Evolving Democracy
The Citizens' Assembly process has got me thinking more deeply
about what democracy really means. "Democracy" is
literally "rule of the people". Democracy, simply, is about how we
make decisions as a group.
In a small group of people, democracy naturally means that
everyone gets to say what they think ought to be done when faced
with a collective decision, and register their support or
opposition to ideas that have been
proposed. How much support an idea requires to be
accepted depends on the particular idea and the traditions of the
community, but is logically somewhere between 50 percent (majority)
and 100 percent (consensus).
If some members of the community are wiser, others will want to
defer their voice in collective decision-making to them, and they
will become leaders. Is this still a
democracy? Of course, since the leaders speak for
others only with their consent. If a majority of the
group Disagrees with a decision taken by the leaders, they can
overrule that decision by speaking up and reclaiming the power they
had deferred to the leaders. When the leaders use force or the
threat of force to maintain their power, "rule of the people" turns
into "rule of some people" -- democracy becomes dictatorship.
In a group of people larger than a small village, the line
between democracy and dictatorship gets more blurry.
For democracy to function in a large group, there needs to be a
more structured system to manage the potentially huge amount of
information representing each person's ideas and
opinions. Traditionally, it has been necessary to
ignore nearly all of that information -- there was simply no way to
bring it all together in any useful way.
To solve this problem, we've relied on the idea that it is
natural to defer one's power to a community leader who represents
one's opinions. So, every few years, we ask all members of the
group, "Who do you want to speak for you in the collective
decision-making process?" The way we ask this question
and how we process the answers is precisely what the Citizens'
Assembly is going to decide for the province of BC. But
I think it is important, before addressing this specific issue, to
put it into its broad context.
Representative "Democracy"
Our system of elected representatives compromises a lot of the
values of small-group democracy:
-
The right to speak for oneself, to submit one's ideas and vote
on the ideas of others, is sadly absent. This is the
entire basis of small-group democracy.
-
The right to defer one's voice to chosen leaders is severely
hampered by having a very limited choice of representatives at each
election, none of whom might properly represent one's opinion, and
by the fact that the representative one actually voted for is most
often not elected.
-
The right to revoke one's support for a representative or change
representatives is extremely limited by having elections only every
few years.
-
The right to override one's representative on a particular issue
is nonexistent.
Actually, very few of the democratic values of a small group
remain in our large-group representative system. Many
observers have pointed out that what we have is in fact an "elected
dictatorship". One hundred years ago, this severely
compromised solution was the best we could do to solve the
information management problem of representing
veryone's ideas and opinions in the collective decision-making
process. Elected
dictatorship has proven to be "the worst form of government, except
for all the others," a lesser among evils.
But now, if we think about it, we have far more
choices. We are living in an information age where we
have developed techniques for managing billions of times more
information than even existed a hundred years ago. And yet we have
not even begun to seriously apply those techniques to democracy,
arguably the most important information management problem of
all. This is sad, but understandable, since we are
after all governed by dictatorship, albeit an elected
one. Any kind of dictatorship will always be concerned,
first and foremost, with maintaining its power to rule over the
people.
New Directions
How can the four democratic values I listed above be applied to
our society, so that we may properly call it a
democracy? The answer is to design a system to collect
each individual's proposals, register their support or opposition
to the proposals of others, allow them to delegate their voice to
the proxy representative of their choice, and thereafter withdraw
their voice from or override their proxy on any issue.
Such a system would likely rely heavily on computers for data
storage and processing. However, even those without
access to a computer would still be able to use it as a more
powerful democratic tool than anything available today.
How would any decisions every be made with this
system? Simple. Whenever over 50% of citizens supported
a proposal, it would be adopted, and if its support slipped back
below 50%, it would be repealed. The participants on
the system could raise the threshold higher than 50%, put in lag
times, or introduce other measures to make the system behave the
way they wanted it to by submitting proposals to alter the system's
behaviour.