Mandela neither demanded nor received an entirely unconditional devotion; in power he expected his compatriots to behave as assertive citizens not genuflecting disciples
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 Deliberative Democracy: what and why?Elsewhere on openDemocracy
Professor James Fishkin of Stanford University, the mastermind of deliberative polling, kicks off dLiberation's coverage with a look at the thinking behind deliberative democracy, and the ways in which such a method of public consultation may be able to help the European Union both address its democratic deficit and its current ongoing stagnation: There is a basic, and recurring problem of public consultation-if we ask elites, we have deliberation without political equality. If we ask the people directly, we can have political equality but usually without deliberation. Can we have both... can we have a method that represents everyone under conditions where the people can become informed and can think through difficult issues? There is the outline of a solution lying in the dust of history. In ancient Athens deliberative microcosms chosen by lot made important public decisions... last year, we brought a modern version of this idea, which I call Deliberative Polling, to Marousi, a suburb of Athens, thus returning - for a weekend - Athenian democracy to Athens after 2400 years. The microcosm chosen by lot embodies political equality because every citizen has an equal random chance to take part in a process in which each person's views count equally... It embodies deliberation through carefully-balanced background materials, moderated small group discussions, plenary sessions in which the questions from the small groups are answered, and then a final confidential questionnaire. The deliberative poll results are then contrasted between the poll results on first contact and those at the end of the process... There are three basic problems that the deliberative poll responds to... all of these apply to European issues to a high degree. 1) Rational ignorance... If I have only one vote in millions, why should I pay attention to the details of public policy or the positions of parties in elections? My individual vote will not make much difference - and we all have more pressing things to do... 2) Non-attitudes or phantom opinions... When people have not thought about an issue, they rarely want to admit it, so instead of saying don't know, they randomly choose an alternative. In the US, people offered answers to the question of whether they approved of the Public Affairs Act of 1975 - but there was no Public Affairs Act of 1975... it was fictional. Then the Washington Post decided to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the 1975 Public Affairs Act, and asked about its repeal - telling half the sample that then President Clinton wanted its repeal and half that the Republican Congress wanted its repeal. They got quite different answers from each group - but of course it never existed in the first place... 3) Even when people talk about politics and even when they consult the media about it, they tend to talk to people like themselves and they tend to consult sources that are congenial to them and that they agree with... In the case of Europe it is obvious that the French talk to the French, the Germans to the Germans, the Bulgarians to the Bulgarians. There is no European-wide dialogue at the mass level. People often have little in the way of opinions about complex European matters and each citizen has one vote or voice among half a billion citizens... The Deliberative Poll offers a solution to these problems. For those in the sample, it overcomes the problem of rational ignorance - each person knows that his or her voice counts, as rather than one in millions they now become one in fifteen or so in small discussion groups, made up of about 400 or so respondents to the questionnaires...We give people a reason to become informed... When we did the first British deliberative poll a woman came up to me and said she wanted to thank me. Her husband was in the sample... and in thirty years of marriage he had never read a newspaper. But she said that once he was invited to this event he had started to read every newspaper every day - and he was going to be much more interesting to live with in retirement... We are replacing non-attitudes - or very much off-the-top-of-the-head impressions of sound bites and headlines - with real opinions, considered judgments formed under transparently good conditions, from balanced materials, good information, responses from experts and leaders in balanced panels, to questions from the small groups... And unlike most political conversations, people will have come in contact with competing points of view. When we did the Danish deliberative poll before the Euro referendum, the country was split almost evenly between yes and no factions. We found that the yes people knew the yes supporting information the no people knew the no supporting information. But when we gathered them in randomly assigned small groups, the yes people learned the no supporting information and the no people learned the yes supporting information... At the end of the day, people got the essentials of the argument on both sides.... As a social scientist, I believe that we need to experiment with different modes of democratic consultation and use social science to ensure that processes are balanced and representative. Only with experimentation can be surmounted the dilemma: elite processes can be deliberative but unequal, plebiscitary processes can be equal but not deliberative.... In my own country, there was only one state that had a referendum on the US constitution - that was Rhode Island... The federalists objected to the idea, saying that a referendum would not be deliberative and people would not be motivated to learn the competing sides of the argument. Rhode Island went ahead - it voted down the US constitution and, in a little known chapter of history, Connecticut threatened to invade from one side and Massachusetts from the other... Rhode Island changed its mind, had the required convention - and joined the union... Elite processes, constitutional conventions had deliberated and produced one answer, plebiscites another. My view is that we need to supplement the tool kit with modern improvements on an ancient Greek idea - and broadcast the deliberations of a representative microcosm of the people themselves... It turns out that in every case we have done it, the people have shown that they are very smart... Why not for Europe? James Fishkin's exercises are interesting. They would make excellent school projects or could be adopted on a wide scale for a more interesting form of opinion polling. However, before we talk about hypothetical ways of forming opinions and weeding out special interests, let us look at a more tried and tested one: the democratic system currently used in all European member states.
We have a party-based democracy in which parties stand for political positions, allowing all voters to have their say on the political direction they wish their country to take, through elected representatives. These representatives work to satisfy the demands of the electorate, not simply because it is their obligation/stated platform, but because of the fear that voter dissatisfaction will lead to defeat in future elections. As for those voters that are uninformed and uninterested, they are self-selected out of the equation by not voting.
Obviously, not a perfect system. There will be those who vote based on ignorance, there will be politicians who do not deliver on their manifestos, but it has worked surprisingly well for hundreds of years and delivered great improvements in the standards of living on the European continent.
Let's compare this to the situation at European-level politics.
*The directly-elected parliament does not have Europe-wide political parties that present common platforms for European policy.
*The Commission is only very loosely accountable to the parliament.
*The decision-making process is dominated by national governments, whose mandate for election in their native countries very rarely focuses on what policies they aim to pursue in Europe.
Could it be that the current stalemate in Europe is due to the lack of good, old-fashioned democracy?
Could it be that our global disillusionment is because the process of increasing globalisation and interconnectedness are administrated by the UN, a body that has been congealed together from necessity and the horrors of war rather than democratically planned, a body with the minimum of enforcement mechanisms and democratic accountability?
In my opinion, we need to introduce good, old-fashioned, tried-and-tested democracy into the European and global levels of government, not struggle to break our deadlock by reinventing the wheel.
The biggest problem is people who choose to become politicians, do so for the worst possible motive ‘their Egos’ and thus make the worst politicians.
I think MP's, like a jury members or lottery winners, should be selected at random from a database of all the electorate.
The selection should be a balanced by age, gender and geographic location.
No one would sit for more than 5 years, and each year 20% replaced by a new intake.
Parliament, excluding that year’s intake, would elect its ministers. Thus no minister could be in office for more than 4 years.
One of the major issues concerning the poor participation within the democratic process of both the EU and the UK (my home country) comes partly, as highlighted by Professor Fishkin, from the polarisation of opinion regarding issues within society with a diminishing level of modalities for ideas exchange available to the majority of the population.
This has been further exacerbated by the “professionalism” of the political sphere, especially within the UK, where presentation, sound-bites and spin have largely taken the place of open discussion and debate on even the most minor of issues within and affecting society at large. Resulting from this, there is a growing sense of extreme apathy and disinterest in the political decision making of the country
This is combined with the ever increasing disenfranchisement of the “youth”, basically anyone under the age of 30 in the UK. This process started back in the 1980’s and quickly gathered pace to a point where at present our children and young adults are seen, and largely feared, by the rest of society and the establishment as a type of 5th column, hell bent on the destruction of society. A separate class of almost non-citizens has been created that started as lager louts, teenage pregnancies, hoodies and feral gangs roaming our streets has been created. Where they are not only largely excluded from participation within what is left of our democratic processes but also legislated against to control their movement and participation within the wider spheres of society.
As a result of this increasing apathy of the older population and the effective exclusion and criminalisation of the children what little popular participation within the political life of the UK is all but dead.
If this dire situation is to be reversed and the once vibrant participation of the citizens of the UK within the political decision making rekindled, then outline for deliberative polling of Professor Fishkin could be an excellent start to this process. The active engagement of randomly selected citizens within this process given the task of input into either local or national decision making based on informed and supported consultation could prove to the last best hope for democracy for the UK and maybe the EU as well.
Why is it that when Britons discuss the flaws of democracy in the UK there is so little talk about the first-past-the-post system? As in America, this encourages a two-party system rather than a diversity of parties and political representatives for all sections of the community. It encourages the two parties to be as similar to each other as possible in order to "poach" each other's vote, with the Democratic party in America now presenting anti-abortion, pro-gun-lobby candidates and David Cameron's Conservative party becoming almost indistinguishable from New Labour.
Could this lack of democracy be part of the problem?
As for the discussion about randomly selecting politicians rather than electing them, I must disagree. If a politician didn't want to be a politician, they would not be afraid of losing the next election. That would take away all their motivation to please the electorate. And although your belief that politicians are some monstrous breed totally different from "the man in the street" is touching, aren't you familiar with the phrase "all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely"? Sure, there are plenty of politicians that I may personally dislike, but replacing them with apathetic, inexperienced and unrepresentative (what makes you think a randomly selected person will represent the wishes of the people anyway?) citizens to be manipulated by the civil service and to disregard the will of the people does not look to me like any kind of improvement.
As far as hoodies, thugs and fifth columns, sure, it would be good to have a greater sense of community responsibility. I would support a program of community work (visiting retirement homes or hospitals, cleaning parks and similar jobs) as a mandatory part of the school curriculum alongside PE. Why should children's physical fitness be more important than their community spirit?
But as far as the democratic system goes, I haven't yet heard anything that strikes me as an improvement to liberal democracy and proportional representation. We need more of it in the world, not less.
I think Prof. Fishman has put his finger on the critical "attention span" issue that affects any complicated deliberation in a democratic body of any size. The idea of randomly tagging people and handing them responsibility for something creates an interesting dynamic. I wonder how many people "step up" to the challenge (as a percentage of those "tagged")?
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fredgohlke said:
Wed, 2007-09-19 22:06
Remaining Candidates Level Electors Selected Unselected 1) 5,637,378 1,879,126 3,758,252 2) 1,879,126 626,375 1,252,751 3) 626,375 208,791 417,584 4) 208,791 69,597 139,194 5) 69,597 23,199 46,398 6) 23,199 7,733 15,466 7) 7,733 2,577 5,156 8) 2,577 859 1,718 9) 859 286 573 10) 286 95 191 11) 95 31 64CONCLUSION The idea presented here will be considered radical. It bears little chance of adoption because it protects no vested interest. The only way such a process will ever be adopted is if the concept can be made a topic of discussion, particularly among students interested in achieving a righteous government. Respectfully submitted Fred Gohlke