Why We Don’t Have a Real Laboratory of Democracy
And how to go about building it, if we decide we want one
By MARTIN REZNY
Just days ago, a pro-Putin party won the elections in Slovakia, the country right next to mine, which led to a lot of comments critical of democracy as a concept. Including one person commenting that democracy might be the real path to unfreedom. In the moment I saw that comment, I thought to myself, as opposed to what? Outright dictatorship? What’s the alternative?
I imagine the left-leaning Americans went through something similar when Trump won the presidential elections, but it really does keep happening all the time. It’s a feature, not a bug. In a democracy, it’s always a possibility that people will choose to reject democracy. The reason why democracy is still better than other regimes is that in all other regimes, you don’t get a choice. In Putin’s Russia, people can’t simply choose freedom.
To paraphrase Churchill, democracy isn’t the best regime, it’s the least worst, that we have come up with so far. Personally, and as a political scientist, I don’t really understand why every time democracy fails, most people feel like the appropriate response is to abolish it, meaning exchanging it for one of the other systems which only fail more often. I believe the appropriate response is to try to improve democracy.
Which brings me to the titular concept of a “laboratory of democracy”. In the American context, this idea is attributed to late supreme court justice Brandeis. It’s basically an argument in favor of federalism — if you have one country with many semi-autonomous states, each can in theory experiment with new laws, which, if successful, can then be adopted by the rest of the federation. In theory. It can also have a much broader meaning.
But before I get into what I think a laboratory of democracy should be, I should explain why I’m even talking about this. In our third meeting of Project Contribute, or ProCon, which is how I feel I’ll be abbreviating it from now on, we have explored the core functionalities of the existing prototype of Nova’s social media tool, which he originally called the Think Tank. We have also ended up debating about debating and politics.
If the main function of the tool that we’re developing is supposed to be improving the quality and productivity of conversations, it will definitely have implications for political organization. Regardless of your political affiliation and location in the world, I’m pretty sure you’d agree that the word “quality” doesn’t apply to our current political conversations. Nobody appears to be in politics today with the intention to improve anything.
And yet, what are we to do? Restorm the Capitol? Do a communist coup? Appoint an Emperor? The alternatives have been tried before, they’re not better. Doesn’t matter if you really don’t like Trump, or if you really don’t like Biden, the last thing you’d want is for the person in power to have more power. It won’t help you to love Putin, if he has the power to send you to die in a pointless war he has the power to start to make everyone’s lives worse.
Like it or not, improving the quality of political conversations is the only thing that’s ever going to result in an improvement of our political reality, within some sort of fundamentally democratic framework. Even the most enlightened of dictatorships, a scientific technocracy, would be something you’d end up liking less than democracy. As it would, rationally, force treatments on you, ban all vices, and generate new risks with new tech.
This may sound like a simple statement, but the catch is that nobody outside of political philosophers really knows what democracy is, or can be. There is no single obviously correct way of doing democracy. One of the first things you learn about democracy at a university in a political science or philosophy class is that there are many theories and models of it, beyond the minimal definition of “there are elections in which all people vote”.
For starters, it makes a lot of difference if the elections are free and fair, or if they’re only for show. If the elections are free and fair, does anything the majority decides go, or should there be some limitations on that, like a bill of fundamental human rights? Should the winner of the elections get all the power, or should everyone be proportionally represented? Should there be representatives at all, or should people vote directly for the legislation?
All that and more is still democracy. There are even types of democracy that haven’t really been tried yet, at least not at scale, like a tiered or cellular democracy, for example. In that, all people would only vote to elect their neighborhood representatives from the people they know directly, to run the neighborhood. Beyond the neighborhood, only the elected representatives for each cell or tier would elect representatives for the next higher level from amongst themselves, and so on and so forth.
Would that work? Who knows. Also, how would you define a “working” democracy? These are the kinds of things there need to be good conversations about. More importantly, there should also be real-world trials based on the good conversations. This is the most reasonable course of action for anyone who believes that any particular democratic system isn’t working right and should be improved. And yet, nobody’s doing this.
To the extent to which there are experts who understand electoral or institutional design, they seem to be preoccupied with helping self-interested politicians and parties hack elections and democratic systems to ensure they get (re)elected and gain the highest possible number of votes. That’s not making democracies better, that’s literally the opposite. That’s how you get gerrymandering, regulatory capture, and all the corruption.
Inside of a Nova’s Think Tank, the whole point of the basic setup of the conversation is to make sure that the best ideas bubble up to the top, or reach everyone’s awareness. Every participant has a limited number of supports they can give to an idea, making everyone rethink boosting something fun, but dumb, instead of the best ideas only, and every idea needs to reach a critical mass of support to be shown to more people. In a way, you could say this already is a type of a tiered democratic system.
If the conversation’s point is only to generate ideas to think about, this would be about the full extent of the process. All of the best ideas would be recorded and publicly accessible (unless private), and perhaps serve as inputs for further rounds of conversation. If the point was to make decisions this way instead, the process would still be the same, except “bubbling up” would mean the idea was voted for, at least as policy.
Run a large number of these bad boys and who knows, maybe you’d get a lot of good ideas worth testing. Like in an actual laboratory, but of democracy. You see, federalism is only one possible type of setup for generating and testing political ideas. In the case of USA, there are many processes that hinder the effectiveness of this federation as a true laboratory of democracy, like rampant lobbyism or polarized politics.
For a true laboratory of democracy to function, it needs to have an environment that’s conducive to constructive debates about what goals most people can agree are worth pursuing, and about which methods are objectively promoting or hindering the achievement of any of those goals. It’s okay to have some areas in which specific groups can’t find common ground, but the overall spirit of the effort must be to try to do better. Not to help your side win and screw over everybody else. Then everyone loses.
If the currently elected representatives don’t want to have any part in trying to make democracy better, that’s fine. In a democracy, there’s always the next elections. You can always turn it around, unless you give it up entirely. The point of the laboratory is that in order to truly turn democracy around, you need to figure out how it can be turned around, or build an agreement around what turning it around would mean. Democracy itself isn’t going to decide your values for you, beyond basic respect for other human beings.
What Luke, Nova, and I therefore decided to try to make happen as the first major trial of the Think Tank system, once it’s fully operational, is to invite trained debaters to try to compete with each other to generate the best ideas of how to solve problems, like those of our current version of democracy. Thus solving what Luke and I have argued for a while is the biggest problem of debating — debating community isn’t using its talents and objectivity to try to brainstorm solutions to the world’s problems.
If the system turns out to work as intended, either as it is or with some tweaks, then it might also solve the main problem of social media so far — suppression of truly meaningful conversations by the boosting of the most trite and inane charisma-driven content. For example, do you remember the Boaty McBoatface incident? Some would say that this is why you can’t let people decide things. I’d say this is why you need to put some thought into how you structure your democratic decision-making processes.
In short, context matters. In a structured debate at a debating competition, there’s a lot of incentive not to try to actively make yourself look like a fool or waste everyone’s time. The same person who can make any number of reasonable points while debating in person in front of a crowd with real personal stakes, can be the one who suggests that a boat should be named Boaty McBoatface, because it’s 3 a.m., they’re on the toilet, they’re anonymous, and they have no real stake in it, reputational or material.
On Nova’s Think Tank platform, the level to which your contributions are supported by others across all conversations will be reflected in your overall rating and standing on the platform. It’s a bit like in debating leagues, where all of your performances are rated and tracked, resulting in your overall speaker rating and ranking. With real potential career benefits to a good record. Ideally, this record should also be topic-specific, enabling one to earn credibility in any given field even if they lack credentials.
The fact is, everyone on the internet can’t be equally heard at the same time. Our system would promote those who have made the best contributions, and quote them only at their most constructive. Not when they’re showing off to win a popularity contest, or when they have a moment of weakness. If this kind of content is what ends up comprising most of everyone’s feed, chances are it will promote more constructiveness of thinking and inspire more meaningful conversations down the line.
To put it another way, as the Korean-Australian two-time world debating champion Bo Seo argues, there’s a difference when a debate is happening with or without an audience, and people should therefore have private debates with people they know personally, rather than watch public debates of people they don’t know who are only trying to win over an audience. The public ranking in our system could be based on private debates, during which the proposed ideas could even be anonymized for the duration of the debate, to mitigate the whole personal attack angle.
Of course, the ability to present an idea will still matter, but not in the same way as on most of the standard social media. On an unstructured, seemingly level democratic playing field, like on YouTube, the reason why better ideas have a hard time winning is that people have many cognitive biases. If a presenter is more beautiful or has a deeper voice, they have an objective advantage. If a video has a more snappy editing, or if the thumbnail has a shocked pikachu face on it, it will be clicked more.
If the algorithm, or structure of the communication platform, only cares about immediate like/dislike response or attention grabbing, best ideas literally cannot win in this type of lowest-common-denominator democracy. Even worse, the people who are attractive and/or good video editors who do have an advantage will still have to compete with each other in a race to the bottom called audience capture. This then trains everyone to communicate more dumbly and give votes to best personal attackers.
Meanwhile, as this whole downward spiral was happening, nothing happened to debating at debating competitions. Well, other than COVID shutting them down for a bit. The format works. As the Canadian communications theorist and technodeterminist Marshall McLuhan said, “medium is the message”. The nature of your communications technology is what’s going to determine how you’ll end up communicating. If a social medium is hardwired to promote good debates, they will happen.
Speaking of which, if you yourself are a debater or know debaters, consider this an open invitation to our future test trial. What we’re looking for is a hundred to a thousand trained debaters who would be willing to participate in a kind of an online debating tournament on our platform, following the rules and principles outlined above. To create a bit of an extra incentive, we are even willing to offer some cash prizes to the winners, or best contributors, in any round, or a self-contained Think Tank conversation.
Also, whether you’re a debater or not, we’re definitely open to suggestions on the topics that should be covered at such a trial tournament, or which problems should be discussed with the aim to propose solutions. By framing it this way, the end result should be policy proposals, or a direct example of how our platform could help improve democracy. So, what do you think, can democracy be improved? Can a laboratory help us do that?
Let us know.
