Nordic Ideology

by Hanzi Freinacht

  Indeed, democracy isn’t real. It doesn’t exist, and never will. Demo­cracy is forever destined to be a fairytale in a land of nowhere, a utopia we’ll never actually reach. Only democratization is really real, and only higher or lower levels of democra­tization can be said to exist.

  Democratization Politics can thus never make reality of the utopian vision of a society governed by the people, but it can bring into existence the relative utopias that strive towards the attractor point of increased collective intelligence—the true north of democratic development.

  Chapter 10:

  EVOLVING DEMOCRACY

  Given that representative democracy has hitherto been the most succ­es­sful form of governance, the main task ahead is to attempt an en­richment of the representative form by means of introdu­cing direct, part­i­cipatory and deliberative democracy within limited sett­ings.

  This chapter is here to consider some pathways for such enrichments and some of the surrounding tools: the development of voting systems, uses of internet democracy, and Unger’s institutional experimen­talism. We also take a look at what Democratization Politics can look like in practice.

  Voting Systems and Internet Democracy

  Even countries less democratic according to measures such as Freedom House can start from somewhere and build newer and deeper forms of democracy—even China can democratize its institutions, albeit from another starting point and through other paths than Western soci­eties.

  Democracy is not, as we observed, a binary var­iable. It is a graded scale pertaining to the level of collective intelligence within the systems of governance, the results of which can be measured by agreed-upon uni­versal principles, and there may be different pathways to its develop­ment.

  So we need to try new paths ahead for governance, until we find which forms prove effective and satisfactory, at which levels of governance, with­in which sectors, and according to which criteria. It is not a question of scra­pping representative democracy and replacing it wholesale; it is a que­stion of learning where today’s system can grow, how it can be refined, and how it can be deepened.

  There are of course many paths ahead within each of the forms, many methods to explore within direct, representative, participatory and delib­erative democracy. In deliberative democracy you have different ways of facilitating, different ways of delineating the topics discussed, ways to dist­ribute speaking time and attentions, etc.; in participatory democracy you have different ways of letting people take part—in adviso­ry functions, par­taking in executive functions, sharing or rotating leader­ship roles, and so on.

  When it comes to direct and representative democracy, you always need some kind of ballot, vote or election, and these can take on a number of different shapes, which have been explored by theorists of elections as well as in practice. For elections of representatives, the following systems all give different dyna­mics:

  First past the post : You count the votes and whoever gets the most votes wins.

  Ranked voting, “instant runoff” : Voters rank the alternatives, and then you eliminate the least popular candidate until someone has 50% of the remaining votes, and then they win. Used in Ireland and Austria.

  Ranked voting, “Borda count” : Voters rank all the candidates, and whoever has the lowest score wins (you get a “1” if you’re someone’s first choice). Used in Slovenia and on some Micronesian Islands.

  Ranked voting, “Condorcet method” : Run a theoretical election between each of the candidates, until one candidate has beaten all others based on their voter rankings. To date not used in any existing country.

  Approval voting : Voters can check boxes for whom they approve of. Who­ever gets most approval wins.

  Score voting : Voters score the candidates on a scale; highest add­ed score wins.

  And of course, there are other possible variations. Each voting system pro­duces different dynamics and different forms of fairness, just like it is with the class­ical distinction between majority vote systems and propor­tional vo­tes. Some systems lead to more strategic voting (“my candidate can’t win either way”), some produce more compromises that have fewer strong sup­p­orters and so forth.

  The point here is not to discuss the implications of the different ballot systems, but simply to point out that this is another arena within which experiment­ation of democratic development is possible.

  In a similar vein, it should be pointed out that there are plenty of possi­bilities to explore digital forms of voting, decision making, participation and deliberation. The first idea that comes to people’s minds is usually that there could be an internet-run direct democracy, through which citizens are themselves asked to vote on different issues. In practice, of course, such a system would still need facilitation and some forms of rep­resentation, and it would likely be a poor form of governance as people would vote on many issues with little background knowledge.

  Looking at our five suggested dimensions of a “true north” of demo­cratic develop­ment (last chapter), it is only clear how a straightforwardly defined inter­net direct democracy might do some good in the first dim­ension. It would almost certainly be harmful to the second one, and its effect in the other three would be doubtful at best—just look down the list again and think:

  Increased dispersion of leadership;

  increased volume, complexity and efficiency of information processing;

  increased accountability and balancing of powers, putting greater demands upon the verifiability of decision making;

  a deepening and thickening of de jure and de facto participation and popular support in pro­cesses of decision-making and opinion formation;

  the growth of democratic, egalitarian and multi-perspectival culture and values.

  Again, the issue is not to envision one certain system to replace the cur­rent one wholesale, but rather to envision a path that lets us experi­ment with and enrich the existing sys­tem in a multiplicity of ways, so as to im­prove the legitimacy, quality, reach and efficiency of governance.

  The point I want to make is that there is today—thanks to the help of online tools—a significant window of opportunity to experiment with new forms of governance. Public institutions must be established with the task of evalu­ating and developing these new forms, and to spread the best practices.

  The research on internet democracy (or so-called “e-democracy”, elec­tro­nic democracy) and the knowledge base about online deliberation and digital citizen engagement is actually quite large—the body of research and practical experience has grown immensely since the early 2000s. With­in this tradition of research there are plenty of people with a deep back­ground in social science, theories of communication, psychology and network theory.

  There are some innovative thought-leaders such as Tim O’Reilly and Clay Shirky—who write about the emergent possibilities of par­tici­pa­tory online tools, as well as the transformations of digital society at large—and there are aca­demics who spend their entire careers research­ing these and similar topics, such as Martin Hilbert (but this field seems to remain with­in highly aca­de­mic circles), and there are plenty of online tools out there, such as Loom­io, Delib and GlassFrog, designed and marketed by count­less com­panies, small and large. And there are—last but not least—so many projects of online citizenship polling, petitions, deliberation and citizen feedback from all around the world, usually at the local and regi­onal levels of gov­ernance, from India to Denmark to the UK to Cali­fornia. And within party politics the Pirate Party (most famously the Ger­man one) has tried some­thing they call “liquid demo­cracy”, which is an early form of crowd­sourced online politics, and the Italian Five Star Move­ment has had elect­oral succ­esses by using simpler forms of online citizen acti­vation. The EU Comm­ission has shown sign­ificant interest in these issues, and public offi­cials are generally positive towards these trends of deep­ening demo­cracy by means of online tools.

  Bottom-Up and
Top-Down

  Given the strength and spread of these trends, why aren’t we seeing a major transition in terms of systems of gov­ernance happening around the world? I’d like to suggest, again, that these developments are up against too strong forces of social and political inertia inherent to the existing structures of governance for them to spread, take hold and begin a true journey of iter­ative im­prove­ment. It is simply too heavy, diffi­cult and, in a general sense, “expensive” to shift the systems of governance for any rich pleth­ora of small actors to succeed in doing so.

  The sheer volume of peo­ple’s actions that have to be re-coordinated for a shift to be effected is sim­ply too large. This is why we have yet to see an effective acc­um­ulation of knowledge about e-governance and implement­ations thereof; only a thousand loose threa­ds and for­gotten trails spread across the globe.

  My suggestion is that the hitherto dominant bottom-up approach must be matched by a coordinating and centralized effort . After all, major infrastructure projects, such as high-speed rail services, sate­llite sys­tems and public universities, rarely emerge solely through grass-root initi­atives. Why should we expect a major update of democracy itself to emer­ge only through bottom-up processes?

  We are hence left with what appears to be a paradox of developing the systems of governance: Any centrally planned top-down effort is likely to miss out on the complexities of everyday life and be built without real contact with human needs and experiences. They tend to be large, clunky and “fragile”, rather than flexible and resilient, as economist Nassim Nich­olas Taleb put it in his famous 2012 book Antifragile .

  But any small-scale bottom-up effort is likely to be drowned in the already existing and more pertinent stru­ctures of society. We must hence strive for a synthesis between the two: a proper metamodern “both-and”. There must be cen­tral planning which coordinates and strengthens a genuine multipli­city of experimental, iter­ative emergences, including local and private initiatives.

  Free bottom-up emergence works fine outside such arenas as govern­ance and basic infrastructure. On the free market and in civil society we see the growth of social media, citizen journalism, Open Data and all sorts of collective and collaborative pro­cesses of “Web 2.0”. There are even new shared forms of encryptions and account­ing that allow for blockchain based crypto-currencies; things that may even­tually funda­mentally trans­form how finance works. All this is mil­es ahead of any corr­es­ponding dev­elopment in the political realm. The best we have in the public realm thus far is perhaps the movement towards “open data”, which in­creases trans­parency and the abi­lity of the public to use official bodies of information.

  Des­pite the fact that the world is brimming with interesting and useful initi­atives within deeper democracy and software solutions to this end, the high hopes of the cyber-utopians of the 1990s and early 2000s have hardly been met. In the midst of a hurricane of digital transformations of society, the political system has remained much like before the internet. This is a worrying inertia.

  As long as the state remains passive in this field and its key agents make no substantive efforts to support these new experiments, to evaluate the best practices, and to spread and apply such practices, we are simply too far away from a tipping point where the current systems of govern­ance start to give way to a wave of institutional innovation and renewal.

  Institutional Experiments

  The conclusion must be clear: an institutional experimentalism is needed, much akin to Unger’s ideas about “experimental zon­es”.

  There must be instituted a central agency which helps to fund, develop, evaluate, as well as gather and share information about all forms of demo­cratic inno­vation—be they digital tools, new voting systems, panel and de­liber­ation programs, decision feedback systems, pathways to citizen invol­ve­ment, or con­flict resolution and mediation efforts: everything that aids the qual­ity, efficiency, reach, transparency and fairness of governance.

  This is the essence of Democratization Politics: The idea is that the state itself and its democratic gov­ern­ance in many layers, from the local to the trans­nat­ional, becomes a developmental project, continuously discussed and im­proved upon.

  On a state level this would mean the establishment of a Ministry of Demo­crat­ization , a governmental department with its own organizati­onal stru­c­ture and its own min­ister. Just like all govern­ments today have min­isters (or heads of department) of healthcare, edu­cation, culture and so forth, we need a minister of democratization in all coun­tries that have reached a certain stage of devel­opment.

  The Ministry of Democratization is the hub in a larger de-centralized multiplicity of ongoing democratic experiments. All cities, muni­cipalities and counties should be allowed a certain budget for trying to improve upon their democratic syst­em through a variety of projects in­vented at the local level; projects built upon civil soc­iety, solutions pur­chased from companies within the field and so on. These projects experiment with new forms of elections within delin­eated decision pro­cesses (different ball­ot systems etc.), new forms of citizen feedback, new ways of enriching the rep­resen­tative system with subcateg­ories of direct votes, participation and deliber­ation.

  The min­istry should be responsible for supporting, in part funding, evaluating and doc­umenting these projects and spreading best prac­tices. Hence, there is a cycle of experimenting with new forms of govern­ance, evaluating and pru­ning these, and continuously updating actual go­vern­ance on all levels. When enough knowledge, experience and expertise has been gathered—not least in the form of an international plethora of inno­vative democratic tech companies—larger experiments can be con­duc­ted on state and even transnational levels.

  This is Democratization Politics: It’s bottom-up-top-down and top-down-bottom-up.

  It builds upon what is actually existing and real to the people involved, and it takes the potentialities and visions seriously. It works both to revol­utionize the political system, and it builds upon a slow, conservative dev­elopment which respects the culture and values of people on the ground. It works both with short-term projects that solve tangible here-and-now pro­blems, and it works on a long-term scale with cycles of decades or longer of updating the institutional code of society.

  As democratic society is designed today, it is simply not built to with­stand the sheer rapidity, force and disruptiveness of social and techno­logi­cal change. We have states which can change their laws as society evolves—but we do not have states with built-in mechanisms at the meta-level, where the way we propose laws and make decisions is itself continuou­sly developed . We hold democratic governance as our most cherished va­lue, and yet we fail to take it seriously enough to ensure that democracy is up­dated and rejuvenated in pace with the development of a postindustrial, digital and globalized world.

  A little crutch from biology might be appropriate here. Denis Noble, a biologist and Professor Emeritus of cardiovascular physiology at Ox­ford, has written a book called The Music of Life . He argues that living systems self-organize not only in a reductionist bottom-up manner, but that there are a multiplicity of processes which emerge at higher levels of self-orga­nization, which also create feed­back processes on lower levels of emer­gence. A cell, can, for instance, include emergent pro­perties which affect chemical processes at the molecular level, and so forth. In other words, if we are to believe this old Brit, there is good reason to think in a bottom-up-top-down and top-down-bottom-up manner when seek­ing to under­stand how a whole system emerges and remains healthy.

  Regardless of how we rate Noble’s understanding from a natural-scien­tific perspective, I certainly feel it may be the right way to think about demo­cratic development from the micro interactions between two people, to the governance of the world-system. Below is a model borrowed from Noble’s 2006 book:

  Figure: Adopted from Oxford cardiology professor Denis Noble’s 2006 book “The Music o
f Life”.

  Would it be so strange if the emergence of governance could work in a corresponding manner? Could there be a deeper coherence, a music of soc­ial life? It does make sense that higher levels of governance can and should have a lively interaction with the lower levels, and that lower level emer­gences should in turn enrich and reshape the higher levels.

  Where to start? We would need, then, to work at the middle level —the

  level of instit­utions—in order to spur a deeper devel­op­ment ac­ross the whole spectrum of governance, from the local to the global.

  Think about it—all latter-day social science points to the simple fact that the quality of a state’s institutions has a larger impact on the sta­bility of a society, its economic development and the wellbeing of its ci­tizens than any other factor. Why is Costa Rica doing okay and Vene­zuela not? Inst­itutions. Why is Denmark a highly functional and competi­tive eco­n­omy and Greece not? Institutions.

  Macrosociology, the sociology of large struc­tures, cultures and classes, has largely been a disappointment. Microsoc­iology, understanding pro­cesses of interaction, socialization and alienation, has also largely failed to produce strong, predictive theories. Meso socio­logy, however, is different. This boring grey mouse of the social sciences, which looks at technical details of institutions and organizations, has pro­ven to be a goldmine: Not only do the structures of organizations reveal why companies thrive or stagnate, but the institutional frameworks of states seem to explain more about societies and human lives than almost anything else.

  Would it be a bad idea if late modern society would expend perhaps half a percent of its GDP on ongoing serious experiments of governance? Upon conti­nu­ously cultivating and updating its own institutional frame­work? Probably not. Would it make sense to educate a number of new professionals who are not only democracy experts, but facilitators, com­munication coa­ches, counselors, organizers, organizational developers, democratic soft­ware dev­el­opers, theorists, evaluators and democratic pro­ject desig­ners? Could we “make an effort to make an effort” to improve democracy itself, until one day, perhaps, it looks completely different from when we started?