To be direct: if I were a deputy, I would almost never attend Rada sessions. At the sessions I did attend, I would read newspapers and magazines and maybe do some light freelancing online. I would trust my party comrades to vote on my behalf and would vote for them in return. If parliamentary immunity were abolished, I would stop doing any work at all. The same would happen if you implemented the idea of recalling deputies at voters’ discretion. And I should say that for all the purposes that progressive society assigns to deputies and parliamentarism in general, I would be an excellent parliamentarian.
I’m not joking. Judge for yourself. Legislation is a lengthy and grueling process. After an author finishes a bill, the actual work takes place in parliamentary committees. A deputy who cares about an issue knows the situation perfectly well long before the bill reaches the floor. If the law falls within his area of interest, he needs to be present to monitor amendments and the procedural process. In all other cases, there’s simply nothing to do there. The same applies when you don’t understand the subject matter of a bill. What’s the point of showing up? A person can’t know everything in the world, and a deputy is no exception. One of the reasons parties exist is precisely that a shared ideological foundation frees their members from having to understand all the details. So there’s nothing wrong with handing your voting card to a comrade with a request to vote as needed. A politician has far more important things to do than pressing buttons in the chamber.
What things, for example? Well, the very things that the same public eagerly demands from politicians and, above all—fulfilling representative functions. That is, defending the interests of their constituents. Defending them from whom? From whom else—police, prosecutors, tax authorities—people have plenty of natural enemies. This kind of work requires time, energy, and commitment. But take away my immunity—goodbye. Defend yourselves as best you can.
You’ll get the same result, only in a more perverse form, if you implement your e-e-e-e… brilliant idea of recalling deputies by voters. The more active a deputy is in his role as a defender of the people, the more enemies he makes. And the greater their desire to be rid of such an activist. There will always be dissatisfied voters. With the right skill, organizing a recall campaign isn’t difficult, and using well-known PR techniques and other inventions of enterprising humanity, such a campaign can even be brought to a successful conclusion. In short, you’ll get a result directly opposite to what was intended: the complete triumph of the principle that “voters must save themselves.”
Why am I writing all this? Look here. Above I have listed the main wishes from which progressive society suffers regarding parliamentarism. Yet all of them clearly contradict the actual benefit that the same society expects a deputy to provide to the people. It’s telling that politicians themselves know full well the circumstances I’ve described. But they never say so. It’s also telling that some part of progressive society—at least its leaders and activists—is also aware of the situation: someone was a deputy, someone was an aide, someone just “hung around the corridors.” But, as we see, this stops no one.
All of this, to my mind, shows that the system called democracy, in which voters are supposed to give politicians the right signals through their choices, cannot sustain itself. As we can see, in our case, the most common complaints that voters make against deputies simply have no practical significance, and the methods by which voters want to cure parliamentary ailments directly contradict their own interests.
There’s nothing surprising in this, really. After all, the voter doesn’t actually choose anything. A choice means voluntarily rejecting one thing in favor of another—for instance, making a purchase in a store. Unfortunately, the voter doesn’t buy deputies. So he has no idea what either deputies or their promises are actually worth. The voter simply lives in a pleasant delusion about what deputies and other politicians should do, how and why they should do it, what they can and cannot do—because, for him, all of this is free. Yes, they fleece him three times over with taxes, but he pays them under the anesthesia of indirect taxation and corporate tax burdens rather than direct payment. And anyway, taxes are simply coercive seizures of property, so there’s no real “taxes in exchange for services.”
Elections work well for a club where all members pay voluntary dues toward goals that are perfectly clear to them—goals that, in fact, are what unite these people. In that case, electing a chairman or treasurer is simply a procedure for appointing someone to a position with known powers. This appointment, by the way, doesn’t necessarily require elections; you could do it by lot, for example.
In a large country where people’s interests diverge and are often outright opposed, holding elections for people busy taking and distributing your money is a travesty and a farce. And, most fundamentally—such a procedure cannot be organized “rationally” by definition. Voters, and especially progressive society, who are supposedly meant to oversee the process, inevitably fall into senility, live in dreams of a magical land of plenty, and gladly, with songs and dances, lead themselves by the nose.