Examining Democracy: Its Obstacles

As objectively great as democracy is, it does have serious flaws. In this article I’ll be looking at some of the biggest flaws in democracy and how to address, or at least reduce, them.

Short-termism:

One of the biggest criticisms of democracy is that it encourages short-term thinking. With politicians serving short terms and having to worry about elections, they lack incentive to come up with long-term policies. This is a very valid criticism of modern democracies: even if a politician has a long-term vision, it won’t help them if it won’t win them the next election. This can be a good thing – politicians can have terrible long term visions – but the problem lies in the fact that often politicians have no long term vision and only care about staying in power. 

This problem isn’t a flaw unique to democracy: in fact, humans are wired to favour short-term gain if the danger isn’t visible. This is one of the reasons why the fight against climate change has been going so terribly. For example in 2006 in Norway, voters were offered a ridiculously cheap plan to take what were at the time big steps on climate change, yet turned it down. It’s also worth noting that it’s not as if dictatorships were making leaps and bounds on climate change back then, or now. People are only made painfully aware of this stupidity in democracies because it happens in public, which can be humiliating, but is ultimately a good thing.

So how can we counteract something literally wired into our brains? One very old idea which is now seeing implementation in various ways is to just force governing bodies to think about the longer-term future when making decisions. This concept has many very ancient precedents, such as with the Iroquois Confederacy in North America where the leaders were constitutionally obliged to consider the welfare of current and future people. These days countries such as Wales and Finland have laws forcing the consideration of the future. Wales passed the ‘Well-Being of Future Generations Act’ in 2015; forcing public bodies to work together to improve the well-being of future generations and think more long term. Meanwhile in Finland there’s a Parliamentary Committee for the Future, and at least once in it’s term the government has to create a ‘Future Report’ (Government’s Future Report), then the Committee’s job is to prepare the Parliament’s response (Parliament’s Future Report). That way legislators keep the future in mind.

One seemingly easy getaround for the problem of democratic short-termism is just to bypass the source of the problem altogether. Given that the problem partly arises from politicians having to worry about elections, you can just skip the elections and use lottery or direct democracy, through a process known as ‘Deliberative Citizen Participation’. In this, citizens get chosen at random to participate in small citizen’s juries who deliberate on whatever issue they were created to deliberate on. Interestingly though, policymakers put very little trust in these whereas the people put huge amounts of trust in them.

Another solution is to just create institutions whose job it is to think long-term. This could perhaps take the form of a more politically influential version of the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in France. The institution’s job would be to do research on future-related issues to better guide and inform the government. This could be combined with citizen juries and/or direct democracy to create future ‘Future Roadmaps’. These would be regularly updated and act as a sort of compass for the government to follow, no matter who the government may be.

Linked to people being inherently short-sighted is another major flaw of democracy: the oft-cited problem of people being pretty dumb. Put more tactfully, just like people aren’t inherently long-sighted, they aren’t necessarily born with the insight necessary to elect people who are.

People are a bit dumb sometimes:

This criticism was first laid out by Socrates in book 6 of Plato’s The Republic. In this he asks why any old person should be fit to judge who should lead a state whereas you’d obviously only trust experienced sailors to sail a ship. It’s important to remember that modern democracy is almost unrecognisable compared to the Athenian ancestor Socrates was criticising. Firstly, our democracies work in very different ways: Athens was a direct democracy, whereas we tend to be representative; we have compulsory education; Athens didn’t; and our world is complex beyond the understanding of most voters, Athens’ wasn’t. Of course there are many, many more differences but these are the main ones relevant to this problem. Despite these differences, the problem of voter ignorance persists in modern democracies, albeit expressed differently.

The fact that we are in a representative, or indirect, democracy complicates the matter. In the Athenian democracy citizens (at the time a very limited proportion of the population) could show up at the Ecclesia, where matters would be discussed and voted on. However these days we don’t do much voting ourselves, instead we just vote for who gets to do it on our behalf. This, in theory removes the problem of voters being pretty dumb; but in practice it changes the focus of idiocy from the issue to the representative. Having compulsory education and a free press, however, changes things a lot. Being literate allows for far more democratic participation, as does access to the press, which also allows voters to be informed.

Compulsory education and a free press certainly help alleviate this flaw with democracy, but the problem persists. The issue isn’t just that people can’t easily inform themselves like in Socrates’ days: often they also can’t be bothered to. While the internet is the largest pool of knowledge in human history, that doesn’t mean everything there is right or that it’s easy to find high quality information. In fact, the writing of this article is a prime example of some of the internet’s problems: the anglophone internet’s few good articles on democracy are buried beneath an endless expanse of disillusioned americans; the lack of content talking about the concept of democracy in general is actually one of the reasons I started writing this. 

People need actually good content, and they need to actually read it. Unfortunately the current Internet, and specifically the algorithms of social media, encourage clickbait-culture and polarisation. One way to help alleviate this issue could be to help local news outlets. The same way most countries have national broadcasters, there could be local, national media outlets so that people can have a reliable source of high-quality articles, where they could also discuss the matters at hand. Having an unbiased local print newspaper that everyone receives would mean that most people would be regularly informed about a wide range of issues. Fostering lively debate in the opinions section would also help, because a healthy culture of political discussion can be nothing but a good thing.

You could also have regular citizen’s juries on local issues to ensure a culture that encourages researching political issues. In this case it doesn’t matter if the citizen’s juries only amount to advising politicians and/or talking to the public, all it really has to do is ensure people regularly inform themselves on a wide range of issues. Another thing that could also help would be to have people vote on issues separately through referendums, like in Switzerland, so that they can research individual topics instead of being confronted with the entirety of national politics every few years. It’s possible that referendums would generate more public, political debate than elections, since there would be a clear point of contention. 

Fake news:

To ensure the electorate makes well-informed decisions you also need to fight fake news. Finland has been particularly successful in this domain (and pretty much all domains actually). They’ve managed this through a large campaign on media literacy and critical thinking, helping Finns spot fake news. They have also been training officials to spot and respond to fake news. Some have also called for the regulation of social media companies. In particular, journalist Jessikka Aro has called for them to have to pay for a sort of intellectual pollution, the same way other companies have to pay for polluting the natural environment. 

These solutions wouldn’t be the end of the problem though. This is because unlike the other problems I’ve mentioned, fake news is an active, continued assault on democracy itself. It’s not a flaw from within, it’s an attack by corporate or undemocratic powers trying to undermine democracy. Therefore the moment we stop one type of fake news another will spring up to take its place. It will be a never ending war and we need to be constantly prepared and ready to defend ourselves. 

Bad news:

Even if you manage to defeat fake news, you could have another problem, the manipulation of the press. The manipulation of the press has been one of the driving factors behind the anglosphere’s kakistocratic tendencies, mainly due to media consolidation. For example, 90% of US media is controlled by just 6 companies. This lack of diversity gives very few people an enormous amount of power over US politics. This is why you should sign up to my newsletter: I am a very independent and trustworthy news-source (trust me on that one). There’s a box at the very bottom of the page to put your email in, by signing up you find out when I post my extremely independent and trustworthy articles.

In corporate media, either the one in charge will decide to push their opinions and views, or they will seek profits and neglect quality journalism. When the bosses are six gigantic companies who bought the media for profit motives the chances of these outcomes not happening are extremely slim. Either proper journalism is stifled from within to ensure revenue or to boost a preferred candidate and ensure revenue. This issue with the commercial press was predicted by Marx in ‘Die Verhandlungen des 6. Rheinischen Landtags. Debatten über Preßfreiheit und Publikation der Landständischen Verhandlungen.’ and endlessly attacked by Karl Kraus a hundred years ago in his magazine ‘Die Fackel’. 

The issues with commercial press are accentuated when the news outlets are part of large conglomerates, and while Europe’s situation in that regard is not as dismal as America’s, there are still huge problems. Many people are familiar with Poland’s current struggle surrounding press freedom, but this is not an issue that doesn’t affect western Europe, quite the contrary in fact. For example, Isabelle de Silva, France’s popular president of the competition authority, did not get her contract renewed by the Elysée after she didn’t support a merger between TF1 and M6 (which would have had a 70% market share).

While the commercial press has inherent problems as mentioned above they can be toned down with strong, industry-specific competition laws, such as putting a limit on how many media organisations one can own. Another thing that would help would be to make sure people who own media can’t own any other private (profit-making) property, so that they can’t perversely use their media investments to increase the value of their other private property or generally push their interests.

Of course one aspirational article can’t address all of the threats to democracy, and certainly can’t solve them. This article is just here to remind people of democracy’s weaknesses so that we can better protect it. I highly encourage all of you to look into these questions further, because the more aware the public is, the better democracy’s outlook. The final article of this series, on how to supercharge democracy for the 21st century, will be appearing on romuluseurope.eu.

You can read the first article of the series here: Examining Democracy: Why it Works – (strasbourgdispatch.eu), and as mentioned above: the newsletter is below.