Let The People Sing | What's The Big Idea? | Is It Allowed? | How Does It Work? | Is It A Good Idea? | What Will Others Say? |
There are only so many ways of listing people. Where there are job-share candidates as well as one-job candidates this will be quite clear from the list and voters will be able to decide whether they prefer a job-sharer to a one-jobber.
Indeed job-sharing could be seen as a logical extension of voting directly for the person to represent you...an innovation introduced in the Swedish Parliamentary elections this year. Instead of voters having to accept the official politician's view on 'one man one job' as the only way to represent their constituents, voters are able to choose between alternative ways of structuring the job. This is what it might look like to the voter:
Miljöpartiet de Gröna
Valsedel EU'99
OBS! concept only!
Per Gahrton (56)
Birger Schlaug (47) / Maria Wetterström
(26)
Inger Schörling (53)
Ulf Holm (30)
MaLou Lindholm (52)
Elisabet Clinell (57) / Niklas
Eriksson (22)
Marianne Johansson (51) / Gunnar
Lundell (24)
Ulf Svensson (79) / Nicola Wachmeister
(24)
Berit Bergman (55) / Thorstein
Bergman (27)
Dan Andersson (42) / Thore Jonason
(41)
Kaysa Grytt (28) / Malena Jönsson
(31)
Paccha Eriksson (25) / Peter
Etherden (52)
etc
etc
However when I am asked how job sharing will work, what is really being asked is not what the list will look like, but how the work will be divided up.
Yet this is rather like asking how a family organises the shopping and the cooking. The job of running the family household is a shared job and there are almost as many different ways of organising the job as there are different people with different skills and different abilities to do the work.
In fact dividing up jobs is the normal way the work of the world is done. Division can be by task or it can be by responsibility. But this is usually the basic question, not the why or the when of the division. Why should it be any different for the work of a Euro MP?
Another example of sharing is the family or the household phone bill. Even in households where there are several people using the same phone, the bill gets paid and each individual contributes his or her share. How it gets done varies from household to household. Some sort it out once every three months around the kitchen table. Others wait until they are told how much they owe. There may be arguments and the phone bill has been known to split up households. But this is not what usually happens. Dividing up jobs is a perfectly normal way to behave. Sharing is what people do.
Take another example. Married couples and partners living together arrange their affairs in a hundred and one different ways. Some ways work better than others. Some work well for some people but cause nothing but trouble for others. Some men are happy sharing the woman's work and doing all the man's work. Other men regard the symmetric marriage as a rip-off and find other ways to do their half of the work...and keep the peace. In the household sector, cooperation is what most ordinary people do.
But having made a case for the defence, there is another less defensive case to be made for job sharing.
This is the democratic case and in particular the case for direct democracy vs. representative democracy. Job sharing presents an interesting opportunity. It may be possible to apply democratic principles in a different manner.
With a string quartet or a rock bank we usually know who is writing the tunes. And even though they may swap things around, there is still only one instrument being played by any one person at any particular time. Is this a model that we could adopt for our new democracy?
Because there is in fact a real problem of democracy. But it is a problem of size and it springs from the sheer imbecility of believing that 300 million people can meaningfully wield one five hundred thousandth of a vote each.
But perhaps something can be done about this? Perhaps decisions can become representative of the views of the people? Perhaps we should accept the idea that these five hundred thousand citizens are part of a voting realm and that the job of the king and queen who hold their vote in the Strasbourg Assembly in their hands is to discover the will of the people and act on it.
This is where the idea of parties comes in. The people are unlikely to want a referendum on every issue...although the Swiss affection for this device suggests it should be more widely used...but the party could be a surrogate for the voice of the people. Why not let the party decide how a Euro MP should cast his and her vote.
Perhaps we could go even further. Apart from the problem of democracy there is also a problem of personal integrity. What is the relationship between a representative, the policy of her party, her vote and her conscience? Perhaps with job sharing we have here a chance to square the circle? The Swedish Green Party could adopt a novel experiment with the voting of their Euro MPs.
Instead of the Swedish Green Party's Euro MPs getting together to coordinate their voting within the 28 strong Green Group in the Strasbourg Assembly, they could bring voting into the Green Group from their constituencies.
The policy could be for the party and the two job-sharing MPs to be in consensus for a vote to be cast for or against within the Green Group. If there is no consensus that particular vote counts as an abstention.This would allow for minority positions and allow for a richer texture to the democratic debate. And the issues could be shared around with different issues delegated to different couples.
Most democrats agree that the people should be asked where a bridge should be sited but few suggest that they should also be asked to vote on how the bridge is to be built. This is a job for the Civil Engineers.
So there is a place for democratic decision and consensus and a place for expertise. Many democrats would argue that the people should be in agreement about which civil engineer they would like or in the process by which he is selected. At the very least they would expect to see a Japanese-style consensus process regarding the way the decision is made and the procedures to be adopted. So it is here.
On a complex issue there might then be 8 for, 11 against and 9 abstentions, for instance. The voting of the Green Group's 28 'block votes' in the light of this poll would then be more in the nature of a tactical question. This is a judgement issue and probably best left to the Green Group's own civil engineering experts.
Now what is being sketched here is not quite as off-the-wall as you might think. In many ways this is the way of the corporate world with its Boards of Directors and Annual General Meetings. Perhaps political governance and corporate governance are destined to converge?
And what about these opinion polls and focus groups that the Bill Clintons and Tony Blairs deploy nowadays? Some see them as cynical devices. But they could instead be seen as techniques for enhancing the democratic process. Why should the Swedish Green Party not do likewise? And there is no reason in principle why a weighting could not be used on the internal voting. Miljöpartiet de Gröna's Euro MP 8, Grön Ungdom's Euro MP 8, Constituency Party 8...of which the Party focus group wields 4. Why not?
How would the media react to all these shenanigans?
The interest of the media would come in one of two different forms. Firstly they would look for Clinton-Lewinsky situations. What we would seek to personalise, they could be counted on to glamorise or trivialise. The golden rule would be for candidates not to misbehave and for the party to move in fast and strike miscreants off the list if they have to.
Secondly, although it has taken a long time, the media are now comfortable with the idea of two gender-balanced spokespersons instead of a party leader. The problem is that they will try to put job-sharing Euro MPs in the same neat little box. This may not always be appropriate. But nonetheless we will have succeeded when the media start saying 'vive la difference'.
We will need to make the media comfortable with us. Where other parties give interviews...even ones around the kitchen table...our job sharers should invite serious journalists in for fireside chats.
If candidates are professional and the couples well rehearsed, showing courtesy, kindness and genuine affection for each other while behaving democratically towards each other, it will rub off. We must walk our talk in our personal dealings with each other as Petra Kelly insisted in her book 'Thinking Green'.
Will it work for the voters themselves?
There are two legitimate causes for voters being concerned when they see a list with job sharers on it. Their first reaction is likely to be one of confusion. And with the electorate's current electoral time span, there may not be a chance for a second reaction. The vote may have been lost after the first reaction. The idea will need to be tested in the pub. How does it play in Peoria?
But nonetheless ordinary people find nothing confusing in children having both a mother and a father. Nor do the children find it confusing having several different teachers. So it would seem it is the novelty rather than the idea that confuses.
The other concern is a reflection of the parlous state of democracy. We live in an age of specialisation. Many Swedes are content to limit their democratic involvement to voting once every five years. They see themselves as appointing somebody to do a specialist job of work. They will question why the Swedish Green Party cannot sort things out among themselves.
The only response to this is to argue that we believe in democracy and that one vote every five years is not our idea of democracy.
Let The People Sing | What's The Big Idea? | Is It Allowed? | How Does It Work? | Is It A Good Idea? | What Will Others Say? |