On 10/4/2013 4:19 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
re: "... we shouldn't then be surprised that small scale
direct democracy has its dynamics too. And I can
definitely see situations where preexisting social
oppression can spread into the social domain in a
community where everybody knows everybody else.
"As I also said in another post, we've had quite some
history with that in the social realm in the small
towns here (in Norway). It could get quite ugly: stand
out from the crowd and you would find yourself shunned
and nasty gossip would start to spread about you.
Fortunately, this social conformity effect is no longer
as strong, among other reasons since the people who
live in such places can move more easily. (And as an
aside, many do. Not just because of the oppressive
small town effect, but because the jobs are to be found
in larger cities -- though I imagine Norway is doing
better than say, Sweden, in this respect: we have a
deliberate element of decentralization in our policies.)
The nature of partisanship is that we seek out and align ourselves with
others who share our views. The circumstances you describe show why, as
groups predisposed to a particular attitude coalesce into larger groups,
party systems aggregate 'preexisting social oppression'. That is why
political parties are the antithesis of public interest groups. They
deliberately shut out those outside their parochial view.
Have any of us not met someone shunned by our acquaintances, only to
find the person more sensible than we were led to expect? As our
understanding and appreciation of such individuals grows, our minds tend
to blur our antipathy. In time, our former opinion no longer clouds our
minds and we find we have grown.
We would be well advised to recall such instances because they will help
us grasp the wisdom of, and the need for, a political infrastructure
that arranges for those predisposed to a given attitude to be exposed
to, and interact with, non-partisans, a process that broadens the
horizons of the participants.
In other words, instead of letting socially oppressive groups coalesce
into solid blocks committed to confrontation, we must find a way to
encourage disparate groups to join in the pursuit of their common interest.
re: "There's an intuition that direct democracy is the
natural state, and that it is definitely better than
representative democracy, in particular where the
representative democracy does a bad job of actually
representing the people."
The intuition that direct democracy is the natural state would be
reasonable if we lived in a state of nature. We don't. We live in an
era dominated by mass communications and behavioral science, which
combine into powerful tools for mass manipulation. To imagine direct
democracy can exist under these circumstances is unwise.
Since modern representative democracies are party-based and "...
representative democracy does a bad job of actually representing the
people", ought we not consider the possibility that letting political
parties name the candidates for elective office is an unsound practice?
Constructive resolution of political issues requires, first of all,
lawmakers with the ability to recognize the value in various - sometimes
competing - points of view, from the people's perspective. That is
impossible for legislators elected to represent a partisan interest.
However intuitive direct democracy may seem, it can not work when the
means of exploiting public opinion are commonly used to gain political
advantage. The effect of such mass manipulation can only be minimized
by reason. If political power is to reside in the people, the political
infrastructure must give the people a way to reason their way through
the issues that concern them. Such deliberation has been shown,
repeatedly, to be most effective in small groups. There are countless
academic studies that show this point. Here are a few:
* Esterling, Fung and Lee show that deliberation in small groups raises
both the knowledge level of the participants and their satisfaction with
the results of their deliberations. See Esterling, Kevin M., Fung,
Archon and Lee, Taeku, Knowledge Inequality and Empowerment in Small
Deliberative Groups: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment at the Oboe
Townhalls (2011). APSA 2011 Annual Meeting Paper. Available at SSRN:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1902664
* Pogrebinschi found that "... policies for minority groups deliberated
in the national conferences tend to be crosscutting as to their content.
The policies tend to favor more than one group simultaneously ...".
See Pogrebinschi, Thamy, Participatory Democracy and the Representation
of Minority Groups in Brazil (2011). APSA 2011 Annual Meeting Paper.
Available at SSRN:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1901000
* A study by Patrick R. Laughlin, Erin C. Hatch, Jonathan S. Silver, and
Lee Boh of the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, published
in the APA Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, finds that
group problem solving is more effective than problem solving by even the
best individual expert. See
http://www.cooperationcommons.com/cooperationcommons/blog/samuelrose/163-study-groups-outperform-the-best-individuals-at-problem-solving
* 'Teaching problem solving through cooperative grouping. Part 2:
Designing problems and structuring groups' found that formal cooperative
groups need to stay together long enough to be successful. On the other
hand, they should be changed often enough so students realize they can
make any group successful -- that their success is not due to being in a
"magic" group. Reported in American Journal of Physics, 60: 637-644. See
http://groups.physics.umn.edu/physed/Research/CGPS/FAQcps.html
re: "Maybe it would be better to say that direct democracy,
while not perfect, is a good thing to try to emulate.
Then we can deal with the problems of direct democracy
when we get there - to the extent those dynamics also
show up in whatever we're using to emulate it."
The observation that "those dynamics [i.e., personal discomfort in
political meetings, pressure for social conformity, inter alia] also
show up in whatever we're using to emulate it" is a powerful insight.
The dynamics affecting people's lives are what guide their individual
decisions. Behavioral scientists use these dynamics to inspire
manipulated responses. Reformers seeking to improve democracy must go
in the other direction. They must provide an environment that
strengthens the people's capability for deliberation and individual
decision making. Attempts to change electoral methods, as in
Burlington, Vermont, fail because they ignore the dynamics of human
interaction. Democracy is about people and the dynamics that allow and
encourage people to reach rational decisions provide the spring from
which successful democratic reform will flow.
re: "From a control perspective, voting happens too
infrequently. It would be like trying to keep a
temperature by adjusting the power to the heater
once every four (or two) years."
By far, the best solution to this problem was outlined by Marcus Pivato
of the Department of Mathematics at Trent University in Ontario, Canada,
in his paper Pyramidal Democracy. His article describing the process is
published in the `Journal of Public Deliberation'.
Pivato moves beyond our common structures of political parties and
periodic elections and outlines a permanent institution where the people
can replace their representatives in the legislature 'on the fly', as
the needs of the nation change.
The power of the system is vested in small groups of motivated citizens
organized into a pyramidal hierarchy who participate in deliberative
policy formation. Each group elects a delegate, who expresses the
deliberative consensus of that group at the next tier of the pyramid.
The process is a powerful meritocratic device, which channels
legislative responsibility towards the most committed and competent
citizens. It makes dynamic, responsive and democratic government
possible. See
http://services.bepress.com/jpd/vol5/iss1/art8
Fred Gohlke
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