How do we save democracy and make it thrive? By making it more participatory

Domenico Romero
Aug 31, 2018 · 12 min read
Photo by Jerry Kiesewetter on Unsplash

In the Trump era, some propose the use of “gatekeepers” to protect democracy. But what democracy really needs to thrive is not to be more closed, but to promote deeper and wider participation of all.

In the Fall of 2016, I was assigned to teach a political science course on transitions to democracy and on democratic collapse. This is a course that I had taught before, but this time there was something different. At every session, my students were increasingly drawing parallels between the theoretical conditions that historically have been associated to a democracy’s move towards authoritarianism, and the speeches and actions of then presidential candidate Donald Trump. I usually try to avoid cheap political shots in the classroom, but also encourage students to draw lessons from history to better interpret evidence about the present and draw conclusions about it, and that is what they were clearly doing. One day we discussed how authoritarians threaten prosecution of political adversaries, and candidate Trump does just that. Another day we explored how delegitimizing the results of an election that does not favor them has been textbook strategy for authoritarians to weaken democratic systems, and Mr. Trump delivers. To all this we can add failing to provide expected personal information such as tax records; threats on journalists; divisive rhetoric and promises to ban people on the basis of their ethnic and religious background; promotion of or turning a blind-eye to supporters’ violence; calls –real or jokingly — to foreign hackers to spy on opponents; etc., and we have a good theoretically-sound case of how any democracy can be at the peril of weakening, and even possibly collapsing. I believe the U.S. is not close to this, but knowing that democracy is not an unchangeable, irreversible situation, was a valuable lesson for my students that Fall, and I wished more people could learn that too.

For this reason, I was highly enthusiastic when I found out that Harvard’s Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote How Democracies Die, based on a similar theoretical background and connections to the Trump presidency than those that students explored in my 2016 course. However, I strongly disagree with their prescription on how to save U.S. democracy. While they propose a democratic system that is safeguarded by the right “gatekeepers,” I argue here that, on the contrary, what democracy needs to survive and thrive is not to be more closed, but to be even more open and promote wider and deeper participation by everyone.

Levitsky and Ziblatt are right: Well established democracies can be at risk too

As the authors point out, one of the key insights of studying democratic collapse is that it does not take a big event for it to take place, it is not always marked by a clear break such as the armed coup against Allende in Chile and the bombing of La Moneda presidential palace. Many instances of regimes moving from democracy to authoritarianism in modern times happen slowly and silently, with an imperceptible erosion of political and civil liberties and a hardening of the political system. And, probably even more importantly: many times total democratic collapse, just as full democratic transition, may not fully take place at all! This situation results in political systems with weak democratic institutions and practices that may even hold elections every certain number of years, but that are far from allowing its citizens real choice and from representing their interests and preferences. Competitive authoritarianism, electoral authoritarianism, delegative democracy, hybrid democracy, polyarchy, etc. are just some of the regime types that political scientist have defined as existing somewhere between ideal democracy and full dictatorship. Which means that democratic erosion is possible and can result in a political regime that does not look like the typical cartoon version of a dictatorship, but that is far from being what people believe democracy should look like.

What is democracy?

This is a good moment to ask ourselves what do we mean when we talk about democracy. There are of course many views on it, but it is fair to say that during the past half of a century it has become clear that democracy is not a monolithical concept, something that you either have or do not have. Instead, democracy is really an ideal system, probably even impossible to reach, in which there is a truly equal voice for everyone. To achieve this in real life is tremendously complicated, as there are multiple economic, social, cultural, and political conditions that give some a better chance than others to have an impact in the decisions that affect the lives of all people in a country.

Reducing these inequalities has been in fact the history of democratic development throughout the world: overcoming economic differences to give not-propertied people the right to vote; overcoming culturally imposed gender barriers to give women the right to vote; overcoming racist bias to guarantee the right to vote of communities of color and indigenous communities; overcoming financial power differential to set public funding and campaign finance laws; among many others.

But there are still many conditions that continue to make it difficult for people to have equal voice. This is true throughout the world, as well as in the U.S., the country that many believe to be a model democracy. People with money have closer contact with decision-makers, and their influence is increasingly unrestricted thanks to Supreme Court decisions of the past decade; women still are a minority in the political system and their voices often continue to be seen as less important than men’s; people of color continue to be criminalized and discriminated against in multiple aspects of life; the electoral college system grants a small number of people in a handful of states the power to choose a president while the vote of people in the largest states does not really matter in modern elections; gerrymandering is used to draw districts that disenfranchise specific groups of voters; etc. And therefore, while the U.S. continues to hold elections on a regular basis, it is hard to argue that this democracy is not perfectible.

Holding regular elections was for most of the twentieth century the benchmark for considering a country democratic. It made sense, some argued, to have a clear cut way of separating those who had made the jump to democracy from those who did not. It didn’t matter that elections were rigged or uncompetitive. For a while all that matter was to have elections. However, for people in the countries that democratized during that period, it was clear that such a system was not democratic enough for them, and they have continued to try to deepen their democracy, to make it increasingly closer to the ideal type. In this vein, for example, some countries have established campaign finance laws that in some places force candidates to run only with the established public funding, or that heavily punish excesses in campaign financing. Some countries are regulating the role of the media to make sure they provide balanced coverage, do not use their content to cheer for specific parties, and clearly differentiate opinions from news. Some countries are using quota systems in candidate lists to increase representation of women and minorities. Through this type of initiatives, people in new democracies are trying to make their political systems increasingly close to the democratic ideal.

The United States has certainly played a key role in the history of democracy in the world. However, this long and rich history may be backfiring. Since the passing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, most people in the U.S. have assumed that there was nothing left to improve in terms of democracy in the country, because now everyone was legally allowed to vote. However, as discussed above, there are plenty of ways in which American democracy can be improved. But while other new democracies have set for themselves really high bars for what it means to be democratic, and continue to work towards them, the U.S.’ assumption that it had already achieved what was achievable have left it without an articulated rationale and without an explicit movement to deepen democracy in this country.

The solution, according to Levitsky and Ziblatt: Democratic Gatekeepers?

The U.S. electoral-focused understanding of democracy makes it complicated for the majority of people to see the authoritarian dangers implicit in some of the attitudes taken by then candidate and now president Trump. It is of course expected that Democrats are going to criticize him for partisan reasons. But even a good number of Republicans during the primary contest and even after Trump had won his Party nomination, were highly critical about him and about some of the attitudes that raised alarms of authoritarianism. Nonetheless, as the election came closer they all joined ranks and supported the Party’s nominee, putting partisanship above any concern they had.

For Levitsky and Ziblatt, this was the problem. According to them, a democratic system cannot allow a possible authoritarian to get elected just because people decided to vote for him. And the best way to do this is to stop the situation one step ahead, avoiding for such a candidate to be able to run in the first place. From this point of view, the gatekeepers of the Republican Party should have had a stronger position and institutional mechanisms to avoid for candidate Trump to win the primary contest, and let run only candidates well vetted by them. Sounds great and simple, right? Except that this solution is, well, undemocratic.

But isn’t a bit of lack of democracy worth it in order to save democracy at large? Maybe, but this idea presents two key problems: one moral, and one practical. The moral one of course is about how extensive the vetting powers of the gatekeepers should go and how would we know that their actions are really necessary. Of course, everyone would agree that it would have been great to have some gatekeepers to keep Hitler from being elected, but moving away from such an extreme example, how would we know when the use of gatekeeping is really granted? For example, maybe Republicans would have stopped Trump from running, but what if he is just a terrible person who implements terrible policies but who does not move towards authoritarianism? Would the intervention then have been justified? And if so, where would it start for other cases? With Obama’s executive actions? With GW Bush run to war in Iraq? Maybe the risks of limiting democracy are necessary in order to avert democratic collapse, but the moral challenge of implementing such a system in reality is complicated at the least.

On the practical side, the question is to what extent would keeping a candidate out of a race would really help things in the long run? For example, what would the most belligerent base of the Trump candidacy have done if an attempt to stop him from running had been made? Maybe not much, and the issue would have just disappeared in the news cycle. But there is also a good chance that a significant number of Trump’s supporters would have been angry about the “party establishment” denying them a voice, and would have been willing to let their anger be known to the world. This is the type of outcome that democracy is supposed to avert by providing a setting in which, even if an outcome is not the preferred one for some people, at least it is clear for them that it was reached under fair competition. If this condition is removed, then the possibilities for conflict increase.

One of the examples that Levitsky and Ziblatt use in support of gatekeeping is the Punto Fijo agreement reached by the two main parties in Venezuela in 1958, which allow them to alienate political participation outside of them, to alternate the presidency, and to share control over the country for over thirty years. Nonetheless, this system reached a breaking point when people became increasingly disaffected by the realization that they really had no voice and that the political parties represented only the interests of political elites willing to alternate in power. This system even resulted in the coining of the term partidocracia — often translated as partyarchy — meaning the system in which power belongs to the parties and has the interests of the parties, not the people, at its core. The result of this disaffection was the landslide election of a political outsider promising to change the whole system: Hugo Chávez. Thus, the lesson from this case is not that gatekeeping works, but that it creates a closed system that is undemocratic and unstable, and that can massively collapse through time.

Saving U.S. democracy: making it more participatory

Photo by rob walsh on Unsplash

In a way, the gatekeeping, closed-democracy aspects of our current system, are part of what made the Trump election possible.

For example, as mentioned before, the electoral college — an old version of gatekeeping itself — disenfranchises large numbers of voters in states like New York or Texas, who have no incentive to vote because they know that their state is going into the same column independently of how many people vote. And even with this disincentivizing condition, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a margin of over two percent. If the U.S. electoral system was more open and rewarded better the individual vote, independently of the state in which this was cast, the election result would have taken care of the potential authoritarian threat posed by Donald Trump on its own.

Another example, probably even more relevant to the gatekeeping argument, is the existence of super-delegates in the Democratic Party primary system. These unpledged delegates actually pledged their support to Hillary Clinton early on the contest, clearly affecting the nature of the primary process and fully conditioning its results and the ultimate election of Clinton as the party’s presidential candidate. The undemocratic nature of the existence of super-delegates was clearer this time than ever before, which clearly affected the unity and strength with which the Democratic Party faced the campaign against Trump. In this case, the morality of gatekeeping clearly enters into question. Moreover, its practicality also is questionable, given that most polls during the primary period consistently gave Bernie Sanders a significantly larger margin of victory over Trump than Clinton’s. The ultimate election of Trump testifies that the populist impulse was stronger than the establishment politicians believed, and there are good reasons to believe that a Sanders candidacy could have gotten part of that vote and win the election. This would have been another way in which a more open democracy would have averted the danger of a possible move towards authoritarianism.

The nature of the electoral college, the super-delegates primary system, gerrymandering, weak campaign finance laws, outdated voting systems, laws intended to suppress voting of minorities, lack of simple reforms such as automatic and same day voter registration, etc., are still going to be there and they are going to continue to disenfranchise the voice of many and amplify the voice of some. Unless we realize this and do something about it.

One of the dangers U.S. democracy faces today is to believe that its weakening is a result of Donald Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, and that once he leaves office everything is going to be perfect: it is not. The nature of the electoral college, the super-delegates primary system, gerrymandering, weak campaign finance laws, outdated voting systems, laws intended to suppress voting of minorities, lack of simple reforms such as automatic and same day voter registration, etc., are still going to be there and they are going to continue to disenfranchise the voice of many and amplify the voice of some. Unless we realize this and do something about it.

Two key aspects are necessary to address in order to save U.S. democracy and make it thrive: one is about expanding the number of people who participate in democracy, and the other is about deepening the level of their participation. First, electoral democracy. Second, participatory democracy.

While addressing the issues discussed above will help us to significantly improve our electoral democracy, it would be important for us to borrow a page from democratizers in other countries and ask ourselves: what do we really want to see in a fully democratic society? The answer for more people throughout the world is to make democracy more participatory. Participatory democracy means to increase the opportunities for people to have meaningful impact in the decisions that affect them. Beyond delegative democracy, in which we give all power to a representative every 4 years while we have no real say on what they do during that time, participatory democracy allows for people to be more engaged in their democracy and to have an impact in decisions and policies that affect their daily lives. Examples of this include participatory budgeting through which community members decide on aspects of local budgets; referenda on key policy decisions such as the way resources are distributed among school districts; citizen-led policy proposals, and; implementation of public policies in collaboration with community based actors; among other initiatives.

These types of efforts are still experimental in the U.S., such as participatory budgeting in New York City, but they are the seeds of a vision for a future in which authoritarianism can be less of a threat not because there is an enlightened elite that can save us from it, but because more of us will be increasingly engaged and will be ready to not let that happen.

Domenico Romero

Written by

Interested in reducing political, social, and economic inequalities, by collaborating with movements that promote participatory alternatives.

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