What are these people missing? Why is this not a fruitful way to think about and discuss this topic? I think there are three points that must be stressed.
They don’t see that these four forms of democracy aren’t coherent preexisting systems set in stone which can “be instituted” at any given point. Rather, they are each a general principle which must continuously be developed in exchange with the other ones. All existing democracies incorporate at least some of these elements. Hence, it’s not a question of “implementing” one “system” or another, but rather of pushing the boundaries for democratic development and cultivating new and deeper layers of governance. Within each of the four forms of democracy there are of course also many different shapes and ways to go about, for instance different ballot techniques as we shall briefly discuss shortly. So it is a question of continuous enrichment of the existing system by means of delimited experimentation, systematic evaluation and of an ongoing discussion regarding which criteria we should use to measure a “better democracy”. Such quality markers could be better decision-making (that decisions actually have the intended effects), higher collective intelligence, more public psychological ownership of the decisions made (and higher compliance to rules and regulations), efficacy, transparency, degree of inclusivity, and other criteria that may yet need to be invented and agreed upon.
People don’t recognize that these four forms of democracy—the possibilities for them—cannot be accepted or dismissed with eternally and universally valid arguments. They are, of course, context dependent. The context within which they emerge includes the value meme demographics of a society, the available technological tools of communication, the degree of cultural democratic development, the amount of accumulated human experience with a certain kind of system, the surrounding bureaucratic framework, the strength and stability of the state, the kind of economy that must be governed, the size of the governed society and the availability of social and psychological innovations of dialogue and decision-making—and so forth.
People don’t recognize that there is an inherently logical relationship between the four different forms of democracy, and that they do in fact make up a coherent pattern of a greater whole. This is a pattern that includes both a developmental directionality and a manner in which the four forms counter the inherent weaknesses of each other.
Okay, hopefully you can see that it’s not a simple matter of being “for” or “against” any of these democratic forms. This incorrect way of thinking shuts down the entire discussion and any fruitful development of a deeper democracy. Either we’re invested in a “pies in the sky” model that never gets tested in real life and has any number of problems once we try it, or we simply get stuck with the current status quo and fail to make adjustments that are both possible and necessary, because we don’t see “how that system would work”.
Interconnecting the Four
Let us now then zoom in on the last of the three points made above. What are the interrelations between the four forms of democracy?
First of all , there is a progression from the most basic and fundamental form to the most advanced and complex one . Direct democracy is the foundation of all democratic decision-making, ensuring that the governed have a say in the decisions made, which is the basis of all democratic legitimacy.
Representative democracy puts some of this decision-making into the hands of smaller groups of people who in turn are elected by means of direct votes.
Participatory democracy creates paths for non-elected people to reenter and enrich the decision processes and execution of decisions made, which thus builds upon an established representative democracy.
And deliberative democracy creates venues for deeper discussions through which people’s participatory understandings themselves can be enriched and more aptly coordinated. Deliberative democracy builds upon a foundation of the participation of relevant stakeholders.
Secondly , you can see that this progression also plays out as a historical sequence of how democracy and democratic theory have developed . Direct democracy, naturally, is the basic form that evolved already in ancient Athens and to which we all return whenever a group of people say “let’s give it a vote”.
Representative democracy grew through various forms of republicanism in antiquity and early modernity, taking stronger and more systematic hold as representation grew after the 1688 Glorious Revolution in England and corresponding developments elsewhere—becoming fully manifested after the French and American revolutions.
Participatory democracy has existed only in a full modern form in some socialist contexts, such as during the Spanish Civil War 1936-1938, in which the Spanish Republican anarchist factions were governed with participatory principles. And then it played a significant role during the utopian leftwing surges and intellectual currents of the 1960s.
And deliberative democracy has bloomed chiefly as an academic concept, being taught at universities since a few decades back. In its concrete forms it exists only on a micro scale, within experimental companies, local citizen inclusion projects, committees and so forth.
Thirdly , there is an inherently logical relationship between each of the four. Direct democracy is of course democracy “in and of itself”, its purest form, which is hence the elemental substance of all democratic governance. The fundamental measure of all consensual and contractual governance structures must ultimately be that the governed govern.
But this is of course always impossible in practice: Not only are there minors and others who cannot partake as equals, but as soon as the coordinated political unit is above a certain size, this requires representation in order to reduce the costs of managing the complexity of decision making. In an advanced economy with significant division of labor, it simply doesn’t make sense to have everyone expend much time and effort making decisions about the minutiae of all public matters.
The larger and more complex the economy, the greater the need for representative democracy; for politicians, civil servants, parliaments, cabinets and parties. Representative democracy can also curtail some of the good old stubbornness of the people, letting those with stronger arguments win in central arenas. The fact that direct-democratic Switzerland only got the vote for women in 1971 (the last canton resisted until 1990 and had to be forced by court decision), reveals the fact that even the most necessary adjustments can be held back by the social inertia of the population. Rousseau famously idealized the Swiss mode of governance, but in practice it often tilts the political game in a conservative rather than a progressive direction, quite unlike what Rousseau romantically imagined. (This being said, the Confederation of Switzerland still has much to teach other countries in terms of effective democratic governance.)
The larger the political unit, the more complexity must be managed by means of representation—and hence the less viable direct democracy becomes. This creates an increasing distance between the governing processes and the constituency itself; i.e. there is by necessity a growing gap between the citizens and their leaders. Today it is common to talk about this phenomenon as “the democratic deficit”; a discussion held particularly in regard to the EU and other forms of transnational governance. The distance between a G7 summit and ordinary citizens, for instance, is simply so vast that it hardly can be called democratic in any real sense.
Hence, the role of participatory democracy is to re-conquer these representative structures, subjecting them to the wills and perspectives of relevant stakeholders and “common people” without bogging it all down with the impossibility of mass votes on each and every technical question. Participatory democracy is the process of enriching the cold machinery of bureaucracy and professionalized politics with warm hands, reconnecting the governing bodies to the governed.
And de
liberative democracy is the practice of refining the processes through which many perspectives are formed and coordinated, so that participation can be fruitful and relevant. The more stakeholders are included at every level of decision making, the greater the risk they clog up the relevant decision-making processes and in effect hinder the actions of one another. Hence, the issue emerges of creating smoother processes through which thoughts, perspectives and actions are coordinated on a deeper and more complex level—the need for thoughtfully designed, curated and facilitated processes of deliberation. Three researchers, Zelma Bone, Judith Crockett and Sandra Hodge, suggested in 2006 the table on the next page to distinguish between debate, dialogue and deliberation. [78]
SHAPES OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE
(adopted from Bone, Crockett and Hodge, 2006)
Debate
Dialogue
Deliberation
Compete
Argue
Promote opinion
Seek majority
Persuade
Dig in
Tight structure
Express
Win/lose
Exchange
Discuss
Build relationships
Understand
Seek understanding
Reach across
Loose structure
Listen
No decision
Weigh
Choose
Make choices
Seek overlap
Seek common ground
Framed to make choices
Flexible structure
Learn
Common ground
I think it summarizes well how deliberative democracy aims for a distinct form of communication: not just “debate”, where the issue is to “win”, not just “dialogue”, where the issue is to “understand one another” but deliberation , where the aim is to create something new together and to find out how to do what’s best given the circumstances.
If we put this table in a wider developmental context, we can see that we go from a pre-democratic state of settling issues by force, to a direct democratic vote where people just arbitrarily take a majority stance, to a debate within central arenas of representative democracy, to a dialogue of participatory democracy, to the deliberation pertaining of course to deliberative democracy. There is an inherent developmental sequence here, paralleled in part by the value memes (modern debate, postmodern dialogue, metamodern deliberation).
Of course, the later stages of this developmental sequence require higher levels of interpersonal trust and are more suitable for handling issues of increased complexity—in which it may be difficult to delineate your interest from mine, or even to define and weigh my very own interests. We’ll get back to the issue of generating deeper trust under Gemeinschaft Politics.
The point we need to see now is simply that deliberative democracy facilitates the listening, learning and understanding processes that make participation possible; and participation makes representation legitimate; and representation makes democratic governance manageable; and direct voting makes democracy legitimate in the first place. Deepening deliberation is key to what I call “co-development”, but deliberation must be used in harmonious tandem with the other forms of democracy.
The fourth and last connection between the four forms of democracy is that they each come in degenerated and pathological shapes, each constituting a distinct kind of tyranny . An important element of why each form of democratic governance can be derailed is that necessary balances with the three other forms fail.
Direct democracy was of course critiqued already during antiquity by Plato and others for its way of creating a crude majority rule, a tyranny of the majority. Naturally, there is no reason to assume that the majority position is always, or even very often, the best one. This tyrannical degeneration is echoed in authoritarian communist regimes with a “dictatorship of the proletariat”. Such regimes generally claim to be a kind of direct democracy, as the Soviet system did to a significant extent. There is thus a super-concentration of power (with no division of powers à la Montesquieu or Locke) and massification of party membership, with no division of powers as “the people” are thought to rule by decree. In practice, of course, a small group or single leader can snatch the reigns, as Napoleon did. As the communist rule progressed, the lack of proper mechanisms of representation meant that information feedback processes were bottlenecked and systemic imbalances grew. All of this harkens back, of course, to Rousseau’s famous words: “We will force you to be free!”
Authoritarian capitalist societies like Singapore, Egypt or Pinochet’s Chile—or in our days, to some extent even China—lack even this pretension of being a “people’s republic”. A small elite simply claims to represent the country as a whole and that they know what’s best. This representation is decoupled from any direct democratic basis, which means that it lacks any democratic legitimacy. This doesn’t in itself mean that its governance must be unsuccessful—just that it may be difficult to develop deeper forms of democratic self-organization, as these societies are necessarily built upon frail monopolies of power.
Fascist “corporativism” that grew in Mussolini’s Italy is a society organized around professional categories, industry interest groups, or a modern equivalent of medieval “guilds”. This can be said to be a perverse form of participatory democracy: If you base governance upon member participation, but with no direct vote and no effective representation mechanisms, people become deeply involved but still have few means of curbing tyranny and misuse of power. So you can get a lot of people to coordinate their actions very intensely for a while, but the lack of both democratic legitimacy, power balance and representation will ensure that the system has low social sustainability. Fascism, and corporativism especially, thus constitute a deranged form of participatory democracy.
Pathological versions of deliberative democracy have yet to emerge on a larger scale—the history of the 20th century doesn’t give us any examples of a “deliberative tyranny”, after all. But we can certainly see derailed attempts at deliberation in smaller “progressive” organizations, which easily take on smothering ideals about “sensitivity”, “humility”, “listening” and so forth, to the extent that people get stuck in complicated and icky social relations while striving for an impossible consensus, accusing one another of being passive aggressive and so on. Because co-development and deeper deliberation is such a powerful attractor as society progresses into a more complex, postindustrial and global order, we are bound to become more and more acquainted with the pathologies pertaining to deliberative democracy and its particular and yet largely unknown forms of tyranny. To be sure, it will have something to do with subtle transgressions of the personal integrity of people, overstretched subtle nudges and manipulations, and the kind of social-psychological mechanisms that can play a part in “group-think”.
Because we need so much deliberation, because we are compelled towards co-development, we must face the darker sides of deliberation. The logic of this progression—from direct, to representative, to participatory, to deliberative democracy (and then back again in different combinations and iterations between them)—points in a certain direction of increased capability for co-development and complex self-organization of society. But it also portends that new and subtler kinds of tyranny and oppression may emerge during the 21st century.
And new sources of oppression can emerge where we least expect it: in the circles most committed to democratic ideals and to deepening democracy. When everyone is committed to the process and to developing their own positions, the divisions of party politics can break down and hence new and subtler concentrations of power and new methods of manipulation can emerge.
What has been said thus far can be summarized in the table on the next page:
> FORMS OF DEMOCRACY
Direct
Representative
Participatory
Deliberative
Basic role
Basis of democratic legitimacy
Manages complexity and issues of scale
Re-introduces stakeholder perspectives
Facilitates the coordination & development of perspectives
How complex?
Least complex
Second least complex
Second most complex
Most complex
Developmental stage
Ancient governance, smaller units
Modern governance, larger units
Critical re-appropriation of modern governance
Making critical appropriation possible in practice
Pathology
Tyranny of the majority, communism
Distant and unaccountable bureaucracy
Fascist corporativism
Subtle smothering, manipulation and group-think
There is a deep connection between these democratic forms of governance, and not any one of them is in-and-of-itself “the best”. The issue is rather that the different forms connect to each other and create a coherent whole, and that the developmental possibilities of any given system of governance must be continuously evaluated and developed.
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Democracy can never be a question of arriving at the best deal once and for all. The terms of governance and political participation must remain open to continual renegotiation to be considered truly democratic, and only through processes of further democratization can the faith in democracy be kept alive. Democracy, it’s not a thing; it’s a process.
Nordic Ideology Page 25