I recently
had the chance to read the essay of David Van Reybrouck ‘Against elections’
(‘Tegen verkiezingen’, in its original title). As far as I can see it has not
yet been translated in English, which is a bit of a shame, since it poses some
pressing questions on the current functioning of our democracy, as well as its
future.
The
starting point of the essay is quite comprehensible: there are two vital criteria for exercising
‘power’ (in the democratic sense, that is): efficiency and legitimacy. Most Western democracies are in crisis on
both these criteria. Elected powers are decreasingly regarded as the safeguard
for an efficient organization of society; and in many cases the very basis of
their power is questioned. Result? Ever fewer people are participating in the
elective process, and those that do tend to vote in an increasingly volatile
way.
This is
what Van Reybrouck calls the ‘democratic fatigue syndrome’, and according to
him this fatigue mainly results from the fact that we tend to assimilate ‘democracy’
with ‘elections’ all too often.
Elections,
however, are a relatively new phenomenon, at least in relation to democracy.
When we look at what is vastly considered the birth-state of democracy (the Athens
of the ancient Greeks), we see that this democracy was to a big extend based on
a lottery. A lottery among a small selection of citizens, surely, but still,
this had some considerable advantages. For instance: since the ‘power’ of
decision takers was by definition limited in time, they were more inclined to
take measures that reached further than their tenure of this power (instead of
just taking short-term measures to make sure to get reelected).
But this
system of lottery has been with us ever since. The leaders of the city-states
of Venice and Firenze were selected through a combination of lottery and elections.
Philosophers like Montesquieu and Rousseau even warned that a system based on elections
would ultimately benefit the aristocracy. This probably explains why the lottery
method disappeared altogether from the constitutions of the US and France after
the revolutions: the people writing these constitutions had nothing to gain
from a system based on lottery… It leads to the somewhat bewildering conclusion
that the system of elections was never meant to be democratic in the first
place!
But things
are changing. We see an increasing amount of initiatives based on ‘participative
democracy’. In Texas (above all places!) a decision about investments in wind
energy originated from the feedback of its citizens; in Japan the population
took part in a decision about the pension system; and in Iceland the
inhabitants contributed to the development of a new constitution.
These
initiatives (and multiple others, most of them can be found on the website www.participedia.net) were not merely referenda,
but genuine efforts to take decisions on a collaborative basis. This could lead
to a a complete new model for our democracies, such as the very sophisticated ‘multi-body
sortition’ method developed by Terrill Bouricius.
This is not
necessarily the ‘ideal’ state of a democracy –arguably there is no such thing.
But what’s for sure is that a more participative form of democracy is preferable
over an election-based one, and as the increasing number of examples show, the
idea is catching on.
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