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How to Open Representative Democracy to the Future?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 August 2023
Abstract
In recent years, various innovations aimed at counteracting perceived presentism and democratic decline have emerged. One primary concern is the issue of inadequate representation in parliaments, which has prompted the development of various proposals for reforming the selection mechanisms of parliamentarians. In this context, lottocracy (selection of representatives at random) and proxy democracy (selection models based on self-selection and flexible nominations that determine the relative influence of representatives) are candidates as selection rules to open democratic representation. Herein, I examine the normative and contextual trade-offs underpinning lottocracy and proxy democracy. While both systems outperform electoral alternatives on the dimensions under study, they induce tensions that are often overlooked. Nonetheless, clarifying the normative compromises is crucial to addressing the challenges facing democratic systems and to informing the deployment of the future of representative democracy.
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- European Journal of Risk Regulation , Volume 14 , Special Issue 4: Special Issue on Long-Term Risks and Future Generations , December 2023 , pp. 674 - 685
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- © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
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2 D Thompson, “Representing future generations: political presentism and democratic trusteeship” (2010) 13 Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 17. See also A Jacobs, Governing for the Long Term: Democracy and the Politics of Investment (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2011).
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4 R Wike et al, “Globally, Broad Support for Representative and Direct Democracy” (Pew Research Center, 2017) <https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2017/10/16/globally-broad-support-for-representative-and-direct-democracy/> (last accessed 23 December 2022).
5 See, respectively, D Allen, S Heintz and E Liu, Our Common Purpose. Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA, American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2022); K Vesa and T Raunio, “Encouraging a longer time horizon: the Committee for the Future in the Finnish Eduskunta” (2020) 26 (2) Journal of Legislative Studies 159; S Brams and P Fishburn, “Approval voting” (1978) 72(3) American Political Science Review 831; M Balinski and R Laraki, Majority Judgment: Measuring, Ranking, and Electing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
6 T Bouricius, “Sortition: envisaging a new form of democracy that enables decision-making for long-term sustainability” in J Hartz-Karp and D Marinova (eds), Methods for Sustainability Research (Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Publishing 2017) p 129.
7 See D Van Reybrouck, Contre les élections (Arles, Éditions Actes Sud 2014); A Guerrero, “Against elections: The lottocratic alternative” (2014) 42(2) Philosophy & Public Affairs 135.
8 H Landemore, Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press 2020) pp 128–29.
9 H Landemore, “Response to Camila Vergara’s Review of Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century” (2021) 20(3) Perspectives on Politics 1061.
10 Y Sintomer, “From deliberative to radical democracy? Sortition and politics in the twenty-first century” (2018) 46(3) Politics & Society 337, 352–53.
11 See Landemore, supra, note 8; A Guerrero, Lottocracy: A New Kind of Democracy (manuscript, 2023); C Courant, “Sortition and Democratic Principles: A Comparative Analysis” in J Gastil and EO Wright (eds), Legislature by Lot: Transformative Designs for Deliberative Governance (New York, Verso Books 2019) p 229.
12 A Rehfeld, “Towards a general theory of political representation” (2006) 68(1) Journal of Politics 1.
13 Citation from J Mansbridge, “Rethinking representation” (2003) 97(4) American Political Science Review 515. See P Rosanvallon¸ “Histoire moderne et contemporaine du politique” (2013) 112 L’annuaire du Collège de France. Cours et travaux 681 for a historical account of representation.
14 See the Triumph of Elections in B Manin, Principes du gouvernement représentatif (Paris, Calmann-Lévy 1997) ch 2. On the withering of electoral democracies, see, respectively, N Urbinati and M Warren, “The concept of representation in contemporary democratic theory” (2008) 11 Annual Review of Political Science 387, 394; L Lessig, They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy (New York, HarperCollins 2019); Eurofound, supra, note 3; Wike, supra, note 4; Thompson, supra, note 2; Jacobs, supra, note 2.
15 JS Mill, “Considerations on representative government” (1861) 39 <https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/John-Stuart-Mill-Considerations-on-Representative-Government.pdf> (last accessed 2 January 2022).
16 Urbinati and Warren, supra, note 14, 391.
17 J Mansbridge, “Clarifying the concept of representation” (2011) 104(3) American Political Science Review 621.
18 On normative considerations, see D Landa and R Pevnick, “Representative democracy as defensible epistocracy” (2020) 114(1) American Political Science Review 1. See also A Lijphart, “The political consequences of electoral laws, 1945–85” (1990) 84(2) American Political Science Review 481 for empirical ones.
19 Landemore, supra, note 8, 134.
20 ibid 87.
21 ibid 89.
22 J Adams, The Works of John Adams, vol 1 (Boston, MA, Little, Brown 1856).
23 J Mansbridge, “Should blacks represent blacks and women represent women? A contingent ‘yes’” (1999) 61(3) Journal of Politics 628. For a conceptual assessment of different views on representation, see H Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, vol 75 (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press 1967).
24 Jacobs, supra, note 2.
25 Respectively, H Landemore, Democratic Reason (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press 2012) and Sintomer, supra, note 10, 353.
26 Sintomer, supra, note 10, 353 specifically writes this in the context of sortition chambers.
27 See, respectively, Aristotle, Politics (Ernest Barker ed., Oxford, Oxford University Press 1958); R Dahl, On Democracy (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press 2020) p 340; A Fung, “Survey article: Recipes for public spheres: Eight institutional design choices and their consequences” (2003) 11(3) Journal of Political Philosophy 338.
28 For proposals, see, for instance, K O’Leary, Saving Democracy: A Plan for Real Representation in America (Redwood City, CA, Stanford University Press 2006); E Callenbach, M Phillips and K Sutherland, A People’s Parliament/A Citizen Legislature (Exeter, Imprint Academic 2008); J Gastil and E Wright, “Legislature by lot: Envisioning sortition within a bicameral system” (2018) 46(3) Politics & Society 303. On concerns, see D Landa and R Pevnick, “Is random selection a cure for the ills of electoral representation?” (2021) 29(1) Journal of Political Philosophy 46 and L Umbers, “Against lottocracy” (2021) 20(2) European Journal of Political Theory 312.
29 Guerrero, supra, note 11, 97, 257.
30 Proxy democracy generalises proxy voting (J Miller, “A program for direct and proxy voting in the legislative process” (1969) 7 Public Choice 107) and liquid democracy. Liquid democracy is (1) area-specific, (2) transitive proxy voting with (3) instant recall that has been used sporadically around the world (see C Valsangiacomo, “Clarifying and Defining the Concept of Liquid Democracy” (2020) 28(1) Swiss Political Science Review 61). I only focus on the potential of fractional transitive proxy voting as an alternative mechanism for parliamentary selection, all other things being equal. In particular, I do not consider instant recall in proxy democracy for its instability but rely on a rotative system such that nominations are held periodically. For an investigation of these concepts as representative processes, see C Valsangiacomo, “Political representation in liquid democracy” (2021) Frontiers in Political Science 7.
31 The specific mechanics of fractional voting may vary, and quadratic voting may be better suited to preventing strategic behaviour while still allowing expressive nominations, as in G Weyl, “The robustness of quadratic voting” (2017) 172(1) Public Choice 75.
32 The approval-based multi-winner literature proposes ways to ensure a proportional representation of perspectives: see, eg, H Aziz et al, “Justified representation in approval-based committee voting” (2017) 48(2) Social Choice and Welfare 461.
33 Valsangiacomo (2020), supra, note 30, 71.
34 Sintomer, supra, note 10, 352.
35 Landemore, supra, note 8, 81.
36 ibid 81–82; RA Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press 1989) p 109.
37 Landemore, supra, note 25.
38 Neither lottocracy without mandates nor proxy democracy proposes a framework to include those who do not engage in the political processes or biased self-selection patterns based on, for example, gender, which are, however, other crucial issues for open democracy.
39 Unlike in electoral democracy, where entrance barriers to participating directly are high, proxy democracy allows every citizen to choose whether they want to participate directly (self-selecting) or indirectly (nominating) in policymaking.
40 Landemore, supra, note 8, 91.
41 The probability of a citizen being chosen at least once in a lottocratic assembly is 1 minus the probability of never being chosen. Assuming that only four out of five citizens are old enough to be selected and that the events of being selected for each term are independent, the probability of never being chosen is (1 – 29/(0.8 × 76,000))m, where m is the number of times one can be selected. We generously assume that a citizen can be chosen once every year and a half over seventy years so that m = 70/1.5. This probability remains comparable if we take into account that a citizen may be selected only once in their lifetime and further shrinks if we include population dynamics. Landemore, supra, note 8, 91 reports a probability of being chosen in one’s lifetime of 67%, but, to the best of my understanding, the assembly would need to be changed every ten days to reach this probability. Other sources (L Chahuneau, “En Belgique, la démocratie par triage au sort” (Le Point, 25 February 2019) <https://www.lepoint.fr/politique/en-belgique-la-democratie-par-tirage-au-sort-25-02-2019-2296250_20.php> (last accessed 26 July 2023) indicate that up to 174 citizens can be sorted through a combination of a permanent assembly with twenty-four members sorted every eighteen months and three potential assemblies with twenty-five to fifty citizens called at most three times a year. Then, the probability is upper bounded by 18% in the most generous scenario.
42 Guerrero, supra, note 11, 246. Selecting at random all elected officials would still induce imbalance in the stakes each individual has a chance to participate in.
43 R Dahl, On Political Equality (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press 2007) p 109. See also T Christiano, “The Basis of Political Equality” in E Edenberg and M Hannon (eds), Political Epistemology (Oxford, Oxford University Press 2021). For the citation, see S Gosepath, “Philosophical Perspectives on Different Kinds of Inequalities” in M Wulfgramm, T Bieber and S Leibfried (eds), Welfare State Transformations and Inequality in OECD Countries (London, Palgave Macmillan 2016) p 75.
44 This was also observed in D Scheufele, “Modern citizenship or policy dead end? Evaluating the need for public participation in science policy making, and why public meetings may not be the answer” (2011) Paper#R-34, Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy Research Paper Series, and Landa and Pevnick, supra, note 28.
45 B Flanigan et al, “Neutralizing self-selection bias in sampling for sortition” presented at the 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020) pp 6528–39.
46 ibid 6529.
47 Climate Assembly UK, “The path to net zero: Climate Assembly UK full report” <https://www.climateassembly.uk/report/read/final-report.pdf> (accessed 1 January 2023).
48 See also B Flanigan et al, “Fair algorithms for selecting citizens’ assemblies” (2021) 596(7873) Nature 548.
49 Sintomer, supra, note 10, 340.
50 J Mansbridge, “The descriptive political representation of gender: An anti-essentialist argument” in J Klausen and C Maier (eds), Has Liberalism Failed Women? (London, Palgrave Macmillan 2001) pp 19, 30.
51 ibid 30.
52 S Ebadian et al, “Is Sortition Both Representative and Fair?” presented at the 37th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022).
53 Flanigan et al, supra, note 48 and supra, note 45, respectively.
54 Valsangiacomo (2021), supra, note 30.
55 Proxy democracy is not per se incompatible with ex-ante diversity – external checks could randomly sample given features from a self-selected group.
56 Valsangiacomo (2021), supra, note 30. See also C Blum and C Zuber, “Liquid democracy: Potentials, problems, and perspectives” (2016) 24(2) Journal of Political Philosophy 162.
57 Guerrero, supra, note 11, 106. In the context of liquid democracy, an experiment documented extreme concentration of power; see S Becker, “Web Platform Makes Professor Most Powerful Pirate” (Spiegel, 2 March 2012) <https://abcnews.go.com/International/web-platform-makes-professor-powerful-pirate/story?id=15835442> (last accessed 26 July 2023).
58 A Kahng, S Mackenzie and A Procaccia, “Liquid democracy: An algorithmic perspective” (2021) 70 Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 1223 and P Gölz et al, “The fluid mechanics of liquid democracy” (2021) 9(4) ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation 1 proposed algorithmic procedures to control power concentration.
59 Aristotle, supra, note 27, 117.
60 Landemore, supra, note 25.
61 ibid.
62 Mansbridge, supra, note 17, 623.
63 See E Beerbohm, “Is democratic leadership possible?” (2015) 109(4) American Political Science Review 639 for a discussion about the compatibility between democracy and leadership.
64 Recent work found theoretically and empirically that, in well-connected and apolitical setups and in the context of liquid democracy, transitive nominations were reaching per-issue competent representatives, see D Halpern et al, “In Defense of Liquid Democracy” (2021, forthcoming); M Revel et al, “Liquid Democracy in Practice: An Empirical Analysis of its Epistemic Performance” presented at the 2nd ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (EAAMO 2022).
65 Landa and Pevnick, supra, note 28.
66 ibid.
67 American founding fathers advocated for maintaining one representative for every 36,000 citizens (A Hamilton, J Madison & J Jay, The Federalist Papers (Oxford, Oxford University Press 2008)). Similarly, proposals are being made to enlarge the US Congress; see Allen et al, supra, note 5.
68 Sintomer, supra, note 10, 348.