Democracy works better when there is less of itIn The Wake Up Call, a new book on the pandemic, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge parse the most successful virus-fighting nations for clues. It is not big government that works, they conclude, so much as competence and trust. Their treatise might avert a lot of aimless state spending in the future. What the authors skirt, though, is that many of these governments also operate at some remove from their electorates. Singapore, with its “guided democracy”, is the obvious case, but there are subtler ones. Except for brief interludes, Japan has one-party rule. Taiwan has had a comparable model for most of its history. Even Germany has a constitutional limit on referendums and just its third chancellor since 1982.
Worth thinking about. I think the same thing can be accomplished by having strong democratic practices, but just having elections less frequently.