Everything hangs on them but little changes. For weeks or months, elections dominate national life. Media reports and public conversations are monopolised by furious jostling and frantic speculation. All else – policymaking, problem-solving, reason itself – grinds to a halt. Unsurprisingly, when the frenzy is over, we discover we have solved almost none of our problems.
An election is a device for maximising conflict and minimising democracy. Parties gain ground by sowing division and anger, often around trivial issues that play to their advantage. At the same time, as the big players seek to appease commercial lobbies and the billionaire press, they converge disastrously on far more important issues, such as austerity, privatised public services, massive inequality of wealth and the unfolding genocide in Gaza. Many of those who seek election manipulate, distract and lie.
Communities are set against each other: see how the Tories appeal to their elderly base by treating young people as a problem to be solved, currently through national service. The parties reduce our complex choices to a brutal binary; sometimes, as in the 2019 election, to a three-word slogan (Get Brexit Done). Vast questions, such as the environmental crisis, the spiral of accumulation by the wealthy, the possibility of food system failure or the resurgent threat of nuclear war, remain unresolved and generally unmentioned. All that is left to us, except for a 10-second action every five years, is to sit and hope. We end up, in our supposedly representative system, with a highly unrepresentative parliament and a perennial sense of disappointment.
Just as capitalism is arguably the opposite of markets, general elections such as the one we now face could be seen as the opposite of democracy. But, as with so many aspects of public life, entirely different concepts have been hopelessly confused. Elections are not democracy and democracy is not elections.
Earlier societies recognised the distinction. Aristotle and Montesquieu observed that elections generated (respectively) “oligarchical” and “aristocratic” rule. After the American and French revolutions, the designers of the new political systems chose elections as a way of excluding the majority, whom they did not trust, from a meaningful involvement in power. Some of them, such as John Adams, James Madison, Antoine Barnave and Boissy D’Anglas, inveighed against the frightening concept of democracy, and insisted those elected should be a class apart, distinguished from the common people as a “natural aristocracy” of the wise, virtuous and competent. I think we can determine how well that worked out.
In the UK, our political model was settled in the 18th century, when democracy was a dirty word and parliament regarded the people with a mixture of contempt and fear. It survived the introduction of the universal franchise almost intact. Why does our system keep electing people whose incomes, assets, interests and psychology are hugely at variance with ours? Because that is what it is designed to do.
There are many alternatives, stifled not by infeasibility but by the determination of powerful people to retain control. In previous columns I’ve mentioned Murray Bookchin’s popular assembly model, implemented in Rojava in north-eastern Syria, in which decisions are handed up from local communities, rather than down from a distant centre; and the highly successful participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, which ensured that money went where it was needed most, rather than to favoured interests. But I don’t want to be prescriptive about the form that deliberative, participatory democracy should take. There are dozens of potential models.
In David Van Reybrouck’s excellent book Against Elections, he favours “sortition”: choosing members of political bodies by lottery. This is how much of political life was run in ancient Athens and in Venice, Florence and other European cities in the second millennium. Today, algorithms can be used to ensure the results of the lottery closely reflect the composition of society.
Hang on, you say. What if incompetent, corrupt, reckless, self-interested people, without expertise, were to find themselves in powerful roles? It’s likely, of course. But deliberative processes possess the extraordinary property of transforming their participants. This is why they work better in practice than in theory. Ordinary citizens tend quickly to take responsibility, to inform themselves, listen respectfully and seek to build consensus. Their decisions tend to be fairer, greener, bolder and more inclusive than those of elected chambers.
Every argument against participation can be returned with interest against elected representation. Incompetent, corrupt, reckless, self-interested? Don’t get me started. Those chosen by lot, whose selection cannot be influenced by money or lobbying, are likely to be more resistant to both. No expertise? Our representatives certainly possess expertise, but generally in self-promotion and electioneering. As we keep discovering, many, elbowing their way from one ministry to the next, are incapable of addressing our predicaments.
Much of the critique of participatory democracy is classist. The working classes cannot be trusted to think for themselves; they must be steered by enlightened guardians. This snobbery extends all the way from Edmund Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, to Karl Marx, in The Communist Manifesto.
We should not accept any change to our political system without evidence that it works. But plenty is accumulating, as citizens’ assemblies and constitutional conventions are used by governments to resolve issues that are too divisive, complex or long-term for the dominant system to handle. When they are well designed, they have proved highly effective at addressing issues that left elected representatives floundering. Ireland used citizens’ groups to help resolve its debates on equal marriage and abortion, overcoming apparently intractable divisions in a largely Catholic nation. France has used a citizens’ assembly to help find a way through the complex and politically hazardous issue of assisted dying.
Between 2021 and 2023, 160 new citizens’ assemblies were set up to resolve difficult problems. Forty of these bodies are now permanent. They help address, for example, homelessness in Paris, urban design in Lisbon and climate policy in Brussels. In the German-speaking part of Belgium, a citizens’ council forms the regional parliament’s second chamber.
A next step, as Van Reybrouck and others have suggested, could be to generalise this model, replacing one parliamentary chamber, such as the House of Lords or the US Senate, with a people’s assembly. This could evolve towards an entirely participatory system, largely based on sortition, in which everyone has an equal chance to make the decisions on which our lives depend. You care about democracy? Then you should hope to see an end to elections like this one.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
