“Blockchain Democracy” and the Misleading Promise of Moscow’s Active Citizen Program
Decentralized, immutable voting structures built off blockchain technology have been heralded as the precursor to “blockchain democracy.” The buzzword gains acclaim from international news outlets and blockchain enthusiasts. Moscow’s Active Citizen program, however, shows the promise is more complex in reality.
Welcome! Today we are taking a deep-dive into an issue sitting squarely at the junction of international politics and blockchain technology — voting. We’re centering this post on blockchain technology’s promise to increase transparency and aid democratization efforts. As you’ll soon find out, that promise can be misleading.
To focus our analysis, we investigated Active Citizen, an electronic, blockchain-enabled voting platform run by the Government of Moscow. We will use Active Citizen as a case-study to examine the potential for blockchain-enabled voting platforms to facilitate and encourage democratization. While corruption and voter intimidation have been features of Russian elections, Moscow officials claim that Active Citizen’s use of the Ethereum blockchain ensures openness, transparency, and reliability in future elections. The Mayor’s office argues that the technology will prevent vote manipulation and promote democracy.
Blockchain news outlets have taken Moscow’s words at face value, variably describing Active Citizen as tool for promoting “direct democracy” and “transparency.” One leading blockchain publication went a step further, praising Russia for “leading the push for blockchain democracy.” The author also describes Russia as “taking a leadership role in making democracy more transparent.” Notably, most of the article’s content comes from a single interview with Andrey Belozerov, an advisor to Moscow’s Chief Information Officer.
Few news outlets, however, have explored the nuances of decentralized democracy behind the curtain of blockchain buzzwords. Evaluating the democratization and anti-corruption potential of Active Citizen requires deep, politically-oriented analysis, which we aim to provide. But first we need to review exactly how Active Citizen uses the Ethereum blockchain.
Active Citizen applies blockchain technology specifically to quell worries among constituents and international observers that Moscow may manipulate vote counts gathered through traditional means. Anyone can become a node operator and theoretically audit the open-source results. Active Citizen’s website provides instructions for how Muscovites can independently monitor the progress and final tallies of referendums. In fact, Belozerov claims that a PwC audit of the code proved officials could not manipulate final tallies (given PwC’s policy of not commenting on work with customers, however, there’s no way to independently verify Belozerov’s claim). For the purposes of this post, we will assume that Active Citizen’s platform is trustworthy and that Moscow cannot manipulate or control the final results.
And so the relevant question becomes: is trusting the results of a vote enough to revolutionize democracy? We think the answer is no. We believe Moscow’s inability to manipulate final tallies does not meaningfully improve government-wide transparency or promote democracy. In fact, we alternatively find that Active Citizen’s deployment of blockchain technology actually undermines democratization efforts. Let’s explore.
To begin, we need to provide a bit of background information on the Russian political system. Russia is an autocratic country, categorized by DC-based think-tank Freedom House as “Not Free.” Moreover, Russia gets poor marks on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. And while Russia is a multiparty democracy on paper, it actually has a highly centralized political system in which power is concentrated in the hands of Vladimir Putin and the United Russia Party. Though a democracy in name, Russia does not entirely operate as a democracy in practice.
So we should ask ourselves, “How does Moscow’s blockchain platform “Active Citizen” fit within Russia’s increasing authoritarianism and Putin’s further centralization of power?”
Let’s start with a key principle: autocrats and despots don’t like giving up power. In a democracy, the best way for incumbents to hold on to authority is to nullify or reduce the power the people have to change or replace them. In the case of Active Citizen, which some blockchain news outlets described as pushing Russia towards democratization, users predominately vote on trivial, non-political decisions like naming subway stations. And even when the blockchain-enabled platform is at its best, letting Muscovites vote on significant issues, it still falls short of meaningful democratization and empowerment — we’ll touch on this later. In fact, Moscow residents report that the application’s referendums don’t address the city’s most pressing problems, like hospital closures and increasing parking tolls. This is not a government accountability tool, nor is it a novel, blockchain-enabled form of direct democracy. So what is it?
We believe Active Citizen is designed to create a false sense of empowerment among Muscovites. This is Moscow’s objective: at the point at which people feel like they have more autonomy and control over their everyday lives, they are less likely to rebel against status quo political structures. So what one blockchain news outlet labels “Blockchain Democracy” functions more as a tool to hedge against popular demands for political change.
Moreover, Active Citizen does little to change the underlying distribution of power in Moscow politics: voting on the name of a new metro line does not disrupt endemic corruption; selecting new seat colors for the Luzhniki Big Sports Arena will not empower investigative journalists. Active Citizen grants Muscovites limited self-expression but only in a safe and sanitized form. The political systems designed to centralize power in the hands of the few remain unchanged: the underlying distribution of power remains unchanged. Gene Sharp, a prominent political scientist who dedicated his life to studying dictatorships, notes quite simply: “Dictators are not in the business of allowing elections that could remove them from their thrones” (6). In the same light, autocrats are not in the business of promoting innovative tech integration that could diminish their power.
With this macro-level analysis in mind, we’re going to take a deeper look into one of the more controversial issues put to a vote via the Active Citizen platform — a massive demolition and housing relocation program poised to affect 10% of Moscow’s housing stock and over 1.6 million residents.
First, a bit of background: an official transcript of a meeting between Sergei Sobyanin, Mayor of Moscow, and Putin details the government’s frustration with laws regulating housing and development. Sobyanin specifically complains about Moscow’s limited authority to demolish large apartment blocks at will — the chief roadblock being variably enforced laws protecting private property. At Sobyanin’s request, Putin affirmed his support for a comprehensive overhaul of demolition laws and property seizures. Sobyanin had Putin’s blessing and was able to proceed.
Protests followed as residents worried about forced displacement, unfair compensation, and kickbacks to construction and real estate oligarchs — both groups are hurting, and a Transparency International special investigation suggests they will benefit from the program. Pro-democracy politician and former KGB official Gennady Gudkov shared the protesters’ concerns: “This law was created so they could take property without any courts and then half of the money from the federal budget will be spent on kickbacks.”
As public dissent escalated, Moscow officials looked for a way to shore up residential support. So Active Citizen launched a referendum allowing residents of Soviet-era five-story Khrushchevka buildings to vote on whether their homes would be included in what the poll labeled a “renovation” program, not a demolition program. Unsurprisingly, the results were overwhelmingly positive: over 90% of voters — 4079 buildings — opted for inclusion.
Officials quickly pointed to the overwhelming support among residents as support for the demolition. So while residents voting through Active Citizen were merely endorsing a provision for their homes to be renovated, they were tacitly lending support to an expansive piece of legislation that functionally gives Sobyanin the power to seize and demolish entire neighborhoods. The government was able to point to the high participation rate to justify the legislation’s more nefarious directives. This leads us to an important yet counterintuitive lesson about international politics.
Active Citizen’s use of blockchain technology and the subsequent assurance that Moscow could not alter final vote tallies increased voter confidence and participation in referendums. But high voter participation rates — usually a hallmark of a functioning democracy — can undermine democratization movements. Autocrats generally require broad public participation in governing structures to maintain at least the veneer of legitimacy. After all, even dictators hold elections. If citizens feel their voices are meaningless and nobody votes, the government’s claim to legitimately represent the people weakens.
This truth is well understood in Russia where voter participation has been declining since Putin took power. In fact, while it was a foregone conclusion that Putin would win the March 2018 elections, his administration was rightfully worried that low voter turnout could undercut his government’s legitimacy. In other countries with controversial political structures, opposition leaders often boycott elections entirely. In Venezuela, for example, many opponents of Maduro believe that participating in rigged elections will only legitimize the government’s mandate.
In the case of Active Citizen, Moscow is testing a way of increasing voter participation — subsequently appearing more legitimate — without ceding power or encouraging democratization. In the case of the controversial housing program, it worked — voter participation increased but citizens had no meaningful control over the actual legislation. Voters, in this sense, were only pretending to make decisions, because the meaningful restraints and provisions had already been dictated. Though blockchain technology provides the sort of transparency and immutability that could support democracy, Moscow’s implementation of the technology through Active Citizen only provided the illusion of empowerment; the political system in Moscow remains autocratic.
Active Citizen should serve as a warning to news outlets and blockchain enthusiasts. With the prevalence of optimism and rose-colored glasses in the industry, the social benefits of blockchain technology can be intoxicating. The potential of blockchain democracy is real, certainly — but it requires proper, meaningful implementation to ensure it endows citizens with the power to influence their government. In Moscow, Active Citizen is shaping up to be a carefully engineered process designed to legitimize a piece of legislation that centralizes power and entrenches corruption. For the time being, it appears the blockchain community’s major news outlets have fallen for it.
Written by Jacob Zionts with research and translation assistance from Rene Nayman
Disclaimer: The views expressed by the author above do not necessarily represent the views of Consensys AG. ConsenSys is a decentralized community with ConsenSys Media being a platform for members to freely express their diverse ideas and perspectives. To learn more about ConsenSys and Ethereum, please visit our website.
