## Metadata - Author: [[David Van Reybrouck]] - Full Title: Against Elections - Category: #books ## Highlights - This blind faith in the ballot box as the ultimate base on which popular sovereignty rests is seen most vividly of all in international diplomacy.46 When Western donor countries hope that countries ravaged by conflict, like Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan or East Timor, will become democracies, what they really mean is this: they must hold elections, preferably on the Western model, with voting booths, ballot papers and ballot boxes, with parties, campaigns and coalitions, with lists of candidates, polling stations and sealing wax, just like we do, only over there, and then they will receive money from us. Local democratic and proto-democratic institutions (village meetings, traditional conflict mediation or ancient jurisprudence) stand no chance. These things may have their value in encouraging a peaceful and collective discussion, but the money will be shut off unless our own tried and tested recipe is adhered to – rather in the way that traditional medicine must back off as soon as Western medicine turns up. ([Location 558](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=558)) - This focus on elections is actually rather odd. For almost three thousand years people have been experimenting with democracy and only in the last two hundred have they practised it exclusively by holding elections. ([Location 574](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=574)) - Representative democracy is in essence a vertical model, but the twenty-first century is increasingly horizontal. Dutch professor of transition management Jan Rotmans said recently: ‘We go from centralised to decentralised, from vertical to horizontal, from top-down to bottom-up. It has taken us more than a hundred years to build this centralised, top-down, vertical society. That whole way of thinking is now being turned upside down. There is a great deal we need to learn and unlearn. The greatest barrier is in our heads.’ ([Location 717](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=717)) - Elections are the fossil fuel of politics. Whereas once they gave democracy a huge boost, much like the boost that oil gave the economy, it now it turns out they cause colossal problems of their own. If we don’t urgently reconsider the nature of our democratic fuel, a huge systemic crisis threatens. If we obstinately continue to hold on to the electoral process at a time of economic malaise, inflammatory media and rapidly changing culture, we will be almost wilfully undermining the democratic process. ([Location 722](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=722)) - ‘First, the participation of citizens was direct, in contrast to our current system in which representatives of the people are specialists to a far greater degree. Today only a jury in a criminal case is truly made up of ordinary citizens. Second, important decisions were taken by very large crowds in the Ekklesia or People’s Assembly, where thousands came together. The Heliaia or People’s Court had six thousand members and some juries consisted of hundreds of citizens. This too is at odds with our system, in which there is a certain oligarchisation of democracy.’ ([Location 747](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=747)) - Nowadays we might perhaps be surprised that Athenian democracy, in its heyday, relied on something as unfamiliar to us as the drawing of lots, but for contemporaries it was simply self-evident that it should. Aristotle put it frankly: ‘For example, the appointment of magistrates by lot is democratical, and the election of them oligarchical.’ ([Location 806](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=806)) - Typical of Athenian democracy was the fact that virtually no distinction existed between politicians and citizens, between the governing and the governed or between holders of power and subjects. The function of ‘career politician’ that we all find so natural today would have seemed totally bizarre and absurd to the average Athenian, and Aristotle linked this to an extremely interesting idea about freedom. ‘The basis of a democratic state is liberty . . . One principle of liberty is for all to rule and be ruled in turn.’57 Twenty-five centuries old, Aristotle’s work still presents some astonishing insights. Freedom does not mean always having power yourself. Nor does it mean being free of the need to pay attention to power or slavishly reconciling yourself to power. Freedom means finding a balance between autonomy and loyalty, between ruling and being ruled. ([Location 811](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=811)) - In retrospect, this fleeting overview of history teaches us six things. 1) Since antiquity, sortition has been used as a valuable political instrument in several states. 2) In all cases these were geographically small, urbanised states (the city state, the civic republic) where only a limited segment of the population could participate in government. 3) The use of lots often coincided with the peak period of prosperity and culture (Athens in the fourth and fifth centuries, Venice and Florence during the Renaissance). 4) There were various applications and procedures, but drawing lots generally resulted in less conflict and more participation by citizens. 5) Sortition was never deployed exclusively but always in combination with elections, in order to guarantee competence. 6) States that used sortition often experienced centuries of political stability, despite great internal differences between rival groups. The tiny state of San Marino drew lots as recently as the mid-twentieth century in order to choose two governors from its sixty-member governing council. ([Location 886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=886)) - Montesquieu, founder of the modern constitutional state, repeated in his The Spirit of the Laws of 1748 the insight that Aristotle had expressed two millennia earlier, ‘Voting by lot is in the nature of democracy; voting by choice is in the nature of aristocracy.’ The elite character of elections was clear to him from the start. In contrast, he claimed, ‘the casting of lots is a way of electing that distresses no one; it leaves to each citizen a reasonable expectation of serving his country.’ ([Location 894](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=894)) - The conclusion is clear, and despite important differences between the authors, the two most important books about the political philosophy of the eighteenth century agree that sortition is more democratic than election and that a combination of the two methods is beneficial to society. The aleatoric and electoral procedures can mutually reinforce each other. ([Location 916](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=916)) - And then something strange happens. Bernard Manin describes it beautifully: Scarcely one generation after the Spirit of the Laws and the Social Contract, however, the idea of attributing public functions by lot had vanished almost without trace. Never was it seriously considered during the American and French revolutions. At the same time that the founding fathers were declaring the equality of all citizens, they decided without the slightest hesitation to establish, on both sides of the Atlantic, the unqualified dominion of a method of selection long deemed to be aristocratic. ([Location 920](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=920)) - For Montesquieu there were three distinct forms of government; monarchy, despotism and the republic. In a monarchy one person was in charge, according to the laws laid down. Despotism also meant the leadership of a single person but without any established laws, which made it arbitrary in the extreme. In a republic, power lay with the people, and with regard to this third form of government he made another extremely important distinction. ‘When the people as a body have sovereign power, it is a democracy. When the sovereign power is in the hands of a part of the people, it is called an aristocracy.’ ([Location 943](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=943)) - To return to the typology of Montesquieu, while the patriotic leaders of the French and American revolutions were decidedly republican, it was in a far from democratic sense. They did not want to allow the people to drive the coach of power but preferred to keep hold of the reins, to prevent inevitable chaos. ([Location 973](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=973)) - The aristocratisation of the revolution must have given Edmund Burke a great deal of pleasure. The British philosopher and politician was seriously disturbed, not to say frightened, by the idea that the people would be given too much power. In his elegantly written Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) he notes that rulers must distinguish themselves from the rest, not by ‘blood and names and titles’ – he too was aware that times were changing – but through ‘virtue and wisdom’. And he added: The occupation of a hairdresser or of a working tallow-chandler cannot be a matter of honour to any person – to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule . . . Everything ought to be open, but not indifferently, to every man. No rotation; no appointment by lot; no mode of election operating in the spirit of sortition or rotation can be generally good in a government conversant in extensive objects. Goodbye to the Athenian ideal. It’s the most explicit eighteenth-century rejection of sortition of which I am aware. Burke was against democracy, against Rousseau, against the revolution and against sortition. ([Location 1049](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=1049)) - The French Revolution, like the American, did not dislodge the aristocracy to replace it with a democracy but rather dislodged a hereditary aristocracy to replace it with an elected aristocracy, ‘une aristocratie élective’, to use Rousseau’s term. Robespierre even called it ‘une aristocratie représentative’.80 The prince and the noble were sent packing, the people were fobbed off with rhetoric about la Nation, le Peuple and la Souveraineté, and a new upper bourgeoisie took power. It derived its legitimacy no longer from God, soil or birth but from another relic of the aristocratic era, elections. ([Location 1068](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=1068)) - Behold the pathogenesis of our electoral fundamentalism. The drawing of lots, the most democratic of all political instruments, lost out in the eighteenth century to elections, a procedure that was not invented as a democratic instrument but as a means of bringing a new, non-hereditary aristocracy to power. The extension of suffrage made that aristocratic procedure thoroughly democratic without relinquishing the fundamental, oligarchic distinction between governors and governed, between politicians and voters. Contrary to what Abraham Lincoln had hoped, the electoral democracy remained more ‘government for the people’ than ‘government by the people’. There was something unavoidably vertical about it, always above and below, always a government and its subjects. Voting became the service lift that brought a few to the top, retaining therefore something of an elective feudalism, a form of internal colonialism that everyone endorsed. ([Location 1209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=1209)) - There is an excellent saying often attributed to Gandhi, although in fact it comes from Central Africa: ‘Whatever you do for me but without me, you do to me,’ words that succinctly sum up the tragedy of today’s electoral-representative democracy. ([Location 1224](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=1224)) - The work of James Fishkin brought about a real deliberative turn in political science, and the fact that deliberative democracy can give a powerful boost to the ailing body of electoral-representative democracy is no longer doubted by any serious scholar. Citizen participation is not just a matter of being allowed to demonstrate, to strike, to sign petitions or to take part in other accepted forms of mobilisation in a public space. It needs to be institutionally embedded. Fishkin has meanwhile organised dozens of deliberative opinion polls all over the world, often with impressive results.97 Texas, the state where he has worked, drew lots on several occasions as a way of selecting people to come and talk about clean energy, not the most obvious subject for an oil state. As a result of deliberations between those citizens, the percentage of people who said they would be willing to pay more for wind-generated and solar power rose from 52 to 84%. Because of that increased support, by 2007 Texas had become the state with the most windmills in the United States, whereas ten years earlier it was way behind in that field. ([Location 1283](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=1283)) - In reality, says Bouricius, you require as many as six different organs because there is a need to reconcile conflicting interests, and being an expert in the field of democratic innovation, he knows what a challenge this is. You want sortition to provide a large, representative sample, but you also know that it’s easier to work in small groups. You want rapid rotation to promote participation, but you also know that longer mandates produce better work. You want to let everyone take part who wishes to do so, but you also know that this means highly educated and articulate citizens will be over-represented. You want citizens to be able to consult each other, but you also know that this presents the danger of group thinking, the tendency to be too quick to find a consensus. You want to give as much power as possible to an allotted body, but you also know that some individuals will put too much pressure on the group process, producing arbitrary outcomes. These five dilemmas are familiar to anyone who has ever worked with alternative forms of consultation. They concern the ideal size of the group, the ideal duration, the ideal selection method, the ideal consultation method and the ideal group dynamic. Well, according to Bouricius there is no ideal, so better just give up the quest for one and set about designing a model that consists of several organs. That way the advantages of various options can reinforce each other and the disadvantages weaken each other. ([Location 1575](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=1575)) - How should the government deal with all those articulate citizens who stand shouting from the sidelines? First, with pleasure rather than suspicion, because behind all the anger both online and offline lies something positive, namely engagement. It may be a gift wrapped in barbed wire, but indifference would be far worse. Second, by learning to let go, not wanting to do everything on the citizen’s behalf, because the citizen is not a child. At the start of the third millennium, relationships are more horizontal. ([Location 1669](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=1669)) - Doctors have had to learn to deal with patients who’ve already looked up their symptoms on the internet. At first that seemed problematic, now it turns out to be a blessing because empowerment can assist recovery, and the same applies to politics when authority changes. Once you had authority and were allowed to speak, now you gain authority by speaking. Leadership is no longer a matter of taking decisions on behalf of the people but of setting processes in train along with the people. Treat responsible citizens as ballot fodder and they’ll behave like ballot fodder, but treat them as adults and they’ll behave like adults. The bond between government and the governed is no longer the same as that between parents and children. We are all adults now and politicians would do well to look past the barbed wire, trust the citizens, take their emotions seriously and value their experience. Invite them in, give them power and because it will always be fair, take all their names and draw lots. ([Location 1673](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=1673)) - I believe the systemic crisis of democracy can be remedied by giving sortition a fresh chance. The drawing of lots is not a miracle cure, not a perfect recipe, any more than elections ever were, but it can correct a number of the faults in the current system. Drawing lots is not irrational, it is arational, a consciously neutral procedure whereby political opportunities can be distributed fairly and discord avoided. The risk of corruption reduces, election fever abates and attention to the common good increases. Citizens chosen by lot may not have the… ([Location 1680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=1680)) - it is worthwhile in this phase of history to entrust legislative power not only to elected citizens but to citizens chosen by lot as well. If we can rely on the principle of sortition in the criminal justice system, why not rely on it in the legislative system? It will restore a good deal of peace. Elected citizens (our politicians) will not be driven by commercial and social media alone, they will be flanked by a second assembly to which election fever and viewing figures are totally irrelevant, an assembly where the common interest and the long term still come first, an assembly of citizens in which it is truly… ([Location 1685](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=1685)) - Democracy is not government by the best in our society, because such a thing is called an aristocracy, elected or not. That is one option, but then let’s change here and now what we call it. Democracy, by contrast, flourishes precisely by allowing a diversity of voices to be heard. It’s all about having an equal say, an equal right to determine what political action is taken. As American philosopher Alex Guerrero put it recently: ‘Each person in a political jurisdiction should have an equal right to participate substantively in determining what political actions will be taken by that… ([Location 1691](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=1691)) - Anyone who looks something up on Google Maps these days will find there’s a choice between a map and a satellite image, one better for planning the route, the other for looking at the surroundings. Democracy is just like that. The representation of the people is a map of society, a simplified representation of a complex reality, and because that representation is used to make a rough sketch of the future (and what is politics about if not making a rough sketch of the future?), this map needs to be as detailed as possible, so that topographical map and aerial photograph complement each other. We urgently need to move towards a bi-representative model, a system of representation that is brought about both through voting and by drawing lots. After all, both have their good points, the expertise of professional politicians and the freedom of citizens who do not need re-election. The electoral and aleatoric models therefore go hand in hand. ([Location 1729](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071DZ1KR1&location=1729))