3 ways to upgrade democracy for the 21st century Max Rashbrooke
Transcriber:
(Māori) Kia ora koutou, everyone.
I want 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 onto 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 Pnyx,
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.
Actually, it was only the free,
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 this
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 one 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
and our government
genuinely deliver on the common good,
the interests 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 will 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 we’ll actually get
the kind of politics that we need,
that we’ll 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 its 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 system
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, a hundred citizens
who are perfectly representative
of the country as a whole.
So perfectly representative
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,
more’s 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 state
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 center,
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,
Porto Alegre in Brazil,
a place 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 Polis 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 time, in this 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’re 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 better quality
than the traditional systems.
In citizens assemblies,
the experts who observed 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.
It’s 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.
(Applause)