We need to reset democracy
[Music]
[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
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]