Should you get a vote if you don’t understand politics?
Interesting electoral outcomes in recent times have some experts asking: Is it time to reconsider the way we pick our leaders?
Analysis by Antony Funnell
Democracy has always been a messy form of government and is often unpredictable. Both qualities can be a strength, but as we know from recent international experience, they can also be a liability.
The election of Donald Trump, for instance, produced a result at odds with the wishes of the majority of voters.
Elsewhere in the world — in democracies like Turkey, Hungary, Poland and the Philippines — citizens are actively making decisions that diminish their own democratic rights, while a 2013 Lowy Institute poll suggested a majority of young Australians are now ambivalent about the virtues of democracy.
Noted Australian democracy scholar John Keane, director of the Sydney Democracy Network, calls it “democide”.
“Democracies commit suicide,” he says.
“They do so under great duress, when significant parts of a voting population become disgruntled, disaffected, disappointed, and they opt … for a different possibility, a different vision.”
And in today’s world, that new possibility is often authoritarian or tyrannical, even though it wears the clothes of compassion, according to Professor Keane.
“This new populism is about dignity. It’s a politics that promises greater dignity to the disaffected,” he says.
“It’s nurtured in the soil of expectations that things could be better in the future, the sense of possibility is something that all populists with a touch understand.
“So the strange thing is that this old grand ideal of self-government of the people through their representatives, where there is an equalising trend, produces these perversions that actually destroy democracy in the name of the people.”
‘Despotisms’ of the 21st Century have unique appeal
The last great incidence of mass democide was in the decades prior to World War II when totalitarianism came to dominate Europe.
Back then, many democratic leaders were open in their admiration and praise of despots.
Today, we see a similar dynamic: Jeremy Corbyn has voiced his admiration for the late Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, while Donald Trump and many of his inner circle have praised Vladimir Putin — as has Pauline Hanson.
But Professor Keane cautions against simple analogies with the 1930s — as the “despotisms” of today have their own unique characteristics and allure.
“Those who govern within them do so in the name of the people. They all have a middle class which remains more or less loyal to a top-down system of power,” he says.
“They are not systems of terror. And all of them govern through making claims that they are preserving the nation, that they are encouraging and sustaining economic growth and so on.
“And these despotisms are strange because they are top-down forms of power, whose rulers manage to win the loyalty of significant parts of the population.
“It’s as if these are systems of voluntary servitude. They are not fear-ridden, totalising system. They allow a good measure of private freedoms.”
In an era of mass ignorance, who should have a right to vote?
The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance — a UN-supported intergenerational organisation — argues there is no definitive and final state of democracy.
In its foundation declaration it states: “Democracy is perishable and has to be sought and created afresh by each new generation”.
By the end of the 20th Century the widely accepted expression of democracy was one vote, one person — universal adult suffrage.
But some are now questioning whether that system is suited to an age in which anti-intellectualism is prevalent, and where many people prefer to make decisions on instinct rather than verifiable fact.
So, why should someone who has no interest in politics or public policy be granted an opportunity to influence the outcome of an election?
Georgetown University’s Jason Brennan, a professor of strategy, economics, ethics and public policy, believes it’s time to become more selective about who should vote and how their votes are counted.
“About half of the voters in most modern democracies don’t have anything like a stable ideology, and they are pretty much ignorant,” he says.
“They don’t really do better … and some are actually worse than chance, when you give them a test of basic knowledge.
“The other half know a little bit more, but the problem is they see everything through a deep ideological lens.”
He argues for an alternative system of voting called epistocracy, which basically means that a person’s vote should only be counted after they have first demonstrated a basic knowledge of the political system.
Professor Brennan says weighting people’s votes according to knowledge would not be a panacea, but could help counter the non-representative political swings caused by fear and deliberate misinformation.
“Come election day everybody votes but when they vote they don’t simply put down their political preferences, you also give them a quiz of basic political knowledge,” he explains.
“At the same time you get their demographic information. And when you have those three sets of data you are then able to determine statistically, what would an enlightened public want … while controlling for whatever effects demographics has on our votes.
“Political scientists have been using this kind of method for a long time to study how knowledge affects our behaviour, and so why not just use it to run the show?”
But such a system could discriminate against people from specific socio-economic or cultural groups, or be manipulated to do so.
There’s also the difficulty of knowing what sort of information should be used to test voter knowledge.
“Ideally you’d put things such as ‘what’s the unemployment rate?’” Professor Brennan says.
Other questions might test knowledge about government spending, recent historical events, or who your member of parliament or congressperson is, he says.
“We might even let democratic processes decide what goes on the test,” he says.
“But the nice thing is, because you are controlling for the effect of demographics, you can reduce whatever biases are introduced there by a significant extent.”
Look to the ancients!
Another radical proposal for changing the democratic system and reinforcing its integrity involves a process borrowed from Ancient Greece called sortition — best described as representation by random selection.
Economist and innovation expert Nicholas Gruen proposes a two-chamber parliament, where members of the upper house are chosen at random from the public for a select period of service, rather like jury duty.
Such a system would help ground the deliberations of elected representatives in the lower house, he says.
Under Dr Gruen’s model, the new people’s chamber would be given a limited delaying power over legislation, along with the ability to force a vote in the house of representatives under special circumstances.
“I would allow an upper house with a supermajority disagreeing with the lower house to impose a secret ballot on the lower house,” he says.
Dr Gruen argues that kind of check-and-balance measure could help prevent another Brexit-type situation.
“Because around the world we are finding governments and parliaments, legislatures, enacting laws which a huge majority of the members of the parliament … actually think are against the public interest,” he says.
He also believes granting average citizens a defined period of civic service would have an ongoing educative effect on the populace.
“This is a way of getting back to an idea that was in Athens and has kind of gradually leached out of our democracy, which Abraham Lincoln summed up so well — government of the people, by the people, for the people,” he says.
Whether such radical suggestions for changing democratic representation would, or could, work is a moot point.
Dr Gruen and Professor Brennan concede they are speculative. But they also believe change is needed in order to safeguard democracy, because as it stands democracy is in grave danger.
Professor Keane talks of an “enveloping gloom” and also warns that time is running out.
“I have spent much of my life writing about the past, the present and the future of democracy and I feel as though I’m engaged in a kind of undertaking process, that I’m a director of some funeral parlour.
“It’s pretty bleak and there are very few exceptions to current trends.”
