What if democracy was RAPID?

Note: This is a 2023 updated version of a more exploratory Medium post I first wrote in 2018. Since then, my thinking on it has firmed up, and the New Citizenship Project team have had a couple of chances to put RAPID democracy into practice…

The concept of RAPID democracy is essentially a response to a combination of two questions:

1. Deliberative democracy has the potential to be transformative, but the numbers of people directly involved in any one process are pretty small. How could we build on around these to create processes that can achieve real scale and visibility, and make the most of many different modes of participation?
2. Why does the old trope of “government should be more like business” keep coming back (as in the article here, for example), and why does it always mean “government should be more like business c.1900” when actually the best businesses have changed completely?

That combination made me think of the RAPID model that Bain & Company developed in the early 2000s, which breaks down the process of decision making into five component parts, and suggests that each is best suited to different participants.

Source: Bain and Company

What if you split out the roles of decision making in democracy more clearly across the people you need to involve (just like businesses do)?

I believe this might provide a framework that can clarify how different modes of participatory democracy can hang together as a whole — creating something that’s more than the sum of the parts of open policymaking, deliberative democracy, representative democracy, and so on…

The five components of RAPID democracy could be organised in different ways according to the problem and the different stakeholders, and there are different tools that could be used at each stage — but here’s an illustration of how it can be used to structure a process:

Input comes first — this is where you’re looking for as many ideas, options and approaches as you can possibly gather for how to address a particular issue. You’ll want to reach out actively to different groups to get a really good and diverse mix of ideas, but this doesn’t require representative samples — you want everyone who has something they want to contribute to be able to put it in there. This really lends itself to open online processes and tools like the Citizens’ Foundation’s Your Priorities platform, which powers Better Reykjavik among other things, or the way Mexico City crowdsourced possible items for its constitution, or in a slightly different role, platforms like Kialo which structure constructive conversations that might lead to ideas. It’s a great opportunity to gather attention and energy, reaching and involving as many stakeholders as possible.

Then Recommend. At this stage, those who will be most affected by a decision have the chance to put forward their preferred option. In the context of decisions that affect an entire nation, this is where citizens’ assemblies really come into their own. Sortition-based recruitment can give you a representative sample of the population, and that sample can be small enough to really get into the detail over the course of a deliberative process. There are other approaches, like the way the Taiwanese government uses the pol.is app, but assemblies are a great match for the objective of this phase.

Then there’s Decide. This is the central moment of the process, the moment of committing the nation or locality to a course of action. It’s like the CEO in a company, and a role where elected representatives might still lead, and still matter. But in a democracy, if they don’t go with the recommendation, they need a clear reason why not; and they should have to state that reason publicly as a minimum requirement. (It’s worth noting that Claudia and DemocracyNext would argue that the Decision, not just the Recommendation, could and should be made by an assembly, with sortition actually replacing elections as the central dynamic of democracy.)

Agree is then a confirmatory, “speak now or forever hold your peace” phase. This is where conventional consultation processes might sit, and in certain circumstances, this is the role for a referendum. Fintan O’Toole wrote this very powerful piece in The Guardian a few years ago comparing the roles of the referenda on Brexit in Britain (which was a binary decision), and on abortion in Ireland (which was preceded by a citizens’ assembly and more), making pretty much this point.

And finally, Perform, which is about doing things with the public by acting as facilitators and enablers (see The People’s Bus of NYC’s Civic Engagement Commission, or matched crowdfunding approaches like Make London, or Brazil’s Community Health Workers), rather than doing things for the public as service delivery, which is also something we’re thinking about a lot…

The key thing is that the RAPID Democracy model allows more people to contribute meaningfully to participatory democracy processes. It makes space for both breadth and depth: wide-ranging, lighter participation in the Input phase, alongside deep, focused participation by a smaller number of citizens in the Recommend phase. This builds upon and enhances existing Citizens’ Assembly models, generating wider citizen interest and investment in the deliberations as well as building a bridge to future mass participation in the Perform phase. The Agree and Decide phases, meanwhile, maintain the link with existing representative democracy and governance mechanisms (this could be also applied at an organisational level, e.g. approval of recommendations by a charity’s trustees or a members’ vote, as well as the national level).

We’ve successfully helped structure Jersey’s Climate Conversation using this framework, and are currently using it as the basis for the People’s Plan for Nature in collaboration with RSPB, WWF and the National Trust — and it seems to be working well. But it’s still very much a work in progress. If you have any thoughts or reflections, I’d love to hear them.