Fintan O'Toole: What will politicians do without patronage?

If the Government is serious about ending the politics of patronage, it has to address two questions. What will politicians do without patronage? And how will voters respond to being told that TDs and ministers can’t get them favours in return for their votes? For patronage isn’t just some aberration of the system – it is the system. Our machine politics is fuelled by the belief (often erroneous) that votes are exchange commodities, given in return for personal benefits. A place on a State board, or a job as an adviser or a driver are the high end of a deep system of patronage that extends all the way down to local clientelist politics. This is why the culture of patronage has lingered so long after all the promises to abandon it – to change the fuel you’d have to radically alter the machine.

Magical thinking

The power of patronage is that it continues to function even when it is pure fiction. Weirdly, politicians for the most part don’t actually do favours in return for votes – and it may not work the other way around either. When, for example, Phil Hogan sends the CVs of constituents to Irish Water, do they actually get jobs? He himself laughed off the very notion last week. So why does he do it? Because the charade satisfies some deep mutual need – for his constituents to feel that they have “pull” and for Hogan to be Big Phil, the local chieftain who can deliver the goods to his people. It’s a form of magical thinking, but beliefs can be all the harder to shift when they do not in fact depend on tangible and controvertible evidence.

At the top, ministers work the patronage system in part to keep alive the bogus notion that the system really works. As long ago as the late 1960s, a famous study of machine politics in Co Donegal found politicians’ “claims of effective intervention” on behalf of their voters to be “imaginary patronage”. The TD’s image as the power broker was found to be generally based on “illusion and manipulation” – a conjuring trick in other words. Typically the rabbit is pulled from the hat by using insider information to discover that a benefit (a local authority house, a hospital admission) is about to be granted anyway and getting in first with the good news.

Some voters are stupid or desperate enough to fall for the trick, but generally there’s something more complicated at work. The evidence is that the “clients” of TDs may not in fact be all that loyal – they trail around every available clinic and presumably know that, if something good happens, each TD will claim the credit. And often – as the parties know to their chagrin – the most demanding “voters” don’t actually vote at all. Imaginary patronage goes hand in hand with imaginary clients.

And yet this increasingly empty ritual persists – not least because a big chunk of the electorate is wedded to it. In the 2011 election, when the State was in the midst of an existential crisis, just 43 per cent of respondents to the RTÉ exit poll said they had voted on national policy. But 38 per cent said they had voted for “a candidate who looks after the needs of the constituency” – in other words for the patronage system.

A lot of Irish people and a majority of Irish politicians simply can’t get away from the allure of “pull”. The persistence of this pre-modern belief into the 21st century owes much to the needs of the political system itself. The more impersonal the State actually becomes – the less open it is to personal intervention – the more important it has been for politicians to keep alive an almost mystical idea of “pull”. The idea of having an insider working the system on your behalf gives that system the illusion of a personal intimacy it actually lacks. There is, in this culture, a perverse pleasure in securing by means of illusory “pull” a benefit to which one is actually entitled. The thought – however mistaken – of having secured it against the rules doubles its value.

Stop pretending

Procedural changes for public appointments are welcome but they can only go so far in transforming this culture. For that to happen, politicians would need to stop pretending to be chieftains. Big Phil would have to tell his constituents that he has no power to get them jobs in Irish Water before, not after, he has gone through the motions of sending off their CVs. And people would have to stop being thrilled by the notion that something they are entitled to has been delivered to them as a result of the magically mysterious operations of insider influence.

Neither of these things can happen without the one thing the Government seems determined not to create – real, deep democratic reform. Such reform would give politicians something to do in the absence of patronage – like the job they get paid to do in holding government to account and actually making laws. And it would give voters enough democratic power to feel that they are citizens with rights rather than suppliants in thrall to a fixer.