Transferring power from politicians to ‘unelected agents’ can help democracy

It may seem counter-intuitive but putting more power into the hands of “unelected agents” at the expense of politicians can enhance democracy.

That was the message delivered by political philosopher Philip Pettit at a public lecture in Dublin yesterday evening.

In a recommendation with particular political resonance this week, the Princeton-based academic said policy areas such as prison sentencing should be taken away from “electoral politics”.

One way of doing this would be to set up a sentencing policy commission “at arm’s length” from parliament. “The politicians could say ‘we would not pressure these people but I am going to write to them’ and the commission could report back after six months.”

This would give people “a more equal influence over policy” in the long term and would help to avoid rash political decisions.

Prof Pettit was addressing the Dr Garret FitzGerald summer school in Dublin, fronting 90 minutes of intellectual punditry on the “infrastructure of democracy”.

Among those attending were the former taoiseach's son ESRI economist John FitzGerald, and Patrick Honohan, the Central Bank governor, who had just hot-footed it from an earlier big-ticket affair at Croke Park, starring French economist Thomas Piketty.

Arguing that democratic institutions should deliver equal access of influence, Prof Pettit said this was made more difficult where there were strong majorities or powerful lobby groups.

To help protect minorities, he said more areas of policy should be “taken off the majoritarian agenda”. This could be done by requiring a “super-majority” for certain sensitive decisions, or running such decisions through a different process “like bicameralism”.

A second chamber “can lead to a check or slowing down” to ensure minorities are taken into account.

The drawing up of electoral boundaries was one policy already already taken out of politicians’ hands, and he recommended this be copied in other fields.

However, he stressed such “depoliticisation will only work if there is a very lively community that is prepared to keep an eye” on the “unelected agents” who take on more responsibility.

Among other things, he said, there needed to be a questioning media, with a variety of owners and controllers.

Prof Pettit, who hails from Ballygar, Co Galway, and lectured in UCD between 1968 and 1977, recalled Garret FitzGerald’s role in the Dublin university’s “gentle revolution”.

Then a TD, FitzGerald spent many evenings promoting a new staff mentor system and lobbying on behalf of the “riffraff of the student movement”.

“It cost him a lot in terms of time; it certainly did not earn him a lot in terms of kudos . . . He always had such a wonderful, wonderful commitment to public service and he did not have to do it in the public eye.”