The BFD | Why We All Love Democracy

John Laurent

John Laurent is an organisation development consultant working with organisations in building open democratically aligned high-performance cultures. He has worked in the pulp and paper, plastics, engineering, food processing, pharmaceutical, professional services and aged care sectors in New Zealand, Australia and China. He is unusual for a consultant in that he has an opinion and is prepared to state it.

In 1989 thousands of protestors were killed in Tiananmen Square by the armed forces of the People’s Republic of China. It was a paradox that so many people in a country experiencing rapid economic growth were prepared to sacrifice their lives for the ideal of democracy. This event showed that the push for democracy is not just a Western ideal, nor is it founded on the prospect of economic gain.

We take for granted that democracy, by which I mean a form of constitution in which every adult citizen has a vote and these votes are of equal value, is the best form of government. Supporters of co-governance seem perplexed by our attachment to one person one vote and our unwillingness to compromise. Willie Jackson said, “Democracy has changed”, and seems baffled as to why we would disagree.

Democracy is associated with the creation of prosperity. A list of countries in terms of per capita GDP finds that the richest are also aligned with being democratic. In addition, a survey (1) of the most happy nations finds that the happiest countries are all democratic. Dictatorships, failed or partial democracies tend to be miserable and poor. Migrants and refugees are only attracted to fully democratic countries.

China is an exception. Despite a lack of democracy, it has achieved an increase in prosperity for its citizens. This demonstrates that a demand for greater wealth was not driving the protestors in Tiananmen Square. There is more than money to the human aspiration for democratic government.

While universal and equal franchise is a basic human right assured to us by the UN Declaration of Human Rights the concept also has a strong resonance in the struggle of all peoples around the world for human autonomy and significance. Our attachment to democracy is primarily emotional. It feels right. The feeling that universal and equal voting rights is right is based on a model for understanding human motivations. It is a system of government that fosters human mental and emotional well-being as well as fostering prosperity.

The pioneering social scientist Abraham Maslow identified that all humans have a higher level need to feel personally significant and have individual autonomy. Maslow identified that when people do not have these needs met then more protective needs, such as the need to control others, win at all costs or protect oneself, become activated.

These needs, played out as beliefs, attitudes and values, apply at the individual level and organisation level as well as in shared cultural norms across entire nations. The level and quality of these human needs are measurable and identifiable within the cultures of different countries.

Societal cultures or norms can be described as the written and unwritten laws and ways of doing things that guide people’s behaviour. Even though some individuals will behave counter-culturally at the individual level, these implicit norms have a real connection with how people do behave and consequently how productive a culture is at delivering outcomes to citizens. Some countries have more constructive norms operating within their cultures than others. Academic David McClelland found that one higher level need, the need to achieve, was positively correlated with the wealth of nations (2). This explains why some resource-poor countries, like Japan or Denmark, are wealthy and happy and some resource-rich countries, like Congo or Libya, are poor and miserable.

As examples of these cultural norms in some countries, it is accepted as normal to accept bribes, steal copyrights, cover up the truth and appropriate others’ property. In other countries where cultures are meeting higher-level needs these would be behaviours that would be responded to as illegal and regarded as aberrant behaviours. These higher-level cultures foster education, entrepreneurship and innovation and consequently wealth creation.

What this adds up to is that universal and equal suffrage not only supports prosperity, it also meets and reinforces a universal human psychological need, although this is a simplistic explanation.

The reason I say it is simplistic is because history shows that you cannot just drop democracy into any society. For universal and equal suffrage to succeed it must be associated with and supported by the shared values and beliefs held, in general, by members of the society in which it is applied. A lack of cultural fit explains why democracy failed in Weimar Germany and why it is not doing too well in Iraq or Russia. Democracy feeds healthy, productive behaviour and, in turn, needs this behaviour to be present in the nation’s culture to be sustainable.

To support this cultural growth, a society needs to be well and accurately informed by free speech and an independent press. Democratic rule can potentially take the form of “tyranny of the majority” whereby those who hold the power, the majority, exploit a minority. In a mature developed society where the average person’s beliefs are oriented towards concern for the common good, fairness and justice, this will not happen. In a tribal society motivated by needs for power or competition, democracy can work to pit dominant groups against others, with unjust outcomes.

I consider that in New Zealand we are the lucky inheritors of a Western culture that does make us fit culturally for democratic government, governed by universal and equal franchise, rule of law and free speech. Our shared societal values and beliefs equip us to receive this gift from our ancestors. To squander it by introducing race-divided franchise or privileged groups in an upper house would be a betrayal of this gift and of ourselves. Simply put, to take equal franchise away from people would make individuals feel insignificant. The thinking would be, “Why bother voting when my vote doesn’t count for much?”

Dame Anne Salmond nailed this when she wrote:

No New Zealander should be asked to accept that, by virtue of their birth, they are less worthy than any other. And the chances that if they are asked, they will agree, are vanishingly small, because to do so is to surrender their dignity as a person.

As it states in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “Article 1: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood”.

No ifs, no buts, no exceptions.