Philip Olterman in The Guardian
Anton Oberländer is a persuasive speaker. Last year, when he and a group of friends were short of cash for a camping trip to Cornwall, he managed to talk Germany’s national rail operator into handing them some free tickets. So impressed was the management with his chutzpah that they invited him back to give a motivational speech to 200 of their employees.
Anton, it should be pointed out, is 14 years old.
The Berlin teenager’s self-confidence is largely the product of a unique educational institution that has turned the conventions of traditional teaching radically upside down. At Oberländer’s school, there are no grades until students turn 15, no timetables, no lecture-style instructions. The pupils themselves decide which subjects they want to study for each lesson and when they want to take an exam.
The school’s syllabus reads like any helicopter parents’ nightmare. Set subjects are limited to maths, German, English and social studies, supplemented by more abstract courses such as “responsibility” or “challenge”. For “challenge”, students aged 12 to 14 are each given €150 (£115) and sent on an adventure they have to plan entirely by themselves. Some go kayaking, others work on a farm. Anton went trekking along England’s south coast.
The philosophy behind these innovations is simple: as the requirements of the labour market are changing, and smartphones and the internet are transforming the ways in which young people process information, headteacher Margret Rasfeld argues, the most important skill a school can pass down to its students is the ability to motivate themselves.
“Look at three or four year olds – they are all full of self-confidence,” Rasfeld says. “Often children can’t wait to start school. But frustratingly, most schools then somehow manage to untrain that confidence.”
The Evangelical School Berlin Centre (ESBC) is trying to do nothing less than “reinvent what a school is”, she says. “The mission of a progressive school should be to prepare young people to cope with change, or better still, to make them look forward to change. In the 21st century schools should see it as their job to develop strong personalities.”
Making students listen to a teacher for 45 minutes and punish them for collaborating on an exercise, Rasfeld says, was not only out of sync with the requirements of the modern world of work but also counterproductive. “Nothing motivates students more than when they discover the meaning behind a subject of their own accord.”
Students at her school are encouraged to think up other ways to prove their acquired skills, such as coding a computer game instead of sitting a maths exam. Oberländer, who had never been away from home for three weeks until he embarked on his challenge in Cornwall, said he learned more English on his trip than he had in several years of learning the language at school.
Reinventing education: pupils at the ESBC, which is gaining a reputation as Germany’s most exciting school. Photograph: Handout
Germany’s federalised education structure, in which each of the 16 states plans its own education system, has traditionally allowed “free learning” models to flourish. Yet unlike Sudbury, Montessori or Steiner schools, Rasfeld’s institution tries to embed student self-determination within a relatively strict system of rules. Students who dawdle during lessons have to come into school on Saturday morning to catch up, a punishment known as “silentium”. “The more freedom you have, the more structure you need,” says Rasfeld.
The main reason why the ESBC is gaining a reputation as Germany’s most exciting school is that its experimental philosophy has also managed to deliver impressive results. Year after year Rasfeld’s institution ends up with the best grades among Berlin’s gesamtschulen, or comprehensive schools, which combine all three school forms of Germany’s tertiary system. Last year’s school leavers achieved an average grade of 2.0, the equivalent of a straight B – even though 40% of the year had been advised not to continue to Abitur, the German equivalent of A-levels, before they joined the school. Having opened in 2007 with just 16 students, the school now operates at full capacity, with 500 pupils and long waiting lists for new applicants.
Given its word-of-mouth success, it is little wonder there have been calls for Rasfeld’s approach to go nationwide. Yet some educational experts question whether the school’s methods can easily be exported: in Berlin, they say, the school can draw the most promising applicants from well-off and progressive families. Rasfeld rejects such criticisms, insisting the school aims for a heterogenous mix of students from different backgrounds. While a cross adorns the assembly hall and each school day starts with worship, only a third of current pupils are baptised. Thirty per cent of students have a migrant background, and 7% are from households where no German is spoken at all.
Even though the ESBC is one of Germany’s 5,000 private schools, fees are means tested and relatively low compared with those common in Britain, ranging between €720 and €6,636 a year. About 5% of students are exempt from fees.
Yet even Rasfeld admits that finding teachers able to adjust to the school’s learning methods can be harder than getting students to do the same.
Aged 65 and due to retire in July, Rasfeld still has ambitious plans. A four-person “education innovation lab” based at the school has been developing teaching materials for schools that want to follow the ESBC’s lead. About 40 schools inGermany are in the process of adopting some or all of Rasfeld’s methods. One in Berlin’s Weissensee district recently let a student trek across the Alps for a challenge project. “Things are only getting started,” says Rasfeld.
“In education, you can only create change from the bottom – if the orders come from the top, schools will resist. Ministries are like giant oil tankers: it takes a long time to turn them around. What we need is lots of little speedboats to show you can do things differently.”
Dan Iles in The Guardian
Jeremy Corbyn addresses a ‘Keep Corbyn’ rally at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
Before Jeremy Corbyn, I would never have dreamed of joining a mainstream political party. Brought up in Wales in a progressive humanist family, my politics was totally alien to the endless parade of shiny careerist politicians who ran the show. My parents had long since torn up their Labour membership over the Iraq war and I was resigned to a political identity on the left without a party. To me and many of my contemporaries Labour was a party without a soul, whose leadership had poisoned the party with its blinkered pro-business dogma and their illegal wars.
But Corbyn changed all that: his distinctly socialist approach based on principled politics inspired me and thousands of others to come in from the political wilderness and join a party that we previously distrusted. I found myself and many members of my family, friends and colleagues suddenly enthusiastic and full of hope for the future. There was still the huge challenge of defeating the Tories ahead of us, but at least that challenge finally meant something. No more putting a cross in a box next to the lesser of two evils.
And, yes, the last nine months have been bumpy. Corbyn’s leadership has been undermined from the start by an influential ring of MPs on the right of the party who were never going to accept his mandate. His team had to make a fresh start, isolated in Westminster away from the social movements that backed him and without the polished political machine that had furnished the previous leadership. And yet despite this, we have seen a whole number of successes: a huge rise in membership, four mayoral posts, the victory in the Lords on tax credits and defending disabled people against cuts to PIP payments, to name a few.
But instead of focusing on his policies, the leaders of the recent Labour coup want to attack Corbyn’s personal qualities. They say that he doesn’t have what it takes to lead the party. But I disagree. While his speech-making abilities are not perfect and he’s far from the machiavellian politician that we have grown accustomed to, Corbyn is a man of ideas – something that the party up until now has been lacking. And what actually is leadership? Because if leadership means being a person of integrity who makes time for the marginalised, who inspires those alienated from the political process, and who isn’t afraid to speak uncomfortable truths, then Corbyn shows leadership in bucketloads.
I come at this from a standpoint of someone who voted remain. Corbyn was right to take a nuanced approach on the EU referendum. I believe Corbyn persuaded 60% of Labour’s supporters to vote remain because he didn’t ignore people’s concerns with the EU. By admitting that the EU is not without its faults and then demanding that we should stay in to reform it (from the left) he was able to bypass the binary claims of the two main referendum campaigns. People voted leave because they felt abandoned by politics and scared about immigration.
These structural issues haven’t just appeared in the last nine months of Corbyn’s leadership. But I think many felt his defence of immigration and his determination to turn the debate towards austerity was refreshing at a time when the leave campaign was openly whipping up racism and xenophobia.
If Corbyn resigns, a move to the right in Labour is inevitable. And the left will be locked out of the party for a decade as the centre of the party pulls up the drawbridge to parliamentary nominations. With this I not only lose a party (so soon after finding it) but the left will lose a strong agent in the fight for a progressive exit of the EU. The UK faces a bonfire of workers’ rights, financial regulation and environmental protections as it’s torn from Europe. Without Corbyn we face being locked into neoliberal rules for the next century.
But this isn’t about Corbyn. Nine months ago I and so many others were inspired back into a party that had refound its soul. Labour cannot be a party of airbrushed professionals. If it has any hope of achieving power it needs to be linked to a mass movement. The membership and unions are where the Labour party gets its strength. They are what sets them apart from the Tories. And for MPs to choose to ignore them now could be one of the biggest mistakes in the party’s history.
Youssef El-Gingihy in The Independent
The Brexit vote has precipitated the deepest political crisis in Britain in a generation. The nation is divided and the climate is lurching dangerously towards the far right. At this critical moment for the future of the country, the Blairites have opportunistically mounted an anti-Corbyn coup. They have been incubating this coup from day one despite Corbyn's overwhelming mandate.
They talk of Corbyn as an aberration. It is, in fact, the other way round. It is the Blairites, who represent a deviation in the history of the Labour party away from its values and eponymous constituency. The biggest threat to the Conservatives would be an alternative, viable anti-austerity manifesto.
Fortunately, the Blairites are outnumbered, in the wider party, by the massive influx of new members joining since the general election. This new membership alone is greater than the entire membership of the Conservative party. Contrary to the media narrative, Corbyn's victory has galvanised whole swathes of the electorate, particularly amongst young voters.
Blair may have won three elections, but in so doing he nearly destroyed his own party. In Scotland, millions felt they had been abandoned by New Labour's policies including the Iraq war and the embrace of neoliberalism. The same pattern has been repeated in the North of England with traditional working class voters in Labour heartlands defecting to UKIP. The UKIP vote went up from under a million in 2010 to nearly 4 million in 2015.
Labour did not just lose the election. It lost the previous five years by acquiescing to a bogus Tory narrative of excessive public spending as causing or exacerbating the crisis despite the IMF clearly rebutting this. Miliband tried to appease his base with attacks on predatory capitalism but, at the same time, he tried to out-tough the Tories on immigration and cuts. This schizoid approach did not convince voters. Why vote for austerity-lite when you can have the real thing?
The idea that Corbyn is unelectable or cannot be sold to the media is a strange one. Real politics and real leadership is about creating a vision for the country rather than merely chasing votes according to what is perceived to be flavour of the month. The post-war Labour government pursued its monumental achievements by being bold and radical. It set the agenda for a social democratic settlement, which shaped the future of Britain for decades, forcing the Tories to accommodate. When the neoliberals started out, they were in the political wilderness. They gradually transformed politics with the backing of powerful allies. For the worse admittedly. But Thatcher never asked the media or the political establishment for permission.
The notion that a return to Blairism would rescue Labour is completely out of touch. And dangerously so. Neoliberal economics is broken and we are in an era of perpetual economic stagnation and crisis. If the left does not offer a convincing, progressive alternative then UKIP and the far right will capitalise.
This is a battle for the soul of the Labour party between neoliberal Blairism and the progressive left. Certainly a split now looks almost inevitable. If that is what is needed to save the party then so be it.
The Conservatives are offering up a prospectus of more of the same - privatisation, financialisation, dismantling the public sector all in the guise of austerity. Now more than ever, we need a strong left with transformative policies to counter the dominance of the right and the framing of politics in the reactionary discourse of nationalism and racism. Only progressive forces can steer Britain away from the dangers of far-right fascism and offer working class people a better future.
David Van Reybrouck in The Guardian
Brexit is a turning point in the history of western democracy. Never before has such a drastic decision been taken through so primitive a procedure – a one-round referendum based on a simple majority. Never before has the fate of a country – of an entire continent, in fact – been changed by the single swing of such a blunt axe, wielded by disenchanted and poorly informed citizens.
But this is just the latest in a series of worrying blows to the health of democracy. On the surface, everything still seems fine. A few years ago, the World Values Survey, a large-scale international research project, asked more than 73,000 people in 57 countries if they believed democracy was a good way to govern a country – and nearly 92% said yes. But that same survey found that in the past 10 years, around the world, there has been a considerable increase in calls for a strong leader “who does not have to bother with parliament and elections” – and that trust in governments and political parties has reached a historical low. It would appear that people like the idea of democracy but loathe the reality.
Trust in the institutions of democracy is also visibly declining. In the past five years, the European Union’s official research bureau found that less than 30% of Europeans had faith in their national parliaments and governments – some of the lowest figures in years, and an indication that almost three-quarters of people distrust their countries’ most important political institutions. Everywhere in the west, political parties – the key players in our democracies – are among the least trusted institutions in society. Although a certain scepticism is an essential component of citizenship in a free society, we are justified in asking how widespread this distrust might be and at what point healthy scepticism tips over into outright aversion.
There is something explosive about an era in which interest in politics grows while faith in politics declines. What does it mean for the stability of a country if more and more people warily keep track of the activities of an authority that they increasingly distrust? How much derision can a system endure, especially now that everyone can share their deeply felt opinions online?
Fifty years ago, we lived in a world of greater political apathy and yet greater trust in politics. Now there is both passion and distrust. These are turbulent times, as the events of the past week demonstrate all too clearly. And yet, for all this turbulence, there has been little reflection on the tools that our democracies use. It is still a heresy to ask whether elections, in their current form, are a badly outmoded technology for converting the collective will of the people into governments and policies.
We discuss and debate the outcome of a referendum without discussing its principles. This should be surprising. In a referendum, we ask people directly what they think when they have not been obliged to think – although they have certainly been bombarded by every conceivable form of manipulation in the months leading up to the vote. But the problem is not confined to referendums: in an election, you may cast your vote, but you are also casting it away for the next few years. This system of delegation to an elected representative may have been necessary in the past – when communication was slow and information was limited – but it is completely out of touch with the way citizens interact with each other today. Even in the 18th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had already observed that elections alone were no guarantee of liberty: “The people of England deceive themselves when they fancy they are free; they are so, in fact, only during the election of members of parliament: for, as soon as a new one is elected, they are again in chains, and are nothing.”
Referendums and elections are both arcane instruments of public deliberation. If we refuse to update our democratic technology, we may find the system is beyond repair; 2016 already risks becoming the worst year for democracy since 1933. We may find, even after the folly of Brexit, that Donald Trump wins the American presidency later this year. But this may have less to do with Trump himself, or the oddities of the American political system, than with a dangerous road that all western democracies have taken: reducing democracy to voting.
Isn’t it bizarre that voting, our highest civic duty, boils down to an individual action performed in the silence of the voting booth? Is this really the place where we turn individual gut feelings into shared priorities? Is it really where the common good and the long term are best served?
By refusing to change procedures, we have made political turmoil and instability defining features of western democracy. Last weekend Spain had to hold its second general election in six months, after the first run did not deliver a government. A few weeks ago, Austria almost elected its first extreme rightwing president, while a Dutch referendum in April voted down a trade agreement between Ukraine and the EU. My country, Belgium, became the laughing stock of Europe a few years earlier, when it failed to form a government for 541 days. But nobody is laughing now that it seems that many western democracies are in the process of turning “Belgian”.
Two women enter a polling station to vote in the EU referendum in London. Photograph: Hannah Mckay/EPA
Countless western societies are currently afflicted by what we might call “democratic fatigue syndrome”. Symptoms may include referendum fever, declining party membership, and low voter turnout. Or government impotence and political paralysis – under relentless media scrutiny, widespread public distrust, and populist upheavals.
But democratic fatigue syndrome is not so much caused by the people, the politicians or the parties – it is caused by the procedure. Democracy is not the problem. Voting is the problem. Where is the reasoned voice of the people in all this? Where do citizens get the chance to obtain the best possible information, engage with each other and decide collectively upon their future? Where do citizens get a chance to shape the fate of their communities? Not in the voting booth, for sure.
The words “election” and “democracy” have become synonymous. We have convinced ourselves that the only way to choose a representative is through the ballot box. After all, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 states as much: “The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.”
The words “this will shall be expressed” are typical of our way of thinking about democracy: when we say “democracy”, we only mean “elections”. But isn’t it remarkable that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights contains such a precise definition of how the will of the people must be expressed? Why should such a concise text about basic rights, which is fewer than 2,000 words long, pay particular attention to the practical execution of one of these rights? It is as if the people who compiled the declaration back in 1948 had come to see the specific method as a basic right, as if the procedure was in itself sacred.
It would appear that the fundamental cause of democratic fatigue syndrome lies in the fact that we have all become electoral fundamentalists, venerating elections but despising the people who are elected.
Electoral fundamentalism is an unshakeable belief in the idea that democracy is inconceivable without elections and elections are a necessary and fundamental precondition when speaking of democracy. Electoral fundamentalists refuse to regard elections as a means of taking part in democracy, seeing them instead as an end in themselves, as a doctrine with an intrinsic, inalienable value.
This blind faith in the ballot box as the ultimate base on which popular sovereignty rests can be seen most vividly of all in international diplomacy. When western donor countries hope that countries ravaged by conflict – such as Congo, Iraq or Afghanistan – 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. 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.
If you look at the recommendations of western donors, it is as if democracy is a kind of export product, off the peg, in handy packaging, ready for dispatch. “Free and fair elections” become an Ikea kit for democracy – to be assembled by the recipient, with or without the help of the instructions enclosed. And if the resulting piece of furniture is lopsided, uncomfortable to sit on or falls apart? Then it’s the fault of the customer.
That elections can have all kinds of outcomes in states that are fragile, including violence, ethnic tensions, criminality and corruption, seems of secondary importance. That elections do not automatically foster democracy, but may instead prevent or destroy it, is conveniently forgotten. We insist that in every country in the world people must traipse off to the polling stations. Our electoral fundamentalism really does take the form of a new, global evangelism. Elections are the sacraments of that new faith, a ritual regarded as a vital necessity in which the form is more important than the content.
This single-minded focus on elections is actually rather odd. During the past 3,000 years, people have been experimenting with democracy and only in the last 200 have they practised it exclusively by holding elections. Yet we regard elections as the only valid method. Why? Force of habit is at play here, of course, but there is a more simple cause, based on the fact that elections have worked pretty well over the past two centuries. Despite a number of notoriously bad outcomes, they have very often made democracy possible.
However, elections originated in a completely different context from the one that they function in today. When the supporters of the American and French revolutions proposed elections as a way of learning “the will of the people”, there were no political parties, no laws regarding universal franchise, no commercial mass media, and no internet. The forerunners of our representative democracy had no idea that any of these things would come into existence.
Elections are the fossil fuel of politics. Whereas once they gave democracy a huge boost, much as oil did for our economies, it now turns out they cause colossal problems of their own. If we don’t urgently reconsider the nature of our democratic fuel, a systemic crisis awaits. If we obstinately hold on to a notion of democracy that reduces its meaning to voting in elections and referendums, at a time of economic malaise, we will undermine the democratic process.
In the years after the second world war, western democracies were dominated by large mass parties, and they held the structures of the state in their hands. Through a network of intermediary organisations, such as unions, corporations and party media, they succeeded in being close to the lives of individual citizens. This resulted in an extremely stable system, with great party loyalty and predictable voting behaviour.
This changed in the 1980s and 1990s, when discourse was increasingly shaped by the free market. Party newspapers disappeared or were bought up by media concerns, commercial broadcasters entered the field and even public broadcasters increasingly adopted market thinking. Viewing, reading and listening figures became hugely important – they were the daily share price index of public opinion. Commercial mass media emerged as the most important builders of social consensus, and organised civil society lost ground. The consequences were predictable, as citizens became consumers and elections hazardous.
Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona. Photograph: Ralph Freso/Getty Images
Parties began to see themselves less as intermediaries between people and power, and instead settled into the fringes of the state apparatus. To retain their places there, they had to turn to the voter every few years to top up their legitimacy. Elections became a battle fought out in the media for the favour of voters. The passions aroused among the populace diverted attention from a far more fundamental emotion, an increasing irritation with anything and everything pertaining to politics.
In 2004, the British sociologist Colin Crouch came up with the term “post-democracy” to describe this new order:
Under this model, while elections certainly exist and can change governments, public electoral debate is a tightly controlled spectacle, managed by rival teams of professionals expert in the techniques of persuasion, and considering a small range of issues selected by those teams. The mass of citizens plays a passive, quiescent part, responding only to the signals given them.
The Italy of Silvio Berlusconi came closest to fitting this definition of the post-democratic state but elsewhere too we have seen processes that tend in that direction. Since the end of the 20th century, citizens have started looking like their 19th-century predecessors. Because civil society has become weaker, a gulf has opened up again between the state and the individual.
After the rise of the political parties, the introduction of universal suffrage, the rise and fall of organised civil society and the dominance of commercial media, another factor has now been added: social media.
At the beginning of the 21st century, citizens could follow the political theatre, minute by minute, on radio, television or the internet, but today they can respond to it from second to second and mobilise others. The culture of immediate reporting now has instant feedback, resulting in even more of a cacophony. The work of the public figure, and especially the elected politician, is not made easier by any of this. He or she can immediately see whether new proposals appeal to the citizen, and indeed just how many people the citizen can whip up. New technology gives people a voice, but the nature of this new political involvement makes the electoral system creak at the joints all the more.
Commercial and social media also reinforce one another – picking up each other’s news and bouncing it back to create an atmosphere of perpetual mudslinging. Tough competition, loss of advertising revenue and falling sales prompt the media to produce increasingly vehement reports about increasingly exaggerated conflicts. For radio and television, national politics has become a daily soap opera, and while editors determine to some extent the framing, the script and the typecasting, politicians, with varying degrees of success, try to slant things this way or that. The most popular politicians are those who succeed in altering the script and reframing the debate – in other words, those who can bend the media to their will.
This collective hysteria has made election fever permanent and has serious consequences for the workings of democracy. Efficiency suffers under the electoral calculus, legitimacy under the continual need to distinguish oneself, while time and again, the electoral system ensures that the long term and the common interest lose out to the short term and party interests. Elections were once invented to make democracy possible, but in these circumstances they seem to be a hindrance.
Since we have reduced democracy to selecting representatives, and reduced representative democracy to mean simply voting, a valuable system is now mired in deep difficulties. Winning the next election has become more important than fulfilling the promises made in the last. Making the best of the system we have is becoming increasingly difficult.
What kind of democracy is appropriate to an era of fast, decentralised communication? How should the government deal with all those articulate citizens who stand shouting from the sidelines?
Imagine having to develop a system today that would express the will of the people. Would it really be a good idea to have them all queue up at polling stations every four or five years with a bit of card in their hands and go into a dark booth to put a mark next to names on a list, names of people about whom restless reporting had been going on for months in a commercial environment that profits from restlessness?
People care deeply about their communities and want to be heard. But a much better way to let the people speak than through a referendum is to return to the central principle of Athenian democracy: drafting by lot, or sortition as it is presently called. In ancient Athens, the large majority of public functions were assigned by lot. Renaissance states such as Venice and Florence worked on the same basis and experienced centuries of political stability. With sortition, you do not ask everyone to vote on an issue few people really understand, but you draft a random sample of the population and make sure they come to the grips with the subject matter in order to take a sensible decision. A cross-section of society that is informed can act more coherently than an entire society that is uninformed.
Experiments with sortition have been successfully applied in the US, Australia, and the Netherlands. The most innovative country so far is certainly Ireland. In December 2012, a constitutional convention began work in order to revise several articles of the constitution of Ireland. Its members were not just a committee of MPs working behind closed doors, but a mixture of elected politicians and ordinary people: 33 elected politicians and 66 citizens, drafted by lot, from both Ireland and Northern Ireland. This group met one weekend per month for more than a year.
An independent research bureau put together the random group of 66 citizens, taking account of age, sex and place of birth. The diversity this produced was helpful when it came to discussing such subjects as same-sex marriage, the rights of women or the ban on blasphemy in the current constitution. However, they did not do all this alone: participants listened to experts and received input from other citizens (more than a thousand contributions came in on the subject of gay marriage). The decisions made by the convention did not have the force of law; the recommendations first had to be passed by the two chambers of the Irish parliament, then by the government and then in a referendum.
By talking to a diverse cross-section of Irish society, politicians could get further than they could have by just talking to each other. By exchanging views with elected officials, citizens could give much more relevant input than they could have in an election or a referendum.
What if this procedure had been applied in the UK last week? What if a random sample of citizens had a chance to learn from experts, listen to proposals, talk to each other and engage with politicians? What if a mixed group of elected and drafted citizens had thought the matter through? What if the rest of society could have had a chance to follow and contribute to their deliberations? What if the proposal this group would have come up with had been subjected to public scrutiny? Do we think a similarly reckless decision would have been taken?
The leaders’ debate on ITV before the 2015 general election. Left to right: Ed Miliband, Leanne Wood, Nicola Sturgeon and David Cameron. Photograph: Ken McKay/ ITV / Rex/EPA
Sortition could provide a remedy to the democratic fatigue syndrome that we see everywhere today. The drawing of lots is not a miracle cure any more than elections ever were, but it can help correct a number of the faults in the current system. The risk of corruption is reduced, election fever abates and attention to the common good increases. Voting on the basis of gut feeling is replaced by sensible deliberation, as those who have been drafted are exposed to expert opinion, objective information and public debate. Citizens chosen by lot may not have the expertise of professional politicians, but they add something vital to the process: freedom. After all, they don’t need to be elected or re-elected.
Juries for criminal trials that are chosen by lot prove that people generally take their task extremely seriously. The fear of a chamber that behaves recklessly or irresponsibly is unfounded. If we agree that 12 people can decide in good faith about the freedom or imprisonment of a fellow citizen, then we can be confident that a number of them can and will serve the interests of the community in a responsible manner.
If many countries rely on the principle of sortition in the criminal justice system, why not rely on it in the legislative system? We already use a lottery like this every day, but we use it in the worst possible form: public opinion polling. As the American political scientist James Fishkin famously remarked: “In a poll, we ask people what they think when they don’t think. It would be more interesting to ask what they think after they had a chance to think.”
Democracy is not, by definition, government by the best, elected or not. It flourishes precisely by allowing a diversity of voices to be heard. It is all about having an equal say, an equal right to determine what political action is taken.
In order to keep democracy alive, we will have to learn that democracy cannot be reduced to voting alone. Elections and referendums become dangerously outmoded tools if they are not enriched with more sensible forms of citizens’ participation. Structured deliberation with a random sample of citizens promises to generate a more vital, dynamic and inclusive form of democracy. In Utrecht, the fourth city of the Netherlands, the city council now drafts by lot 150 citizens to co-create its sustainable energy plan. These processes may become a permanent feature of any modern democracy.
The most common argument against sortition is the supposed incompetence of the those who have not been elected. A body of elected representatives undoubtedly has more technical competencies than a body chosen by lot. But what is the use of a parliament full of highly educated lawyers if few of them know the price of bread?
Besides, the elected do not know everything. They need staff and researchers to fill the gaps in their expertise. In much the same way, a representative body chosen by lot would not stand alone. It could invite experts, rely on professionals to moderate debates and put questions to citizens. Legislation could arise from the interaction between it and an elected chamber.
The arguments put forward against sortition are often identical to the reasons once put forward for not allowing peasants, workers or women to vote. Then, too, opponents claimed it would mark the end of democracy. Do we think Brexit might still have been possible if citizens had been truly invited to express their grievances and search for solutions together with those they had voted for?
If David Cameron had opted for the genuine participation of citizens, he would have obtained a much clearer view of what people really wanted, a powerful list of shared priorities, an agenda for further negotiations, and created much less distrust between the masses and the ruling class. On top of that, he would have gained global admiration for daring to tackle a complex challenge by an innovative process that values people’s voices instead of counting their votes. He could have set a new standard for democracy, rather than serving as its gravedigger.