Indeed, democracy isn’t real. It doesn’t exist, and never will. Democracy is forever destined to be a fairytale in a land of nowhere, a utopia we’ll never actually reach. Only democratization is really real, and only higher or lower levels of democratization can be said to exist.
Democratization Politics can thus never make reality of the utopian vision of a society governed by the people, but it can bring into existence the relative utopias that strive towards the attractor point of increased collective intelligence—the true north of democratic development.
Chapter 10:
EVOLVING DEMOCRACY
Given that representative democracy has hitherto been the most successful form of governance, the main task ahead is to attempt an enrichment of the representative form by means of introducing direct, participatory and deliberative democracy within limited settings.
This chapter is here to consider some pathways for such enrichments and some of the surrounding tools: the development of voting systems, uses of internet democracy, and Unger’s institutional experimentalism. We also take a look at what Democratization Politics can look like in practice.
Voting Systems and Internet Democracy
Even countries less democratic according to measures such as Freedom House can start from somewhere and build newer and deeper forms of democracy—even China can democratize its institutions, albeit from another starting point and through other paths than Western societies.
Democracy is not, as we observed, a binary variable. It is a graded scale pertaining to the level of collective intelligence within the systems of governance, the results of which can be measured by agreed-upon universal principles, and there may be different pathways to its development.
So we need to try new paths ahead for governance, until we find which forms prove effective and satisfactory, at which levels of governance, within which sectors, and according to which criteria. It is not a question of scrapping representative democracy and replacing it wholesale; it is a question of learning where today’s system can grow, how it can be refined, and how it can be deepened.
There are of course many paths ahead within each of the forms, many methods to explore within direct, representative, participatory and deliberative democracy. In deliberative democracy you have different ways of facilitating, different ways of delineating the topics discussed, ways to distribute speaking time and attentions, etc.; in participatory democracy you have different ways of letting people take part—in advisory functions, partaking in executive functions, sharing or rotating leadership roles, and so on.
When it comes to direct and representative democracy, you always need some kind of ballot, vote or election, and these can take on a number of different shapes, which have been explored by theorists of elections as well as in practice. For elections of representatives, the following systems all give different dynamics:
First past the post : You count the votes and whoever gets the most votes wins.
Ranked voting, “instant runoff” : Voters rank the alternatives, and then you eliminate the least popular candidate until someone has 50% of the remaining votes, and then they win. Used in Ireland and Austria.
Ranked voting, “Borda count” : Voters rank all the candidates, and whoever has the lowest score wins (you get a “1” if you’re someone’s first choice). Used in Slovenia and on some Micronesian Islands.
Ranked voting, “Condorcet method” : Run a theoretical election between each of the candidates, until one candidate has beaten all others based on their voter rankings. To date not used in any existing country.
Approval voting : Voters can check boxes for whom they approve of. Whoever gets most approval wins.
Score voting : Voters score the candidates on a scale; highest added score wins.
And of course, there are other possible variations. Each voting system produces different dynamics and different forms of fairness, just like it is with the classical distinction between majority vote systems and proportional votes. Some systems lead to more strategic voting (“my candidate can’t win either way”), some produce more compromises that have fewer strong supporters and so forth.
The point here is not to discuss the implications of the different ballot systems, but simply to point out that this is another arena within which experimentation of democratic development is possible.
In a similar vein, it should be pointed out that there are plenty of possibilities to explore digital forms of voting, decision making, participation and deliberation. The first idea that comes to people’s minds is usually that there could be an internet-run direct democracy, through which citizens are themselves asked to vote on different issues. In practice, of course, such a system would still need facilitation and some forms of representation, and it would likely be a poor form of governance as people would vote on many issues with little background knowledge.
Looking at our five suggested dimensions of a “true north” of democratic development (last chapter), it is only clear how a straightforwardly defined internet direct democracy might do some good in the first dimension. It would almost certainly be harmful to the second one, and its effect in the other three would be doubtful at best—just look down the list again and think:
Increased dispersion of leadership;
increased volume, complexity and efficiency of information processing;
increased accountability and balancing of powers, putting greater demands upon the verifiability of decision making;
a deepening and thickening of de jure and de facto participation and popular support in processes of decision-making and opinion formation;
the growth of democratic, egalitarian and multi-perspectival culture and values.
Again, the issue is not to envision one certain system to replace the current one wholesale, but rather to envision a path that lets us experiment with and enrich the existing system in a multiplicity of ways, so as to improve the legitimacy, quality, reach and efficiency of governance.
The point I want to make is that there is today—thanks to the help of online tools—a significant window of opportunity to experiment with new forms of governance. Public institutions must be established with the task of evaluating and developing these new forms, and to spread the best practices.
The research on internet democracy (or so-called “e-democracy”, electronic democracy) and the knowledge base about online deliberation and digital citizen engagement is actually quite large—the body of research and practical experience has grown immensely since the early 2000s. Within this tradition of research there are plenty of people with a deep background in social science, theories of communication, psychology and network theory.
There are some innovative thought-leaders such as Tim O’Reilly and Clay Shirky—who write about the emergent possibilities of participatory online tools, as well as the transformations of digital society at large—and there are academics who spend their entire careers researching these and similar topics, such as Martin Hilbert (but this field seems to remain within highly academic circles), and there are plenty of online tools out there, such as Loomio, Delib and GlassFrog, designed and marketed by countless companies, small and large. And there are—last but not least—so many projects of online citizenship polling, petitions, deliberation and citizen feedback from all around the world, usually at the local and regional levels of governance, from India to Denmark to the UK to California. And within party politics the Pirate Party (most famously the German one) has tried something they call “liquid democracy”, which is an early form of crowdsourced online politics, and the Italian Five Star Movement has had electoral successes by using simpler forms of online citizen activation. The EU Commission has shown significant interest in these issues, and public officials are generally positive towards these trends of deepening democracy by means of online tools.
Bottom-Up and
Top-Down
Given the strength and spread of these trends, why aren’t we seeing a major transition in terms of systems of governance happening around the world? I’d like to suggest, again, that these developments are up against too strong forces of social and political inertia inherent to the existing structures of governance for them to spread, take hold and begin a true journey of iterative improvement. It is simply too heavy, difficult and, in a general sense, “expensive” to shift the systems of governance for any rich plethora of small actors to succeed in doing so.
The sheer volume of people’s actions that have to be re-coordinated for a shift to be effected is simply too large. This is why we have yet to see an effective accumulation of knowledge about e-governance and implementations thereof; only a thousand loose threads and forgotten trails spread across the globe.
My suggestion is that the hitherto dominant bottom-up approach must be matched by a coordinating and centralized effort . After all, major infrastructure projects, such as high-speed rail services, satellite systems and public universities, rarely emerge solely through grass-root initiatives. Why should we expect a major update of democracy itself to emerge only through bottom-up processes?
We are hence left with what appears to be a paradox of developing the systems of governance: Any centrally planned top-down effort is likely to miss out on the complexities of everyday life and be built without real contact with human needs and experiences. They tend to be large, clunky and “fragile”, rather than flexible and resilient, as economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb put it in his famous 2012 book Antifragile .
But any small-scale bottom-up effort is likely to be drowned in the already existing and more pertinent structures of society. We must hence strive for a synthesis between the two: a proper metamodern “both-and”. There must be central planning which coordinates and strengthens a genuine multiplicity of experimental, iterative emergences, including local and private initiatives.
Free bottom-up emergence works fine outside such arenas as governance and basic infrastructure. On the free market and in civil society we see the growth of social media, citizen journalism, Open Data and all sorts of collective and collaborative processes of “Web 2.0”. There are even new shared forms of encryptions and accounting that allow for blockchain based crypto-currencies; things that may eventually fundamentally transform how finance works. All this is miles ahead of any corresponding development in the political realm. The best we have in the public realm thus far is perhaps the movement towards “open data”, which increases transparency and the ability of the public to use official bodies of information.
Despite the fact that the world is brimming with interesting and useful initiatives within deeper democracy and software solutions to this end, the high hopes of the cyber-utopians of the 1990s and early 2000s have hardly been met. In the midst of a hurricane of digital transformations of society, the political system has remained much like before the internet. This is a worrying inertia.
As long as the state remains passive in this field and its key agents make no substantive efforts to support these new experiments, to evaluate the best practices, and to spread and apply such practices, we are simply too far away from a tipping point where the current systems of governance start to give way to a wave of institutional innovation and renewal.
Institutional Experiments
The conclusion must be clear: an institutional experimentalism is needed, much akin to Unger’s ideas about “experimental zones”.
There must be instituted a central agency which helps to fund, develop, evaluate, as well as gather and share information about all forms of democratic innovation—be they digital tools, new voting systems, panel and deliberation programs, decision feedback systems, pathways to citizen involvement, or conflict resolution and mediation efforts: everything that aids the quality, efficiency, reach, transparency and fairness of governance.
This is the essence of Democratization Politics: The idea is that the state itself and its democratic governance in many layers, from the local to the transnational, becomes a developmental project, continuously discussed and improved upon.
On a state level this would mean the establishment of a Ministry of Democratization , a governmental department with its own organizational structure and its own minister. Just like all governments today have ministers (or heads of department) of healthcare, education, culture and so forth, we need a minister of democratization in all countries that have reached a certain stage of development.
The Ministry of Democratization is the hub in a larger de-centralized multiplicity of ongoing democratic experiments. All cities, municipalities and counties should be allowed a certain budget for trying to improve upon their democratic system through a variety of projects invented at the local level; projects built upon civil society, solutions purchased from companies within the field and so on. These projects experiment with new forms of elections within delineated decision processes (different ballot systems etc.), new forms of citizen feedback, new ways of enriching the representative system with subcategories of direct votes, participation and deliberation.
The ministry should be responsible for supporting, in part funding, evaluating and documenting these projects and spreading best practices. Hence, there is a cycle of experimenting with new forms of governance, evaluating and pruning these, and continuously updating actual governance on all levels. When enough knowledge, experience and expertise has been gathered—not least in the form of an international plethora of innovative democratic tech companies—larger experiments can be conducted on state and even transnational levels.
This is Democratization Politics: It’s bottom-up-top-down and top-down-bottom-up.
It builds upon what is actually existing and real to the people involved, and it takes the potentialities and visions seriously. It works both to revolutionize the political system, and it builds upon a slow, conservative development which respects the culture and values of people on the ground. It works both with short-term projects that solve tangible here-and-now problems, and it works on a long-term scale with cycles of decades or longer of updating the institutional code of society.
As democratic society is designed today, it is simply not built to withstand the sheer rapidity, force and disruptiveness of social and technological change. We have states which can change their laws as society evolves—but we do not have states with built-in mechanisms at the meta-level, where the way we propose laws and make decisions is itself continuously developed . We hold democratic governance as our most cherished value, and yet we fail to take it seriously enough to ensure that democracy is updated and rejuvenated in pace with the development of a postindustrial, digital and globalized world.
A little crutch from biology might be appropriate here. Denis Noble, a biologist and Professor Emeritus of cardiovascular physiology at Oxford, has written a book called The Music of Life . He argues that living systems self-organize not only in a reductionist bottom-up manner, but that there are a multiplicity of processes which emerge at higher levels of self-organization, which also create feedback processes on lower levels of emergence. A cell, can, for instance, include emergent properties which affect chemical processes at the molecular level, and so forth. In other words, if we are to believe this old Brit, there is good reason to think in a bottom-up-top-down and top-down-bottom-up manner when seeking to understand how a whole system emerges and remains healthy.
Regardless of how we rate Noble’s understanding from a natural-scientific perspective, I certainly feel it may be the right way to think about democratic development from the micro interactions between two people, to the governance of the world-system. Below is a model borrowed from Noble’s 2006 book:
Figure: Adopted from Oxford cardiology professor Denis Noble’s 2006 book “The Music o
f Life”.
Would it be so strange if the emergence of governance could work in a corresponding manner? Could there be a deeper coherence, a music of social life? It does make sense that higher levels of governance can and should have a lively interaction with the lower levels, and that lower level emergences should in turn enrich and reshape the higher levels.
Where to start? We would need, then, to work at the middle level —the
level of institutions—in order to spur a deeper development across the whole spectrum of governance, from the local to the global.
Think about it—all latter-day social science points to the simple fact that the quality of a state’s institutions has a larger impact on the stability of a society, its economic development and the wellbeing of its citizens than any other factor. Why is Costa Rica doing okay and Venezuela not? Institutions. Why is Denmark a highly functional and competitive economy and Greece not? Institutions.
Macrosociology, the sociology of large structures, cultures and classes, has largely been a disappointment. Microsociology, understanding processes of interaction, socialization and alienation, has also largely failed to produce strong, predictive theories. Meso sociology, however, is different. This boring grey mouse of the social sciences, which looks at technical details of institutions and organizations, has proven to be a goldmine: Not only do the structures of organizations reveal why companies thrive or stagnate, but the institutional frameworks of states seem to explain more about societies and human lives than almost anything else.
Would it be a bad idea if late modern society would expend perhaps half a percent of its GDP on ongoing serious experiments of governance? Upon continuously cultivating and updating its own institutional framework? Probably not. Would it make sense to educate a number of new professionals who are not only democracy experts, but facilitators, communication coaches, counselors, organizers, organizational developers, democratic software developers, theorists, evaluators and democratic project designers? Could we “make an effort to make an effort” to improve democracy itself, until one day, perhaps, it looks completely different from when we started?
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