‘“It’s always best on these occasions to do what the mob do.”
“But suppose there are two mobs?” suggested Mr Snodgrass.
“Shout with the largest,” replied Mr Pickwick.’
Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers (1837)
So much has been written in praise of democracy that it can be daunting even to broach the subject. We are told by leading scholars that the term is ‘sacred’.1 It is the ‘motherhood and apple pie’ of politics;2 a ‘universal value’3 with a ‘privileged aura of legitimacy’.4 It presses ‘a claim for authority and a demand for respect.’5 It is ‘the leading standard of political legitimacy in the current era.’6
In the twentieth century, democracy’s prestige in the realm of ideas was matched by its growth in practice. From just twelve at the end of the Second World War,7 by the late 1990s there were 120 electoral democracies in the world: more than 60 per cent of independent states.8
But that’s not the whole story.
For most of history, humans have been sceptical of the idea of democracy. As a system of government it has been conspicuous mainly in its absence. And since 2006 the number and quality of democracies in the world has been gradually declining.9 Many are plagued by low turnout, political gridlock, chronic public indifference, and mistrust.10 Public discontent is growing.11 Politicians are widely disliked. Although Plato was being a little dramatic when he described democracy as when the poor ‘win, kill or exile their opponents’,12 he was right to resist the assumption that democracy is always a good thing, that more is always better, or that democracy as he knew it (or as we currently know it) is the best possible form of government. Like any other concept, the meaning and value of democracy can be contested. Like any other system of government, it can be changed, lost, or destroyed.
In the next two chapters we look to the digital lifeworld and ask: how can the people rule? Democracy in the future will not be the same as it was in classical Athens or even in advanced twentieth-century democracies. Some aspects of the process, like campaigning and deliberation, have already been irrevocably changed by digital technologies. Looking ahead, we may see further changes to the way we prepare legislation, how we vote, even whether we vote. Technology could fundamentally alter what it means for humans to govern themselves. Visible on the horizon are five different systems of democracy, each made possible by digital technology: Deliberative Democracy, Direct Democracy, Wiki Democracy, Data Democracy, and AI Democracy. None of these systems is perfect. But each has aspects that are superior to what we currently have. The question for democrats in the twenty-first century will be: could some combination of these models enable a new and better way of organizing our collective life and holding power to account? Democracy may be having a hard time right now, but as the power of the state and tech firms continues to swell, it could come to be more important than ever. The digital lifeworld could yet offer democracy its finest hour. But it has to be fit for purpose.
We begin with the story of democracy, from classical Athens to the present. Next, we look at the arguments that have traditionally been made in its favour. Then we turn our focus to the digital lifeworld, looking at each of the alternative models set out above, asking first what they might entail in practice, and second, what we like and what we find problematic.
Some of the ideas in the next two chapters will be unfamiliar, even repugnant to many readers. Conscious of how much has been sacrificed in its name, we are rightly sceptical of any challenge to the idea of electoral democracy. And it can be hard to see past the way we currently do things. But remember. The way you may feel about the idea (for instance) of an AI system making political decisions on your behalf is little different from the way many of our forebears felt when they contemplated the idea that such decisions might be made by those who seemed least qualified to make them: the people.
The term democracy is generally used to refer to a form of government in which ultimate political power rests with the many (the people, the masses, the multitude, the governed) rather than the few (monarchs, dictators, oligarchs). This definition embraces a range of systems, from those in which everyone takes part in the business of government, to more diluted systems in which rulers are merely accountable to, elected by, or rule in the interests of the ruled.13 As is well-known, the word demokratia is a fudge of two Greek root words, demos (people) and kratos (rule). In addition to describing a procedure for taking collective decisions, the term democratic is also used to describe the social ideals that underpin that procedure. More on these ideals later. First, a brief biography of the most charismatic concept in politics.
Democracy first flourished in Athens around 500 years before the birth of Jesus Christ. The Athenian Ecclesia (Assembly) was both a sovereign body and a physical place. Citizens gathered there to decide all sorts of matters, from laws and taxes to questions of war and peace. The community in Athens was modest in size and tightly knit. Out of about 30,000 citizens, the Assembly was quorate with 6,000 present. That’s 6,000 people in one place, trying to reach a unanimous decision. Where agreement was impossible, the majority prevailed. Any Athenian citizen could be selected for office, and participation was remunerated so that all had an equal chance of doing so.14 As chronicled by Thucydides in The Peloponnesian War (fifth century BCE), Athens’ greatest statesman, Pericles, described the system thus:15
Our constitution is called a democracy because we govern in the interests of the majority, not just the few. Our laws give equal rights to all in private disputes, but public preferment depends on individual distinction and is determined largely by merit rather than rotation: and poverty is no barrier to office, if a man despite his humble condition has the ability to do some good to the city.
This was classical democracy, a model that is often wistfully invoked as the highest form of human self-rule. In reality it had some quite serious shortcomings. Pericles’ reference to the ‘whole people’, for instance, was somewhat misleading. Not everyone in Athens was a citizen. In fact, only Athenian-born men older than twenty were eligible for citizenship. This excluded every immigrant, woman, and slave—who, together, outnumbered the voting citizenry by ten to one.16
Athenian democracy lasted for just 175 years until it was extinguished by Macedonian conquerors in 322 BCE.17 As the classical world gave way to early Christendom, and for more than 2,000 years after the death of democracy in Athens, not only the system but the very concept of democracy was absent from human affairs. The medieval world that replaced classical antiquity was dominated by a conception of politics in which the central purpose of human life was submission to God’s will. Power came from the heavens, not the people.18 Princes and popes ruled by divine right, not popular consent. Obedience was a matter of faith, not politics.
It was not until the eleventh century, nearly a millennium and a half after the fall of Athens, that genuine systems of secular self-rule began to re-emerge in Europe. The early Italian city-republics of Florence, Siena, Pisa, and Milan were ruled not by kings but by councils drawn from wealthy families. The Athenians would not have seen these statelets as practising genuine self-government and they were certainly not democracies as we would understand them. But the idea that earthly affairs could be run by lay consuls and administrators was, at the time, revolutionary.19
Another reason why the early Italian city-republics did not describe themselves as democracies was that until the thirteenth century the word demokratia itself remained unknown to the Latin-speaking world. The Romans had never used it and it had been lost with Greek civilization. It only entered the Latin language in around 1260 when Aristotle’s great work, Politics, was translated by the Dominican friar William of Moerbeke.20 But after centuries in obscurity, the concept did not receive a warm welcome home. On the contrary, democracy came to describe a frightful political system in which the stinking masses were able to force their sordid desires on everyone else. Thomas Aquinas, the foremost scholar of the medieval world, and a contemporary of William of Moerbeke, described democracy as, ‘when the common people oppress the rich by force of numbers . . . like a single tyrant’.21
This proved to be a durable view.
If we fast-forward 500 years to seventeenth-century England, a nation riven by civil war, we find a group called the Levellers engaged in a historic struggle for popular sovereignty, an expanded franchise, and equality before the law. Their aim was quintessentially democratic: to bring the might of the government under the control of the people. Yet even the Levellers did not describe themselves as democrats, though the word had entered the English language in the previous century.22 Democracy was still a term of derision used against the Levellers by their political enemies.23
It was not until the late-eighteenth century, the rumbling age of revolution in France and America, that the noun democrat, the adjective democratic, and the verb democratize came into mainstream usage.24 And yet they were still uttered with mistrust. James Madison believed that, ‘democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention . . . and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.’25 In his memoirs, the eighteenth-century lothario Giacomo Casanova described seeing a horde of drunken men rampaging destructively through London (picture an English soccer match circa 1975) and described the members of the mob as democratic animals. It was not meant as a compliment.26
After more than 2,000 years in the conceptual wilderness, the term democracy began its comeback tour at the end of the nineteenth century, not in its classical form but reborn as liberal democracy. The central premise of liberal democracy, which can be traced back to the seventeenth-century writings of John Locke is that individuals should be given a wide remit to live their lives as they see fit. This means using the democratic process to keep the powerful in check (the democratic bit) but it also means protecting the people from the people themselves (the liberal bit). Advocates of liberal democracy believe—to repurpose the words of the Roman historian Livy—that although ‘the mob’ is often a ‘humble slave’, it can also be a ‘cruel master’.27 What made liberal democracy unique was its rejection of the idea that more democracy is always better. The rule of law, individual rights, divorce of church and state, separation of powers—these are core facets of liberal democracy but their fundamental purpose is to limit untrammelled people power, not facilitate it.
Liberal democracy places strict restrictions on what the democratic sovereign can lawfully do. In classical Athens your rights depended entirely on the good graces of the Assembly: if the people decided you were to lose your property or die, that was it. Socrates understood this the hard way. There was even a yearly process, known as ostracism, by which the Assembly could vote to exile any citizen for ten years. The unfortunate ‘winner’ of this poll had to leave the city within ten days. The penalty for returning was death. In a liberal democracy ostracism would not be possible. Citizens’ rights are carved in rock and cannot so easily be ignored. Checks, balances, and due process will protect you even when the majority is screaming for your blood. Unlike the Athenian Assembly, the liberal state is forbidden by law from violating the sacred spaces that are reserved for private life: home, family, and some aspects of social life.28 Though he could scarcely be called a liberal thinker, even Niccolò Machiavelli recognized that an uncontrolled multitude and an uncontrolled prince were just as bad as each other: ‘all err in equal measure when they err without fear of punishment.’29
The liberal ideal dominated democratic thinking in the twentieth century.
Many of the democracies that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century were liberal democracies. A common feature was that they were representative rather than direct systems. This meant that key decisions were taken by elected representatives rather than the assembled citizenry. A number of factors made this desirable. First, the size and scale of modern polities made institutions like the Athenian Assembly impossible. Second, the complexity of modern life was seen as ill-suited to mass-deliberation. Third, representative democracy enabled the ‘best and the brightest’ (ahem) to rise to the fore, creating a class of professional politicians equipped to serve the public interest. Fourth, dialogue between politicians and the public was seen as a useful generator of good ideas. Finally, representative systems were considered the best way to mediate and moderate the fickle passions of the masses, while still taking their sentiment into account. In the modern age, representative democracy has been our best answer to the question posed by Joseph Schumpeter: ‘How is it technically possible for “people” to rule?’30
Schumpeter, a giant of twentieth-century economics, was sceptical in principle of the value of direct participation, arguing that the ‘electoral mass . . . is incapable of action other than a stampede’.31 And he looked at the modern democracies around him and decided that in practice, too, they were nothing like the classical archetype. For Schumpeter, what defined democracy was not popular participation or deliberation; it was the basic act of electing and ditching political leaders—and little more. On this view, the democratic process is basically the same as the market for consumer goods. In the words of the political theorist Alan Ryan:32
We do not sit at home elaborating the specification of something as complex as an automobile, and then go and ask a manufacturer to build it. Entrepreneurs dream up products that they think advertisers can persuade us to want; they assemble the capital and the workforce to create these products, and then offer them to us at a price. If they have guessed right about what we can be persuaded to want, they prosper; if not, they go broke.
So it is with politicians, who think up policies, present them to the people, and succeed or fail depending on their popularity.
The name generally given to the Schumpeterian model of democracy—competitive elitism—sounds like a Harvard College drinking game, but is in fact the most accurate way of describing the democracies in which many of us live.∝
The internet was supposed to transform democracy. And since its widespread adoption in the 1990s it has indeed made important differences to the way that advanced democracies function. Three in particular are significant.
The first is in the field of political campaigning. In almost every major election, online tools are now used to raise funds, organize supporters, enforce message discipline, disseminate information, and keep tabs on activists. In recent years, political élites have also begun to exploit the remarkable potential of big data in profiling citizens, modelling their political behaviour, predicting their intentions, and targeting advertisements and organizational resources accordingly.33 Schumpeter would have been thrilled: the process effectively mirrors the techniques used by corporations to profile and market their goods to consumers. Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential re-election campaign, for instance, gathered voter information into a single database and combined it with data scraped from social media and elsewhere. His machine learning algorithms then tried to predict how likely each individual voter would be to support Obama, to turn up to vote, to respond to reminders, and to change his or her mind based on a conversation on a specific issue. The campaign ran 66,000 simulations of the election every night and used the results to assign campaign resources: ‘whom to call, which doors to knock on, what to say’.35 Four years later, in the 2016 US presidential election, the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica (whose services were engaged by Donald Trump) reportedly gathered a database of 220 million people—almost the entire US voting population—with psychological profiles of each voter based on 5,000 separate data points.36 This enabled the Trump campaign to use bots (AI systems) and advertisements on social media to target individual voters with pinpoint accuracy. The result was the holy grail of political campaigning: a large-scale shift in public opinion. This new approach to data-based campaigning has been called the ‘engineering of consent’37 and more ominously, the ‘weaponized AI propaganda machine’.38
Second, the internet has changed the relationship between government and citizens, enabling them to work together to solve public policy problems. Online consultations, open government, e-petitions, e-rulemaking,39 crowdsourcing of ideas (as in Estonia and Finland),40 hackathons, and participatory budgeting (as in Paris, where residents propose and vote on items of public spending)41 are all new ways of coming up with ideas, subjecting policy to scrutiny and refinement, bringing private-sector resources to bear on big problems, and increasing the efficiency and legitimacy of government.42 The notion of e-government is underpinned by one question, posed by Beth Simone Noveck: ‘If we can develop the algorithms and platforms to target consumers, can we not also target citizens for the far worthier purpose of undertaking public service?’43 The answer seems to be a tentative yes.
Third, the internet has changed the relationship between citizens and other citizens by facilitating the emergence of online associations and movements. Arab Spring activists, MoveOn, Occupy, the antiglobalization movement, ‘right to die’ advocates, Anonymous ‘hacktivists’—all these groups have used the internet to coordinate action and protest in a way that would have been done very differently (if at all) before. The result is that old-school interest groups like trade unions, guilds, and clubs have been joined by a dazzling new array of online associations that require much smaller investments of time and money on the part of their participants. Hitting ‘Like’ for a cause on Facebook, or retweeting a political statement with which you agree, is much less onerous than sitting through endless dreary meetings in church basements. Online groups typically grow, mutate, and decay much faster than their offline counterparts. As a result, our political ecosystem is much more febrile than in the past. It’s been described, aptly, as ‘chaotic pluralism’.44
In my view, these developments are impressive but in the grand arc of democratic history they are not revolutionary. Online campaigning and e-government are both new ways of doing old things. They haven’t changed what a campaign is, or what a government does. And there is nothing novel in the idea of democratic pluralism:45 as Alexis de Tocqueville recognized in Democracy in America (1835), civil society organizations like clubs and societies have been a ‘necessary guarantee against the tyranny of the majority’ since at least the earliest days of the American republic.46 If Schumpeter were still around, he would say that online campaigning has actually strengthened the competitive elitism model of democracy that dominated the twentieth century, and that other internet-related developments have merely chafed at its edges. If by some gruesome miracle Henry Ford were resurrected too, he might describe what we’ve seen so far as faster horses.
We need to think about the challenges and opportunities for democracy in the digital lifeworld, if possible looking past the classical, liberal, and competitive elitist models. In chapter thirteen we investigate five quite different models we might come to see. But before we get there, let’s take a moment just to consider why democracy has so consistently been said to be the best form of government. That will leave us better able to assess the merits of the different forms of democracy in the future.
The first and oldest argument in favour of democracy rests on liberty. It is related to the republican ideal of freedom we saw in Part III. It holds that we are only truly free when we live under laws of our own making. Otherwise we are the playthings of alien powers—princes, despots, foreign occupiers—unable to set our own course or choose our idea of the good life. Uniquely, democracy enables all the people to be free together. Only when we all sacrifice a little bit of our natural liberty, by submitting to the will of everyone else, can we be masters of our own collective fate. ‘Since each man gives himself to all, he gives himself to no-one,’ argues Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘and since there is no associate over whom he does not gain the same rights as others gain over him, each man recovers the equivalent of everything he loses.’47
The second argument in favour of democracy, also taken from the republican tradition, relies on human nature. Aristotle famously claimed that ‘man is by nature a political animal’.48 In the Athenian polis from which he came, the state was not merely a means for people to clump together in the same place; it existed ‘for the sake of noble actions’ by its citizens through participation in public affairs.49 Taking part in politics was an integral part of being human and living a full life. Hence Pericles again: ‘[w]e are unique in the way we regard anyone who takes no part in public affairs: we do not call that a quiet life, we call it a useless life.’50 A more modest version of this argument, advanced by John Stuart Mill in his Considerations on Representative Government (1861), is that participation in politics is an important means of self-improvement. Neither the routine drudgery of our daily work, nor the pursuit of private wealth, nor the mere ‘satisfaction of daily wants’ can fully cultivate our moral and intellectual faculties. But giving us ‘something to do for the public’ is good for us. It requires us to weigh interests other than our own and to be guided, for a time, by the common interest rather than our own selfish desires.51 By taking part with others, we improve ourselves.
A third argument, and for many the most important, draws on the ideal of equality. If each human life is of equal moral worth, then political decisions should pay equal heed to everyone’s interests and preferences. As such, every person within a political community ought to have an equal chance to influence the decisions that affect them, and no élite group or person should be allowed to hoard power for themselves. Democracy is a good way of ensuring this. Equal representation is also seen as a necessary gateway to other equalities, whether socio-economic or cultural (see Part V).
The fourth argument in favour of democracy is that, of all forms of government, it most often results in the creation of the best outcomes in terms of laws and policies. This argument has been put in various ways, but it boils down to the idea that democracy is the best way to harness the useful information and knowledge that is scattered across the individual minds of a given community. We can call this democracy’s epistemic superiority (epistemology is the study of knowledge).52 For starters, it is said, the people themselves are best placed to say what their own interests and preferences are, as opposed to some prince or bureaucrat deciding for them. And even if each individual is not particularly knowledgeable, the combined experiences, skills, insight, expertise, intuitions, and beliefs of a community can yield a rich seam of wisdom. This idea was at the root of Aristotle’s famous observation that:53
the many, no one of whom taken singly is a sound man, may yet, taken altogether, be better than the few, not individually but collectively, in the same way that a feast to which all contribute is better than one supplied at one man’s expense.
Aristotle’s belief was rooted in empirical reality. Scholars now say that ancient Athens’ success in outwitting and outlasting its nondemocratic Greek rivals was the result of its unique ability to organize the knowledge of its citizenry, through the debates and votes that were part of the democratic process.54
Political scientists have tried to explain the epistemic superiority of democracy in two different ways. One group, called the counters, say that as a matter of mathematical logic a large and more diverse group of people will answer political questions better than a smaller group—even one composed of experts.55 This line of thinking can be traced back to the seventeenth-century Dutch thinker Baruch Spinoza, who believed that ‘it is almost impossible that the majority of a people, especially if it be a large one, should agree in an irrational design.’56 Spinoza’s conviction was shared by the Marquis de Condorcet, the eighteenth-century philosopher and mathematician whose famous Jury Theorem holds, in basic terms, that if a large group votes on a yes-or-no issue, the majority of voters are virtually certain to vote for the correct answer as long as: (a) the median voter is better than random at choosing correct answers, (b) voters vote independently of each other, and (c) voters vote sincerely rather than strategically. These days, this phenomenon is referred to as the wisdom of crowds.57 It explains the hoary old tale in which the average answer of 800 participants in a competition to guess the weight of an ox was within one pound of the correct number.58
Another group of theorists, called the talkers, say that democracy is more than mere aggregation of individual opinions. It is democracy’s deliberative element that leads to better legislative outcomes. Public airing of political issues allows ideas and information to be shared, biases and vested interests to be revealed, and reason and rationality to triumph over ignorance and prejudice. ‘The unforced force of the better argument’ ultimately leads to the best outcomes.59
Whether you are a counter or a talker, the argument that we are smarter together than we are as individuals is an important one. It contradicts the belief, held for much of human history, that the filthy hordes have no business interfering with complex matters of state.
The fifth argument in favour of democracy concerns stability: since a democratic system is more likely than other forms of government to be perceived as legitimate, it is least likely to collapse under the strains of governing. De Tocqueville, describing the fledgling American democracy, spoke of the ‘sort of paternal pride’ that protects a democratic government even when it messes up.60
The final argument for democracy is that—for all its faults—it is the best way of preventing tyranny and corruption. So long as the people retain control of the levers of power, they are likely to spare themselves the worst excesses of mad kings and bad dictators. Government ‘of the people’ and ‘by the people’ is most likely to be ‘for the people’ too. This was the point stressed at the end of the last chapter.
Every one of these arguments is open to challenge. For example, if liberty is what matters, can it really be said that a minority group in a democracy is ‘free’ if it lives under harsh rules dictated by the majority? Rousseau’s cheery answer that those persons are ‘forced to be free’ is unlikely to be to everyone’s taste.61 If equality is so important, then isn’t it more important for a system to be liberal—enshrining equal rights under the law—than democratic, where a majority could pass laws treating certain groups unequally? Do we accept that the crowd—which sentenced Socrates to death, elected Hitler, and often seems to be irrational, capricious, or xenophobic—is as wise as claimed?62 Doesn’t the recent trend toward authoritarianism suggest that democracy isn’t as stable or strong a bulwark against tyranny as we might have hoped? To these objections, the democrat can always reply in the manner of Churchill: that democracy is indeed flawed—but less flawed than all other systems. But it seems unsatisfactory. Can we do better?
∝ Schumpeter himself, who taught at Harvard, was an interesting fellow. He claimed to have three goals in life: to be the greatest economist in the world, the best horseman in all of Austria, and the finest lover in Vienna. Wikipedia reports that he claimed to have met two of these goals but never said which two—although he did observe that there were, ‘too many fine horsemen in Austria for him to succeed in all his aspirations’.34