Desiccated calculating machines

Claudia Chwalisz has a piece in the new RSA Journal arguing for the primacy of randomly selected citizen assemblies over electoral politics. For simplicity I’m going to call this idea klerotocracy.

The core of her argument is this:

I once viewed citizens’ assemblies as a necessary complement to strengthen representative democracy as we conceive of it today. However … a system defined by elections, with political parties and politicians, is designed for short-termism, for debate, for conflict and for polarisation. It puts re-election goals and party logic ahead of the common good. Adding on new forms of democratic institutions like citizens’ assemblies to an electoral system does not address the underlying democratic problems of an elections-based system. […] There is a need to shift political and legislative power to institutionalised citizens’ assemblies so that they can eventually become the heart of our democratic systems, defining a new democratic paradigm.

Claudia is an expert on citizen assemblies from her work at the OECD and elsewhere, but I think the model that she puts forward loads the format with more weight than it can bear, and underplays some essential features of the current system which assemblies can’t replace.

Power and accountability need to be felt not theorised

Politics is about power and accountability, and about taking the most difficult decisions in society - who lives, who dies, who gets what. Resources are finite, choices are never simple, so conflict is inevitable. The whole of politics is managing that conflict as best we can, and representative democracy is a good way to do it.

The power of the state to make those choices has to be spread as widely as possible, if people are to support the process. Everyone needs a piece of that power, not just a hundred lucky lottery winners. Claudia’s article says that there may be opportunities for other forms of democracy to be available, but subordinated to the citizen assemblies that are creating the new paradigm - and the problem lies in that subordination. If voters are electing chief implementing officers for the decisions taken by assemblies, then assemblies have the power.

If that is the case, then power is more concentrated than it was before - into whoever happens to be in that room (and, unless the oversight is good, into whoever sets the agenda and provides the information).

The equal vote is the best tool for distribution of power we have devised, and it’s not just me who says so. For all voters feel let down by current politics, two thirds of citizens say that free votes and regular elections are essential features of democracy.

What those voters have grasped is that those who take decisions need to be accountable. Modern electoral systems, particularly first-past-the-post systems, do not always deliver that accountability in a fine-grained way, but failure is punished. The article criticises the “re-election goals and party logic” of representative systems, but I thoroughly support them - they are the sign of powerful people being afraid of the voters, which is a healthy and democratic sentiment.

Voters are people too

Klerotocracy’s biggest challenge is how to reflect the fact that every individual citizen is a person, with a whole range of complex and often contradictory views, and a strong sense of their own rights and interests.

Existing citizen assemblies rationalise that complexity down to the views of a hundred people for the sake of simplicity and cost, not because those hundred people cover the full range of public views and opinions.

Even if, by some miracle, those happy hundred were perfectly representative and perfectly informed, by what right should they rule over the unlucky many? In Athens, you might reasonably expect to get your turn in the assembly sooner or later. Even in my petit plat pays of 11 million, you’d need tens of thousands of citizen assemblies for people to genuinely be able to rule and be ruled in turn.

In any case, even with hundreds of thousands of assemblies meeting each weekend, any individual decision will have been taken by one assembly of a few hundred at most - with no accountability for their decisions or implementation, and no opportunity to step up and have your say.

Which citizen is going to sit back and accept a decision they deeply disagree with, if they could not vote for or against it, were not selected to participate in taking it, couldn’t campaign for or against it, and the people who did take it cannot be held accountable? It requires an impossible leap of faith to deprive people of the power of the vote on this basis.

Running before we can walk

I think citizen assemblies are a valuable tool, and I’ve run more than a few, but they are fundamentally a means of understanding societal views and drawing broad recommendations out of discussions. Their processes are nowhere near robust or transparent enough to be given the prime decision making power over every government decision. Their long and deep thinking approach is not adapted for the endless series of rapid and detailed decisions every politician has to make, still less the rapid guesswork that is needed in a crisis.

This incompatibility is hard to get away from. Restricting assemblies only to the strategic summit would mean handing immense power of implementation to bureaucracies. Multiplying them and pushing them deeper into decision making systems would create endless conflicts of mandate, as well as being expensive. The accountability that elected politicians and parties have for their handling of crises would be completely absent.

More generally, klerotocracy raises the centuries-old question of who guards the guards? Transparency and anti-corruption rules would need to be introduced for members. Detailed selection algorithms would need to be agreed - by a different assembly? Controls would need to be in place to ensure that facilitators, information providers, and implementing bureaucracies did not abuse their positions. Some of these are in place for existing advisory assemblies, but generally there is an assumption that controls can be light because impact is indirect. If trillions of euros of direct spending decisions were flowing through those processes, the opportunities for corruption would be immense, and the controls against it would have to become commensurately heavy.

Horror politici

I think Claudia and I disagree most fundamentally on the value of politics. It’s clear from her piece that she sees it as an obstacle to good decision making, and indeed an obstacle to democracy itself, in the form she prefers.

As I’ve said on here before, I believe politics and political parties are essential elements of democracy. Without them, government is reduced to a technocracy moderated by civil uprisings. Parties are not just vehicles for self-interest, they are also vehicles for continuity of policy making and accountability. They can train future representatives and synthesise different positions around a core philosophy to create the coherent policy framework that any government needs to operate. They provide a set of reference points for voters, who often pay attention to politics only when the election is close. Their campaigning logic and relentless oversimplification of complex issues are features, not bugs.

Inside the citizen assembly chamber, democracy is unconfined. The happy hundred can be informed, express their opinion, have deep discussions and even express their indignation - in a measured way - as they produce their recommendations.

Feeling the human and democratic energy in that room is one of the great pleasures of designing and running citizen assemblies. But if that is all we have, then outside that room, power is in the hands of desiccated calculating machines - selection algorithms, facilitation plans and implementing bureaucracy - with little oversight and no accountability.

I wouldn’t give up my vote for it.