In 2016, Belgian cultural historian David Van Reybrouck wrote a provocative article titled “Why elections are bad for democracy” in The Guardian arguing that all democracies have taken a dangerous road by “reducing democracy to voting.” He further maintained that we have all become “electoral fundamentalists.”
The 21st century has posed a great dilemma for both the leaders and the voters. Voters seem to venerate elections but despise the people who they elect. And leaders are often seen wanting to vote the voters out.
Reybrouck has now written an equally provocative piece in Noema magazine under the title “Democracy’s missing link” where he is advocating a ‘preferendum’ whereby voters will be asked to analyse and prioritize 30 different proposals. They will have to exercise their choice among preferences like “strongly disagree,” “disagree,” “agree,” “strongly agree,” etc.
In recent years one can discern another trend. Interest in politics is growing but faith in politics is declining. Reybrouck sees a lurking danger of democratic autocrats grabbing power if liberal democracy can’t find mechanisms to empower the citizens.
Politics in many countries is becoming a vaudeville, a soap opera. And we know, in Italian opera, everyone dies in the end. Democracy is already paying a price in the form of institutional inertia and institutional vandalism.
The danger also comes from the emerging trend of what Italian writer Enzo Traverso calls “post-fascism.” In loose terms, post-fascism refers to what fascism will look like in the 21st century.
Today, many leaders are delivering a constant diet of drama to the public. Like soap operas, politics has become an addictive mix of the trivial, juicy and catastrophic. Populists are banking on their ability to create not just a drama, but a long-running drama. They know the power of a story in the age of social media. People live by the narrative.
Democracy is also facing a ‘fake it till you make it’ syndrome. As a 1968 song by American duo Simon and Garfunkel goes, “And I know I’m fakin’ it, I’m not really makin’ it.”
In politics, we see increasingly more spectacle and less performance. In most democracies today, deep democracy has become shallow but deep poverty is deepening. Even the American democracy has slid towards what Steven Levitsky calls “competitive authoritarianism.”
‘Dadaism’ is a movement in art and literature based on deliberate irrationality and negation of traditional artistic values. With an embrace of deliberate, irrational views and homophobic behavior, politics is witnessing what can be called “political Dadaism.”
The fringe element is no more on the fringe, it represents what can be characterized as ‘political punk.’ This class feeds on big lies, big enemy and big myth.
Socrates and Plato spoke of “noble lies.” Demagogues today may be indulging in reckless lies exploiting the voters as they know societies operate and function through a grand myth.
Representative democracy has fast become a “polyarchy.” A major deficit of representative democracy is the limited accountability of the political players and institutions.
There is a growing gap between citizens and state institutions leading to what American sociologist Theda Skocpol calls a ‘diminished democracy.’
Democracy is facing a new challenge thanks to what Martin Gurri calls ‘Revolt of the Public’ which many believe is a paradigm shift. Roger Berkowitz, director of the Hannah Arendt Centre, in New York wonders if liberal democracy can survive the rise of the public.
Reybrouck suggests that the voters be given two ballot papers, first with names of candidates and parties and the second with 30 different proposals. Preferendum, he believes, would enable voters to choose a list of “shared priorities” and their policy preferences while voting. It has one advantage. It will be far more difficult to manipulate. But can this work at the national level and in countries with large voters?
Citizens’ assemblies are now an accepted mechanism to solve multifaceted public issues. This ‘deliberative wave’ has now found wide acceptance. The OECD has collected evidence and data that support the idea that citizen participation in public decision making can “deliver better policies, strengthen democracy and build trust.”
Democracy needs institutional innovation. Yale University professor Helene Landemore has spent much of her career trying to understand the value and meaning of democracy. She favours a hybridization between representative democracy and open democracy.
Open democracy, she says, is about being “represented and representing in turn.” As she further explains, there is no stable “they” in open democracy, no political élite to resent; there is only a stable idea of “us.”
The engagement of citizens in political decision-making is a core element of open democracy. Citizens’ assembly alone guarantees a correlation between what citizens expect and what their political representatives decide.
Way back in 2009, the New Democracy Foundation, organized the Australian Citizens’ Parliament, in which 150 randomly selected participants deliberated for four days before presenting their proposal to Parliament.
Both governments and civil society organisations have taken the initiative in this regard. The state-supported citizens’ assemblies have been held in Canada and the Netherlands, while the Australian and Belgian cases are society-supported. Belgium has come out with an advanced quasi-institutionalized form of citizen deliberation.
It has a permanent citizen council in the German-speaking community and a permanent mixed parliamentary commission in the Brussels-Capital Region. Landemore stresses the need to reinvent popular rule for the twenty-first century. She has reconceptualized the principle of democratic representation by decoupling it from elections.
She favours direct citizen agency through voting in referendums and many other initiatives. Her views are in consonance with Athenian democracy.
But the question remains, can delegates to citizens’ assemblies drawn by lots ‘represent’ the citizens who had no role in selecting them? Many believe, deliberation too can’t belong only to the world of the parliament.
Landemore’s concept of ‘open democracy’ seeks to bring mass democracy and deliberation together in an alternative to electoral democracy, crystallized in the idea of an open minipublic. Rebrouck’s ‘preferendum’ and Landemore’s ‘open democracy’ may sound great on paper, but can they work? Weren’t universal basic income and universal leisure dismissed as utopian earlier? Democracy has a parallel in love. As Tennyson wrote, “it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved.”
(The writer is director, Institute of Social Sciences, Delhi)