National election results in many mature democracies are converging on 50-50 splits. The US, the UK, Austria, Denmark, Brazil, and many other countries have recently delivered election outcomes with less than a one percentage point difference between the leading parties. Evidently, the long durée of democracy culminates in a persistent political stand-off.
What is it that cleaves national polities so neatly down the middle? What are the implications of this equilibrating tendency which is arriving at its limit in our time?
The South African polity has not reached a 50-50 split of political power. However, indications are that it too is moving in this direction as the ANC has tended towards 50% of the national vote. Although I treat the 50-50 democracy in ideal-typical terms in this article, it is an instructive model for thinking about a mode of politics that is seemingly on its way here.
A pure stand-off is an impasse between equals. It is a moment of equilibrium between opposing forces of equal strength. A moment of stasis in tension. Democracy at 50-50 then is a relational state of stasis rather than one of change. As it minimises power differentials between parties, it maximises the intensity of the stand-off between them.
If South Africa needs change — as it surely does — it should avoid the 50-50 political stand-off like the plague. This follows from the fact that the precondition of change in any direction in a democratic polity is that there must be a power differential that is derived from the citizenry.
In the 50-50 state of stasis, which is not at all a state of rest, democracy cannot produce a resolution of any crisis whatsoever. This is because a 50-50 split puts democracy itself in abeyance as the means to making political decisions. Democracy at 50-50 fatally undercuts itself.
The word “crisis” is derived from (though not synonymous with) the ancient Greek “krisis” which, simply put, refers to a situation of high significance that awaits a decision. In this sense, a crisis is a fork in the road - a critical juncture that awaits a judgement call. The only way beyond a crisis is through the making of a decision.
Apart from being stasis-inducing, a 50-50 stand-off presents another serious problem for deciding matters of public significance. The stand-off is an internal phenomenon - it induces a tension that is endogenous to a closed system of opposed political formations. Democracy at 50-50 thus produces the paradoxical condition of a perpetual yet static state of civil crisis. A state of undecidability that has turned on itself.
What fills the vacuum left by democracy put in abeyance at 50-50? How are political decisions made in a political stand-off? Perhaps the better question is: where else are political decisions made in a stand-off?
Politics does not depend on democracy and will most certainly find expression elsewhere and by other means in the 50-50 nation-state. The state which cannot produce political decisions democratically leaves that function to the executive/administrative arm of government by default. If a national legislature is perpetually hung and ineffectual, the executive will produce its own political decisions even though the executive is the realm of hierarchical authority.
The great danger then with this default path is that an executive arm unfettered by democratic processes will slip into technocratic authoritarianism. Political history and contemporary politics are littered with many examples of the slippage of states from two-party stand-offs into the authoritarian madness of the no-party fascist state.
The aristocratic road to governance by executive and administrative diktat alone is surely closed to any liberal democrat. That is the true road to serfdom. That is why calls to “insulate” administration from politics are appropriately rejected as undemocratic in principle. No right-minded democrat can call for an “autonomous” executive or public service. That is like calling for democracy to be replaced with rule by a latter-day monarch or a class of neo-mandarins.
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More optimistic social democrats, myself included, would say that democracy at 50-50 can still produce political decisions if it functions in a deliberative mode guided by the public interest. Indeed, many small-scale stand-offs at the legislative level in South Africa are de-pressurised through deliberation in plenary sittings and in the plethora of committees that make national political decisions on a democratic basis.
In South Africa, ways forward are still charted somewhat deliberatively. However, this is becoming more rare and now occurs, when it does, where one political party holds enough sway to deign to be magnanimous to the opposition parties.
Deliberation as a robust solution to the problem of democracy at 50-50 depends on there being a common principle of rational communication. One that is acceded to across party lines. What happens now in and between the US Congress and Senate, and the British Houses of Parliament, falls far short of deliberative politics precisely because of the lack of such an enlightened principle.
In fact, the opposing parties in those states only seem to bare their fangs at each other from across the floor. Has anyone turned to Habermas’s high ideal of communicative rationality in the 50-50 democracy? Seemingly not.
Liberal democrats, who tend to eschew centralised forms of governance, place more faith in the devolution of national politics to the many local sites of political decision-making. Such a devolution may countervail the stasis of a 50-50 stand-off at the national level.
What adds plausibility to this article of faith is that our polity confers a wide range of political powers and competencies to the provincial and local spheres of government. Statistically speaking, a national stand-off may be distributed at the local level in more differentiated ways. In theory, therefore, political decisions can be made locally where there are likely to be greater differentials of power.
Although the devolutionary route has the further advantage that it brings democracy closer to the public, it presents serious problems of its own. There are many examples of South African politics at the local governance level which have already degenerated into hideous 50-50 stalemates between pseudo-coalitions.
This evidence suggests that an approaching stand-off at the national level, rather than being distributed differently at the local level, may in fact reproduce and intensify itself by devolution.
A lack of integrative decision-making at the national level cannot be replaced by devolution to the local level. While the national and the local are mutually dependent political spheres, they are certainly not interchangeable. An effective democracy requires a national site of political decision-making that can address national crises in the public interest. A hung Parliament would make this largely impossible to achieve.
What causes a 50-50 state to come about?
This is a complex question that needs separate treatment. However, it is of huge significance that the 50-50 bi-party stand-offs in mature democracies came about after the earlier division of the citizenry into voters and non-voters. About half of citizens in mature democracies do not vote and this has been the case for many years now.
In South Africa, a deepening split between voters and non-voters was also evident in the 46% voter turnout in the 2021 local government elections. It is declining public involvement and low voter turnout that prepare the slippery slope to a 50-50 election result.
For non-voters, democracy had been put in abeyance long before the emergence of the 50-50 party stand-offs that we see now in so many places. As frustrated citizens lose faith in democracy and refrain from the polls, so the more politically aligned citizens persist in voting. By this process of selection and anti-selection, fuelled by increasingly belligerent party rhetoric, and fanned by social media and party-aligned news outlets, a deeper degree of conviction results among the dwindling cohort of voting citizens.
Over time this feedback loop prises open the fissures between the contending political parties until they become chasms of antithetical political convictions. The casualty of this evolutionary process is the public interest as the underpinning value of our deliberative democracy. Indeed, no shared values can survive in the 50-50 state.
The sharp decline in democratic participation by South African citizens over the years since 1994 should therefore be of concern to us all but especially to the legislative arm of government.
Yet, at the same time, it is the activation of that latent potential that may reinvigorate our democracy and so stave off our falling further into the static 50-50 state of perpetual crisis. DM