How to strengthen democracy through civil society?

Summary:

On 10 June 2024, at the Rafael del Pino Foundation, the dialogue "Better Spain: How to strengthen democracy through Civil Society" took place. The participants were Miriam González Durántez, lawyer specialising in international trade, founder and president of España Mejor; Elena Pisonero, executive president of Taldig; Víctor Lapuente, professor at the University of Gothenburg and visiting professor at ESADE, and Manuel Villoria Mendieta, professor of Political Science and Administration at the Universidad Rey Juan.

Miriam González: Better Spain celebrates its first anniversary. Twelve months after the day we launched the foundation, I am even more convinced of the need for an open, participatory and socially active civil society. We must all work together to find real solutions to the country's real problems. To begin to manage the economic and political reforms that are necessary for the country. We must remove obstacles to growth and put it at the centre of the country's political agenda.

Elena Pisonero: There is a polarisation instigated by politics with a clear interest in inhibiting participation and social life. This feeds a vicious circle in which we are trapped because it prevents this significance. It is not because of all political parties, there are some interested in it because it prevents the important questions from being asked. The elites are not a world apart from society, they feed off it. There is also a self-interested problem of demonising elites because they are automatically seen as the ones who hold power, when they are much more than that. Young people do not aspire to be part of the elite, which is a problem because they do not want to be part of the governance of the country. The elite is the one that changes, that transforms.

Victor Lapuente: The centre is falling, we are becoming polarised. Spain ranks 23-24th in the world in terms of democracy, but we have lost a few places. We are resisting the rise of autocracies. In fifty years we have a smaller percentage of the world's population living in autocracies. We don't have substantive polarisation as in many countries either on immigration or on fiscal policy. What has occurred is a normal polarisation in which the left wants more taxes and the right wants less. But we have public health and public education. But we have the negative polarisation, a feeling of antipathy towards the political opponent that we only experience in the United States. This justifies anything to the ruler, which seems very dangerous. Orban survives because of this fear.

Miriam González: Polarisation is not only happening in our country, it is a global phenomenon. We are going through a huge change in society, in how our societies manage the economy. When the countries at the top go down and those at the bottom go up, it is normal for people to enter passionately into the debate. In societies that become very polarised, things go wrong. People go to extremes when they sense a dangerous situation in their economic and social situation. This is terrible for the quality of democracy because if all the time we waste on confrontation were spent on what needs to be done, the democratic system would be much better.

Manuel Villoria: The world is so complex that politics has neglected to analyse reality in all its complexity. To avoid this, he develops a series of mechanisms that allow politics to manage this complex reality. Today's world is very complex - immigration, artificial intelligence, new technologies. The average citizen has trouble adapting to this and responding to it in policy terms. And because he has those difficulties, he needs help. Traditionally, we had serious, intellectual newspapers that helped people interpret reality according to liberal-democratic values. But that has fallen. Disintermediation is brutal: we have social networks, we lack intellectuals to help us and then we are left with demagogues, which is fracturing reality. The result is that institutions suffer. For example, the judiciary, which is said to be right-wing or left-wing. If a case of corruption is judged, it is said that it is because the judge is right-wing or left-wing and this is used to try to control the judiciary. This is an example of how we are destroying institutions through these mechanisms of polarisation and simplification that go nowhere.

Víctor Lapuente: In democracy we are usually among the twenty or twenty-five best nations in the world. But as a government, which is the other leg of the state, the one that has to do not with how we make decisions, but with how we implement them, how we execute them, that is where we really suffer. This has to do with the difficulties and the bureaucratic obstacles to collaborate with civil society. We have excessive bureaucratic rules for everything, bureaucracy arises from any problem. The relevant thing about the cases we have these days is that we are going to see a change for the worse in the regulation of public procurement, in which the subjective part of contracts is going to be eliminated to prevent the letter of recommendation from someone's wife from being able to determine anything. The whole tendering process is going to be made much more complicated and we are going to live in a continuous bureaucratic nightmare. In the countries of southern Europe we live with exaggerated passion. In the countries that score in the top places in terms of quality of government, what they have done is to cut red tape and have a much more fluid relationship between the state and civil society. This is what we lack in Spain: we have replaced trust with control. If politicians distrust citizens, they constantly regulate them. We saw this during the pandemic. In everything, the answer is more regulation and that is one of the main problems we have. The first is the politicisation of all public institutions, the colonisation by all parties, used to having absolutely exaggerated power compared to any modern democracy in penetrating all administrative levels through free appointment. The other side of the coin is excessive bureaucratisation, which feeds back into politicisation.

Elena Pisonero: Bureaucratisation prevents us from seeing what we are talking about. We are at a time of systemic change, which generates fear because it is incomprehensible. In this context, whoever wants to be in power has the need to fill the space, and there are tendencies according to origins, and tends to introduce rules. There are certain people who find this very comforting at a time when there is so much fear. This is a reality. Reality is little observed and it is thought that something is going to be maintained over time. We have had a problem of lulling ourselves into a process where we thought that everything was going to flow and it was all about applying a manual. But things are changing and that manual has to be changed as well. That is very scary. In that situation we have tried too many rules, but already the seams are coming apart at the seams. Yesterday we voted for a fairly focused area, but there is a lack of a shared vision and ambition, because we are very afraid and we want to preserve. We cannot regulate everything. What it is about is how we can shape a new framework that allows us to navigate in this world, which is very complex and not built. There are some impulses in which people move better in a world without rules, that is China, Russia, the United States. We must not go against the rules, but against the bureaucracy that prevents the active participation of all those who can contribute. We have to recover that dynamism in which we can contribute the best of ourselves, train ourselves, have the ambition to form that new, updated model in which we re-establish a series of rules in which we can all grow, because that is what progress is all about. For that we need institutions and we need to go to the very essence of their function, and not to their survival.

Víctor Lapuente: The more regulation, the more corruption and the more corruption, the less social trust.

Miriam González: In terms of bureaucracy we have two overlapping things. We have a problem at the European level. The European Union is an eminently legal construction. The internal market was invented by lawyers. It has tended to regulate, to add rules, and we are now at a point where part of these rules, this regulatory obsession, has become a problem. The jewel in the crown of the European Union is the internal market. Everything depends on it. We have taken the focus away from fragmentation, from being able to move completely freely, from being broad, and we have set about regulating it. That is one of the problems we have at European level. But at the national level, bureaucracy has become one of the instruments of corruption. The most corrupt countries are the ones with the most red tape and the most hyper-regulation. There is a critical point that is ideal, but we have gone too far. This bureaucracy is how ethical abuses have been happening. We need to pay a lot of attention to guarantee mechanisms and control mechanisms.

Manuel Villoria: In the private sector, we have the system of compliance, arising from the 2010 Penal Code. Compliance, If you are serious about it, it is very important. Virtually all companies with more than five thousand employees have such a system. When it is set up as a mechanism to avoid criminal problems because, if necessary, it can be said that they have a system to prevent criminal offences. compliance, there is no culture behind it, which is what works. If we talk about the public sector, the integrity systems are in not having integrity systems. The OECD told us we had to have them. One of the obligations is to have anti-fraud systems, which are not perfect. All public organisations that receive Next Generation funds have to have anti-fraud systems. If you have it, it is to do self-assessment of what you have done, but the 50% of the municipalities and autonomous communities have not done self-assessment of their risks, their problems. It has been established as something you have to have, without any philosophy behind it about preventing corruption. The fundamental thing is to comply with procedures. Anyone running anti-fraud schemes, and companies receiving Next Generation funds, have to go through a conflict of interest check through the DACI (declaration of absence of conflict of interest). Everybody has to sign it, they do it automatically and so on. Then this goes through a control system. This is an example of how bureaucratisation and the culture behind it is missing.

Víctor Lapuente: If you take the indicators of the level of politicisation in senior appointments with the indicators of corruption and transparency, the correlation is very high. Politicisation leads to corruption and bad practices because you are not going to denounce your boss or accept any advisor coming in, because you know that your career depends on not telling him the truth. In some countries the opposite is true. Sometimes the British press criticises the lack of politicisation, so that sometimes civil servants don't have the will to carry out the minister's policy. But it is much better to have a system where the scope for political appointments is very limited. Technically, it is very simple: the terms of office should not coincide. That's why it's good to create agencies, which are the ones that implement public policies. That is the first major reform we need. The second is that public administration is not managed. Public service areas, hospitals, schools, are run by public managers who have the room for manoeuvre to hire, to decide on intrinsic incentives for promotion and career development. We don't have that in Spain. We need to de-bureaucratise this and imprint the spirit of private management on the public sector, so that public managers can manage. In Spain, the opposite is true: public managers are decided in the BOE.

Elena Pisonero: The vast majority of companies do not have a contractual relationship with the government. If their life depended on what the public sector decided, the economy would decline because it would inhibit risk-taking, which is the essence of any human activity. An uneasy relationship has been followed, depending on the administration of the moment. There is too much intervention in activity. The administration should manage public services and become more professional if it is decided that the public sector should provide these services. Companies take risks and make plans that have to be implemented. The problem is when these plans are combined. If things are clear, they should operate on merit, not arbitrariness. This is a deterioration of a modern society, which we should not normalise. This makes many companies unwilling to contract with the administration. What we need to do is to have healthy relations, with objective rules, with regulatory bodies to ensure that the rules are complied with and to establish the cut-off point between what is a political decision and its execution. The problem is that, here, the political level is lowered down to the last detail. A balance has to be struck, but this is achieved through transparency. There is a perversion that our life seems to be based on compliance rather than on the things you have to do properly, which is different. Companies have to take risks because there is an opportunity in risk. And if they don't do it properly, they end up suffering on their own account. The problem with politics is that it appropriates the common good for its own benefit, because it doesn't set a common agenda with shared benefits, nor does it monitor and question how things are done. That is a deterioration, but it has not always been the case and we have to recover from that. Let's not take it for granted that this is the right thing to do and we have to improve it, we have to break it.

Manuel Villoria: Yes, the corruption cases are similar to those of the 1990s, but they are also similar to those of the Duke of Lerma. It is a long tradition in which there is always an abuse of power for private benefit, direct or indirect. Traditional clientelism, which was based on the enormous economic distance between the richest and the most powerful, the bosses and the caciques, and the people, has largely disappeared. That traditional clientelism of you give me your vote and I'll take your child, I'll let you send him to school, I'll help you get him to school. In Latin America, a different kind of clientelism has developed because the poorest people have organised themselves and now they negotiate on a one-to-one basis with politicians. What is true is that there is a different kind of clientelism, more political, more of a relationship in which, for a time, I finance you and you help me. This has also improved thanks to the ban on legal entities financing parties and campaigns. So our clientelism is relative. What we do have is a lot of patronage. There is patronage because the public sector is used to place friends and clientelist networks of politicians and civil servants. But the fundamental key to why there may be patronage in Spain is I don't know whether it is a cultural or institutional issue, such as certain rules of the game that exist in our society that reinforce particularism over universalism. This idea that the key to solving problems is what friends you have, who you have relationships with. And so that network is that situation whereby the key is friends and connections is very clear in Spain. In international transparency, in the last barometer, my Portuguese friend Luis de Sousa and I insisted that we had to include some questions about connections, what they call in English pulling strings, and we introduce the question. It is fascinating because 40% of Spaniards answered that they had used networks of connections and friends to reach and to be able to have certain public services. Maybe they were entitled to them, but thanks to that they skipped the queues, the 40%. In other words, it was seen as normal to have connections in order to access public services, and that is a dangerous element because it breaks equality, the criteria of impartiality and generates damage. The issue of connections has to do with a cultural framework, which is what we have had at other levels. To say that Spain has a culture favourable to corruption would be more difficult for me. In general terms, we are secularised societies with materialistic values, like many European societies. We are not Morocco. There is not much difference. In terms of social capital, we have fairly closed and strong networks, which have a lot to do with our family tradition. There are few bridges, and as there are few bridges, information and knowledge circulate very little. Moreover, we do not achieve that fluidity between society so that wealth can develop. There may be something there, but I am not absolutely sure that we are very different from other societies in southern Europe, nor are we at worrying levels in this area. But it is true that we are still quite family-oriented societies, quite focused on networks of friends and networks of connections. We generate a strong culture of trust, but bridges with other networks are difficult to build. This means that social capital does not flow.

Miriam González: Most of society is horrified by some of this favourable treatment, which is condoned at the political level, but which we find appalling on a day-to-day basis. What happens is that we don't know how to get out of this vicious circle we have got ourselves into in order to generate a more positive dynamic. Regarding companies' compliance systems, it is very important to see what works in companies. They work in countries where they work because there is vigilance and enforcement. I have been on boards of financial services companies where 85% of our time was devoted to compliance systems. Why? Because you have criminal liability and you know that if the regulator comes to you, I don't know how many times a year, and they catch you when they should have asked a question about whether this code, or this standard, was being complied with and you haven't done it, you have a huge personal problem. When there have been a large number of companies that have given services or goods, something in kind, for free to someone related to power, if it has happened in many companies and I were a regulator in Spain, I would be thinking that maybe we have a systemic problem. If any of these companies are related to the United States, someone's hair has fallen out, because in the United States the compliance system linked to the Foreign Corruption Services Act is quite serious. That oversight is extremely important with respect to standards in public office with a complexity, which is that when you are looking at the president and the ministers you can't put someone above them apart from the judicial system to exercise that oversight. How do you solve that in a lot of countries? By putting different layers of control. What is the problem in Spain? The systems. How many times is it controlled in Spain that a minister or a president has to resign because he deliberately lies to Parliament? Why do we have corruption? Because we do not significantly change the systems once we have the problems. One thing is the integrity systems that apply to the whole administration and another is at the top, as happens in companies. Who sets the culture of the company? The chairman and the board of directors. Who sets the ethical culture of the country? The Prime Minister and the ministers, and they must be given additional responsibility. I don't understand why we don't have rules here that every time ministerial matters are discussed there has to be a civil servant present. In Italy you go to the websites and you see the CVs of the officials, why they have been appointed, their salaries, why don't we have that, why don't we have very clear rules about what they pay you when you are in the houses with the cars, what happens in the appointments? How is it possible that we don't have that kind of rules, that you can't go down to the lowest levels of the Administration? Because there comes a time when that administration has to respond to the political decision. But if you are weakening it year after year, in the end the administration cannot respond to you. I don't understand why the president and the ministers, whatever party they belong to, can't make these kinds of commitments.

Elena Pisonero: This vicious circle must be broken. Civil society has to assume in the first person that the best guarantee that there will be a level of rights and a healthy coexistence is to assume the obligations and individual responsibility that this requires. If we do not assume in the first person the ethical level and the standard that we want to see in society, society will not have that ethical level demanded of its leaders. We cannot expect someone to come along and set things up for us and give us the brave new world. Only with responsibility and with obligations can we really have the rights to live up to our ambitions. And that requires a lot of personal demand. It is that self-regulation of a mature society, which is to demand and comply, because you want to do things well, because otherwise you do not generate trust, which is essential for growth and healthy coexistence. A strong civil society is the only guarantee of a strong democracy. We should not expect leaders to come from an alien planet, who are ethical, who are good. If we are as responsible to ourselves as we are demanding of others, we will have the leaders we deserve.

Víctor Lapuente: There are two ways of organising a society, which is trust, which is what we all want, and the other alternative is through control. In Spain we are controlling too much. To have a good civil society we need a more dynamic public sector that trusts the citizen more. In many cases, it is simply applying the rule. In other words, if María López decides to go to a public tender, she can make a sworn declaration of her assets. But if María López herself wants to access some kind of social assistance, then it is a real nightmare for her in terms of administrative procedures. So the administration itself has many mechanisms. We could make much more use of positive administrative silence, when what predominates is negative administrative silence. We need a much more dynamic public sector that knows how to attract young people. We have very low STEM profiles in science, technology, engineering and mathematics in the public administration. With that it is going to be very difficult to attract young people.

Manuel Villoria: Civil society is fundamental not only for a healthy democracy, but in very concrete terms for the fight against corruption. The systems work because we are not condemned to corruption, we do not have a culture that condemns us to corruption. We have some cultural traits that probably have to do with historical traditions, which are gradually changing the social and economic situation. But we need proper rules and a much more demanding self-regulation by the public authorities, not just based on bureaucracy, but based on values. When we have those rules and we have a civil society that we empower, it has the capacity to denounce, to demand, to complain. Then things change radically. When we only have rules, but civil society is not empowered, in the end politicians stop complying with them. But if you have an empowered civil society, it is not so easy. If there is no public exemplarity, it is very difficult for us to transform. Example is fundamental to be able to develop decent societies.

Miriam González: Civil society is fundamental. The quality of a democracy is measured by the quality of the rulers and the quality of the governed. We all have a responsibility. There are two fundamental challenges. One is to bring things down to earth. Often the contribution of civil society is too high. We have to ground things down. And the second thing we have to do is to focus. We have a very manipulable system, because there is a lot of closeness between different powers and different ways of communicating. It's very easy to get lost. We have to be clear about what we want. I could not agree more on the need to have an empowered civil society, but we have to be realistic. Nobody is going to empower us, we have to empower ourselves.

The Rafael del Pino Foundation is not responsible for the comments, opinions or statements made by the people who participate in its activities and which are expressed as a result of their inalienable right to freedom of expression and under their sole responsibility. The contents included in the summary of this conference are the result of the debates held at the meeting held for this purpose at the Foundation and are the responsibility of their authors.

The Rafael del Pino Foundation is not responsible for any comments, opinions or statements made by third parties. In this respect, the FRP is not obliged to monitor the views expressed by such third parties who participate in its activities and which are expressed as a result of their inalienable right to freedom of expression and under their own responsibility. The contents included in the summary of this conference are the result of the discussions that took place during the conference organised for this purpose at the Foundation and are the sole responsibility of its authors.

• Facebook
• X
• LinkedIn