The Problem: Representative Democracy Isn’t Representing Us
Let's talk about citizen-centered democratic systems
The Omni-Win Project aims to amplify the co-creation of a better democracy: A system that includes people in the decisions that affect their lives. That’s what this week’s essay focuses on.
I believe there are already solutions to all of the issues we have to overcome. However, those involved in resolving the problems are not necessarily talking to each other, or the solutions are not well-known. My goal is to bring them to your awareness, spread the word, and put people into conversation with each other. I've organized my thinking into four strategic themes:
Collaborative communication skills
Upgrading our democratic systems
Understanding the frameworks and philosophical thinking to change our culture
Personal improvement to make this happen.
In my last essay, I talked about collaborative communication.
It might not be a surprise to hear that democracy is struggling. Our representative democracy is not necessarily helping us make the best decisions. It’s getting stuck. Around the world, there's a popular arc towards authoritarianism and other ways of making decisions, and that's probably not the best choice.
Democracy is a breakthrough, amazing concept. It's great that we believe that the people should have input into the decisions affecting their lives. They should be voting on who their leaders are.
Let’s give a special shout-out to the United States here. The United States has the longest-running democracy in the world right now; it’s been going on for well over 200 years. The oldest democracy originated in Greece.
In the beginning, only white people who owned land could vote. With a lot of work, we opened up democracy to everyone. Women were able to vote in the United States in 1920. People of all races in the United States could participate in democracy in 1965.
It’s a relatively new experiment. There's something important about how we're trying to believe that people should have a choice and impact on the decisions that affect their lives. But it's struggling right now: It's not doing a very good job of representing the voices of people.
This essay will break down two critiques and explain why they're challenging and problematic. Tomorrow, I’ll be discussing the awesome ways we can change this.
The problems with voting
It's such a cool idea for people to be able to choose their leader rather than have their ruler ordained by God or similar. I think of voting as the lowest form of democracy. We get just one vote, and then we have four years of being frustrated about what happens. If you want to influence anything in the meantime, your options include lobbying, sending letters, protesting, or various kinds of advocacy.
Voting also creates win-lose situations. 51% of the people won something, but the other 49% lost. They don't get anything that they want. Guess what? That 49% will try to figure out how to be the 51% next time. That just gets us in this cycle of rivalrous dynamics, something I was talking about a couple of weeks ago.
It creates an all-or-nothing situation. You either get your law, legislation, or policy passed, or you don’t. That kind of black and white, binary thinking isn’t effective.
It creates resentment, which causes all sorts of issues. On the one hand, we're voting for policies, and on the other hand, we're voting for representatives.
When we're voting for policy, many challenges are happening here. First of all, politicians are bundling pieces of legislation together. Some of the latest things that have passed through Congress in the United States are hundreds and hundreds of pages long, containing all sorts of issues that aren’t necessarily connected.
For example, during one of the COVID response bills, they added a piece of legislation that talked about declassifying UFOs in the United States. That doesn't have anything to do with COVID. Nonetheless, someone needed to add it because no one would get their policies passed otherwise.
The other challenge is that politicians create these policies in a black box. There's no transparency. It’s all negotiated in private, and then it comes out publicly. From there, you either can take it or leave it. That combination is really problematic.
By the time it gets to the citizens to vote on, they don't even understand what's happening. Having that up or down vote on an issue means we cannot engage in the nuance. Honestly, everything in the world is complex and nuanced.
Another issue with the up-down voting is that our system is frozen. In the United States, the US Senate has a 50:50 voting margin right now. We're constantly getting stuck.
Some people want to fix this by eliminating the filibuster or making it so that people don't need to have a 60% majority. But frankly, we need to talk about the nuance and find out why some people are into the idea and why they're not.
Representative democracy isn’t representing us
From this video by RepresentUs, I learned something really interesting. Princeton University conducted a study asking whether the government truly represents the people's desires.
We would think that if the voices of the people really mattered, then something that has 0% support would have a 0% chance of passing. Conversely, something with 100% support would have a 100% likelihood of passing.
But guess what? They did their research and crunched the numbers.
Everything that happens in Congress has a 30% chance of passing, regardless of whether people like it. Researchers concluded that citizens’ desires have close to 0% impact on legislation. Minuscule. It's a near-zero impact, statistically irrelevant.
That's our first clue that this up-down voting policy is not working right now. So, what might be some other things that are impacting this? Our democracy is a representative system, so we vote for our person, and then they represent us for a while. In a certain way, it’s like a mega bundle.
First of all, the person we’re voting for comes up with their policies, and then you get to vote for this person. You're voting for everything they want, which creates a situation where we're stuck.
“What if I like part of what this guy's saying, but this part of what this other guy’s saying?”
That's not a possibility with our current voting system. There are many more challenges with representative government than putting all this pressure on this person to figure out all the answers by themselves or in secret with other influences.
Politicians are corruptible
Manuel Arriaga wrote a book called Rebooting Democracy. He has a list of ten reasons why politicians fail to represent us. Here’s a taste of it:
First of all, those people are self-selecting. They're people who want to be in power, usually with a lot of money, and tend to be extroverted. So they're not a good sample of our regular population.
What's more, once they get into power, they hang out with people in the same position, becoming more distant from the people they're supposed to represent. They're also isolated in Washington. Over time, they get lost in the political process rather than thinking about what people need.
There are plenty of corrosive incentives. They want to stay in office, so they have an incentive to win and do what will help them out more than maybe what's right. Perhaps they go into office with this beautiful idea of being a public servant, and I'm sure that happens a lot. But there’s a dark influence in politics, whether it’s how the elections work or the pressure of "this is just the way we do things around here." If they're new, they’ll need to do what their leaders say; they won’t have any influence. All of these force compromises.
Let’s not forget the corrupting influence of money. In the United States, people can give money to politicians. The money essentially acts as a bribe so they can get what they want. In many countries, this would be considered severe corruption. But in the United States? It’s par for the course. We even have The Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court saying that corporations are citizens too.
Money influences our politics a lot. It gets closer to being one dollar, one vote, instead of one person, one vote. While our voting system is minimally impactful, money undermines it.
We're always looking to the lesser evil: “I don't trust that person, but I trust this person less.” That lesser evil or voting against people becomes normal. When we add to the rivalrous, win-lose dynamics, that feeds into polarization. It incentivizes everyone to look out for their own interests because as soon as they start listening to other folks, there's the perception they risk losing what they believe in.
For a moment, think about the cost of everyone looking out for their unilateral self-interest, trying to get what they want. Honestly, that's about as anti-democratic as it can get. If we want politicians to listen to the people, we have to care about everyone. Right now, there’s more of an incentive to exclude or beat the people we don't like than to figure out what they want.
Maybe none of this is new to you, but hopefully that's a good summary of some of the challenges we're facing in our current democratic system.
So, what are some solutions to these issues? There are a lot of really cool organizations and experiments creating deliberative democracy and citizen-based decision-making. Actual citizens, not elected officials, participate in making the decisions affecting their lives. We wouldn't have to change our entire system; we just need to try it.
Tomorrow, I’ll be addressing these solutions and letting you know about the awesome tools that can really change up our democracy. Stay tuned!
Here are some extra resources:
Fractal Friends episode "Healing the Political Divide" with Bill Shireman
Fractal Friends episode "The Emergence of Wise Democracy" with Tom Atlee
If you prefer to watch your content, here’s a video of this essay:
You can find more information about the work I do in conflict transformation on my website: http://www.omni-win.com
You can schedule a call with me here: https://calendly.com/duncanautrey
Don’t forget to check out the rest of my posts as I discuss how we can work together to ensure we all win.
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