We need democracy ecosystems, not democracy waves.
Illustration via AI, Microsoft Designer. This column was edited and produced by Zócalo Public Square.
If democracy is going to flourish on this planet, its practitioners must come to see themselves as members of the same team.
Unfortunately, global democracy is a field divided. And not primarily by country or language—the biggest divide is by type. Democratic activists, experts and reformers often are fierce partisans of just one of several competing sub-fields: electoral democracy, deliberative democracy (focusing on randomly selected citizens studying tough issues), participatory democracy (where people might set a local budget or make a plan, at official invitation), direct democracy (initiative and referendum), or digital democracy (using online environments like Decidim or vTaiwan).
I routinely experience this dynamic firsthand. I’ve been a convener of global forums on direct democracy since 2008, and have been excluded or dismissed from gatherings looking at participatory or deliberative forms of democracy. After I took a fellowship at an institute that encourages new thinking on deliberative democracy, two supporters of my direct democracy work accused me of betrayal; one stopped talking to me.
This democratic divide, and how to bridge it, is the subject of a smart and urgent new white paper, “From Waves to Ecosystems: The Next Stage of Democratic Innovation,” authored by a leading democracy practitioner and thinker. Josh Lerner is co-executive director of People Powered, a global hub for communities, organizations, researchers, and funders seeking to improve democracy. His paper was commissioned by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Ithaca Initiative, a new civil discourse program at the University of Delaware.
“Most pro-democracy movements focus on defending elections. Others call for innovations in direct, deliberative, or participatory democracy. Champions of each approach have claimed that their solution alone will deliver real democracy,” writes Lerner, before adding:
“There is, however, no one way to fix democracy.”
One problem is that most of the money spent on developing democracy is swallowed up by elections, even though elections, he writes, “have generally not resulted in equal political power or government by the people.”
In our era, he adds, elected governments increasingly exploit elections to establish minority rule, with economic elites maintaining outsized influence. Elections also “attract and put in power people who rate as more narcissistic and psychopathic than average, people who too often exploit their position for personal gain.” As a result, majorities of people in electoral democracies around the world tell pollsters that “their political system needs major changes or needs to be completely reformed.”
Instead of system reform, however, democracies double-down on elections. Lerner writes: “We are pouring so much money and time into elections that other democratic practices are pushed to the sidelines, marginal and disconnected.”
That disconnection leaves them competing for small amounts of attention and funding. Different types of democracy have enjoyed waves of popularity. Direct democracy grew rapidly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and participatory democracy became fashionable amidst the turmoil of the 1960s and again in the 1990s with the creation of participatory budgeting in Brazil. Today, many democratic practitioners are riding a “deliberative wave” that focuses on using lotteries to create assemblies of everyday citizens to make decisions.
But the waves have retarded broader democratic development. Lerner writes: “Each wave’s advocates become so focused on their goals that they often dismiss other approaches…. Waves lead to groupthink. Each wave becomes top-heavy with big expectations that it will change everything and be the one solution we’ve been waiting for.
“No single kind of democracy works well for all our decisions… What if all of these democratic approaches are limited individually but more effective together? What if we could balance the weaknesses of one model with the strengths of another?”
Lerner, striking an optimistic note, sees an “emerging next stage” that involves “weaving different democratic practices into balanced democratic ecosystems.”
Why ecosystems? Because successful ecosystems are diverse, interconnected, and dynamic, with lots of species. “Healthy ecosystems change over time to remain resilient as conditions and needs fluctuate,” Lerner writes.
For example, assemblies and direct democracy don’t work well for tricky budget decisions in a fiscal crisis, but the participatory budgeting process does. Deliberative democracy’s citizens assemblies work well for producing proposals on difficult issues (like abortion in Ireland). But for legitimacy, all voters—not just the small assembly—should decide whether to adopt such a proposal as the actual law, via a direct democracy referendum.
What would a healthy democratic ecosystem look like? Lerner points to Paris, which has experimented with different combinations of democratic practice. There, an elected city council is working together with a deliberative, and permanent, citizens assembly of randomly selected Parisians on big topics like homelessness. And the deliberative assembly, chosen by sortition, works with a participatory budgeting process on how to spend 100 million Euros annually on city improvements.
Lerner says that, instead of competing with one another, advocates of different democratic processes should build bridges, and share a common infrastructure of support (translation, staff, technology). Then they can focus on their “common enemy”—authoritarian regimes and funders of anti-democratic work.
But it’s not enough to defend the current system against such forces, writes Lerner. Democracy needs a “just transition”—a phrase he deliberately borrows from the climate movement—to this much more robust and varied ecosystem.
“What if instead of solely defending elections, we also offered something better—a broader system of democracy that gave people a more meaningful voice?” Lerner writes. “This transition will not be easy. Like for climate change, it will require changing mindsets, jobs, skills,
and everyday practices.”
It also requires more urgency. Democratic practitioners love experiments and pilots, but those are too slow. “We have toyed with alternatives while the ice caps and our trust in democracy melt away…. Authoritarian regimes are wreaking havoc faster than our efforts to counterattack them.”
In other words, we need not just new systems of democracy but new ecosystems. And we need them now.
