The Modern Rite of Voting: Paradoxes of Democracy & Participation

“Go to work, send your kids to school, follow fashion, act normal, walk on the pavement, watch t.v., save for your old age, obey the law, repeat after me: I am free.”?Unknown

Almost half of the world's population, around 4 billion people, will vote in more than 70 countries in 2024. A rite of modern societies, which some 150 years ago in a few nations was only performed by a few men. A time when women's suffrage was excluded. If we were to apply economic terms to politics, the fact that women could not vote in those years would be a failure of democracy.

In this article, I will analyse several paradoxical failures of democracy, similar to what in economics we call market failures (externalities, time-inconsistent preferences, information asymmetries, non-competitive markets, principal-agent problems...) and I will propose a framework to help us understand how to move towards remedying these failures.

The philosopher Wittgenstein said that ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language’. In this time and context, the use of the word democracy denotes the participation of people in the election of political representatives for an average of 4 years. Like a detective who wants to solve a mystery, I need to look into the past to find possible clues that have brought about this present. In this case, if we go to the etymology of the word ‘democracy’ we see that it comes from the Greek words ‘demos’, meaning people, and ‘Kratos’ meaning power; ‘power of the people’: a form of government that depends on the will of the people. In the 19th century, US President Abraham Lincoln said, “Democracy is a government of the people, by the people and for the people”. This is a definition that many of us today may have idealised as true democracy. The question I ask myself is, in 2024, are those three parts fulfilled or do we still think that democracy is only about participation? Let's look at each of the three cases.

1)??? Government of the People

Economic power rules over political power, sometimes through pressure from corporate lobbies and corruption. Other times it is done with a very blatant lack of ethics through revolving doors in both directions. Finally, as Naomi Klein pointed out in her book “No is Not Enough”, in the case of the USA and Trump, it was no longer necessary to hide with covers and intermediaries - it was Trump himself and most of his cabinet, who are millionaires and billionaires, who hold it. This also happened with millionaires in other countries like Fox did in Mexico, Pi?era in Chile, Macri in Argentina, Sunak in the UK, and the current cases of Putin (Russia) and Noboa (Ecuador).

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2)??? Government by the People

In economic activism, it is often said that our acts of buying are like votes. We are defining ourselves by buying, and each time we buy we cast a vote that sends a message about what we want or don't want. If we don't want something we boycott it by not buying it. However, the intricacies of the market and the systemic dynamics of inequality have bridged that activism. A large majority of supermarket products are already monopolised by a minority of companies and from a purchasing power and inflationary point of view a large majority of people are forced to choose the cheapest products so their economic vote choice is not fulfilled.

If we were to take for granted the economic vote that we make every day, which we could change according to the context, in politics there is only one vote and this usually lasts about four years. Those elected in these representative democracies start to displease us after a few months and we can no longer change our vote. Political programmes ‘sold’ before the elections are not fulfilled and these programmes are a set of proposals that one has to accept as a whole without being able to discard some that one does not like. It seems more like a participation in party sympathy than a participation in concrete ideas of a menu. Only Switzerland, through its numerous annual referendums, allows the people to participate in concrete ideas. It is probably this distrust, among other reasons, that has led to a decline in participation. The people do not feel represented. Finally a few months ago Trump in his election campaign with this message, "You won't have to vote any more" perhaps hinted that we should not waste so much time voting even once every four years.

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3)??? Government for the People

If in the previous paragraph, we find a trend towards abstention, we can also observe another current trend: inequality continues to increase every year. Paradoxically, if fewer and fewer people are becoming richer and more and more people are becoming poorer and poorer, it could be attributed to the fact that the policies of the different governments are not benefiting the majority of the people. The government is not for the people but for the few.

Faced with these democratic failures of representative democracy, I wonder what could be done. In the figure below, with a certain simplicity, I describe four types of governance along two axes: Democracy and Participation.

As an anthropologist I see two trends in the future of governance that leave us with an interesting paradox, in theory, we will see less participation:

• The first, ‘government by the few’ - those with more economic power, are less democratic and less participatory. It is a kind of regression to stages before representative democracy. Abstention and political apathy are the effects of this possible pseudo-democracy in representative democracies. This same trend can be reinforced by our destruction of the planet and its effects on resources which will have to be rationalised. An eco-fascism or a neo-feudalism as Varoufakis points out with the latter is a very real possibility.
• The second of these are citizens' assemblies which are a representative group of citizens who are selected at random from the population to learn about, deliberate upon, and make recommendations about one particular or several issues. At the moment, politicians in parliaments still have a veto over whether or not to follow these assembly's recommendations. However, a big step towards suspending that veto could paradoxically be more democratic in the sense of Lincoln's quote.

The fourth element of the framework is sociocracy. This could be defined as a mode of decision-making and governance that allows an organisation, whatever its size - from a family to a country or even a world parliament - to behave as a living organism, and to self-organise and self-correct.

Finally, and returning to the anonymous quote that headed this text, let us be free and obey the laws by giving our vote, or let us be free, let us change the form of governance and start down the path of citizens' assemblies to reach a truly participatory and democratic sociocracy.