This is part II of a three-part series. [Part I].
In conventional representative democracy, lack of accountability between elections leads to broken promises; voters often suffer lesser-evil dilemmas – as described in Part I of this series, [“Failure to Represent.”] Disillusionment with electoral politics leads many to favor participatory democracy instead.
Participatory democracy combines direct democracy at the local level with elected recallable delegates for wider decision making. Under this Federative Principle, or what Steven Shalom calls “Nested Councils,” citizens meet regularly in small local directly democratic assemblies (possibly passing hyper-local legislation) to elect recallable delegates to legislate (with guidance from the local assemblies) for larger areas from among themselves. These delegates in turn elect delegates governing still larger areas, and so on up to the national level – extreme indirection rather like a game of telephone.
The sheer number of decisions states and nations require ensure delegates would decide most questions with little accountability. Legislators in California passed about 1200 laws during 2022. The US Congress typically passes between 2 and 3 million words of legislation each year. For obvious reasons, staff does most policy work. In a nested council system, information overload would prevent local assemblies from having time or energy to truly control higher level councils, or even comprehensively review their actions.
The Zapatistas in Chiapas, and the Democratic Confederalism that formerly existed in Rojava are (or were) real life examples of this. The Zapatistas restructured their system in 2023 to decentralize it further, because larger councils were deciding key questions with only proforma consultation on the local level. (No subsequent evidence shows this decentralization fixing the problem.)
Hammy Cihad and Thomas Miley in their article “Lessons From Rojava for the Paradigm of Social Ecology” make clear that the Rojava system, where the directly democratic communes were supposed to be the basis of all power, in practice was run by the party and the military. From various well respected published sources they compile the following quotes: “decisions were not driven by the processes or products of direct democracy, but rather that they were already made and discussion provided … an illusion of consultation.” The council system is “dominated by the supporters of the PYD and the latter’s front organizations.” “…the leadership of the PKK in the Qandil mountains … are the ones who exercise real control,” Direct interviews they conducted yielded quotes such as: “The commune only does small bureaucratic tasks and provides people with gas cylinders and bread. It has no real power. The decisions come from above and the commune just implements them.” “…communes are limited to mere service functions with no real power…”
In fairness, Rojava, until the destruction of its project, was under frequent attack by the Syrian, Russian, and Turkish militaries, and by Daesh/ISIS. Under those circumstances it may have been inevitable that the military had significant informal power which inevitably compromised democracy and sometimes civil liberties and human rights. As an example of the latter: POW camps for former ISIS fighters and supporters imprisoned whole villages without any serious effort to determine who actually supported ISIS. Constant military attacks probably made some level of human rights violations inevitable, and provides a partial explanation of why power did not, in practice, vest in civilian communes rather than the people with guns. Novelist Michael Moorcock once called war “the greatest of all tyrants.” Representative democracies have committed far greater crimes during war time. But many also managed to hold contested elections under extreme attack, and maintain civilian control of the military, even under extreme threat. It is not too much to ask that a system that claims to be radically more democratic than those states do the same.
This is not to deny the success stories. Porto Alegre’s participatory budget process greatly reduced poverty and corruption. New England, with its town meetings, was a primary center of the abolitionist movement, a secondary center for women’s suffrage, and avoided some (though by no means all) of the recent craziness rampant elsewhere in the United States. The Zapatistas, surrounded by a hostile Mexican government and pressured by a hostile United States, greatly reduced tuberculosis and maternal mortality rates in areas they controlled. But, in addition to Rojava and the Zapatistas inability to maintain bottom-up control, none of these examples reached one other key goal of participatory democracy – voluntary participation by the majority of citizens in governing.
The Porto Alegre budget, at its peak, drew around 8% of the population to informal, non-binding neighborhood meetings that set agendas for formal assemblies. The subset of New England open town meetings which allow direct voting on issues and modification of proposals in response to discussion average turnout rates from 2% to 20%. No more than 36% of the population of Venezuela ever took part in neighborhood citizen assemblies under Chavez. Councils and committees frequently “would fail to meet quorums” ranging from 10-30%. Neighborhood council participation rates in Rojava ranged from 20-50%.
The Zapatistas in Chiapas are an exception, sort of. Mandatory attendance produces high turnout rates at neighborhood assemblies. (Chiapas has an indigenous tradition of popular assemblies of male heads of households. Without a mandate, few women or young people would attend.) But those high rates are only in Zapatista neighborhoods. In the majority of municipalities, less than half the population live in neighborhoods that hold assemblies. That aside, “Join our liberatory project for mandatory attendance at six-hour monthly meetings!” seems like an unpersuasive argument.
Three Claims About Participatory Democracy
Advocates make three arguments for indirect nested council systems. One: directly democratic deliberative local meetings will act as schools for democracy. Two: indirect election ensures delegates are chosen by deliberation (not just passive filling out of ballots) at each level of government, resulting in better choices. Three: indirect elections ensure each delegate at each level of government is elected by people who know them personally.
If information overload means that the directly democratic base assemblies have no real power, then there is little to deliberate upon, and attendance will be low in any case. That makes it hard to see how they will act as “schools for democracy.”
As to whether such assemblies will choose delegates deliberatively, it depends on whether people come to the meetings truly undecided, or whether everybody already knows who they wish to vote for. In most caucuses and governing conventions in the US, the latter is more likely than the former.
In terms of personal knowledge of delegates, the advantage in citizens knowing city council members personally is clear, if not necessarily large; the advantage in city council delegates knowing county delegates and so on is not immediately obvious. Using extreme indirection to ensure personal voter knowledge of candidates also has a dark side: someone quite loveable and personally charismatic can hold horrible views on issues.
Nested councils also replicate some problems of older representative democracies. Is the delegate who can get garbage collected and potholes fixed necessarily the right person to indirectly choose national legislators? Talk about “lesser evil” problems! Additionally, remember from Part I, that in legislatures without proportional representation a minority of voters can elect a majority of representatives? The same type of gerrymandering potential applies to this council system. Remember how more districts offer more opportunities for gerrymandering? Making the base of government very small local assemblies multiplies the “districts” many times compared to conventional legislatures, increasing opportunities for deliberate or accidental gerrymandering.
Nested councils are fundamentally flawed for large-scale governance due to extreme indirection, information constraints, structural lesser-evilism, structural gerrymandering plus structurally low participation. (They may well have their place in worker or government owned firms, but that is beyond the scope of this article.)
Sortition (Selection by Lot)
Many organizations seeking greater democracy, including the “Democracy in Europe Movement” (DIEM25) founded by Yanis Varoufakis, favor random selection as a means of choosing a representative legislature. According to probability theory, choosing a large enough random sample from a much larger population (sometimes as few as 400) ensures that the sample almost certainly represents the larger universe to some extent, even when sampling populations of millions or billions. Opinion polls operate upon this principle, which is not completely reassuring. Randomly choosing 400 or more people, like a super jury (technically called “sortition”) would result in a legislature that roughly represented the people along the lines of political opinions, class, gender, race, ethnicity and religion.
Sortition would provide zero formal accountability, not even the weak accountability of needing to run for reelection. Without such accountability, and limited to a single short term, legislators would be more vulnerable to bribes and bullying than conventional elected representatives, especially if directed at their families rather than at them directly.
A more fundamental problem: legislatures depend on professional staff; a super-jury chosen by lot would go directly from ordinary life to running a parliament or council. Agenda control by that staff would be overwhelming.
Randomly chosen citizen assemblies have been used successfully for single issues in influential nations. For example, a 99-member assembly in Ireland, chosen by lot, recommended repealing the constitutional article that prohibited abortion. This repeal eventually passed by referendum in Ireland. Note though, that the assembly spent five weekends on this issue. A full-time legislature with reasonable time off could spend comparable effort deliberating on 24 bills annually, compared to hundreds or thousands that legislatures typically consider. That might be worthwhile as a secondary chamber, an occasional intervener that could initiate a plebiscite for any of its proposals the main legislature turned down. (Though, this better occur infrequently. Constant plebiscites tend to lead to low voter attention.)
Conclusion to Part II
For government scale decision making, participatory democracy neither results in majority participation, nor proves particularly democratic in practice. The sheer amount of information governments need to deal with overwhelm such attempts, especially when they depend upon extreme indirection. This suggests that for all its flaws, representative democracy remains the best method of self-government for nations provided it is made truly representative and truly accountable. Part III, [“The Returnable Vote”] will discuss a parliamentary system that could accomplish this.
What about…?
Are low participation rates really a valid argument against nested councils? If people don’t attend, they choose the rest of us as representatives.
Apparently, radical democracy is compatible with minority rule, so long as it is the right minority – those comfortable in long political meetings.
Isn’t there a long history of past successful participatory democracies?
They don’t seem promising. Many indigenous peoples the world over used popular assemblies of various types; but these were tiny nations by contemporary standards, nations where overwhelmingly most decisions were local, and governance above the local level, when it existed, was extremely limited. I will add that many traditional councils (not all, but many) were limited to male heads of households, as in Chiapas or in Afghanistan’s traditional Loya Jirgas. (This is no longer the case for either.)
What about the assembly of ancient Athens? Its core premise: work was for slaves, women and foreigners; the business of (male) citizens was government and war.
What about New England town meetings? As noted, turnout today is pitiful. But in the 17th and 18th centuries they began as all male meetings of owners of minimum property or income; they soon allowed most free puritan white males to vote. (Indians, Quakers, Catholics, Scots and free people of color were excluded from even living in the towns.) Further, they were run by consensus, and fiercely rejected majority rule. Because New England law enforcement ran on the English constable system, but with so few constables as to be practically powerless, they depended upon public opinion to ensure compliance. Sounds extraordinarily proto-democratic, a cross-class consensus-run assembly with non-violent enforcement.
But as Michael Zuckerman notes in his marvelous essay “Mirage of Democracy, The Town Meeting in America” the intent behind the meetings was far from democratic. Lack of enforcement capability was why meetings let poorer men in – to hammer out the minimum concessions required to keep less prosperous colonists compliant with laws passed. Elites used town meetings to obtain agreement from the lower orders, as a colonial manufacturing of consent. Also note: anyone vulnerable enough to economic coercion was excluded from meetings – tenants, servants, women, and even sons of property owners who reached voting age but lived in their fathers’ homes.
Historical roots are not destiny; but historical awareness may avert over-idealization of Indigenous assemblies, Athenian democracy, New England town meetings, or other past political forms as precedents for governance by participatory democracy.
Weren’t the Spanish Anarchists, during the Spanish Civil War, a successful participatory democracy?
Violence and betrayal prevented them from vesting power in assemblies for any length of time, or in many cases at all. Even in the earliest days, exigencies of the war resulted in the establishment of many committees without any right of recall by popular assemblies. Within three months of taking power, they had to make major concessions by allowing unelected representatives from non-anarchist factions to sit on key committees. The Spanish Anarchists accomplished amazing things under harsh conditions, improving life for the majority in the middle of a fight against a brutal fascist enemy and treachery by Communist and Republican allies. They are no example of either success or failure of a participatory democracy they never had a chance to establish.
Wouldn’t adding strict consensus solve any flaws with nested councils, by protecting the rights of even the tiniest of minorities?
A strict consensus system requires unanimous consent; if even one person opposes something passionately enough, they can block consensus – an ability to veto, whether or not it is called that. There is a voluntary norm for very small minorities to “step aside,” rather than blocking, but either the right to block exists, or it is not strict consensus. No system of decision making can survive on a large scale that depends on nobody, out of millions, being an asshole. For this reason, most modern consensus-based groups allow majority or supermajority decision making if no consensus is reached. Strict consensus has its place, for example within affinity groups engaging in direct action, but not for primary governmental decision-making bodies
Couldn’t we network councils, instead of nesting them?
Under networking, local groups negotiate cooperation on a case-by-case basis. This requires consensus between groups, with all the problems consensus brings. Alternatively, negotiation leads to majority rule, which converts the network into nested councils. Note that networking multiple groups works well for coalition building among organizations, and is often the only possible basis for it. But there is no reason to believe it would scale to governmental levels of complexity.
Wouldn’t modern devices let us bypass assemblies, and legislate via up or down majority votes of the entire citizenry?
Plebiscitary democracy would constitute information overload, and agenda setting by a minority on a grand scale, with little place for deliberation.
Couldn’t you combine proxies with plebiscitary democracy, so that those with time and energy could participate full time in plebiscites and the rest delegate proxies to any of hundreds of thousands or millions taking part?
This process, known as “Liquid Democracy” was proposed as a form of permanent electronic plebiscite back in 2000. The problem: it is still a plebiscite. There are still hundreds of thousands or millions of ‘legislators.’ That leaves no real room for deliberation; proposals are voted up or down. Far more will be proposed than even full-time “voters” can consider. Without a formal legislative process, some informal means will decide which proposal even come up for a vote, and of those which voters pay enough attention to consider. Under these circumstances, the agenda will be set by a tiny minority, almost certainly consisting of media stars, influencers and celebrities.
Portions of this article were previously published by the author in New Politics, and are reused with permission.
| ReceiptsNote: Journal or publisher name are links. Generally non-paywalled URLs are prioritized. Paywalled DOIs are provided, when available, as additional links |
| “Too many committees” as last words of Buenaventura DurrutiEnzensberger, Hans Magnus. 2018 (1972). “His Death” in Anarchy’s Brief Summer: The Life and Death of Buenaventura Durruti. Translated by Mitchell, Mike. pp. 265–284. . |
| Porto Alegre’s participatory budget process greatly reduced poverty and corruption.Yves Sintomer. 2012-Dec-30). “Transnational Models of Citizen Participation: The Case of Participatory Budgeting.” Journal of Public Deliberation (8:2:article 9). |
| New England AbolitionismJonathan B. Baird.2021-Sep-06. “Examining the New England abolitionist tradition.” Concord Monitor. |
| New England as secondary center of Women’s Suffrage movementHeather Monroe Prescott. 2020. “Woman Suffrage in New England.” National Parks Service. Original url is: https://www.nps.gov/articles/woman-suffrage-in-new-england.htm |
| New England votes in slightly less insane way than US as a wholeRobert Crohan, Feb-12. “Analyzing the 2024 Election Results in New England.” Elections Daily. |
| Zaptistas greatly reduced tuberculosis and maternal mortality.Laura Castellanos. 2014-Jan-04. “El suicidio ronda en San Andrés,” El Universal. |
| Port Alegre 8% participation in budgetingSwarnim Wagle & Parmesh Shah. Mar-2003. “Note No. 71 Case Study 2 – Porto Alegre, Brazil: Participatory Approaches in Budgeting and Public Expenditure Management.” Social Development Notes: Environmentally Sustainable Social Development Network(2742,p2). World Bank |
| 2% of voters participate in New England town meetings. (Implicit in 1.2% being 60% of total vote.)opinion Lyndsey Rolheiser and Albert Saiz. 2020. “Is Participatory Democracy Representative? A Survey of Engaged Town Meeting Voters.” New England Journal of Political Science ( 12:1: p32) |
| 20% participation in New England Town meetingsRobert Preer, 1986-Jul-13. “Town Meetings Don’t Work.” The Washington Post. Note this source is 34 year earlier than the 2% figure. |
| 36% participation in Venezuela communal councils under Chavez.Kirk A. Hawkins. 2010. “Who Mobilizes? Participatory Democracy in Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution.” Latin American Politics and Society (52,3, p41 of pp 31-66) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/tsq.1207 |
| In Venezuela Councils and Committees would often fail to meet quorums of between 10% and 30%George Gabriel, Jenny Marl Torres & Yoari Garbrido. 2002-Mar-09. “Gender in Venezuela.” Venezuela Analysis. |
| Rojave 20% to 50% turnoutJoost Jongerden, and Michael Knapp. Oct-6-2016. “Communal Democracy: The Social Contract and Confederalism in Rojava. “Comparative Islamic Studies” (10:1: 2014: p99 of pp87-109). https://doi.org/10.1558/cis.29642 |
| Zapatista assemblies in fewer than half of neighborhoods under Zapatista controlCarlos Cortez. 2004. “Social Strategies and Public Policies in an Indigenous Zone in Chiapas, Mexico.” Institute of Development Studies Bulletin (35: 2 p79 of pp76-83). |
| Zapatista – pre 2023 system resulted in top-down controlSubcomandante Insurgente Moisés. Nov-15-2023. “The Captain: Tenth Part: Regarding pyramids and their uses and customary regimes.” Enlace Zapatista. |
| Communes in Rojava not the primary source of power Hammy Cihad, Miley Cihad and Jeffrey Thomas. Jan-09-2022. “Lessons From Rojava for the Paradigm of Social Ecology.” Frontiers in Political Science(3,2021).The above article is the secondary source for the following primary sources of quotations:“Illusion of consultation”Harriet Allsopp and Wladimir van Wilgenburg. 2019. The Kurds of Northern Syria. Governance, Diversity, and Conflicts. P147.Councils “dominated by supporters of the PYD and front organizations”Thomas Schmidinger. 2018. Rojava: Revolution, War, and the Future of Syria’s Kurds. P134.”…the leadership of the PKK in the Qandil mountains … are the ones who exercise real control”Michael Gunter. (2014). Out of Nowhere. The Kurds of Syria in Peace and War. Quoted in above. Cihad and Thomas, in addition to doing excellent research in existing literature also conducted interviews of their own:”…The decisions come from above and the commune just implements them.” Interview with Ibram Bozan November 2021.”…communes are limited to mere service functions with no real power…” Interview with citizen who asked not to be identified, November 2021. |
| Human rights violation RojaveUnited Nations Support Mission in Libya (2024-10-09). “Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic.” United Nations Human Rights Council: (57th Session, Agenda Item 4) 9-Sep-2024 – 9-Oct-2024. |
| Nested CouncilsStephen Shalom. 2021. “Decision-Making in a Good Society: The Case for Nested Councils.” The Center for Postcapitalist Civilization’s Working Papers. |
| Sameea Kamal. 2023-Feb-21. “In California Legislature, 500 Bills Beat the Deadline.” Cal Matters. (Feb. 21). |
| 2 to 3 million words of legislation per yearGovTrack. 2023. “Congress/Bills Statistics and Historical Comparisons.” |
| Irish Citizens Assembly (chosen by lot) spent five weekends on a single issueThe Involve Foundation. May-30-2018. “The Citizens’ Assembly Behind the Irish Abortion Referendum. |
| Greeks believed work for slavesAristotle. Politics. 350 BCE. Book 1. Chapters 3-7For women Chapters 5,12,13. |
| Greeks work for ForeignersAristotle. Politics. 350 BCE. Book 7. Chapter 9,10,14.Citizens should concentrate on government and warChapters 9, 15 Supporting arguments on need for citizens to have leisure so they can concentrate on government and warChapters 10,13 |
| Intent of New England town meetings undemocratic even after extension of franchiseMichael Zuckerman. 2019. “Mirage of Democracy: The Town Meeting in America.” Journal of Public Deliberation(15:2: article 3). |
| Committees with no right of recallGreg George. Feb-1982. “Social Alternatives and the State: Some Lessons of the Spanish Revolution.” Social Alternatives(2:3:pp 30-44) |
| Liquid Democracy/AKA Delegative DemocracyBryan Ford. 2002-May-15. Delegative Democracy . (Note: the first formal paper on this, but was discussed online and the term “Liquid Democracy” coined in 2000. |
| Gar Lipow. 2024-Winter. “Participatory Democracy Minus Endless Meetings.” New Politics ( XIX:4 whole number 76). |
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