Carles Boix: "We are experiencing a very important structural change in politics"
Carles Boix, Robert Garrett Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, is coming to Barcelona, to “his home”, to lead, at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the UB, a research project for which he obtained an Advanced Grant, the prestigious grant given by the European Research Council (ERC) to senior researchers. Boix holds a doctorate from Harvard University, and worked as consultant at the World Bank and in the Inter-American Development Bank. Also, he has been member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since October 2010. His research covers the areas of political economy and comparative politics, in particular democratic theory, the origins of institutions and their effects on growth and inequality. In this interview, he speaks about politics, both in Europe and America, and about what research will be like at the University of Barcelona.
Carles Boix, Robert Garrett Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, is coming to Barcelona, to “his home”, to lead, at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the UB, a research project for which he obtained an Advanced Grant, the prestigious grant given by the European Research Council (ERC) to senior researchers. Boix holds a doctorate from Harvard University, and worked as consultant at the World Bank and in the Inter-American Development Bank. Also, he has been member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since October 2010. His research covers the areas of political economy and comparative politics, in particular democratic theory, the origins of institutions and their effects on growth and inequality. In this interview, he speaks about politics, both in Europe and America, and about what research will be like at the University of Barcelona.
In a recent article you published on the newspaper Ara, you talked about a distance between the voters and political elites.
Politics used to be a lot about consensus, very centered, right-wing or left-wing. And in some way, this has “crashed”. This is an important element of what we see: the change in the United States, Brexit, anti-immigrant protectionist partiesʼ movements in Europe, Le Pen, etc… Political parties have changed over the years, because there is a tension among some electorates -which are still represented- and the new social strata that havenʼt benefited from the technological changes and globalization which took place over the last decades.
In Spain, that would be the “mileuristes” (people with salaries around a thousand euros). If we think of the way on which electoral space is distributed in Spain, for example, the left-wing is divided in two groups: older people still vote for the classic social-democracy and young people who have lower salaries, or lower considering their education, have voted for political parties such as Podemos. There is an important element of structural change behind this political space reorganization. Then, there might be another factor, which has to do with the distance between electors and elites. The ones who control communication and political space -or the ones who take part in it- are somewhat powerful, and then there is a distance between electorates and political elites.
What measures could contribute to shorten this distance? Open lists, for example?
They could, but we sometimes think open lists will easily solve problems. Open lists were used in Italy before 1991. In the list, the voters could change the order of the candidates. In fact, it was quite used in southern Italy. In the north, people voted for the list without changing the order. And why was it so used in the south? Because inside those political parties, the different politicians were competing against each other, usually through clientele policies, to get votes from the electors. Therefore, those people listed on top were those who made more personal favors after the elections. I believe that it depends more on the kind of relationship between voters and politicians instead of specific changes in regulations: to what extend voters are informed, able to mobilize, and donʼt depend on a certain politician to get a personal favor. I am not saying open lists are not interesting, but there might be other things I would choose.
Which structural change in our political systems were you referring to?
We are living an important structural change in politics. The idea we had of economy has changed. When we think of the 20th century from an industrial perspective we think of the automobile business (we think of Ford and General Motors, Detroit, Seat…). Companies in which a great amount of their production is automatized, in which central workers in production processes are semi-skilled workers organized in labor unions. For those kinds of jobs, which are essential in this production process, there is a certain equality in salaries and capital and earned income. Some call this the golden age of democratic capitalism. In the United States, it began in 1920, while in Europe it occurred after the Second Great War. In this context, political parties represented all middle classes, or working classes but semi-skilled people. Electoral competition happened frequently in the center of politics. Socialists, Cristiano-democratic, even liberal or conservative parties kept a certain consensus around this kind of economy, social relations…etc. From the eighties, nineties on, as a result of certain technological changes, the introduction of the computer and its impact on lots of jobs that people had but now have disappeared or are starting to disappear, there has been a split on what would be the core part of distribution of income and jobs in economy. And this is mixed with a certain process of globalization, of real competitiveness, from countries with lower salaries that have removed many industries. It didnʼt happen everywhere; industries with a high added value in Germany and other places are still powerful and keep on competing worldwide. But those companies of toys, furniture, and textile… have been affected by globalization. This hasnʼt caused a split but a reduction of that central space and it has affected, in my opinion, the way in which politics were done.
As a political scientist, is the independence process of Catalonia interesting?
It is very interesting. It has fewer parallelisms than what we think because most -if not all- independences, have taken place historically in moments of essential change in the international system: the end of the World Great War and the fall of central empires caused the creation of small countries in central Europe; after the Second Great War came the decolonization; with the fall of the Soviet Union lots of countries got their freedom back. Except for some cases such as Iceland and Norway, most of the cases of independence take place in moments of crisis -even the independence of Latin America, which took place when Spain was occupied by the French and was recovering from the War of Independence. The Catalan case is happening when there is stability in the international order. However, there is a certain parallelism; we have seen many peaceful urban revolutions with more or less success, which have been the product of popular mobilizations. All revolutions in Eastern Europe, Arabic revolutions, most of them failed except for the one in Tunis…. In this other sense, it is true that there is a certain parallelism because right at this moment, when negotiation doesnʼt look like an option, I think this will not change without peopleʼs mobilization. And this is interesting, really interesting.
You work in the United States; do you think Trump and his policies will consolidate?
Trumpʼs victory is the result of a coalition of very diverse social groups. The United States has to be understood as Europe, for its dimensions and amount of people, from Moscow to Lisbon: I mean, heterogeneous and complex. Democrats and republicans are a coalition of different parts each. Trumpʼs coalition has three sides. The first one is the traditional Republican Party, Reaganʼs, willing to lower taxes and in favor of deregulation. The second is an interesting sector, called social policies, which would be abortion policies, family, which were voted for the Republican Party already. The third area is what Trump got to bring to the Republican Party: a part of the working class from the industrial areas ranging from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania. A big part of this group, who were democrats, has voted for Trump this time. Perhaps they wouldnʼt have voted for another Republican candidate, but they did vote for Trump thanks to his offer of protectionism towards immigration and Asiaʼs competitiveness. This electoral change comes from the structural change we were talking about. This can also be seen with Brexit, or France where lots of people had voted for left-wing parties and now are considering voting for Le Pen. Up to what extent can this Trump coalition get consolidated? This is what I donʼt know because since there are three different groups and lots of tension, mostly on those in favor of deregulation and lower taxes and requests from these industrial or post-industrial working class sectors. And I cannot see how this tension can be easily solved.
Which are the main traits of the research project you will lead at the UB, The birth of party democracy. The emergence of mass parties and the choice of electoral laws in Europe and North America (1870-1940)?
The project aims to analyze the training of political parties and electoral institutions in the first democratic wave, which started in the early 19th century with the revolutions in 1848 and lasted until the Great World War. It is a progressive growth of democracy, mostly in Europe, Western Europe, and America.
The project goes for combining new methodologies (statistics in political science of the current contemporary economy) with a collection of historical data from those times. We want census data which requires and analyzes maps of that period, including a great amount of information, in order to reconstruct historical and electoral processes of that period. The project is political science but there is also an interest in contacting economists, historians, and sociologists. The Faculty of Economics and Business of the UB is an interesting place to carry this out. It used to be a school of economics and political sciences. Conducting the study here makes sense.