In Part 2a, I identified how indirect representation is insufficient on its own for governance in the 21st century. Legislatures have reached a nadir of trust from the citizens because they repeatedly fail to meaningfully address the demands for action on economic inequality, immigration, climate change, and other crises of the day (real or manufactured by propaganda machines). These demands are able to be made by citizens, in part, because the Internet and other communications technology have massively increased citizens’ access to information.
Our political system functioned (i.e. it could govern, it obviously was not just) when access to information was limited and managed by elites. Under that system, “public opinion” could be molded to win popular support for elite interests while political fights happened between different groups of ruling class members. The groups that could make organized demands on the government could be satisfied because the government could take action without worrying too much about punishment by the typical voter.
Now, elite formation of public opinion has been weakened by the Internet after being cracked by the political polarization of news and the 24 hour news cycle. In this environment, elites still have power to shape public opinion as the numerous propaganda channels of the Right demonstrate.1 However, organizations and individuals with truthful news, perspectives, or information2 that does not support the status quo, what I label legitimately subversive information, have many more outlets to share that information. Substack is one such example.
This has created an opening for participation in policy deliberation.3 Thus there are groups and individuals that are making new legitimate demands for change. But even if a government is responsive to these legitimate demands, as the Biden administration seems to have been, it has failed to win approval for their actions. Hence, before we talk about the deeper systemic problem with democracy, let’s talk about “deliverism”.
The problem with our legislatures and governance is not so much that the government fails to deliver and the people do not trust them for that reason. It is more indirect. Taking action will be subject to the mistrust that has built due to the repeated failures of the government and the exploitation and exacerbation of that mistrust by political entrepreneurs. Hence, although where the Biden administration has taken action it has often been approved of by the public, the vast propaganda machine and perverse ideology that has infected the Right in this country will strive to discount that moderate action as somehow corrupt. The Right cannot be disempowered through action alone because it is seen as adversarial action.
So long as our system relies on adversarial winner-take-all elections and discourse where we have teams we root for the problem will persist. The indirectness of political competition allows us to easily scapegoat and demonize our political opponents and not just the leaders (which may be justifiable) but other citizens for being malicious or foolish enough to support those leaders. It allows us to be narcissistically righteous without ever having to acknowledge that to change others’ perspectives we have to strive to understand why they form their opinions and not simply defeat them on the political battlefield.
People must be brought in and included in governance. The more inclusive peace negotiations are, the more long-lasting the peace and a democratic system is, typically, one way that said peace is maintained. Democracy is a kind of peaceful management of internal conflicts - an agreement to coexist and compete through the legitimacy of numbers and persuasion, rather than the legitimacy of arms. By analogy, it seems likely that the more participatory the democracy, the more sustainable it will be.
There are several means to make a system more participatory. To start, multiparty systems through more proportional electoral rules than the U.S.’s first-part-the-post single member district system include a larger diversity of interests and require policy compromise, and thus inclusion of more perspectives, to form governments. However, even with proportional representation systems, as in many European countries, the problems of mistrust in legislature and rise of nationalist populist anti-democratic parties are present. Although such systems are more participatory forms of indirect representation, proportional representation is only the best of a flawed democratic system.
The inability of indirect representative institutions, especially legislatures, is rooted in their nature, i.e. indirectness. This political system limits the level of participation in decision-making by design and the citizenry is educated enough that they can, in many cases, represent their own interests as or more effectively than a representative. In addition, a “rank-and-file” citizen may be better able to consider and compromise with the interests of their opponents than an elected official because the elected official is bound by party affiliation to represent their party’s interests rather than the “common good”. This is doubly so in the US system which gives ideologically-mobilized small groups willing to withhold their support great leverage over electeds.
Defining democracy in the Information Age, setting a new horizon for democratic peoples’ to aspire to establish, must leave behind indirectness as insufficient, a waystation to more profoundly living up to democracy’s core ideal, self-rule. Though perhaps necessary for large states struggling against other less democratic large states in international competition, its time is past. Clinging to it will only lead to disaster.
Democracy in the 21st century must adapt to survive by adopting elements of so-called direct and deliberative democracy. Direct democracy calls for citizens to be able to rule themselves and not through elected intermediaries. Deliberative democracy calls for greater discussion and genuine debate as a source of legitimacy rather than numbers alone.
A wonderful example of the fusion of these perspectives into a practical policy is Oregon’s Citizen Initiative Review. In Oregon, when a voter referendum gets enough signatures to go on the ballot, a random but demographically representative sample of voters are selected to gather for several days. They are trained on rhetoric and debate, then given presentations on the referendum question from independent experts, supporters, and opponents. Then they write a pamphlet approved by consensus of the best reasons to vote for and against the proposal which is then mailed to each voter in the state.
This institutional innovation solves two problems. First, it prevents referendums from becoming campaigns by well-funded corporate interests to use the facade of democratic legitimacy to pass a law opposed to the public interest. It defuses propaganda efforts by giving an independent credible assessment of the issue and tries to give the question a fair shake for people who do not have time or resources to consider an issue in full.
Second, it engages a select group of voters in civic education and participation and tells citizens that they too should take civic education seriously because they may be called next time. In an age where civic duty is not something we have a strong incentive to fulfill, this initiative invites citizens to do what Rousseau suggests all should do - imagine themselves as legislators.
The organization DemocracyNext has begun advocating for expansion of Citizens’ Assemblies such as the recent one on end of life care in France. Likewise, a few years ago a group of scholars and citizens extensively researched the appeal and value of “Citizen Cabinets”, which are effectively advisory Citizens’ Assemblies. Like in Oregon’s Citizen Initiative program, these groups bring together randomly selected citizens to debate and provide recommendations on a particular policy issue. Ideas like these should be more broadly experimented with and implemented.
Most interestingly is the new legislative institution that has been implemented in Belgium since 2019. There the residents of Ostbelgien, the German-speaking eastern district of the country, established a permanent “Citizen’s Council” of two dozen randomly selected, demographically representative Ostbelgiens who serve one and a half year terms in which they decide on questions for Ostbelgien Citizen Assemblies to reach answers to. The rest of Belgium recently followed suit by establishing advisory Citizen Assemblies and deliberative committees in the national parliament. Though the citizens are only advisory, the parliament is required to respond to their recommendations within nine months or explain why action has not been taken.
Imagine if such a system were adopted in other democracies and the assemblies were given greater power. For instance, if parliaments are to be enlarged, as many have advocated for in the U.S., instead of adding elected seats, they could add seats selected by proportional sortition. Imagine if we added 200 citizen representatives to the House. Such an addition of regular citizens could deliberate bills introduced by different sides and would force the elected legislators to make a direct case to this representative sample of the citizenry. It would cure the political paralysis plaguing our polarized polity while maintaining the power of political parties to set the agenda. In short, it could lead to legislatures governing in meaningful ways.
There is no silver bullet to the political turmoil and crisis facing “democracy”. But any proposal which does not consider how the technology and corresponding conditions of living have changed and responds to them is not serious. How we get information has changed. The demands we make of our governments have expanded not just because we are living in a moment of multiple crises but because we are aware of these multiple and overlapping problems. Systems of indirect representation simply cannot sustain in countries with digitally literate citizens. The system of indirect representation must transform to include more direct and deliberative self-rule.
For an excellent analysis of the relationship between Republican voters and the elite interests behind them mobilizing them, see Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson.
Or at least news or information that one believes is truthful and is willing to face evidence to the contrary.
In democratic transition theory, an opening of society, such as Glasnost in the late 1980s Soviet Union, often precedes a democratization, i.e. holding of fair elections. In this context, this opening means a renewed respect for freedom of speech and dissent. If we want to analogize, the Internet creates an opening of society that may lead to a greater democratization, i.e. a more inclusive democracy. Of course, as with traditional openings, democratization is neither inevitable nor necessarily permanent.