important decisions to a powerful figure. But the Hansard Society’s audit doesn’t show anything of the kind. According to it, 55 percent of Britons say big questions should be put to referendums more often than today.
The trust in direct democracy, even if it has yielded a substandard result (56 percent say Britain is in decline), shows that the desire for strong leadership isn’t quite the same as a demand for autocracy. It’s just that 47 percent of the Hansard Society’s respondents, the highest percentage in the 15-year history of the audits, feel that in the current system, they have no influence on national decision-making.
Democracy is often an excuse for bungling leaders to justify opaque decision-making that makes little sense to people outside the political bubble. Theresa May’s government, unable to negotiate a workable version of Brexit with the European Union or the U.K. parliament, is in power despite not having won an outright majority in an election, on the strength of a coalition deal with a party that has denied it a majority at crucial moments. It claims democratic legitimacy and a mandate to deliver the will of the people as expressed in the 2016 referendum – without ever asking the people again. From the point of view of voter power, all of this is utterly incomprehensible.
A strong leader, let’s face it, would have brought about an outcome by now – either a no-deal Brexit or a compromise so logical that it would be impossible to reject. The demand for a “rule-breaking” leader reflects British voters’ frustration with endless process without results, stubbornness without creativity, infighting without closure. That’s not a failure of democracy. It’s a failure of the political system to lift up individuals worthy of leadership and present them to the people. Player selection systems sometimes fail in the same way, producing a weak national team in a soccer-crazy country.
In the absence of decisive leadership capable of solving complex problems, and in the absence even of candidates for such leadership, voters don’t want to give up power to an authoritarian. They want it for themselves, and that explains the persistent backing for referendums as the only way to influence big decisions.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Therese Raphael at traphael4@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.
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