It could be you

As Churchill famously said, “Democracy is a bit shit”.

I’ve just finished “Against Elections” by David van Reybroucke, who makes a strong case for improving democratic processes by selecting some parts of the government by random appointment, i.e.drawing lots, instead of election.

“Sortition”, as he calls it — selection by drawing lots — was a key element of Athenian democracy that went out of fashion after the Roman republic, and was then widely used again in various forms in Italian and Spanish city-states from the 13th to the 16th centuries. People were selected at random from the populace and required to serve in governmental roles for a defined period of time, before returning to their usual lives while other randomly selected people took their turn.

The evolution of modern democracy is generally traced back to the American and French revolutions of the late 18th century, and democracy is equated with elections, but van Reybroucke points out that both those new republics chose elective democracy precisely because it would deliver power to an elite rather than to the people at large. From the limited pool of those eligible to stand for election, the idea was that the ones chosen would be those who could demonstrate exceptional wisdom and virtue and talent. Not rule by the people, but rule by the special people. Essentially, a form of aristocracy rather than democracy.

Over the decades and centuries, even though the limited pool of electors in most modern democracies has expanded to almost universal suffrage (for those aged 18-plus, at least), our electoral processes still manage to deliver us government by the “highly-educated elite”, to the ridiculous extremes of Cameron, Osborne, Johnson and their cronies.

The Ripped Off Britons web-site provides some interesting figures that demonstrate the extent to which we continue to elect the highly-educated — whilst only 1% of school-leavers go on to Oxford or Cambridge universities, 27% of MPs are Oxbridge graduates, and the percentage of cabinet ministers who are ex-Oxbridge has consistently hovered around the 70% mark since 1951.

In light of that, it’s not very surprising that inequality has widened and political participation has declined.

What the lottery of “sortition” did for the Athenians, and for the Venetians, and the Florentines, and the Perugians, and the Majorcans, was to add an element into their political selection processes that helped break down the divide between the government and the governed, and delivered political education through active participation in political decision-making. Rule by the people, who took their turns as called and then returned, after a short period, to whatever they had been doing previously. In this way, law and policy and administration and justice belonged to all those involved.

If we think that could never work for us, then why are we happy to still use almost exactly the same system for jury service?

David van Reybrouke gives examples of how “sortition” is coming back into use in political decision-making in the modern era, with examples from Ireland, Iceland, Canada, Belgium and the Netherlands. Varying levels of success, but lessons learnt.

So, just assuming that we might retain a bi-cameral Parliament, why would we not have random, temporary, rotating “ordinary” people in one House, and wise and virtuous technocratic experts in the other? — as just one possible mechanism.

Because you can’t trust the people. Don’t the experts tell us that Brexit was the fault of the ignorant and the prejudiced and the unenlightened for not following the experts’ advice?

Speaking of expertise, people are experts on their own lives — to a far greater degree than a QC and a hedge-fund manager and a director of corporate communications, for example, would be experts on working in a chippy in Redcar, or a health visitor service in Whitehaven, or managing a household in Collyhurst.

One area of mass public engagement and comment that van Reybroucke doesn’t really get into is social media. The skilful use of social media was said to be a key factor in Obama’s success in the 2008 and 2012 US presidential races, in Sanders’ 2016 primary campaign that came from nowhere to rattle the Democrats’ powerful party machinery, and in Corbyn’s similar successful leadership campaign. Both Sanders and Corbyn see themselves as building a social movement that includes re-engaging the disengaged. But increased popular engagement is threatening for the political elite.

In the 21st July New Statesman, Helen Lewis describes “How Jeremy Corbyn won Facebook”, reporting that “In the week that Theresa May became Prime Minister, Corbyn’s Facebook page reached a third of all UK internet users”. Her article makes four comments that reflect how this broadened public engagement and discourse is seen by her as a problem rather than as a positive development in democratic engagement:

• the effect of Facebook on public discourse is not just “amplifying” but “potentially distorting”
• the Facebook bubble, like the Westminster bubble, is likely to create “increasingly polarised communities without us even noticing”
• by pre-selecting two leadership candidates, the Tories “ensure that direct democracy is tempered by the parliamentary party”
• independent on-line news sources, like The Canary, are “more trusted as a source of news than the mainstream media” and they are “encouraging an anti-elite, anti-expert, anti-media populist tone in politics”, which Lewis sees as something that needs to be “tackled”.

It’s good that she recognises the potential for distortion and polarisation in Westminster as well as in social media “echo-chambers”. What’s interesting is that she sees direct democracy as something that needs to be “tempered” by parliament, and that she implies that the elites and the experts and the media are in need of protection from the populace — when it’s the wisdom and the expertise and the rich variety of people “out there” that needs to be valued and tapped and acted on.