6.6.7.4   Confusion

(This is an archived page, from the Patterns of Power Edition 3 book.  Current versions are at book contents).

Individual voters have more refined control over how they are governed if there are different layers of election, but voters can easily become confused:

·      The governance framework may be too complicated for people to fully understand, so they find it difficult to vote meaningfully.  Very clear communication is necessary – and the result of complexity can be either confusion or apathy.

·      People are aware of national political parties and what they stand for, so in practice they tend to vote along party lines even though national issues are not the most important or relevant at local, multinational or global levels.  The 2008 local elections in Britain provided an example of confusion: whilst the votes were for local politicians, much of the media coverage was about the national government’s abolition of the 10p tax rate – yet income tax was clearly a national and not a local issue.[1]

·      If politicians have responsibilities at more than one level of subsidiarity, they cannot be clearly interpreted as having electoral mandates in all their roles.  For example national politicians are normally elected on the basis of domestic political issues, but they also represent their countries in the EU Council of Ministers and in global policy-making (6.6.4.2). 

The best option for many people is probably to vote according to their political ideologies – which would be a coherent approach and would give them a hand on the governance ‘joystick’ (6.2.6.2).