The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State are Leaving Communities Behind. Raghuram Rajan
idealistic Marxist literature prevented the chosen elite, the nomenklatura, a superclass that had access to the best shops and the choicest luxuries, from emerging in every Marxist country, even as the fundamental inefficiencies of centralised monopolistic production slowed growth. Without competition to show up inefficiencies and penalize the merely greedy, and without the decentralized decision making that Adam Smith and later Friedrich Hayek thought was essential to make best use of local information, centralised monopolies eventually ended up as a sclerotic mess, as exemplified by the former Soviet Union.
In a sense, though, revolutionary Marxism had the potential to be much worse than monopoly capitalism, for it eliminated political competition explicitly, concentrating political power and economic decision making in the same hands. Anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin fought against the centralized state implied by Marxism, and argued for decentralised self-governing structures, only to see their influence in radical Left circles diminish. The communists, like Rockefeller, wanted to retain all the power to decide for themselves.
Fortunately, neither Rockefeller’s nor Marx’s vision was realised in the industrialising West. Democracy preserved market competition, and market competition preserved democracy. That is what we will examine in the remainder of this chapter, and in the next one, focusing on the special role played by the community.
EXTENDING THE FRANCHISE
Early in their industrialisation, most market economies concentrated economic and political power in the same hands – even in the middle of the nineteenth century, British cabinets were dominated by the landed peerage. However, as the dissatisfaction of the working classes mounted, the elite recognised that while their explicit responsibility for the rest had evaporated with the end of feudalism, some accountability had to be restored for the nation as a whole to function with more cohesion. The centralised government of the nation-state had stripped the community of some of the powers to determine local policies, even while the Industrial Revolution and the changing market brought many new pressures that the community needed addressing. Those lower down on the economic pyramid demanded a political say – else their plight would simply be dismissed, as it always has been, as the unpleasant but unavoidable consequences of progress. Undoubtedly, if the state was weak and ineffective, a coup or revolution from below was always a possibility. If it was stronger, though, the underprivileged had to stay broadly within the system to change it. In nascent democracies, this meant pushing for broader enfranchisement.
In feudal England, the right to vote was reserved for male ‘freeholders’, that is, those who had independent ownership of land.21 Ostensibly, these would have a long-term interest in the well-being of the community.22 More plausibly, property holders believed that by keeping the vote restricted to people like themselves, they would protect their property from the poor. They would also prevent the state from expropriating their wealth to finance imprudent spending. Indeed, despite a war of independence against the British in which Americans from all economic strata participated, the newly independent colonies of the United States typically restricted the right to vote to those men with property, with only Pennsylvania and South Carolina going further to allow all men who paid taxes to vote. In all these would-be states, women and slaves were excluded.
Over time, the vote was extended. None of the states that joined the Union after the original thirteen had property requirements restricting voting eligibility. Even the majority of the original thirteen colonies that entered the Union eliminated the property requirement by the middle of the nineteenth century, with the battle over economic-based restrictions on franchise waged seriously only in the older states like Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia, where land or wealth inequality was more pronounced, and populations more diverse.23 Even in venerable old England, suffrage steadily expanded during the nineteenth century as property requirements for eligibility were whittled down, in 1832 to include the middle class, in 1867 the urban worker, and in 1884 rural workers.24
The expansion of the suffrage was typically followed, both in the United States and the United Kingdom, by an increase in local public spending: on local schools open to all, on health care and public heath necessities like sewerage systems and public toilets in urban areas, and on local support systems for the indigent and elderly.25 Thus community powers and activity centering on local spending strengthened as the voting franchise broadened.
The expansion of the suffrage was rarely linear. For instance, in the United States, at the same time as economic-based restrictions on voting eligibility were abandoned under the populist president Andrew Jackson, groups that were deemed unsuitable for participation in community decisions, such as blacks, women, Native Americans, the mentally incompetent, criminals, and the newly resident, were explicitly excluded.26 Indeed, on the eve of the Civil War, only the five New England states where blacks were few, and New York, which had a $250 property requirement applied only to blacks, still allowed blacks to vote. When Southern blacks obtained the right to vote after the Civil War, they started being excluded again through a variety of targeted measures such as literacy and residency tests.
Latin America also followed a similar pattern, starting with strict property requirements, followed by an extension of the franchise as pressure on landowners came from other citizens of European descent, and eventually a replacement of economic restrictions with literacy tests so as to specifically exclude workers and the poor, especially Native Americans. By the end of the nineteenth century, suffrage was still far from universal in much of Western Europe and North America, with women and minorities generally excluded (New Zealand was the first modern country to let women vote in 1893). However, there had been a substantial expansion in the electoral franchise to nearly all white men, a significant broadening of the franchise since the minuscule electorates at the beginning of the century. Why did this happen?
WHY WAS THE FRANCHISE EXTENDED?
As markets became more integrated, both nationally and internationally, economic adversity from far away could affect a community, and disproportionately the less well-to-do. In the same way that a free market decentralised economic decision making, a more democratic structure would allow many more voices to be heard, allow the local community to influence their representatives and the federal government, and allow people to feel more in control of their destinies. Political empowerment could compensate, in a small way, for the lack of economic empowerment.
Why did legislators, whose allegiance was to those who already had the vote, extend the franchise? After all, few who have power want to share it. We can dismiss the possibility that the legislators suddenly absorbed the spirit of the Enlightenment, believing that in the interests of fairness, suffrage should become universal, and in the interests of legitimacy, every one among the ruled should have a voice in government. While the rallying cry of the American Revolution was ‘no taxation without representation’, it said nothing about the representation of those who did not pay taxes. In fact, the franchise was typically extended in steps, not in one go (as might have been the case if legislators became suddenly enlightened). Therefore, we have to look elsewhere for explanations.
Fear
Economist Daron Acemoglu and political scientist James Robinson argue that an important reason for the elite to extend the franchise was perhaps the fear that if it were not extended, the unwashed masses might revolt.27 The French Revolution was a warning to those in power that if they were not careful, many of their heads could end up mounted on pikes. And yet the Revolution could also be read as a cautionary tale of what could happen if revolutionaries were given a role in government. The archconservative Edmund Burke warned ‘the occupation of a hair-dresser … cannot be a matter of honour to any person … Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state, but the state suffers oppression if such as they … are permitted to rule. In this you think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with nature.’28 This then was the dilemma that tormented the guardians of political power: Should the masses be kept