The Future of Democracy
By David Mathews
We live in an era in which, perhaps most governments, despite major differences, would describe themselves as democratic. Their differences reveal major disagreements over what democracy is or should be. Although there is no single definition, the situation calls for a better understanding of how a democracy works. Colombia’s civic and educational institutions, in collaboration with similar institutions around the world, are making a significant contribution to that understanding. This is no small contribution. Democracy is likely to remain the dominant form of government for some time, but what kind of democracy that will be is an open question.
The Colombian work I am referring to is the deliberative forums for citizens begun nearly two decades ago under the leadership of Dora Rothlisberger and Gabriel Murillo Castaño at the University of the Andes. These citizen forums were held for people to make decisions on local issues such as the best kind of education for young people. More recently, the University of Cartagena has held citizen forums on problems such as what can be done about corruption.
Professor Murillo and Lariza Pizano have analyzed these forums as they relate to democracy in their recent book, Deliberación y construcción de ciudadanía: una apuesta a la progresión democrática a comienzos del nuevo milenio (Deliberation and Citizenship Building: Betting on the Progression of Democracy at the Beginning of the New Millennium). The book has not been translated into English, but Julie Fisher has summarized and reviewed their findings in a Kettering Foundation Occasional Paper, Promoting Citizenship in Latin America.
Similar forums for citizens have been held in other Latin American countries including Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Russian universities, libraries, and schools have held their own deliberative forums, and there have been comparable ones in Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Ireland, as well as numerous other countries, from South Africa to New Zealand, and from Thailand to Tajikistan.
In all of these countries, citizens have used these forums to respond to difficult issues that threaten their collective well-being. Over the last 25 years, thousands of independent, local forums have been held in the United States using briefing books for citizens based on Kettering Foundation research. These books are National Issues Forums (NIF) issue guides for public deliberation.
Whatever the country, such forums as these get at the central question in a democracy: can average citizens make sound decisions on complex issues and act wisely to advance their collective well-being?
CHALLENGES TO REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT
Despite the differences over the meaning of democracy that I just mentioned, the tendency is to equate democracy with representative governments legitimated by free, contested elections—where the role of citizens is primarily that of voters. This understanding of democracy is being challenged, however, by deep-seated problems that persist in spite of the administrative efficiency, professional expertise, and military strength of even the most powerful representative governments. These problems suggest that citizens must be more than just voters.
The role that ordinary citizens play in politics may seem irrelevant in a world that depends on scientific and technical information, which is beyond the grasp of all except a small elite. Citizens, it has been said, echoing Plato, are hopeless amateurs in a professional society, now made even more complex by globalization. At the same time, problems that challenge representative government most are those that do not have technical solutions and are relatively impervious to scientific knowledge.
One of my colleagues, an associate of the foundation, Dr. Randa Slim, who works with scholars in her native country, Lebanon, as well as in other countries in the Middle East, recently explained her reservations about the ability of institutional democracy to respond to contemporary problems in the Winter 2007 issue of the Kettering Review. She is one of many today who believes in representative government but does not think that it alone is sufficient. In the Middle East, she has not found convincing evidence that elections always lead to stable governments.
Elections, she elaborates, “may exacerbate societal divisions rather than heal them.” They create winners and losers; and, if the losers have enjoyed privileges and power for a long time, they are unwilling to give them up without a fight. Furthermore, elections, Dr. Slim observes, tend to equate citizenship with voting, which is a solitary act performed in the confines of a polling booth. Sustainable democracy, she believes, requires a broader understanding of citizenship, one that includes relationships with other citizens who are not of the same tribe or religion. Contested elections and representative governments, she contends, are ill-suited to dealing with the morally charged, identity-based conflicts that plague many societies.
Efforts to promote democracy, Dr. Slim feels, have usually been restricted to technical assistance to make the machinery of government more effective. Much less effort, she finds, has been devoted to making governments relevant to citizens’ needs and aspirations—and, I would add, taking advantage of their latent capacities. The consequence of equating democracy with only its institutional form has created false expectations in the region and disappointments in the international community.
Even in stable democracies, representative government is not able to do what only citizens can do. It is said that democratic governments can create a constituency but can’t be the authors of their own legitimacy. And, although we may expect them to, governments have great difficulty sustaining tough decisions on issues that the citizenry is unwilling to support over the long term. Governments can command obedience, but they cannot create public will. They can build common highways but not the common ground that unifies a country. Finally, it is the culture of public life, not governmental decrees, that transforms private individuals into citizens—people who are responsible political actors.
DISCOVERING THE FOUNDATIONS OF DEMOCRACY
Literally defined, democracy is self-government, which isn’t the same as representative government. But what is democracy about if not the creation of representative bodies in countries too large to be governed by citizens directly? Kettering has found answers to this question in what is happening in and around the deliberative forums that have been taking place in Colombia and other countries. Although what we have learned goes beyond what happens within these forums, their effects are impressive.
Deliberative public forums help people move from initial reactions—often hasty and ill-informed—to more shared and reflective judgments. That is because when people deliberate together, they have to do more than receive information or air grievances. They have to try to make decisions about what they and their governments can do to deal with the problems they face.
Deliberation is a means for making decisions when there is a discrepancy between what is happening and what people believe should be happening, yet there are also great differences of opinion about what should be. Deliberation is more than critical reasoning about what is efficient or technically sound; it has been called moral reasoning because it takes into account what people value. The things that people consider most important for their common welfare are always at stake in the choices citizens make about acting on societal problems. Deliberation involves weighing various options for acting on a given problem against those things that people value most.
In the process of this careful weighing, people develop what the ancient Greeks called practical wisdom, which is needed to make decisions consistent with what people determine to be most valuable. Practical wisdom promotes sound judgment—although deliberation does not make citizens infallible. Nonetheless, as the Greeks explained, deliberation is essential; it is the talk that people use to teach themselves before they act. As I said earlier, deliberation is a counter to hasty decision making. The civic and educational organizations around the globe that have conducted deliberative forums have done so in order to reintroduce this reflective practice into a world of hype, partisan rhetoric, and extreme polarization.
Deliberative forums have brought the voice of citizens to bear on critical problems, such as terrorism, health care, and ethnic conflict. Yet nothing has been more powerful than the insights that have come from these forums about what it takes to make democracy work, and particularly, what citizens can do to gain a measure of control over their collective fate.
Studying such forums has led the Kettering Foundation to see that there is a political world underneath the more obvious world of elections and government institutions. By compiling accounts of forums over a quarter of a century and from every corner of the globe, the foundation and its colleagues are learning how a democracy can engage its citizens, generate political will, inform public judgment, and amass the power needed for effective action. We don’t think we have discovered another form of democracy but rather democracy in its most elemental form. We believe that the more obvious institutions of democracy—such as elections, representative assemblies, and administrative agencies—can’t work as they should without strong foundations beneath them.
Needing a word to identify what we are seeing, we have been calling it democracy in its primary or “organic” form to distinguish it from the institutional machinery of governments. It might also be called village or community democracy because that is where it has been rooted for centuries. This primary form of democracy begins before deliberation or collective decision making occurs and continues afterward. The Kettering Foundation has been trying to understand all of the practices in democracy at this level, and I will provide an overview of what we have learned shortly. But I would also like to explain why we believe democracy in this elemental form has been around for so long yet isn’t well-recognized today.
EARLY DEMOCRACY
The politics that grows out of the practices associated with public deliberation are similar to those in most ancient forms of government. The Kettering Foundation Press published a series of reports on the earliest recorded history of politics in Collective Decision Making Around the World: Essays on Historical Deliberative Practices, edited by Ileana Marin. We have drawn on evidence from political anthropology, archeology, sociology, biology, and linguistics to gain a better understanding of the origins of democracy.
The familiar adage that humans always hunt in pairs or that they are political animals is confirmed in this research. Indeed, human beings appear to have invented politics when they became conscious of themselves as more than individuals. The first collective activity that developed this expanded consciousness was probably synchronized expression, that is chanting or singing linked to rhythmical body movement. Even before we had the faculties needed for modern speech, our ancestors sang together, a form of cooperation that reinforced other collective efforts like hunting large game, according to the research assembled in Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body. As people sang and danced, they also developed an expanded sense of their identity as members of a tribe and a community.
The impulse that led to the creation of political society was probably the instinct to gain some measure of control over circumstances that threaten people’s survival. As was observed by E. E. Evans-Pritchard in his 1969 book on the Nuer tribe living in southern Sudan, a lack of rain would bring family groups together into large collectives for mutual assistance and security. Our earliest ancestors learned that control (or better said, influence) came from collective efforts, which required collective decision making. Not surprisingly, the first languages included words for deciding together, which were very close in meaning to the modern word “deliberation.”
For instance, there is a particularly precise pictograph for deliberation in Egyptian hieroglyphics. The symbols include one for a great many people (hundreds) and another for people speaking. Other symbols indicate that the people have come forth or are grouped together in a house or hall to deliberate. And the Egyptians made a distinction between deliberation and other forms of speech by using different arrangements of symbols for criticizing, mediating disputes, and taking counsel.
Our own Indo-European root for the word “deliberation” is taken from lithra, the scale that was used to balance the weight of various goods against a stone representing a known value, something like the pound weights used long before we had digital scales.
All of what I have been describing was occurring throughout the world long before the Greeks coined the word “democracy.” My point is that the forums for citizens are not using a “Kettering methodology” or even a U.S. methodology that they have to adapt to local conditions. Most countries have their own traditions of deliberation to build on. For instance, just as Gandhi drew on ancient Indian practices, Nelson Mandela drew on African traditions of inclusive collective decision making, which he described in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom:
I watched and learned from the tribal meetings that were regularly held at the Great Place. These were not scheduled, but were called as needed, and were held to discuss national matters such as a drought, the culling of cattle, policies ordered by the magistrate, or new laws decreed by the government. All Thembus [members of the Thembus communities] were free to come—and a great many did, on horseback or by foot. . . . Everyone who wanted to speak did so. It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, but everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and laborer. . . . The meetings would continue until some kind of consensus was reached.
PRIMARY DEMOCRACY TODAY
As in early forms of democracy, modern self-rule starts when one individual’s personal and family life connects with the lives of other people and families. Citizens worry about their jobs, their health, and their children’s education. And they keep coming back to these primary concerns, which remain political touchstones. When people are asked to consider a broader issue, the first thing they usually ask themselves is, does this problem affect me or my family?
If people see a connection between a community problem and their personal interests, they are more inclined to talk to other people. For example, a woman might speak with her neighbors about drug paraphernalia she sees in the street. It could be a short conversation, probably over her backyard fence. At the next stage, conversations like this one become more structured when they are carried into churches and civic groups. Later still, in the United States, town meetings might be held on what should be done to keep drugs out of the community, and people might decide on a strategy. Some of the things they decide might be carried out by ad hoc groups or civic organizations. Government agencies will probably be asked to play a role. If these sorts of problem-solving initiatives result in civic work being done on problems, then a public begins to form in the community, a citizenry with the capacity for continued collective decision making and action.
Kettering publications report in more detail on how citizens become politically engaged, but, as is clear in this example, there is no magic formula or special technique involved. Primary or more organic democracy is latent in everyday conversations: What do you think is happening? Does it affect you? What do you think should be done? Are there any downsides to what you are suggesting? If there are, do you think we should still do what you propose or do something else? Unfortunately, there may be few opportunities for such thoughtful conversations in modern society.
Nonetheless, people are still political animals, and ordinary routines can become effective democratic practices if critical moments or junctures are recognized and used to their full potential.
Take the matter of giving names to problems. It happens every day without much notice. Political leaders name problems when they speak; the news media does it when reporters write stories. Yet who gets to name problems and the terms used to describe them are very important because they shape everything that follows. The solution to a problem is usually implied in its name. Citizens name problems in terms of their experiences and the things they hold dear. And when the names given to problems reflect people’s deepest concerns, a routine activity is transformed into a public or democratic practice.
Naming a problem in public terms isn’t simply using everyday language. Public terms are distinctive in that they capture intangibles. Crime can be described in statistical terms, yet people value safety, and safety can’t be quantified. Such intangibles are deeply important to most everyone. We all want to be free from danger, secure from economic privation, able to pursue our own interests, and treated fairly by others—to mention a few of our primal motives. These collective or basic political motivations are similar to the individual needs that Abraham Maslow found common to all human beings. Such public imperatives are more fundamental than the interests that grow out of our particular circumstances (since circumstances change). And they are different from idiosyncratic personal values, which also vary.
Professionals, on the other hand, name problems in a useful, but different way, using technical terms. The names they use naturally reflect their expertise and the solutions their professions provide. Even though nothing is wrong with professional names, they don’t normally take into account what citizens experience or value. For example, in the United States, people tend to think of drug abuse in terms of what they see happening to families and how it influences young people, not in terms of police interdiction of the drug trade.
Professional names are certainly accurate; in fact, they are so accurate that they create the impression that no other names are possible. But when people fail to see their worries reflected in the way problems are presented, they lose interest. In addition, professional descriptions may give the impression that there is little that citizens can do. The names political partisans use to describe problems can have the same effects. Battles over the “right” name can ignite partisan conflicts, which many people believe are counterproductive.
The various names that people give to their problems imply different sorts of actions to solve the problems. To make sound decisions, citizens have to consider all of these options. Think of all that might be done to protect families, the backbone of every civilization. In the United States, when people consider all of the pressures on today’s families, many focus on the importance of the institution of marriage and lament the high divorce rate. These same people may also feel strongly about parental responsibility. And most of them probably worry about what is happening to children when they hear stories of abuse or lack of medical care; they believe in protecting the young. So on just this one issue, people value several things: marriage, parental responsibility, and the well-being of children.
Each of these concerns suggests a different option for acting on the problem. The difficulty is that it’s impossible to act on all the options because resources are limited and some options conflict with others. For instance, the value placed on protecting children suggests taking them out of families where there is abuse. Yet the value on protecting the family suggests that “abuse,” other than physical injury, is difficult to define and that the intervention in family life is seldom justified.
Sometimes a range of options is considered, the cost of each is determined, and the inevitable tensions among competing options are fairly assessed. At other times, only one option is considered or two are presented as bipolar opposites. These different approaches to a problem are different frameworks for decision making. The latter two tend to promote disagreements. The first sets the stage for a fair trial and is more open to more citizens because it considers more options. The framing of a decision is another critical juncture in politics, just as it is in a court trial. Presenting all options fairly is a powerful democratic practice.
Weighing the costs and consequences of various options to make a decision, we have learned, only occurs when people face up to the difficult trade-offs that have to be among options. Citizens have to work through the tensions in order to make sound decisions, and deliberation has been called “choice work” for that reason. What makes the choices difficult is that the things we citizens hold dear—like our security and freedom—are at stake. Yet we can’t have everything we want. For instance, an action that protects our security might curb our freedom. Consequently, we have to choose. And to choose wisely, we have to face up to the consequences of our preferences.
Unquestionably, differences over what is valuable often pit people against one another. Yet deliberative forums have shown ways that people can disagree without it leading to polarizing conflict. Although the things people value are the source of disagreements, human beings value many of the same things; these are the ultimate purposes or ends of life, and the means to attaining those ends. In deliberations, people have opportunities to decide, in a given situation, if their security (for example) is more or less important than something else that is dear to them.
Contrary to what some theorists have argued, deliberative forums typically don’t result in agreement. They are more likely to produce a “consensus,” in the original Latin meaning of a shared sense of a problem. This shared and expanded perspective allows for a variety of responses that are complementary or move in the same general direction. That has been useful when combating problems that can’t be solved by one group or institution and that require the use of numerous resources. In most countries, for instance, combating entrenched poverty in urban centers and remote rural areas has been such a problem. There is no one action that can solve such a problem.
How decisions are implemented in actions is obviously another critical juncture in politics. Action can be uniform and hegemonic—everyone expected to do the same thing at the same time—but such uniformity is often unlikely, except in extreme circumstances. Putting together a coalition of multifaceted actions that are mutually beneficial is a more viable democratic practice. And it follows naturally when deliberations lead to renaming problems to expose their full dimensions and multiple facets.
The last and perhaps most important juncture that Kettering has observed in politics usually comes after an action has been taken to solve a problem. Normally an assessment is made of how successful the action was in meeting a fixed goal. And, in most cases, success is measured quantitatively by some professionals trained in metrics. That is appropriate when the goal is to increase or reduce the quantity of something. But professional assessments do not typically allow citizens to learn collectively by determining if what they thought was truly important was, in fact, as valuable as it first seemed.
When people learn civically, they have to evaluate both the consequences of their actions and their goals, rather than assessing consequences against predetermined measures of success. When people are continuously learning in this way, they learn about themselves as well as the outcomes of their efforts. Being in a learning mode helps keep up the momentum needed to deal with deep-seated, society-wide problems. Rather than being stopped by the disappointment of not being initially successful, citizens learn from the experience, and, using lessons learned, are prone to try again.
Collective or civic learning has many of the same qualities as deliberation. You might say it is deliberation after rather than just before the action because both involve carefully weighing actions against their effects on the commonweal. This type of learning is like deliberation in that assessments are done by taking into account the intangible things that people value and then carefully weighing the consequences of actions against those things.
As people struggle with making the collective decisions needed for collective action, they rename problems and reframe options as they anticipate the actions that might be taken. That is why watching citizen forums helped the foundation to see the other side of democracy, the organic side. The best deliberative forums contain the political DNA of all of these practices. Furthermore, naming, framing, and deliberating, which lead to multifaceted actions and civic learning, are not separate activities but elements of the work citizens must do to gain a measure of control over their collective fate.
WHY PRIMARY DEMOCRACY HAS BEEN IGNORED
If democracy in its elemental or organic form is essential to the institutions of representative government, why has it been necessary to rediscover it? One reason is that institutional democracy tends to evaluate everything in politics by its own standards. In addition, as people become disillusioned with conventional politics, they won’t call what they do to solve problems with their fellow citizens “politics.” Still another reason for this loss is that much of what happens in primary democracy is so personal that it seems private and so social that it is written off as politically irrelevant.
To illustrate the tendency to judge all of politics by institutional standards, take the requirement to get “up to scale.” In representative governments, majorities rule. So from an institutional perspective, the size of a political effort is a proper measure of its significance.
A party with a handful of members isn’t likely to be taken seriously. Organic politics, however, operates on a small scale or microlevel. The groups that citizens form aren’t large, they tend to be ad hoc, and there may not be a great many of them. Their power lies in the significance of the ideas about politics that they generate, the work they do by collective effort, and the extent of their associations or social connections. Getting up to scale is not as important as building networks or what have been described as “nesting public spheres.” Reform movements, in the United States for example, usually begin organically before they become institutional. Recent scholarship on the civil rights movement documents the importance of the associations formed by local people long before the federal government became involved.
Primary democracy is also dismissed because it doesn’t follow the conventional wisdom about how to get things done in “real” politics. Democracy at its most basic, however, has its own “rules” for getting the work of citizens done. These rules are pragmatic, not idealistic. Collective decision making creates incentives to listen, to consider opposing points of view, and to try to judge fairly. These foster mutual consent, which is the goal rather than agreement by the majority.
As is evident in Nelson Mandela’s observations, reciprocity and equal regard for speakers are essential to collective action. The relationships formed in organic democracy also create their own type of power, it is not power over but power with others. Primary, deliberative democracy opens doors into politics for people without wealth, social position, or institutional authority. All that is required is having an opinion and being willing to listen to the opinions of others. We have seen these doors open in deliberative forums.
THE NECESSARY WORK OF CITIZENS
Democracy in its primary form depends on citizens to be producers of public goods from their collective efforts, not just consumers of government services or informed voters. Without question, people depend on government for things they would have difficulty doing without its machinery. Yet, as I noted earlier, it seems equally true that not only governments but also many major institutions cannot do their jobs without being reinforced by the things people create through civic action. That interdependence has been documented in studies done by Harvard Professor Robert Putman on the role civil society plays in effective governance. When governments try to go it alone, they can run into serious limitations.
One of our colleagues in Latin America was invited to visit a new president in a neighboring country who was trying to win legitimacy for his administration by holding public meetings. Citizens were encouraged to present their needs, and they responded with long lists of things they wanted the government to do. Nothing was said about what citizens needed to do on their own behalf. The country was poor, the government was already close to bankruptcy, and now expectations were at an all-time high. The new administration could not meet all the needs, expectations turned to disappointment, and the president was soon forced out of office.
These and similar situations have prompted studies of what citizens can do to solve some of their own problems. A newspaper in Ohio reported on a number of projects in the United States: A tribe of Eskimos in a remote Artic village joined forces to protect a herd of caribou; three hundred local citizens in an urban county worked together to eliminate a source of air pollution; six thousand people organized to preserve a historic farm in North Carolina; and six people sitting around a kitchen table in a low-income neighborhood in Washington, D.C., made plans to stop drug traffic on their streets. The newspaper did not seem to have any problem finding stories. These civic projects reinforce what governments do in their efforts to protect the environment, preserve important historical sites, and stop drug trafficking.
Professors John McKnight and John Kretzmann at Northwestern University have a similar list of cases of effective collective action by citizens in the poorest urban neighborhoods. And the Kettering Foundation Press published a book, Reclaiming Public Education by Reclaiming Our Democracy, with cases of what citizens have done to enrich the education of school children. In Okolona in rural Mississippi, for example, citizens worked together to establish a summer camp to supplement what children learned in the public schools and to create a school for adults that taught basic literacy skills. These were the products, things that citizens created to serve the public good, and they reinforced what the regular schools were providing.
THE FUTURE
I have seen other cases in countries from Thailand to Russia, and they all speak to the critical issue of whether citizens can make a real difference in politics. Political power lies in the ability to act, to do something that makes a difference. That is the significance of the things that citizens make through their collective efforts, whether they are as simple as summer camps for children or as ambitious as homes for the homeless. Citizens who have the ability to act on their problems obviously have the power to make a difference. And the ability to act together effectively depends on the ability to make sound decisions about which collective efforts to undertake.
Scholar Vincent Colapietro hit the mark when he wrote, “whatever else the task of being a citizen encompasses, it imposes the need to deliberate about just what it means to be a citizen.” But we do not make decisions about our citizenship in the abstract; we decide in the context of the major issues of the day.
Ultimately, the role of the public will be determined by what citizens expect of themselves. So decisions being made in all types of deliberative forums aren’t just about which civic actions or government policies are best; they are about what citizens should be doing. These decisions, made forum by forum, will go a long way toward defining the kind of democracy that will characterize this new century. This is why the last 25 years of forums, including those in Colombia, have been so important, and it is why public deliberation will be critical in the future. It isn’t melodramatic to say that our ability to understand the full meaning of democracy hangs in the balance; in fact, it does.