Some readers of this blog with know my preoccupation with the shortcomings of Vox Pop Democracy. Here are some aphorisms from David Van Reybrouck who’s book Against elections does not appear to have been translated out of Dutch at this stage. They offer some interesting ways of understanding the difference between deliberative and representative democracy.
1. Democracy is not meant to make people happy, it is meant to teach people how to be unhappy.
2. Democracy is not meant to be exciting, but to be boring.
3. Democracy is not about solving conflict, it is about learning to live with conflict. (Luc Huyse)
4. A world in which conflicts are constantly being minimized is not a democracy, it is utopia.
5. A world in which conflicts are constantly being maximized is not a democracy, it is hysteria.
6. A world in which conflicts are valued as sources of insight into each other nurtures the culture of democracy.
7. Of all political systems, democracy is the one that celebrates conflict the most.
8. Democracy is not about consensus, it is about conflict.
9. A world in which conflicts are being dealt with before they turn into violence fosters the culture of democracy.
10. A world in which conflicts are neither buried nor blown up is in the process of becoming democratic.
11. Democracy is an early harvest of what otherwise would grow into war.
12. In order to remain democratic, the pursuit of happiness should go hand in hand with the acceptance of unhappiness.
13. Happy the society whose inhabitants are all slightly unhappy, for this may betray the culture of democracy.
14. Democracy is about the even distribution of unhappiness. This is its utopian ideal. In the absence of its full realisation, it teaches people to be moderately happy about their moderate unhappiness.
15. Democracy is government of the people (tick), for the people (tick), by the people (question mark).
16. Universal suffrage does not suffice to allow us to speak of ‘government by the people’.
17. If elections once belonged to the nature of aristocracy, universal suffrage was only a form of ‘quantitative democratisation’, not ‘qualitative democratisation’ (Bernard Manin). People got a right to vote, not to speak.
18. The person who casts his or her vote, casts it away. This is called: the principle of delegation. The only way of reclaiming that vote, is by sanctioning candidates at the next election.
19. Today, people despise the elected, but worship the elections. This is wrong: rather than being upset about politicians, parties and parliaments, they should be upset about the electoral
mechanism.
20. For the very first time in the history of representative government, the weight of the next election has become bigger than the weight of the previous election. The danger of the sanction has become bigger than the power of the delegation.
21. The theory of electoral democracy: let the past push the present (delegation). The practice of electoral democracy: the future hinders the present (sanction). This cripples action. We are being ruled by a misty void. This void is not the future, but the fear of the future.
22. Elections are not only outdated as a democratic procedure, they were never meant to be democratic in the first place. Elections were invented to stop the danger of democracy. This is not
blasphemy, but history.
23. Three thousand years of experimenting with democracy, and only two hundred years of playing with elections: and yet, we believe that elections are sacred.
24. There is nothing sacred about elections. They are only procedures, aristocratic procedures that people have tried to democratize, with considerable success, over the past two centuries.
25. There is nothing sacred about ‘one man, one vote’. It is only the historically contingent expression of a deeper democratic concern: the equal distribution of political chances.
26. If democracy is government through debate, electoral democracy is fairly mute: citizens wait, citizens listen, citizens cast their vote, citizens wait again.
27. In a world that is becoming increasingly horizontal, elections are an obsolete vestige of more vertical times.
28. In a world where information spins fast, voting once every four years is no longer enough.
29. In a world where technology empowers people, citizens not only want to vote, but voice their opinions, too.
30. Democracy through periodic delegation and sanction is rapidly loosing its legitimacy.
31. In a communication society like ours, it is natural that people want to engage in public discussion on the future of their society, it is positive that they want to take part in collective affairs and help shape the future of their communities.
32. People have the right to vote, they now ask for the right to speak.
33. How should the right to speak be organized? We have to avoid that only those with money, degrees and contacts get heard. We should not repeat the mistakes from the past: a new democracy should never become an elitist democracy.
34. The right to speak should be evenly distributed. The best way to do so is by sortition, i.e. by random sampling.
35. Sortition is the blind selection procedure by which a random sample of a population is drafted in order to get an adequate representation of that population.
36. If elections create representation on the basis of virtue, sortition creates representation on the basis of equality.
37. Both have their advantages: elections may guarantee more competences, sortition guarantees more freedom. Those who are drafted have to rotate after a while, their decisions will not be influenced by the need for reelection.
38. Two key notions for elections: delegation and sanction. Two key notions for sortition: equality and rotation.
39. If democracy is about the equal distribution of political chances, sortition guarantees that everybody has the same chance of being selected.
40. ‘One man, one vote’ now becomes ‘One person, one chance’.
41. Sortition is commonly used in contemporary democracies: it forms the basis of the entire polling business.
42. Opinion polls measure what people think when they don’t think; it would be much more interesting to know what they think when they had a chance to think (James Fishkin).
43. Giving a random sample of people a chance to think by letting them talking to each other and to experts and by giving them time to get at their own conclusions is the very nature of deliberative democracy.
44. Deliberative democracy is not about voting but about talking; it is not about avoiding conflict but about embracing it; it is not about consensus but dissensus.
45. Because deliberative democracy is both about the pursuit of happiness and the acceptance of unhappiness, it is a much needed complement to classical electoral democracy
So would representative democracy be an evolutionary biproduct to allow survival of the fittest in a mass society? Working for local goverment I have often mused over the idea of almagamating state and local by converting the local wards to replace the current state electorates. This would expand the parliament and create a more granular democratic exchange while breaking the two party system and diversifying represention.
Well a brief reading of the literature advocating greater deliberative democracy makes a very important point (Proposition 24 above) which is that the elections which underpin representative democracy are a modern invention. They’re sure enough an adaptation of earlier forms of government to the evolution of mass society. But they were also grafted onto very aristocratic forms. In the UK they were grafted onto the parliamentary system which represented the top 1% in their dealings with the sovereign.
The coming of representative democracy has of course democratised that structure well enough, but it turns out for a range of reasons that even such formally democratic arrangements provide considerable opportunity for the wealthy and powerful to influence the state.
By contrast the institutions of deliberative democracy are much more immune to this. And in Athens they were established precisely in response to, and as a bulwark against tyranny and oligarchy.
Is an Athenian style deliberative democracy possible given the logistics. Elections may be crude and open to abuse but would a delibrative function within the electoral or legislative system be any different.
Well the idea is to try to get ‘ordinary people’ in there – with the guarantee that they’re ordinary and representative (in the statistical sense) via sortition. I suggested a fairly substantial development of the idea here, though one might want to start more modestly. I’m wondering if you’re talking about Athenian style participatory democracy – which is a different matter. The Athenians had elements of both participatory democracy (The Ecclesia or Popular Assembly) and deliberative democracy (The Council of 500 which were chosen by lot).
More a long the lines of participatory democracy with the difference of full access to all through the use of citizen initiated collective and individual participation. This could range from concensus to referendum or even legislative. Unfortunately the only practical, flexible and scalable frame work are online services which are a probity and security land mine.
Yes, well I’m talking about bodies that are subsets of the electorate chosen by sortition, not election.
Thailand has recently abolished the limited representative democracy they had. Instead of investing enough in propaganda to ensure that their representatives have a majority in parliament, the elite prefer royalist military dictatorship. Keeping the army and the Royal Family on side probably costs them more, but it satisfies their outlook on life.
I love no 42, a great aphorism.
I love the idea as well, it appeals to my distrust of elites at the same time as it reminds me of my own elitism; quite a feat.
I would be most enthusiastic about something more explicitly Athenian: sortition to select the Senate, for example. Terms of 6 years rolling with sortition of 1/3rd every 2 years would appeal to me, although it would be necessary to compensate sortitees (would we quickly come to call them sots?) quite handsomely I would think.
To make Nick like my comment I would also support forming expert advisory committees whose advice would be required before the sortitees could decide on legislation coming within that committees’ expertise.
Thanks Patrick, you’re a man after my own heart. I don’t know if you know that I proposed a Senate or third house – just not to upset the applecart – chosen by sortition a good while ago.
On your point about expertise, you may be surprised but I regard this as less important than the people’s sovereignty through sortition. I have a high expectation that people would do their best to get themselves informed – including by using the prerogatives (and budget) of such an assembly to seek expert briefing. Since I don’t think you need to impose the experts on the people, I’d much rather not do that – and make the people sovereign over the experts. Of course if it worked out seriously contrary to my expectations I might change my mind ;)
The other thought I had about this and I think it is an important one is that, as I argued in the pieces I’ve written on this, democracies need cognitive elites. (The jury is a special purpose cognitive elite built around a particular legal case.) Anyway it occurred to me that we’ve tended to ignore the precedent of the House of Lords in our thinking about democracy. That’s natural enough because the institution is palpably not democratic. But the idea of having a house, some discussion chamber for those who have distinguished themselves in some way still has some appeal (if one can strip it of the privilege and general snobbiness that the current HoL arrangements entail).
Anyway it occurred to me as a thought experiment that one could also have a chamber chosen by sortition from amongst the ‘distinguished’. Of course there are substantial problems here – namely who decides what’s distinguished? Of course my operating presumption is that I’d delegate that to the people’s chamber – chosen by sortition from all the people. In any event, a principal motivation for this for me is that I see career structures being a major means by which vested interests operate through parties to intimidate the foot-soldiers of parliament to do their bidding. Sortition and limits on terms offers a lot of protection against careerism and seems to me to make it much more likely that people will do their best from whatever group they’re chosen.
Anyway, I like the idea of some institutionalised listening to people who have distinguished themselves – in whatever walk of life. I’m not a big fan of the Australian honours, but it would be kind of interesting to see what a chamber of 100 randomly selected AC, AO and AMs come up with. It would at least provide some of the benefits in terms of the quality of public debate that the House of Lords offers the UK.
One major problem of this is that it would be hugely biased in favour of the upper middle class, against migrants, women and lots of other things. I’d be happy to try to work out ways of trying to make the chamber more representative of the population – but via the notion that we identify a class of people from all walks of life who have distinguished themselves. (I realise this has bugs on it and I’m really putting it forward as a thought experiment rather than a serious proposal at this stage. But I really do like the idea of striking a blow against careerism.)
One might pursue similar ideas in a more targeted way. For example one might
• Give responsibility for the review of the national school curriculum to a council randomly selected from among Australia’s top educators with one third of the membership refreshing each year;
• Select a random panel of distinguished economists to provide an opinion on the appropriate fiscal stance to be included as a headline item in the Federal budget and MYEFO
As a comedian said: “If democracy actually worked, they would have stopped it by now.”
+1