Examining Democracy: Its Future?

I’ve already talked about why democracy works, and its flaws, but I’ve hardly addressed the potential to improve democracy further. In this article I’ll be doing just that!

Citizen Journalism:

As I talked about in the previous article, the press is extremely important in upholding democracy. While the internet’s contributions to this are often overlooked in favour of the damage caused by social media, they are pretty substantial. Firstly, high-quality journalism from around the world is available to all at the click of a button; but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. One could in fact argue that social media is the internet’s greatest contribution to democracy, as paradoxical as that might seem. Citizen Journalism is why:

• It allows everybody to hold power to account, most notably being the recording of George Floyd’s murder on a mobile phone
• It can help circumvent censorship, such as during the Arab Spring
• It can do what traditional media can’t or won’t, such as tracking russian troop movements or documenting the 2004 tsunami
• Look at the war in Ukraine!

The fact that everyone can film the world and publish what they film gives the people power to bypass traditional media institutions, which can sometimes be a very good thing.

Responsible/Non-Profit Business:

While the press is often described as one of the pillars of democracy, it can also be it’s bane. Motivated by profits and power, the press can neglect its democratic duties and use its power to push its interests. 

Some of the best and most relevant journalism is done by organisations who aren’t profit-motivated, such as the Guardian and Bellingcat. However there’s no reason having basic morals should be restricted to the press! If corporations and those running them at least tried to apply the morals they (should have) learnt in kindergarten, the world would be a better place. You’d think avoiding child slavery would be common ettiquette, but I guess people are quite mal-élevé these days.

You might think that this doesn’t affect democracy much (or at least not our ones, but I’m sure the child slaves have a thing or two to say on this matter), but it does. Not least because it’s a bad idea to have such uncouth people occupying important and powerful places in society, but also because of lobbying.

Thanks to lobbying from people who have forgotten the basic elements of decency, such as not literally putting profits over the future of the planet (which you’d think would be hard to forget given that so many movies revolve around similar choices), fossil fuel companies have blocked climate legislation and lied and obfuscated so much that we’ve somehow ended up in our current mess.

Clearly democracy would be better off without lobbying from such people, and I see two solutions:

• A kindergarten restructuring: clearly the lessons being taught there aren’t sticking, so I think we should have a graduation test to make sure kids understand these lessons before moving into primary school; or maybe instead of keeping all these kids stuck in kindergarten we could just hammer these lessons in their whole lives until the brats give in and put trivial things such as the planet above their desire to own a yacht. Private schools would have to be forced into collaborating.

• Or maybe we could put through legislation that would help businesses running on more sustainable, less I-would-fail-to-graduate-from-kindergarten models, such as non-profits and worker cooperatives (which are far more environmentally-minded, for instance).

Voting systems:

One of the most obvious elements of democracy is voting, yet many countries have messed it up. To understand why we’ll have to look at the different voting systems:

The U.K. is so undemocratic that it barely qualifies as a democracy. The U.K. still has an unelected upper house with seats reserved for the clergy and aristocracy. The House of Lords is one of the cute little souvenirs from the middle-ages, like city coats of arms; but while city coats of arms are cute and fun, the House of Lords is a tasteless ode to feudalism at best. 

First-past-the-post voting is the second most common system in the world, but this is due to Britain’s colonial influence, and has nothing to do with merit. In my humble opinion the only merit FPTP has is its simplicity, which is its fatal flaw. First-past-the-post is one of the only systems in which a large majority can support a party and still fail to get a majority in parliament, it’s that unrepresentative (ironic for a representative democracy). If that party wins in many seats by a good margin and loses in the rest by a fine margin, they have a majority of votes but a minority of seats (This can and does happen, like in the U.K. 1951 election). There are many more problems with FPTP but this is an article about democracy improvement, not ruining democracy.

The Electoral College is a very unique take on democracy, in which you vote for who votes for who votes for you. Metarepresentative democracy?

Hong-Kong’s electoral system is a work of art, and more evidence that ruining democracy is to the British what pushing stuff off ledges is to cats. It’s so abstract and random and nonsensical, it feels a bit like something out of a Terry Pratchett novel. Even before the Communist Party changed the law so that only “patriots” could stand for election, it was absurd. Currently, there are geographical constituencies, but also “functional constituencies”: these are business sectors and get to choose thirty members over the people’s twenty. Function constituencies hold closed elections so nobody really knows what’s going on. The remaining forty members are elected by the Election committee, who also chooses the Chief Executive. It is composed of various different (pretty arbitrary) business and other sectors. This is by far the funkiest and most dysfunctional system I’ve seen yet, you can read more here.

Proportional representation is as basic and bland as it gets, but it works. It’s the most common system worldwide, and in it seats are allocated so that they are proportional to the party’s share of votes. French people explain how this causes scary things like coalitions while crying into their “semi-proportional” system.

Preferential voting (or Instant-Runoff Voting) is what’s used in Australia. In it you rank candidates, if nobody has a majority of people’s first preferences, the person with the least first-choices is eliminated, the second choices of those voters is then added to the tally. This process is repeated until there’s a clear winner. It’s a pretty solid system, but it can be gamed and can also exhibit majority reversal, as pointed out by the Marquis de Condorcet in 1804. He came up with a much more accurate system.

The Condorcet methods are very cool. Every candidate is marked as better or worse than another in each possible pairing. If someone wins the majority of the vote in each pairing, that person wins and is a Condorcet winner. It is however possible that there is a cyclic-preference, like in rock-paper-scissors. In that case there will always be a ‘smith set’, the smallest group who beat all candidates not in the group. Essentially all Condorcet methods elect someone from the Smith set. As cool as the Condorcet methods are, they are too complicated to be practical for national elections.

Majority judgement is the most recently invented voting system talked about in this article, it was invented in 2011 by two researchers at the CNRS in France. In it you ‘grade’ each candidate, the candidates get an overall grade based off of where the middle is, like this:

If two candidates have the same grade, like above with Macron and Pécresse, the orientation and size of the groups who didn’t give that grade are taken into account to rank candidates. Majority judgement is one of the best available voting systems at the moment.

Digital democracy:

Digital democracy could become the biggest thing in democracy since infrastructure and logistics got good enough to hold elections across countries rather than cities. Digital democracy is where citizens get to directly participate in democracy through the internet. Sort of like the citizen juries and direct democracy mentioned in my previous article, but on a much wider scale. It would be best fitted for small-scale politics, such as municipalities, but could equally be used on national scales.

One of the most innovative elements of Digital Democracy is a system called Liquid Democracy, though it was actually invented long before the internet. It’s a sort of mix of direct and representative systems: you can choose to either vote directly or give your vote to a “delegate”, who can use or pass on their votes. This means voters can really invest themselves in issues they are interested in, and can of course become delegates themselves. In some versions delegates are specialised and can only have votes delegated to them on certain matters. Liquid democracy generally gives citizens far more agency than current systems, and it fits perfectly with digital democracy. Many of Europe’s pirate parties use it internally.

Modern AI has been used to turn public opinion into actual suggestions:Taiwan tried the system on stakeholders, and made a law with it! In this truly innovative system, participants are aggregated into groups based on which opinions they agree with, and then these groups have to make their opinion more palatable to grow, eventually the number of groups diminishes and the end result is a few opinions shared by nearly all: this can then be turned into policy. This is an excellent example of the potential the internet has for making democracy more democratic, and facilitating debate and discussion.

Digital democracy makes it far easier to do public consultations, let citizens actively participate in law making and the budget (budget participation is becoming quite common in cities), and hold citizen juries. One of the biggest problems in the way of it being implemented is however the reluctance of politicians. It’s easy to be sceptical of digital democracy, but just remember that it is really flexible, and so can be altered based on circumstances. Finally, if you haven’t read my previous article it might be good to do so to understand why making democracy more democratic is such a great thing for our countries.

Across the world democracy is under threat, it is up to us to protect it, and becoming more democratic is one of the best ways to do that. I highly suggest you look into the theory behind democracy more, because people need to understand democracy to know why they have to defend it. People also need to be educated on democracy to ensure that they are attached to the principles and not to their respective systems (which may be quite bad: U.K.). Part of protecting democracy is ensuring it evolves. Europe is lucky because most of our constitutions are quite recent, but they need to be kept up to scratch to keep democracy alive and well.

The other two articles of this series are here:

Examining Democracy: Why it Works – (strasbourgdispatch.eu)

Examining Democracy: Its Obstacles – (strasbourgdispatch.eu)