Unstacking the deck

We continue our investigation of what a deliberately chosen system of justice might look like. While we were looking at the broader theoretical results of Rawls in the first four installments of this series, we’ll focus on one particular point here: the “fair value of political liberty“

That will take slaughtering another sacred cow of current politics: elections.

Yup, that’s how we roll.

“ENEMY OF DEMOCRACY! DICTATOR!” Woooooh, cool down!
I love democracy and loathe dictatorship. I just think, we are butchering the democratic process badly. Why? Well, to put it with Rawls:

The liberties protected by the principle of participation lose much of their value whenever those who have greater private means are permitted to use their advantages to control the course of public debate. For eventually these inequalities will enable those better situated to exercise a larger influence over the development of legislation. In due time they are likely to acquire a preponderant weight in settling social questions, at least in regard to those matters upon which they normally agree, which is to say in regard to those things that support their favored circumstances. [RAWLS, p. 225]

Of course, just because wealthy people could have greater influence on our political decision making, doesn’t mean they will use it, right? What could their possible motivation be for that?

Essentially the fault lies in the fact that the democratic political process is at best regulated rivalry; it does not even in theory have the desirable properties that price theory ascribes to truly competitive markets. Moreover, the effects of injustices in the political system are much more grave and long lasting than market imperfections. Political power rapidly accumulates and becomes unequal; and making use of the coercive apparatus of the state and its law, those who gain the advantage can often assure themselves of a favored position. Thus inequities in the economic and social system may soon undermine whatever political equality might have existed under fortunate historical conditions. [RAWLS, p.226]

Oh, because it pays to use the political process for personal gain? But it won’t be that bad, right? Well according to the Sunlight Foundation, “[…] on average, for every dollar spent on influencing politics, the nation’s most politically active corporations received $760 from the government.” That’s a ROI of 76.000%. Pretty neat!
It’s probably not a representative study and I am pretty sure the consultants of the companies would have great arguments for why these number are not “accurate”. Anyway, I think I’m on firm ground in assuming that the returns will be higher than the market average. It could be wrong by a factor (a FACTOR!) of 100 and still be directionally accurate! The problem could literally be just 1% of what this story finds and still be huge!

Elected representatives are anything but representative.
They are too old, way too rich, too well connected, too educated, too lawyerly. It’s not just a phenomenon, a problem might I say, in the USA. It seems to be the same story everywhere. After enough time has passed, democratic institutions are firmly in the hand of career bureaucrats, party elites and technocrats. This is not necessarily bad. I have a lot of respect for highly capable technocrats. But I think they can give even more to society, if they focus on developing, implementing and measuring the effects of their regulations, in accordance with the will of the people, which we are failing at measuring.

Speaking of political parties, it seems that Rawls would agree with Bernie Sanders on their finances:

If society does not bear the costs of organization, and party funds need to be solicited from the more advantaged social and economic interests, the pleadings of these groups are bound to receive excessive attention. And this is all the more likely when the less favored members of society, having been effectively prevented by their lack of means from exercising their fair degree of influence, withdraw into apathy and resentment. Historically one of the main defects of constitutional government has been the failure to insure the fair value of political liberty. The necessary corrective steps have not been taken, indeed, they never seem to have been seriously entertained. Disparities in the distribution of property and wealth that far exceed what is compatible with political equality have generally been tolerated by the legal system. [RAWLS, p.225-226]

These tendencies, obvious to attentive observers 50 years ago, have become glaringly obvious today. We live in a world of ultra-partisan advocacy, massive campaign budgets, fake news, a whole new industry of professionals in persuasion, veterans of advertisement campaigns, has political campaigns firmly in its grips, filter bubbles created by news selection and social media consumption are everywhere, as is social ostracism for not conforming to whatever narrative exists “on our side”.

So what is going on here? Is democracy a bad idea in the first place? Is the citizenry stupid and lazy? Are the politicians evil and corrupt? Well, I think these are all possibilities. But given that I am biased in favor of the democratic idea – not by my upbringing, but by reasoning about a good system, I like to tell myself – and that democracy suffers from the same effects almost everywhere, I tend to think that a different hypothesis is more promising.
The system of democracy we inherited was not designed to be suited for our current technologies and the designers didn’t know as much about the flaws of our human psyche, as we know today, thanks to behavioral economists and evolutionary psychologist. We are just doing it wrong!

Well, at least relative to my expectation, about how democracy should look like.

How do you measure “democracy”?

There are roughly four criteria that would indicate that the population actually has a significant role in ruling itself:

• Inclusion: citizens have an equal opportunity to participate

• Choice: alternatives to decide upon must be sufficiently different and realizable

• Deliberation: decision makers need to be motivated to think about the pros and cons of the alternatives in a context that provides them with “good” information about them.

• Impact: the choices need to have an effect on decisions.

“The decision as to who is included easily determines the democratic result, not the other way around.” [FISHKIN, p. 15] I already fretted about the self-selection bias, which precludes “inclusion”, I’d consider appropriate for public decision making.

Today’s institutions promote “rational ignorance” far too often; if it doesn’t make any difference to be informed about a topic whatsoever, why put all the work into it to get informed? There are too many competing possibilities to spend time and energy on, why waste it to be one in a million votes? What are the odds that you will ever cast a deciding vote? What are the odds your vote “really” matters?

There are some encouraging examples of “choice” and “impact” lately. I will probably regret saying this, because people will later hallucinate that they read my opinion on this issue, without me actually stating it, but I am going to say it anyway:
The “Brexit”-vote satisfied in my view these two criteria. The alternatives were different and the impact is projected to be huge.
But the very fact that we are still speaking about it years after it happened, anecdotally indicates how rare and controversial an important decision by a plebiscite is.
How often can you as citizen decide on things that matter? Or even chime in?
Shutdowns of factories? Closure of borders? Reopening? Have you been asked? Were you able to defer your decision to your expert of choice? I am not saying that would have been ideal or even better, I don’t know that, but I think there was no constitutional process that asked regular citizens, right?

Forms of democracy

Why do I care about democracy at all? Because there is competition!
There are alternative systems, like Singapore’s, which are seemingly operating on cost-benefit analysis principles with no regard to public opinion. That might work in terms of GDP.
Then there is China with its tightly regulated political process, suffocating (in my opinion) controls on privacy and a centrally devised plans for the economy. That might also work in terms of GDP.
But I think the benefits don’t outweigh the costs for I believe new ideas, new insights and general progress comes out the struggle of public opinions. I think personal liberty is inductive to innovation in technology and morals. But if democracy doesn’t deliver the results people want, I can’t imagine there will be enough nostalgia to keep it.
So we have to innovate on our democracy as well; piecemeal as always, but innovate nonetheless.

In the literature, there are a whole lot of conceptions of democracy. We will go with James Fishkin and identify 3 principles that are internal to the design of democratic institutions, namely political equality, participation (of the masses) and deliberation as well as a fourth one, that is about the effects of the democratic decisions, non-tyranny. These dimensions will allow us to span possible instantiations of democracy by identifying whether or not they accept a certain principle.

• Political equality means, what it seems to mean: Does the design of the process grant each person equal chances of casting a decisive vote? Do their votes have the same power?

• Participation measures, whether citizens can influence the politics of policies or even the dialogue about them.

• Deliberation means roughly that there are institutional measures to ensure that the reasons pro and contra a decision can be made under good conditions in shared discussions. Good conditions means that there is access to reasonably good information and a moderated discussion with conscientious peers.

• Non-tyranny means that policies are avoided that would impose severe deprivations, when reasonable alternatives exists, that wouldn’t. This measures, if a tyranny of the majority is effectively stifled.

Fishkin identifies four forms of democracy that are each committed to two of these principles and are usually agnostic about the other two. These four brands of democracy have been or still are influential.

Participatory Democracy

In this conception of democracy the participation of the masses and equal counting are emphasized. Even when using secret ballots, the equality of all views offered or expressed is cherished. It’s not necessarily important that the people are educated about the issues, although there is also support for voter handbooks or other technologies for voter information.
It has to be kept in mind, that we are looking for a model of democracy for large democracies and not for small settings like town meetings.
There could be penalties for not voting, incentives to vote (like a lottery) or a combination of both. Anyway, the goal is to get as many people to participate as possible.

Elite deliberation

Elite deliberation is the idea that a group of highly educated (and wealthy, I assume) elites deliberate without too much interference from the commoners. They create themselves settings, where debate is possible. Public opinion only influences these elite bodies indirectly through filters. This seems to have been Madison’s idea(l?) for the US Constitution.
The people elect representatives, who elect the president. Or they elect governors, who elect Senate members.
They would, in theory, refine the public’s view by their superior capacity for intellectual debate. Representatives of people discussing in an appropriate setting, were envisioned to better serve the public good and avoid the tyranny of the majority than the people debating themselves.
Participation of the people is not a value in itself in this view, because the unfiltered emotions and opinions of the people might be a threat.
Here, disinterested elites, hopefully highly capable technocrats, deal with what matters, according to whatever metric they come up with.
If their cost-benefit analysis indicates that some topic is important, they will deal with it, unfazed by whatever stirs the emotions of the public.
I can’t deny that this ideal of fact-based, emotionless, almost scientific government has some appeal to me. But then I remember the quarrels people get into, even in scientific organizations, and I am not so sure about the superior reasoning capabilities and higher control of emotions anymore. Highly trained experts are human after all. They suffer from the same evolved biases as the rest of us.
And that is under the assumption that highly trained and not only powerful people or their stooges get into these elite bodies.

Competitive Democracy

Competitive Democracy is democracy via electoral competition. Joseph Schumpeter was probably the most influential proponent of this specific form of democracy. Democracy is not about collective will formation but just a competitive struggle for the people’s vote. There are legal guarantees, particularly constitutional ones, against the tyranny of the majority. Other than that, pretty much everything goes. It’s competition after all. The will of the people is and always was meaningless; anything else is more or less a fairy tale of times gone by.
“Electoral competition, without any constraints on whether candidates or parties can mislead or bamboozle the voters to win, is what matters on this view.” [FISHKIN, p. 25] Schumpeter did not even specify that political equality needs to be uphold in competitive elections and was included by Fishkin to make the position more defensible. Some variants of this position avoid emphasizing participation, because it could be a threat to stability and/or be a disturbance to the decision-making of the elites. Just to avoid the tyranny of the masses, of course. Ordinary citizens are expected to be rationally ignorant and not much is done to change that. It’s not too inconvenient, anyway. Oh and of course Schumpeter doesn’t expect “a ‘genuine’ public will, but rather ‘a manufactured will.’ “The will of the people is the product and not the motive power of the political process.’ Further, ‘the ways in which issues and the popular will are being manufactured is [sic] exactly analogous to the ways of commercial advertising.’ In fact, he believes that competing parties and interest groups have ‘infinitely more scope’ on public issues than in commercial competition to manufacture the opinions they hope to satisfy. Competitive democracy, at least on Schumpeterian terms, sees little likelihood and little need for deliberation by the people.” [FISHKIN, p.25]
Let that sink in:

This view of democracy expects you to be a fool and sees nothing really wrong with fooling you. Politics is a reality show, performed to arouse you for, to entertain you with, to placate you about certain topics.

There is nothing substantial about it. All that matters is going through the motions of elections and paying lip service to the “sovereign”. The ruling elites don’t need and certainly don’t want your input.
In this conception of democracy, there is actually not too much wrong with what I’d like to join Fishkin in bemoaning:

There is vote suppression, distortions of campaign finance, a largely uninformed public, vast sums of money spent to mislead and manipulate public opinion, efforts to spread fake news on social media, and a public that is increasingly likely to talk mostly to the like-minded, and consult mostly news sources it agrees with. In addition, we often have the theory of competitive democracy applied in gerrymandered districts designed so that there will be little competition. Even where there is competition in elections, that competition can produce the least substantive, dirtiest campaigns focused on character and personality, often with gross distortions of personal history. If negative campaigning wins elections, by suppressing the approval ratings and turnout for the other side, then those tendencies will be enhanced by greater competition. Candidates and parties want to win. If voters become informed about the complexities of serious issues that is only a by-product, and one that is rarely achieved. So increasing competition may well worsen our elections—by making campaigns dirtier and less substantive, by further amplifying the role of money (including dark money), and by putting a premium on the successful manipulation of public opinion. [FISHKIN, p.4]

Have you recognized it yet or do I have to mention specifically that this is the kind of democracy we inherited and live in? That is perpetuated by party politics, financial interests and media bubbles?

So what else do we got?

Deliberative Democracy

The fourth conception of democracy emphasizes, as its name already reveals, deliberation by the people and equally weighs the resulting views.
“Deliberation” presupposes a setting, where it is reasonably possible to think critically.
“What would the people think, under transparently good conditions for thinking about these issues?” is the guiding question. So the participants are given balanced briefing materials, with input from proponents and opponents of ideas, they discuss in small groups with trained moderators and they participate in plenary sessions with competing experts. “That’s totally unrealistic, politicians don’t have the time to do that and they are biased anyway”, might be what comes to your mind. And I would agree.
That’s why there is another part to deliberative democracy: the deliberators are randomly selected by lot.
“Dude, we can’t let random people run our democracy!” To which I say: Yes, you can!
This is actually, how democracy worked in the first place. When The old Greeks invented democracy, and they designed it to use elements of randomness: they drew lots to decide, who’s on their councils. We have taken “democracy” and “competitive election” to be synonyms for “only” the last 300 years. Which is of course a long time and I think this mode has worked reasonably well. But the inherent problem of competitive elections, namely creating biased samples of the population to vote on issues, having a small and fixed number of well-known people, who are always in need for campaign funds for the next dirty election or for attractive jobs in the private sector once their political term has ended and entry costs to the political realm that are so high, that you have to join one of the established clubs/parties and subject to the party line instead of thinking for yourself, have in my opinion tipped the scale towards another approach to democracy a long time ago.
Randomly selected people, who convene for a short amount of time to discuss about a certain topic, are a better representation of the population. There will be grandmas and workers and students and homosexuals and Muslims and Hindus, roughly in proportion to their size in the general populations, if you take a large enough sample. A plus, if you care about diversity. There will also be all relevant viewpoints and interests in accordance with their prevalence in the general public. Great, if you care about diversity of opinion. The selected people will have more “skin in the game”, because there won’t be an attractive job waiting for them after their stint in politics ended. They have to live with the effects of their choices. They aren’t as easily bribable, because they are only “in power” for a short amount of time and not known with too much lead-time.
They are not necessarily in political clubs and don’t have to toe the party line, lest the party whip will kick them out.
Whom do you run “negative” ads against, whose character do you try to assassinate, if there is no one running for office?

I’ll just throw in another argument for deliberation: It’s about a theory about the origin of language. The so called argumentative theory of reasoning asserts that biased and flawed arguments are social adaptations that enable one group to persuade (and defeat) another.

"[The] argumentative theory of reasoning asserts that" bias, lack of logic and other supposed flaws that pollute the stream of reason are instead social adaptations that enable one group to persuade (and defeat) another."

Rationalizing, not rational. https://t.co/XoccOxyLS8

— Martin Lukas (@realMartinLukas) January 16, 2020

In this view, pitting against opposing views is necessary to overcome our “nature”, which is a natural adaption that pollutes our reasoning capabilities, but made us win more often in the past. In this theory, we are designed to create the drama of politics; because stirring emotions, branding people as bad etc., is what we are naturally adapted to do.
We need to put conscious effort into formalizing a process that doesn’t pander to our own self-serving biases; like in science, where you must have the humility to outline where exactly your theory would fail, so other people can falsify it, we have to consciously create settings, where the validity of arguments can be weight appropriately.
I have no idea how accurate this theory is. It would just offer an interpretation of the observable behavior that doesn’t assume stupidity or malicious intend of any actor.

Whatever the truth about the origin of this realty show, we call modern politics, is, whether it’s and evolutionary adaptions or just the result of a flawed design relying on elections, our current model of democracy creates discontent in the citizenry.

What can be done?

Our only option is changing the design of our system. Of course it’s dangerous to just propose a new “ideal” and overthrow everything.
I am an advocate of piecemeal engineering and believe in the power of the iterative approach.

An interesting idea might be to change party fiance law. How about sending out vouchers to all citizens redeemable only for support of a party, a candidate or a ballot initiative? Parties and candidates can’t spend money, if they can’t prove it came from one of these vouchers. Wouldn’t that take a little bit of power from dark money and put it into the hands of the people? I would love to see something like that tested! Does any state want to volunteer? Vermont?

Another interesting idea has been proposed, at least in Europe, by the Pirate Party. It’s called Liquid Democracy. In this model, the individual is empowered. Each citizen can delegate, or retain, the right to vote on specific, or all, topics.
So you could chose, like now, to be completely represented by a single member in a parliament on all topics. Or you could chose to let AOC vote on social issues and Matt Gaetz on immigration for you. And retain the vote on infrastructure and energy for yourself. Or delegate it to your neighbor Alice, if you think she’s knowledgeable on that sort of stuff.
Society would need a Consent Management Tool, secure digital identities and cryptographically auditable voting schemes for this. But I’d love to see this tested and the tools developed! We could test these tools even in companies. Is there a community run corporation that wants to try this? Or a union?

There are already encouraging experiments and results around the globe with randomly selected deliberation groups for different purposes: from budgeting to consulting on ballot initiatives. [FISHKIN, Part III] offers a few examples and references. You could start by using lots on local councils, later on, you could replace the House of Representatives with people drawn by lot. Fishkin proposes a national holiday, the deliberation day, where all citizens can participate in smallish, moderated deliberation groups. There are a lot of ideas to be tried and there is a lot of testing to be done!

Just as a thought experiment, how far could we push this idea? How far can randomly selecting citizens go? I am not proposing it, I am showing you, what [VAN REYBROUCK, p. 138ff] presents on how a legislature, deliberately designed to use randomness, could look like.

There are a few competing demands on the groups you select by lot.
You want large, representative samples, but you also know it’s better to work in smallish groups. You want a rapid rotation of people in the selected groups to promote participation and stifle any attempt of bribery, but you also know there is learning curve and experience can make a difference. You want people to be able to contribute voluntarily, but you also know this will skew your group-averages towards the well educated. You want to enable consultation, but you know that it can lead to groupthink, you want to give power to allotted bodies, but you also want to have checks and balances to prevent arbitrary usage of power. These are five dilemmas concerning the right size, ideal duration, ideal selection method, ideal consultation method and ideal group dynamic.

If you know how to square that circle, please contact me. I am really interested in your ideas!

VAN REYBROUCK opts instead for using multiple bodies designed to reinforce their relatives strengths and weaken their relative drawbacks.
In this system, instead of giving all power to a single, randomly selected body, the legislative work is split up.

At first the agenda has to be set. That’s the task of the Agenda Council. They do, what their name indicates. Every citizens can use petitions to draw attention to a topic.
This Council designates, but does not develop topics. The members are randomly selected from volunteers.

After that, Interest Panels come into play. There can be a lot of them. These are panels of 12 citizens, that can propose a bill or part of a bill. They are purely self-selected, no lots or elections are used. Think-Tanks and lobbyists could work here. But that isn’t much of a problem, because they can’t enact their own bills. If you know the Agenda and have relevant skills, this is your chance to introduce sensible legislation!

In a third phase the proposals are put before a Review Panel. There is a panel for each domain. They might be likened to today’s parliamentary committees. These panels don’t have the right to initiate legislation nor to vote on its adoption. They are collecting the input of the Interest Panels’ work on the Agenda Council’s topics and create the proposals from them, which get actually voted upon. These Panels use public hearing and consult experts. Their members are randomly selected from volunteers for 3 years.
Every year a third of them is replaced by fresh randomly selected people.

The Review Panels have obviously great power. To prevent them from becoming the center of power, there is fourth phase. The legislation of the Review Panel is put before a Policy Jury. It has no permanent members, instead every time a decision is needed, 400 people are randomly sampled from all citizens. They will convene for at most a week, usually for only a single day. They can’t opt out of this duty, unless there are valid reasons (i.e. non-elective medical procedures). The remuneration is chosen to be attractive.

The Jury hears the various policy proposals in formal presentations of arguments for and against it, a cost-benefit analysis might also be a great tool for this. The proposals are presented by neutral staff members. Maybe we could use a synthetic presenter to eliminate this possible path of bias as well. After that, they vote in a secret, auditable ballot on the proposal. They don’t discuss about the proposals.

The Policy Jury represents the people. It’s decision has the force of law.

We got two additional bodies in the proposal to look at.
The Rules Council develops procedures for the drawing of lots, for hearings and votes. Maybe on sunsetting of laws, which kinds of laws need a plebiscite and how long the timeframe between the introduction of similar laws has to be.
The Oversight Council ensures that civil servants follow the procedures and deals with complaints.

Observe that the Rules Council can iterate the rules of the games to improve its efficiency. It’s not a static system, it’s a system designed to facilitate learning and adaptability to new challenges.

“In a nutshell: anyone who feels capable of serving society is given the chance to get involved in the discussion, but it is the community as a whole that ultimately decides“
[VAN REYBROUCK, p. 148]

So what could be used from this design? What would you like to add? What would you remove? What would your first step towards a solution like that be?

The problem is pressing, there are tools available and we can test them small.

Let’s get going!

References:
[Rawls] RAWLS, John. A Theory of Justice (Oxford Paperbacks 301 301). Harvard University Press. Kindle-Version.

[FISHKIN] FISHKIN, James S.. Democracy When the People Are Thinking. OUP Oxford. Kindle-Version.

[VAN REYBROUCK] VAN REYBROUCK, David. Against elections: The case for democracy. Random House, 2016.