What is common to all democratic systems, whether ancient, present or future, is that they are circular processes driven by participation. They consist of at least five stages:
- Agenda-Setting.
- Proposal Formulation.
- Decision.
- Implementation.
- Evaluation.
In the first stage, something is noticed in society that is set on the political agenda. It may be a concern someone is experiencing, a change in the outside world, or an opportunity for improvement of some kind. This stage is characterized by awareness-raising and problem formulation.
In stage number two, ideas and suggestions are formulated on how what was previously put on the agenda can be solved by doing another way in the future. It is proposals that challenge the existing condition, called “status quo”. It could be tax rates that should be updated, an amendment to a law or the construction of an infrastructure project that is proposed to be started.
In the third stage, a decision is made as to whether the new proposal should apply or whether to continue as before.
In stage number four, the new decision is implemented in society. The resources required are allocated and the authorities and bureaucrats responsible for implementing the action get to work.
In the fifth stage, a follow-up of the action in the fourth stage is made. It is evaluated whether the updated tax rate, the amendment of the law or the construction of the infrastructure project solved the task as intended. If the outcome became as intended then society have a new status quo to maintain and the process starts over with the next point on the political agenda. If it didn’t, the matter is sent back to stage number one again for a new process.
Just as sustainable economies will need to be circular, so too will sustainable democracies need to be circular.
All of these five steps need to be used in every democratic society, but, one can object, can also be used by a single dictator in a dictatorship.
That’s absolutely right.
In order for this decision-making process to be democratic, or at least as democratic as possible, it must meet (or preferably even fulfill) five democracy criteria to the highest degree possible. These are:
- Equal voting rights in the final decision.
- Unlimited and equal opportunities for effective participation.
- Enlightened understanding.
- Control of the agenda.
- Full inclusion of all those who are subject to the political decision.
Why is this so and why these specific criteria? This is because if these criteria are met, the decisions will be perceived as legitimate. If the criteria are met in full, everyone who is subject to the political decisions will have had equal and unrestricted opportunities to influence them. They will all have had exactly the same say and if anyone of them had come up with a better idea, they would have had the same, and unlimited, opportunity to have their own proposal tested.
This means that there is no injustice in the creation of the decision that one can refer to, and which therefore can be used as an excuse to not follow the decision. Those included in democracy (everyone) feel a moral obligation to follow what is decided.
If the decision is legitimate and morally justifiable, it also means that the state does not have to use as much of its monopoly of violence to enforce it.
This is the whole basis of the theory behind what a democratic system looks like. In fact, it is not more difficult than this. On top of this, one can weave a lot of philosophical layers to, other ways, describe benefits and advantages of democracy. So many has done ever since Aristotle’s days. One can also see that in the innermost and indivisible kernel of democracy there are absolute requirements for a number of individual freedoms, such as freedom of expression, which all have to be entitled to without distinction of any kind. On top of it all, there can also be laid epistemological arguments for democracy (epistemology is the study of the nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality of belief) which points to the fact that democratic processes simply lead to normatively better and true decisions. This is good, because there are those who think that an expert rule would be the very best. Then it is nice for them to know that all of us who are subject to the political decisions are the real experts. We will return to why this is so in a little while.
The task is simply to design each of these five stages in the process so that they, when applicable, follow, or fullfill, as many of the five criteria of democracy as possible. Along the way, we can also see what philosophical and epistemological arguments we can add, and what individual freedoms will be needed, in order for the democratic process, driven by participation, to work as well as possible and include as many as possible, at as equal conditions as possible.
Finally, we will also see what the citizens themselves want when it comes to a democratic system. Because there is no point in designing a perfect solution that no one wants.
1. Agenda-setting.
The question seems almost rhetorical, but still has to be asked: Who has the best knowledge of how society works and what in our community that may need to change?
The answer is, of course, the citizens themselves. These are the people who live and work in society and are undoubtedly the most prominent experts in their own lives. They know, from first hand experience, exectily how, among other things, the school and the health care systems work, how certain traffic rules are complied with and the effects of the Employment Protection Act. Therefore, it is important that there are effective channels for each individual citizen to call attention to an issue. Some citizens of the community are also extraordinarily knowledgeable or involved in certain activities and therefore have special knowledge of different subjects. They can be teachers, doctors, judges or other experts on different things and therefore it is so important that they can be heard.
Agenda setting is largely synonymous with criterion number 4 – Control over the agenda. Criterion number 3 – Enlightened understanding also fits in, because those who themselves are part of society can after all be said to have knowledge and understanding of their own and their immediate situation. Criterion number 2 – Unlimited and equal opportunity for effective participation and number 5 – Full inclusion of everyone who is subject to the political decisions is of course applicable.
How then can this first stage in a democratic process be provided to best meet these criteria?
For starters, of course, freedom of speech is essential. Freedom of speech does not come by itself and cannot be taken for granted. Not even in a country like Sweden. The opposite to freedom of speech is, of course, censorship and there are some who believe that their opinion is censored when it does not receive the dissemination that they themselves think it deserves and there are also some who will subject themselves to self-censorship.
Those who have opinions that contradict democratic basic principles have challenges in getting their opinions disseminated in established news channels because those who convey news do not want to appear bad, unscrupulous or unmoderated. This allows alternative media to emerge to meet that need. It also means that alternative media are assessed with another source-critical yardstick. On the other side of the political scale, people often censor themselves to escape the hatred, persecution and threats against themselves and their family from the undemocratic side.
Citizens benefit most from news media that delivers interesting and relevant news with Journalistic ethics and standards intact. Citizens’ task must therefore to always be, regardless of the sender, source critical.
When it comes to politics in the field of tension in the left–right political spectrum, Sverker Lindström, in the report The Money Behind Social Policy (in Swedish), investigates how much extra-parliamentary power that, more or less openly, is invested by the various political elites to influence the Swedish political agenda. The report is published by LO, The Swedish Trade Union Confederation, and the Social Democratic think tank Arena Idea and therefore gives you both a good opportunity to gain some insight into the extra-parliamentary influence work and to train your source-critical skills.
Who, then, are key players when it comes to agenda setting in today’s society?
Today, it is the political elites, the political parties, newspapers and other media that decide which information should be spread more widely in the public. Since the battle of the agenda is the one that shapes everything else that happens in political life, this is where the great resources are invested. One can see how the Swedish politician week in Almedalen has grown year by year. It is in these contexts that the thoughts of new hospitals, more expensive than the 828 meters high Burj Khalifa in Dubai, are planted by those who will one day build them. Any demands or wishes on budget-record-breaking hospitals rarely come from citizens
The individual citizen has long been insignificant in the competition, but on social media, like the Arab Spring or Taiwanese Sunflower Revolution, appeals from concerned citizens gather large groups.
With the freedom of the press, a printer (or copier), an individual citizen can certainly express himself freely, but in order to have debate article published on a debate page, it is required that the piece passes the debate editor who is the gatekeeper deciding what should be done publicly or not. These gatekeepers are often recruited from the political parties or the elites’ think tanks.
This means that there is much to be done to strengthen citizens’ opportunities to put their own proposals on the political agenda. Local, municipal, regional and national. In fact, it is only at EU level that we Swedes find a truly citizen-friendly function to capture suggestions from us citizens. It is called the European Citizens’ Initiative. There, all EU citizens can come up with proposals and back other initiatives that have already been submitted.
Having this kind of opportunity for initiatives at all territorial levels in Sweden would be a necessary and good complement to the situation we have today. Then our democratic system would meet the democracy criteria to a much higher degree.
2. Proposal Formulation.
In this stage too, we can imagine that citizens could have a more advanced position. This is sometimes referred to as crowdsourcing in modern language. It is a way to take advantage of the collective intelligence and cognitive diversity that is actually found only in large groups of people. So besides the criteria for democracy: 2 – Unlimited and equal opportunity for effective participation, 3 – Enlightened understanding and 5 – Full inclusion of all those who are subject to political decisions, we can also put epistemological arguments for democracy.
One such argument is that of cognitive diversity (or the Hong – Page theorem: Groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers av Lu Hong och Scott E. Page)
It says that cognitive diversity is more important for the production of smart collective decisions than individual ability. “Cognitive diversity is the difference in how different people will approach a problem or question” as Hélène Landemore writes in the book Democratic Reason – Politics, Collective intelligence and the Rule of the Many. It denotes the variety of perspectives, interpretations, solution models and methods for predicting what effect a particular solution can have. This means that it is actually always better to have a deliberative exercise with a group of people with a cognitive diversity than a group of smart people who think alike.
A manager I once had expressed it: “It’s good that you say you disagree, because if two participants sit in a meeting and think alike, then one of them is redundant.” Political science professor Bo Rothstein, who we will return to later, has said on the same theme: “Just talking to those who think like yourself is the general recipe for getting really stupid.”
Nor can you know in advance what qualities or experiences a group of people will need to solve a particular problem. Only using trained experts in a certain field can be a way to stay in the old tracks of the old school. In fact, it may in retrospect prove that a conversation was needed between someone who knew how her grandparents dipped candles, a person who nursed drug addicts in Finland and a third person who had never been a golf caddy to spark the idea of a new and smarter power grid should work. Since this is impossible to know in advance, as inclusive deliberation as possible is the best way, in addition to better meeting the democracy criteria, to find new and better proposals as well.
This illustrates why randomness is a much better selection method for a deliberative assembly than any other selection method.
Today it is mainly the political elites with the political parties who make the proposals on how to address the social problems. Often with ideological or populist motives and driving forces. In practice, this means fairly homogeneous groups of people driven by ideology, prestige, power cravings and loyalty to a political elite. This is unnecessarily far from a democratic ideal, which, after all, is within the reasonable limits.
The Swedish public inquiry system has long had an important function as broad, public, investigations have been set to find solutions to various societal problems. In recent times, however, public inquiries have generally received ever narrower directives. A public inquiry can now be commissioned to develop solutions for a decision that has already been decided.
One might also think that since the state is so concerned that the crowdfunding (taxation) works as well as possible, it would appear better if it cared as much about crowdsourcing working as well as possible.
3. Decision.
This stage is the one that usually attracts the most attention from those who want to develop democracy. It may have to do with it being surrounded by some drama and that the decision is so clearly a crucial moment. Therefore, many with direct democratic ideas are focused on exactly how the voting itself should be brought about and who should vote.
But in fact, it is at this stage that the least happens.
In a democracy, you obviously use some type of majority decision. If most people want to keep to the status quo, that’s what you do, if most people want a change according to what is proposed, then they decide to do so. If we are to turn to the democracy criteria again, the first 1 – Equal voting rights in the decisive decision is almost synonymous with this third stage. Criterion 2 – Unlimited and equal opportunity for effective participation, 3 – Enlightened understanding and 5 – Full inclusion of all those who are subject to political decisions also appear to be highly relevant.
Here, too, there are arguments that points to the fact that there are mechanisms that make democratic decisions better and smarter decisions. One of them is the Miracle of Aggregation and another is Nicolas de Condorcet’s Jury Theorem.
The Miracle of Aggregation.
This is, of course, not a miracle at all. The name comes from the phenomenon getting its name before it got its explanation. In experiments, it had been found that if enough people try to estimate something, Florida’s orange harvest during a season, or the weight of an ox when it has been skinned and cut, then the group’s average estimate comes extraordinarily close to the correct answer. The most common explanation for this is that it is simply a statistical phenomenon that comes from the fact that one, even relatively small, group located on or near the correct answer is large enough to guide the whole group to the correct answer as long as all the who are wrong when they overestimate or underestimate the actual result, are just as wrong and therefore neutralize each other’s deviations. This means that since we cannot choose in advance who will prove to have the right answer and only ask them, we can ask enough people and still get the right answer.
Condorocets Jury Theorem.
This is, roughly, how Hélène Landemore explains the theorem in Democratic Reason:
Given the following conditions: (A) People are generally better at making choices between two alternatives by using their intellect than by flipping a coin, and (B) they are making their choices independently of one another:
Out of ten voters (of which each have a 51% probability of choosing the right alternative in a yes or no question), a majority of six of these ten people will have a 52% chance of being right.
For a group of 1000 people, a minimum majority of 501 people have almost 73% chance of being right.
If the group gets bigger than that, then the majority’s chance of being right, will be approaching 100%.
(There is another premise in the original theorem, which of course applies to a jury, that one should choose according to one’s true beliefs and not according to that would benefit one’s self, but it is not relevant in a context of democracy where it is entirely legitimate to choose what’s best for oneself. Anyone interested in math can find out more about the theorem itself here.)
This is just the purely mathematical part of it. We can also speculate in that the people in the group have more than just the least possible probability of being right and that the majority after a vote will be greater than just the smallest possible.
Then only the question that remains is whether people really make better decisions with their intellect than they would if they flipped a coin. Well, what would happen if you, instead of all the hundreds of decisions that you make on an ordinary day, would act randomly all these times instead. Tomorrow for example. It will surely be a very different day. (Please don’t do that!)
Today, the decisions are formally made on political issues in the Riksdag and in municipal assemblies and regions. In practice however, those who vote are told by the respective party’s management how to vote. This means that both of these epistemological features are completely out of play. That’s a pity.
(In the case of the budget-record-breaking hospital built in Solna, an examination says that it was a something called choise blindness which was largely behind the political failure. Based on that actual outcome, one can suspect that choise blindness actually can produce worse results than the flipping of a coin can do.)
With this we have been able to show that it is better if many more are involved and make the decisions than just the handful who say how the 349 brave souls in Parliament should press their voting buttons.
Ideally, they should be as many as 1000 people and they should make their choices independently. Since all our preferences should weigh as much alike as possible, the group’s views should be as similar to the population as a whole as possible. They should be representative of all citizens and include widely different lifestyles, opinions and experiences in order to benefit from the cognitive diversity that we raised earlier. They also need to have relevant knowledge of the proposal they are considering.
It is extra good if those who make the decisions also are empathetic and have the ability to take future generations of people into account, and those who live in the immediate area too, who will also be affected. Only allowing people whose temporal horizons never are more than four years away to make decisions can only result in short-term gains for themselves and long-term tragedies for the rest.
Political decisions are therefore too important to be left to politicians only.
4. Implementation.
Everyone knows this, of course, but we have to mention it anyway to make this study complete. In order to execute what has been decided, you usually have a chosen Government, and sometimes a President, who will carry out and lead the job itself. You can have an organization with authorities and bureaucracies. In smaller territorial units, you may have a mayor or a chairman of a municipal council who is responsible for the activities that you have decided. In the hierarchical bottom of the bureaucracy are street level authorities such as teachers, police officers, judges, firefighters and civil servants at Migration Boards, the Tax Agencies and so on in regional and municipal operations. In society, of course, we also have the ordinary citizens who are also expected to follow all decisions made. To some extent we are all in this way involved in implementing.
It turns out that the result is ofter poor. Ordinary citizens are generally law-abiding and we are many who pay the tax as we should but when it comes to how governments are governed, there is great dissemination of outcomes.
In fact, political scientist Bo Rothstein, who has researched the subject, has called implementation research for “misery research and the pathology of the social sciences” and found that it is very uncommon for decisions to be fully implemented in reality. This despite targeted actions against government officials and bureaucrats such as carrots, sticks and motivating ceremonies such as kick-offs, conference weekends, lavish campaigns and stunts with printed balloons.
Implementation “from top to bottom” often does not work because the message is distorted in a kind of whispering game on the way to the individual administrator or authority. Middle managers in the hierarchy sometimes prioritizes differently and it is not unusual with individuals who can not or simply do not want to do what have been decided.
Therefore, in addition to top down governance, bottom up (!) and network governance is tried. Network governance often means appointing national and regional coordinators for the task. The Swedish Alliance governments Reinfeldt I and Reinfeldt II appointed 32 national coordinators during their terms of office. Sweden is now crammed with coordinators.
Since almost nothing turns out the way it was supoposed to and all controling, documentation, administration and following-up make the state apparatus ineffective and cost increasing, a Swedish public inquiry has recently been launched to produce what is called a trust-based governance. The major disadvantages of trust-based governance is that it is next to impossible to comprehend for an ordinary mortal (even though the Danish organization OAO explains it quite well here), and may fit badly into the five stage desicion model.
But what is then that strange power that can make this problematic implementation step work?
It’s the legitimacy stupid!
As we said at the beginning, one of the unique features of a functioning democratic process is that it effectively generates legitimate decisions.
It is the value of legitimacy we are aiming at by constantly trying to meet the five criteria of democracy.
It is the legitimacy that causes citizens to accept and abide by the laws that are established and pay the taxes that are to be paid. It is exactly the same legitimacy that should make the Government and all government officials to do the same. The moral obligation that causes citizens to follow a genuinely democratically decided decision must also make those in the state apparatus follow it. Otherwise, of course, the law enforcement agencies must intervene. An official cannot simply deviate because everyone is equal before the law. No one stands above the law. Where the legitimacy ends, the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force persists.
The public power is exercised under the laws, as it is stated in the Swedish constitution (Regeringsformen).
5. Evaluation.
This is the last stage in the process and really ties it all together into a circle. In this stage all citizens are included just as in the agenda setting. The actual outcome of governance is measured with the sensory power of more than ten million people in all places in our community. Did it turn out the way we expected?
But how about the future then?
The democratic system of the future will be exactly what we make it. If we continue to vote as we have done so far, we will get more, and more, of the same. The political elites who now have power will of course rather see that we continue to distribute the political power between them than seeing us taking the political power ourselves. But it is actually a choice that we make ourselves.
Our unique advantage is that we are so many. In Sweden we are a population of just over ten million people. At the same time, only about 4 per mille(!) of us holds any political power between the elections.
It’s like a little ant sitting on an elephant’s back, telling it what to do. If the elephant was only aware of the strength it had, it could easily shake off the ant or ignore it.
Every four years, a small, small gap is open for us who wants to get into the system. It is so small that the only thing we can get is a small, small envelope with only one ballot in.
But together we have several million ballots, and the path through that small gap is the one we have to take.
What do the voters want?
When scientists have asked voters how they want democracy to work, they say that they do not want it to work like it does now. The electorate have very low confidence in the political parties and there are plenty of voters who do not think that politicians handle tax money in a good way and that politicians can be both power hungry as well as incompetent and corrupt.
At the same time, citizens do not want to decide everything themselves. One can understand that too.
Because, on average in a country like Sweden, you make something like 1500 decisions at a national level, 1000 decisions in the region where you live and 1000 decisions, per year, in your municipality. This means that there are about 10 decisions in 10 widely different questions that you, your spouse or partner, your grandchildren, their grandmother, the car mechanic down on the corner, etc. should familiarize themselves with, understand and decide on each day. Many decisions come many at once and, as you know, the Riksdag has closed for three months over the summer. As a consequence, some weeks there will be hundreds of decisions to be made.
The hours of the day will not suffice. With what is called liquid democracy, and which is marketed as an intermediate between direct and representative democracy, those who are most engaged may, at most, pick out one voting per week in a subject that they are extra interested in and themselves vote in. But that inevitably means that we give away more than 99.86% of our political power to delegates we were forced to choose, and that we have no idea what decisions our votes are used for. We also do not know if, to whom, or at what price our votes are being sold.
Liquid democracy means you get the pleasure of having your own voting button in your hand in a voting where other super delegates may have hundreds of thousands or millions. No equal voting rights in the decisive decision. No unlimited and equal opportunity for effective participation. No enlightened understanding. No legitimacy. Nothing.
The result of liquid democracy is you have virtually no political power nor anyone to make responsible for the desicions afterwards. Maybe you don’t even have any ordinary general elections left so you can opt out of the liquid democracy.
When the voters are asked, they say that thay want the decisions to be made by empathic, uncorrupted and competent decision makers who make the decisions that they themselves would have made in their place. Democracy should preferably be like a Stealth aircraft that is not visible on the radar but always is there. Voters’ opinions should govern without them having to engage too much. Democracy should work but not appear.
This means that we must think in new and different ways.
Folkstyret.
Folkstyret is a democratic party. If Folkstyret is voted on by the citizens into a decisive assembly, the Folkstyret will forward each proposal to 1000 randomly selected persons. They receive information about the proposal and then respond to what they think about it on a five-point scale. Folkstyret finds out the statically normal view of the proposal, the one which most people can agree with, and then votes accordingly in the decision-making assembly. Each time a person in the population gets a question about what they think of a proposal, they also have a chance to say if there is some other issue they want to bring to the political agenda or if they want to back up any other proposal that someone else has put forward. These proposals are sorted in order of popularity and converted by Folkstyret’s elected citizens’ representatives into motions.
Folkstyret has two built-in “auto-no” votes, which means that Folkstyret automatically votes against proposals that are not approved by the Law Council. This means that proposals that are contrary to the Constitution, are discriminatory, restrict our individual freedoms or are not congruent with other legislation cannot be implemented with the help of Folkstyret. Thus, Folkstyret cannot be used to dismantle democracy by, otherwise, democratic procedures. The second “auto-no” is triggered if a proposal or a vote has been manipulated so that Folkstyret is not able to produce a legitimate foundation for the vote. For example, if the time given is too short or if someone is trying to force a decision too far away from the citizen (that the principle of subsidiarity is not followed).
All in all, this also means that Folkstyret only needs to have one single election promise in all general elections: to follow their own statutes.
This solution benefits from the fact that we are many in the population. This also means that each randomly selected group is large enough and versatile enough to be able to take advantage of all the epistemological benefits of democracy and that it is sufficiently representative to reflect the real and thoughtful opinion of the population on the issue. At the same time, and because we are many millions of inhabitants in the country, each of us will, on average, be selected quite rarely. Folkstyret gives the whole democratic system and its decisions more legitimacy, perfectly reflects our views on each issue while not “disturbing” us in our ordinary lives. Exactly the Stealth Democracy that citizens have stated they want.
Since people with political power tend to handle other people’s money a little lavishly, the citizens’ direct involvement in the decisions will mean fewer hospital projects that ranks high above Burj Khalifa in Dubai on the list of the world’s most expensive buildings. More of the tax money will instead be used for things that citizens demand.
Those of us who want to get involved politically can do so as much as we want in influencing public opinion, but we all have just as much political power in the decisions.
Since Folkstyret does not come up with any policy of its own, but is merely a pure and undistorted channel for citizens’ opinions on various issues directly into the deciding assembly, Folkstyret can arrange citizen assemblies of randomly selected citizens who can tackle more complex political problems (such as a law on public procurement), free from prestige, ideological ideas and other barriers. Just let the power of the best arguments lead them on the path to the common good. If it turns out that a decision that has undergone this democratic procedure in all its five stages does not generate the result that it was intended, it will “automatically” be corrected in the next lap of ever on-going process. Much more flexible, vibrant and evolving than it is today, when a chosen decision maker by prestige sticks to his decision so that instead of correcting it as soon as possible, one must wait for four years until the decision maker can be voted out.
The political parties can then wholeheartedly represent the political elites, farmers and foresters, the labor movement, the free churches, the environmental movement and so on. At each election, the voters can choose how much influence the political parties should have in relation to themselves.
If enough people elect Folkstyret, we, the voters, may one day oureslves be able to take part in deciding who will become our prime minister, since it is a position elected by Parliament in which we then are represented. Then we can choose a candidate that we believe will have the most politically relevant characteristics for the next four years. It doesn’t have to be any of the party leaders.
If this is the democratic system of the future, only time itself can tell. But that we jointly need to take this first step on the way there is one thing that is certain.
