We need to reset democracy

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[Applause]

everyone

i want to talk to you today about

democracy

about the struggles that it’s

experiencing

and the fact that all of us together in

this room

might be the solution but before i get

on to that

i want to take a little detour into the

past

this is a picture from athens or more

specifically

it’s a picture of a place called the

pinnix which is where about two and a

half thousand years ago

the ancient greeks the ancient athenians

gathered to take all their major

political decisions

together i say the ancient athenians

in fact it was only the men uh actually

it was only the

three resident property owning men

but with all those failings it was still

a revolutionary idea that ordinary

people

were capable of dealing with the biggest

issues of the time

and didn’t need to rely on a single

supposedly superior ruler

it was you know it was a way of doing

things it was a

political system it was you could say a

democratic technology

appropriate to the time

fast forward to the 19th century when

democracy was having another flourishing

moment

and the democratic technology that they

were using then

was representative democracy the idea

that you have to

elect a bunch of people gentlemen

in the picture here all gentlemen at the

time of course

you had to elect them to look after your

best interests

and if you think about the conditions of

the time the fact that it was impossible

to gather everybody together physically

and of course they didn’t have the means

to gather everyone together virtually it

was again a kind of democratic

technology

appropriate to the time

fast forward again to the 21st century

and we’re living through

what’s internationally known as the

crisis of democracy

what i would call the crisis of

representative democracy

the sense that people are falling out of

love with us as a way of getting things

done

that it’s not fundamentally working

and we see this crisis take many forms

in many different countries so

in the uk you see a country that now at

times looks almost ungovernable

in places like hungary and turkey you

see very frighteningly authoritarian

leaders being elected

in places like new zealand we see it in

the nearly 1 million people who could

have voted

at the last general election but who

chose not to

now these kinds of struggles these sort

of crises of democracy

have many roots of course but for me one

of the biggest ones is that we haven’t

upgraded

our democratic technology we’re still

far too reliant

on the systems that we inherited from

the 19th and from the 20th century and

we know this because in survey after

survey

people tell us they say we don’t think

that we’re getting a fair share

of decision-making power decisions

happen somewhere else

they say we don’t think the current

systems allow government to genuinely

deliver on the common good

the interest that we share as citizens

they say we’re much less deferential

than ever before

and we expect more than ever before and

we want more than ever before to be

engaged in the big political decisions

that affect us and they know

that our systems of democracy have just

not kept pace

with either the expectations or the

potential

of the 21st century

and for me what that suggests is that we

need a really significant

upgrade of our systems of democracy

that doesn’t mean we throw out

everything that’s working about the

current system because we’ll always need

representatives to carry out some of the

complex work of running the modern world

but it does mean a bit more athens

and a bit less victorian england and it

also means

a big shift towards what’s generally

called

everyday democracy and it gets this name

because it’s about finding ways of

bringing democracy

closer to people giving us more

meaningful opportunities to be involved

in it

giving us a sense that we’re not just

part of government on one day every few

years when we vote

but we’re part of it every other day of

the year

now that everyday democracy has two key

qualities

that i’ve seen prove their worth time

and again in the research that i’ve done

the first is participation because it’s

only if we as citizens

as much as possible get involved

in the decisions that affect us that

will actually get

the kind of politics that we need that

will actually get our common good

served the second important quality

is deliberation and that’s just a fancy

way of saying high quality public

discussion

because all very well people

participating

but it’s only when we come together and

we listen to each other

we engage with the evidence and reflect

on our own views

that we genuinely bring to the surface

the wisdom and the ideas that would

otherwise remain scattered

and isolated amongst us as a group

it’s only then that the crowd really

becomes smarter than the individual

so if we ask what could this abstract

idea this everyday democracy actually

look like in practice

the great thing is we don’t even have to

use our imaginations

because these things are already

happening in pockets around the world

one of my favorite quotes comes from the

science fiction writer william gibson

who once said the future’s already here

it’s just unevenly spread

so what i want to do is share with you

three things from this unevenly spread

future that i’m really excited about

in terms of upgrading the systems of

democracy that we work with

three components of that potential

democratic

upgrade and the first of them

is the citizens assembly and the idea

here is that

a polling company is contracted by

government

to draw up say 100

citizens who are perfectly

representative of the country as a whole

so perfectly represented in terms of age

gender ethnicity income level and so on

and these people are brought together

over a period of weekends

or a week paid for their time and asked

to

discuss an issue of crucial public

importance

they’re given training on how to discuss

issues well with each other

which we’ll all know of course from our

experiences of arguing online if nowhere

else

is not an ability that we’re all born

with innately most the pity

in the citizens assembly people are also

put in front of evidence and the experts

and they’re given time to discuss the

issue deeply

with their fellow citizens and come to a

set of consensus recommendations

so these kinds of assemblies have been

used in places like canada

where they were used to draw up a new

national action plan

on mental health for the whole country

a citizens assembly was used recently in

melbourne

to basically lay the foundation of a new

10-year

financial plan for the whole city so

these assemblies can have real teeth

real weight the second key element

of the democratic upgrade participatory

budgeting

the idea here is that a local council or

a city council

takes its budget for spending on new

buildings

new services and says we’re going to put

a chunk of this up

for the public to decide but only after

you’ve argued the issues over carefully

with each other and so the process

starts at the neighborhood level

you have people meeting together in

community halls

in basketball courts making the

trade-offs

saying well are we going to spend that

money on a new health centre

or are we going to spend it on safety

improvements to a local road

people using their expertise in their

own lives

those discussions are then pushed up to

the suburb or ward level

and then again to the city level

and in full view of the public the

public themselves

makes the final allocation of that

budget and in the city where this all

originated

puerto rigre and brazil are placed with

about a million inhabitants

as many as 50 000 people get engaged in

that process every year

the third element of the upgrade

online consensus forming

in taiwan a few years ago when uber

arrived on their shores

the government immediately launched an

online discussion process

using a piece of software called polis

which is also

coincidentally or not coincidentally

what the ancient athenians call

themselves when they were making their

collective decisions

and the way polus works is it groups

people together

and then using machine learning and a

bunch of other techniques it encourages

good discussion

amongst those participating it allows

them to put up

proposals which are then discussed

knocked back

refined until they reach something like

80 percent consensus

and in the taiwanese case within about

four weeks

this process had yielded six

recommendations for how people wanted to

see uber regulated

and those almost all of them were

immediately picked up

by the government and accepted by uber

now i find these examples really

inspiring

people sometimes ask me why i’m an

optimist and

a large part of the answer is these

kinds of innovations

because i think they you know they

really show us that

we can have a kind of politics which is

deeply responsive

to our needs as citizens but which

avoids

the peril of the threats to human

liberties the threats to civil liberties

that authoritarian

populism descends into they show us that

even though we live in what looks like

quite a dark time

there are things that act a bit like

emergency lighting

guiding us towards something better

and although these are all ideas from

the western tradition

they can also be combined with adapted

by

indigenous traditions that also value

turn taking in speech

and consensus decision making

and the thread that binds all these

traditions together

is essentially a faith in other people a

faith in people’s ability

to handle difficult decisions a faith in

people’s ability to come together

and make political decisions

intelligently

in the polis example we see that

government can be agile

and nimble in the face of tech

disruption

in the participatory budgeting we see

that we can build systems that are

disproportionately used by poor people

and which deliver infrastructure that is

of better quality than the traditional

systems

in citizens assemblies the experts who

observe them

time and again say that in those good

conditions

people’s ability to listen to others to

engage with the evidence

and to shift from their entrenched views

is consistently

astounding and that’s a really

really hopeful finding because you know

i think we live at a time

where you see right around the world

huge suspicion of other people of other

citizens

huge doubts about whether people are

really able to bear the burden of

decision making

that democracy places on them

but if you’re worried for instance about

whether

a lot of people out there you know are

misinformed

or fallen prey to online propaganda

what better way to push back against

that

than by ensuring that they’re placed in

forums

forums like the new england town hall

meetings shown here

forums where they have to come face to

face with other people or at least be in

close virtual contact

where they have to justify their

opinions have to deal

with the evidence and are encouraged to

step away

from their prejudices

the canadian philosopher joseph heath

says

that rationality our ability to make

good decisions

isn’t something that we achieve as

individuals if we achieve it at all

as something we achieve in groups our

best hope of rationality

is each other or to put the thing

a different way the problem with

democracy

is not other people it’s not other

citizens

the problem is the situations in which

they

in which we all have been asked to do

our democratic work

the problem is the outdated democratic

technology that we’ve all been forced to

use

and so what these examples show to me

the reason i find them

inspiring is that i think they

demonstrate that if you get the

situations right

if you get the technology upgraded then

actually the things that we do

when we come together as citizens can be

astounding

and together we really can build a form

of democracy that’s genuinely fit for

the 21st century

thank you very much

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[Applause]

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