Detox democracy through representation by random selection

Modern social science finds something similar. Participants in citizens’ juries almost unanimously report it as having been a very good experience in which they felt privileged to be asked to participate in and keen to give of their best in. ⁷ As it turns out, random selection of citizens for juries provides the ideal test bed for generating causal data about the effect of jury duty and there’s good evidence from the US that participating in just one jury is a powerful form of civics education producing subsequent increases in voter turnout of as much as 7% with that increase in the average being disproportionately from those with previously low voting turnout.

Antagonism and polarisation

Much of political science depicts democracy as an essentially adversarial process by focusing primarily on competitive elections -  Zsuzsanna Chappell

Modern liberal democracy operates in a way that would have pretty much horrified most of the architects of democracy in the 18th and 19th century. They warned gravely of the spirit of ‘faction’ infecting the polity, the spirit of faction is more or less institutionalised today. I remember as a kid thinking that having an official Opposition to the Government was pretty weird. And I still do. Of course I understand how and why and also the rationale for the party system which operates as a means by which voters can try to pick candidates by broad ideological sympathies. That puts them more ‘in control’ than backing their representatives ‘judgement’ — or so the theory goes. Moreover division and contest ideally serves to clarify and sharpen disagreement and that might help forge more considered resolution on the floor of the legislature — or so the theory goes.

Problem is that opposition for opposition’s sake is weird. There’s clearly an ideal balance between seeking agreement — which the legislature will always do in some form or other — and debating differences. And the problem seems to be getting a lot worse. People talk about polarisation in politics, but it’s a weird kind of polarisation, because the actual policy or even ideological differences between the parties is surprisingly small. Both major parties want a large state of at least a quarter of the economy, relatively free markets and regulation of clear market failures — for instance in environment and public and workplace safety.

Yet for all manner of reasons its usually good for Oppositions to make life as difficult as possible for governments (though I suspect this is truer for right than left leaning parties). We saw this in Australia in the years of Abbott’s leadership of the Opposition. In the US, even Republican voters think the Republicans were much less prepared to compromise to reach solutions — even though they thought they should. But it’s unclear how many changed their vote on a thing like that — in my experience people don’t tend to vote on such abstract things. This is their one chance to express their beliefs. See eg this report containing this table:

Indeed, US studies suggest that reality comes to be interpreted not through experience of the world but through party affiliation. Responding to the same report, Andrea Campbell, professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had this to say. “I was not surprised party affiliation influenced people’s opinions of the Affordable Care Act, but I was surprised that partisanship trumped personal experiences with our health care system. Personal experiences, like being denied health insurance for a pre-existing condition, have little effect on public support for the law. Instead, support is largely based on political party affiliation and beliefs about the likely impact of the law in the near future.”

Ideally democracies need both adversarialism and consensualism to function well, just as Aristotle and others championed the idea of mixing elements of different constitutions – aristocracy and democracy for instance. In her book Beyond Adversary Democracy, Jane Mansbridge contrasted Unitary versus Adversary Democracy. Unitary democracy focuses on getting to a compromise consensus – or near consensus position. As I’ve argued previously I think the beauty of the Accord was that it mobilsed the forces of unitary democracy to offset the forces of adversarial democracy sitting back in Parliament in Canberra:

“The search for consensus often identified politically viable means of making policy progress while addressing the concerns of major interest groups. And once policies had been broadly agreed, the partners to the process then helped sell the sometimes difficult messages that emerged like the need to rein in expenditure, reduce real wage costs, protection and means test benefits.”

Compare this with the way in which, in parliament, progress is constantly re-litigated wherever there’s scope for political advantage. The institutions of deliberative democracy — citizens juries and people’s chambers embody the dynamic of unitary democracy. As with a jury in a legal case, the task of the body is to make progress and if it can’t do so, everyone has failed. And progress isn’t some bare majority — which would be divisive — but a broad (if not necessarily unanimous) consensus. All the evidence I’ve seen of citizens juries backs this up. Participants almost invariably comment on their relief that they’re not presented with the self-righteousness of activists, but are rather discussing things with ‘ordinary people’.

Electoral campaigning as road rage

In many ways the impersonality involved in mass campaigning for elections, and the various media strategies to arouse interest and engagement encourages something akin to road rage. Media outlets stoke people’s contempt for others, their sense of entitlement and resentment towards others (even identifying individual people as hate objects). Politicians tend to be more circumspect about individuals, focusing instead on misrepresenting the policies and motives of their political opponents.

You know those occasions where you express or get close to expressing road rage only to find that your target is someone you know? You know how it gives you a quite arresting shock of recognition. What was I thinking? Well something similar occurs in the transition from adversarial mass democracy to the human scale of deliberative groups – even relatively large groups. (It’s probably one reason why the elite get on with each other and show such solidarity. They mostly know each other, bump into each other in the Captain’s Club, in the corporate boxes etc.) In addition to the anecdotal evidence I’ve presented above, Sally (1995) reports that “A meta-analysis of over 100 experiments found that face-to-face communication in social dilemma games raises cooperation by 40 to 45 percentage points. That’s huge!

Finally, mechanisms of sortition or selection for deliberative bodies at random were very often chosen precisely for their ability to insulate politics from the factionalism of the powerful. Thus Athens’ political mechanisms were self-consciously developed as antidotes to the ever present danger of Athens’ aristocratic families fighting with one another and/or plotting to re-install oligarchy. Likewise in Renaissance Florence and Venice selection of bodies by sortition was chosen to moderate rivalry between great families. As I have mulled these things over in my mind, it’s struck me that, of the one or two handfuls of great creative flowerings of civilisation, it’s rather remarkable that two to three of them (I’ll take Venice as a half of one) occurred in small places with substantial representation of people chosen by lot in government.