ZORAN RAKOVIC: The Electoral Consequences of the Unrestrained Schnauzer

Political scientists worry about party machines, media filters and democratic decline. They have overlooked the schnauzer at the gate.

A civilisation may survive inflation, ministerial reshuffles, committee reports, ideological fashion, administrative incompetence and even the periodic discovery that a government department has spent two million dollars developing a consultation process for a consultation process, but I am increasingly doubtful that representative democracy can survive the New Zealand dog. This is not an attack upon dogs, which are in most respects superior to political parties: they are loyal, they usually recognise their owners, they do not publish manifestos they have no intention of reading, and when they dislike you they generally communicate the fact with admirable clarity. My concern is narrower and more constitutional. We have spent a century refining electoral law, parliamentary procedure and theories of democratic legitimacy while allowing a parallel system of unelected territorial government to develop behind wooden fences, corrugated gates and signs saying BEWARE OF DOG. The Electoral Commission does not record this system. Universities do not teach it. The press rarely investigates it. Yet every candidate who has approached a suburban front gate knows that a substantial portion of New Zealand's democratic process is administered by animals whose understanding of constitutional convention consists principally of determining whether your ankles belong within their jurisdiction.

Max Weber told us, with the confidence available to scholars who had never canvassed a lifestyle block, that the modern state is distinguished by its claim to a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. This proposition must now be amended. In New Zealand the monopoly is shared with a border collie called Rex, a mastiff called Bella and, on rural properties, something the owner insists is "mostly huntaway" but which from twenty metres resembles an escaped experiment from a military laboratory. The candidate approaches with leaflets, a smile and perhaps several opinions concerning infrastructure, rural health or tax policy, and from underneath the ute emerges the REAL local authority. At this moment all the political philosophy of Europe becomes useless. Rousseau provides no guidance. Rawls is silent. Burke offers nothing. The candidate must decide whether the democratic necessity of meeting the homeowner justifies the possibility of being reconstructed surgically. Here we encounter the first great constitutional principle of canine democracy: access to the voter depends not merely upon law, willingness or civic virtue, but upon whether Bobby has been secured. A locked gate may be opened. A sceptical voter may be persuaded. Bobby is sovereign.

Ostrogorski, who warned that party organisations would eventually stand between the citizen and the representative, diagnosed only half the disease because he failed to account for the terrier. Long before the caucus disciplines the MP, long before the party office decides which issues deserve oxygen, long before the media decides which political quarrels merit national attention, a small white dog with psychopathic energy has already decided whether the representative reaches the doorstep. It is an extraordinary example of what political theorists call agenda setting, though the agenda in question consists mainly of barking until the visitor leaves. We frequently worry, and rightly so, about the filtration of public opinion through party machines, bureaucracies and institutional routines, but democracy is filtered spatially before it is filtered politically. The street looks open, the voter theoretically accessible, the candidate nominally free to knock, and yet one household after another may be removed from democratic conversation by a creature whose principal policy position is that strangers should cease existing. If one wished to design a system for reducing spontaneous contact between citizen and representative while avoiding all allegations of authoritarianism, one could hardly improve upon this. No censorship law is required. Simply purchase a German shepherd.

The dogs that permit entry are scarcely less dangerous, because once the candidate reaches the doorstep another assault upon democracy begins, this time against deliberation itself. The candidate attempts to explain that local growth must be accompanied by infrastructure, that primary healthcare access may require regional intervention, or that taxation should be understood not merely as extraction but as the price of maintaining common institutions, and the dog immediately offers its counterargument: WOOF. The candidate resumes: "What concerns me is the mismatch between population growth and service delivery..." WOOF WOOF. "One mechanism might be..." WOOOOOOF. Habermas imagined the democratic public sphere as a space in which citizens test reasons against one another and approach understanding through rational exchange, which is a splendid idea so long as nobody owns a beagle. The dog has perfected a form of political communication already familiar in wider public life: repetition substitutes for evidence, volume substitutes for argument, interruption substitutes for rebuttal and persistence substitutes for coherence. If democracy is indeed declining, we should at least acknowledge that the spaniel was ahead of the curve.

Gramsci would probably have enjoyed the deeper joke because the most effective forms of power are often those we cease to recognise as power. Nobody sees the dog at the gate as a political institution. It is merely "our lovely boy", although the lovely boy has just prevented a candidate from speaking to two registered voters and removed half a leaflet with his teeth. Were a state official stationed outside every home with instructions to discourage unsolicited political conversation, citizens would regard the practice as sinister. Give the official a wagging tail and a name like Charlie and the same arrangement becomes domestic charm. Foucault would also have recognised the elegance of the mechanism. The modern disciplinary system works best when the subject regulates himself before force must actually be applied. The dog need not bite. The dog merely watches. The candidate observes the posture, calculates the distance between gate and door, estimates the time required for retreat, notices the absence of an owner, and quietly decides that this particular household can perhaps be represented in the aggregate. Bentham gave us the Panopticon, a building in which the possibility of observation disciplines behaviour. New Zealand has improved the concept by adding saliva and teeth.

Yet even this understates the democratic danger because the most effective dogs are not the aggressive ones at all. Aggressive dogs merely exclude the candidate. Friendly dogs capture him. Here the golden retriever emerges as a far more sophisticated political operator than the rottweiler. A rottweiler says, in effect, "You shall not pass." This is crude authoritarianism and can be identified immediately. The golden retriever practises soft power. It approaches carrying a tennis ball, deposits the ball at the candidate's feet, looks upward with the expression of a creature unjustly denied happiness since the foundation of the world, and instantly transforms the political encounter. The candidate has arrived to discuss housing policy but throws the ball. The dog returns. The voter appears. The candidate means to introduce himself but is now asking the dog's name. Within ninety seconds the discussion has moved from democratic representation to whether Molly is part Labrador. Erich Fromm might have said that the human need for affection overwhelms ideology, while René Girard could have explained that desire is contagious: the owner loves the dog, the dog desires attention, and soon the candidate desires the dog's approval as intensely as the voter's. The result is politically humiliating. "I'd be grateful for your electorate vote," says the candidate. The dog places its head against his knee. "Oh, you beautiful thing," says the candidate, and at that precise instant sovereignty changes hands.

We should not underestimate the scale of this problem. Political parties employ strategists, pollsters, communications specialists, demographic modellers and people whose profession apparently consists of deciding whether the candidate should remove his jacket before standing beside a tractor, yet almost no campaign budget accounts for the canine electorate. Dogs do not appear in polling samples. They do not respond to campaign emails. They are not members of focus groups. Nonetheless they decide whether the gate is crossed, whether the conversation is audible, whether the candidate remains long enough to make a point and whether his trousers return home in the condition in which democracy issued them. It may therefore be time for a modest programme of constitutional reform. Every property containing a dog over twenty kilograms might be required to provide a clearly marked democratic corridor from footpath to front door. Dogs capable of barking continuously through policy explanations could be registered as third-party broadcasters. Labradors who solicit attention during vote requests might fall under electoral advertising rules on the grounds that they provide an undeclared material benefit, namely emotional gratification. Particularly persuasive golden retrievers should disclose their campaign affiliations.

Still, one must not be unjust. Dogs possess several civic virtues from which Parliament could learn. They are transparent about loyalty, consistent in territorial policy and generally unwilling to pretend that yesterday's hostility was actually a constructive consultation process. They do not leak against their owners. They do not discover principles only after opinion polling. They do not describe a bite as "robust engagement with stakeholders". When a dog believes you should leave, it does not commission a working group. It growls. This directness may be barbaric, but it has a certain moral cleanliness that modern politics occasionally lacks. One might even argue that the dog is not the enemy of democracy but its satirist, standing at the gate as a furry reminder that all our elaborate institutions ultimately depend upon the absurdly physical question of whether human beings can actually reach one another and speak.

And so while committees continue discussing democratic resilience, misinformation, political finance and public trust, I propose that we spare one nervous glance for the ordinary suburban gate. Behind it sits the unacknowledged constitutional actor of New Zealand politics, part censor, part security service, part heckler, part lobbyist and part emotional blackmailer, capable of closing the public sphere with a growl or dissolving serious policy discussion by rolling onto its back. We have worried for years about foreign interference in our democracy, but perhaps the first inquiry should begin closer to home, with the blue heeler at Number 27 who has already prevented three candidates from reaching the front door, destroyed six leaflets and, according to his owner, "wouldn't hurt a fly." That last claim, I should add, is usually delivered from the safe side of the fence.

Zoran Rakovic is standing as an Independent candidate for Selwyn and writes at To make the darkness conscious