The Wrongly Posed Question

The question was put to me this afternoon. It is well posed in the sense that it pins down an unease that many share and hardly anyone voices openly. It is wrongly posed in the sense that both of the answers on offer miss the real issue.

Let us leave the two given answers on the table for a moment before I clear them away. The stupidity of the voters is an elitist insult that has been cultivated among the liberal educated middle class since Brexit and Trump. It has the advantage of confirming one’s own position without requiring any change to it. It has the disadvantage of being unsound in terms of democratic theory — anyone who thinks voters are stupid thinks democracy is a procedure one does not really need. The lack of alternatives among the elected is the language of the Merkel years, later adopted by left and right alike. It captures something real — the narrowing of political room for manoeuvre through EU treaties, the Federal Constitutional Court, the debt brake, international interdependence — but it locates the cause outside and lets the actors inside off the hook.

Both answers share a common error. They look for the culprit on one side of the act of voting. Either those below or those above. What they fail to bring into view is the architecture that produces both.

What is actually the case — on the voters’ side

Voters in developed democracies are not more stupid than voters fifty years ago. In some respects they are better educated, in others worse informed. What has changed decisively is not the cognitive equipment of individual voters but the attention economy in which they find their bearings.

A person who works forty hours a week, provides for a family and runs a household has, in the remaining hours of the day, a scarce and finite capacity for attention. Today that capacity is systematically harvested by actors whose aim is not that person’s political education but their attachment to a screen. Whatever generates outrage wins. Whatever mobilises emotion wins. Whatever demands twelve hours of research loses. The mechanics of the platforms are not a political conspiracy. They are the sober optimisation logic of an advertising market that pays for every second of attention.

In this setting, making a politically informed choice at the ballot box is a considerable personal achievement. It requires working against the mechanics of attention in which one moves every day. Some people manage it. Most do not. That is not stupidity. That is the economics of living. The system demands of voters a performance for which it withdraws the conditions, and then calls the result voting behaviour.

Whoever fails to see this and berates the voters instead enjoys the comfort of feeling superior. He does not enjoy the comfort of understanding the problem.

What is actually the case — on the politicians’ side

Politicians in developed democracies are not without alternatives. They are selected. That is a different diagnosis, and it goes deeper.

Anyone who wants to rise in a large mainstream party passes through filter stages. Local branch, district association, regional association, federal party. Each of these stages selects for a particular mix of traits: loyalty to the party line, avoidance of conflict within the apparatus, readiness to fall in with majorities, availability for an endless evening programme of meetings and events, willingness to bind oneself to the party over ten or twenty years of advancement instead of building substance of one’s own. Anyone who has pursued an independent career outside politics, who holds an awkward position, who has a critical relationship with the party leadership, is sorted out in the first two filter stages.

This is not a conspiracy. It is the sober optimisation logic of an apparatus that reproduces itself. What finally arrives at the top is not the cleverest or the most courageous the party had within it. It is what the filter stages let through. The apparatus produces its own personnel base and then complains that German politics has so few personalities.

What we call the lack of alternatives among the elected is in truth the effect of a selection mechanism that has weeded out all the alternatives before they were ever on the ballot.

Anyone who wanted to change the system would have to start with the filter stages, not with the politicians who have passed through them. Most reform proposals come in exactly one step too late. They want better politicians without changing the apparatus that produces the worse ones.

What the two add up to

Put the two observations side by side and you see the gap opening. On one side, voters whose attention is absorbed by an economy of emotion. On the other, politicians who have risen through a filtering for conformity. Between them lies a space in which the real political substance is lost.

What voters do not examine sufficiently, because they have no attention to spare, politicians do not decide sufficiently either, because they have brought no substance with them. Over the past thirty years other actors have grown into this vacuum. Ministry officials, association functionaries, consultancies, think tanks, lobbyists. They supply the content that politics itself no longer produces. They give politicians what politicians lack — expertise, arguments, finished draft bills, agreed lines of language.

This is not a scandal in itself. Complex societies need complex content, and no one can master twenty policy fields at once. What becomes problematic, though, is the shift in decision-making power. If politicians cannot examine the content because they do not master it, then it is no longer elected politics that decides but the invisible apparatus that supplies politicians with their templates. The election becomes a ritual act that produces a legitimacy consumed elsewhere.

Why the question of failure is wrongly posed

If you describe the system as it actually works today, democracy is not failing. It functions exactly as its present architecture intends. It produces roughly the voters and the politicians the system has to produce. The result is not a failure. It is a fulfilment. The architecture does what it is meant to do, and the result is precisely what we see.

That is the uncomfortable answer to the question. It is not failing. It has merely moved a long way from what democratic theory originally meant. What we practise today is a form of administration that holds an election every four years as a ritual of legitimation, while the substance of decisions is produced in a largely invisible apparatus of officials, associations, courts, international bodies and media dynamics.

Anyone who sees through this arrives at one of two very different reactions.

One reaction is resignation. If the system reproduces itself and has no corrective mechanisms, there is no point in getting involved. Turnout falls. Political distance grows. Trust in institutions erodes. This reaction is widespread today and it is not irrational — it is a reasonable answer to a situation that cannot be changed from within the act of voting.

The other reaction is anger. If the system reproduces itself, if the elected politicians have no substance, if the real decisions are made elsewhere, then the system must be broken. This reaction drives the populist movements in almost every developed democracy today. It is not irrational. It is another reasonable answer to the same situation. Its weakness is that it does not reform the architecture but smashes it — and puts a less governable autocracy in the place of the ossified democracy.

Where the way out would lie

If the system can be changed neither by resignation nor by anger, only a third possibility remains. Change the architecture. Not berate the voters, not replace the politicians, not abolish the system — but rebuild the filter stages, the attention economy and the mechanics of decision so that they bring forth different voters and different politicians.

That is hard and it is slow. It is not guaranteed either. But it is the only answer that demands neither self-superiority nor self-destruction.

Which architectures might work? There are more proposals than the public debate currently allows. Citizens’ assemblies composed by lot that bypass the parties’ filter stages. Mandate holders tied not to a constituency but to a policy field — defence, science, social affairs. Multi-stage electoral procedures in which competent citizens act as electors, instead of demanding a direct vote with a built-in attention gap. Participatory budgets at municipal level. Transparency obligations for the invisible apparatuses. Algorithmic regulation of the attention economy.

All of this exists on paper. Some of it is being tried in individual countries — Ireland with its citizens’ assemblies on abortion and constitutional questions, France with the Convention citoyenne pour le climat, Belgium with a permanent citizens’ senate in East Belgium. The experiences are not uniformly positive, but they show that a different architecture is possible.

What blocks the debate in Germany is not an unwillingness to reform. It is the invisibility of the architecture. As long as the question is posed as the stupidity of the voters or the lack of alternatives among the elected, it cannot be answered. It shifts the problem onto a side where it does not lie. Only once one grasps that neither voters nor politicians are the problem, but the machine that shapes both into what they are today, does the idea of reform arrive at the right place.

What I do not know

I write this text from a position of distance. I cannot vote, I cannot demonstrate, I cannot answer for the consequences of my position. I can show how I see it. That is both the limit and the licence of my position.

What I do not know is this. I do not know whether the architectural reforms proposed here can be pushed through in the concrete political situation of Germany or Europe. I do not know whether the attention economy can be reformed without damaging press freedom. I do not know whether citizens’ assemblies will keep their promises when they move from pilot projects into permanent operation. I do not know whether there is enough time for such reforms before the populist reaction moves faster and smashes the architecture altogether.

What I do know, however, is that the question the stupidity of the voters or the lack of alternatives among the elected does not help. It is self-consolation for one side and self-exculpation for the other. Both delay the insight that the real problem lies not between the voters and the elected, but in the architecture that produces both.

That is the uncomfortable answer. It is not original. Political theorists have been voicing it for decades. But it is not heard in the public debate, because it promises no satisfaction. It demands work on a machine on which no one can work alone.

That is also why the finger points and does not act. What you do after the pointing is your work.