lots to heal
American democracy's poor health is structural, and so is the remedy.
Elections won’t get better, but democracy can.
At a time when Americans agree on little, we share a fear that our democracy is unwell. Some see a sickness born of stolen votes; others blame corrupt politicians, or gerrymandering, or the electoral college, or exorbitant campaign spending, or systemic voter disenfranchisement...
But perhaps the deepest problem for proponents of government of, by, and for the people is that the people no longer hold the people in high regard. We look at our compatriots and see dangerous fools. We see weak-minded others preyed upon by manipulative scoundrels. We fear a looming end to all that is good and true at their stupid hands.
As distrust grows ever deeper, discussion ever more shallow, elections ever more bitter, and solutions ever more scarce, can we really trust democracy? Can we trust these stupid people will make wise choices? Can we trust the leaders they choose? How can we trust a process that is succeeding at little beyond pissing everybody off? What good is rule by the people when the people are morons?
Indeed we can’t and shouldn’t trust the old process, but not because we’re a nation of villainous idiots. The problem is not the voters but voting itself. Elections will not evolve from a source of feckless discord into one of fruitful discourse. Re-glorifying voting won’t somehow usher in a new era of healthy deliberation. Elections will not bring us back together. Elections are not the antidote; they are the poison.
To be clear democracy is not the poison, elections are. Happily, not all democracy is electoral. In fact, the original demokratia in ancient Greece wasn't based on elections. The bulk of their government was not chosen by the people; it was composed of the people. For example, participation in the Athenian Boule, a governing council of over 500 citizens, was determined by lots.
Today, the ancient tradition of democracy by lots, or sortition, is undergoing a revival – and an upgrade from Athens’ flawed system. Process pioneers all over the world have been experimenting with mini-publics, panels of citizens chosen at random. The purposes of these mini-publics vary widely, as do their processes and their names (citizen assemblies, citizen juries, Bürgerrat, etc), but in all cases, participants gather for facilitated sessions of learning and deliberation.
In this context, it turns out that random citizens deliberate far better than elected ones. The citizens in mini-publics tend to grapple sincerely with others’ ideas; elected politicians tend to recite from a rehearsed partisan playbook. The citizens group and regroup fluidly; the politicians stick with their tribe. The citizens question experts and consider their responses; politicians treat experts as either angels or demons, depending upon how the expert’s recommendations align with their preferred policy.
In fact, mini-publics are often convened when matters get too controversial for politicians. Such a council was convened in France, for example, when the famous yellow vests protests broke out in protest of the government’s climate change policy. Mini-publics have been called upon to propose abortion policy in Ireland, COVID-19 recovery in Oregon, and even to draft a new constitution in Iceland.
The results have been striking. Not only do these sampled citizens come together around impressive in-depth proposals, but they emerge from the process with a deeper respect for each others’ perspectives. Even folks whose previous political engagement involved little beyond sharing pointed memes prove capable of thoughtful deliberation.
Because the concept seems so heretical, it bears repeating: discussing challenging political topics can actually connect people who disagree.
The apparent implausibility of this claim speaks volumes. There is perhaps no more devastating indictment of our politics than this: we increasingly believe that we – or at least the others – are incapable of even having a decent conversation.
But with the right framing, productive deliberation in diverse groups is not just possible but routine. Appropriate facilitation reliably makes participation in mini-publics a profoundly rewarding, even moving, experience. If random citizens can learn to understand each other, converge around solutions, and feel more fully human along the way, what is it that prevents our elected representatives, our chosen ones from doing it too? In a word: elections.
The problem with elections is not just that they fail to identify the best for the job, though wow do they fail. To get elected, one must cultivate relationships with party insiders and wealthy donors while appearing free of all such influences. One must pass litmus tests of party orthodoxy while presenting as an independent thinker. One must trumpet one’s virtues while maintaining that one’s campaign isn’t about oneself. In short, one must master many contradictory faces. Those who succeed are proven the best only at navigating this labyrinth of disingenuousness, not at anything that follows.
Nor do legislators' deliberations fail because elections are terrible at achieving balanced representation, though oh boy are they. Elections will always be biased towards the kinds of people who are good at getting elected, and that’s a decidedly nonrepresentative – and ultimately misrepresentative – group. The misrepresentation is worse than just unjust; it’s also unwise. Groups need diverse minds to make wise decisions.
Suppose you have a team of a hundred wealthy self-promoters. Who would you add to the team to help them make wiser choices? Perhaps some scholars? Some laborers? Some folks with street smarts? Some farmers, technologists, or artists? How else would you enrich the team with more perspective, more wisdom, more understanding to achieve a more representative whole? Now consider what electoral democracy gives us in this all-too-common scenario: a few hundred more wealthy self-promoters.
But poor representation doesn’t explain poor deliberation; if anything, deliberation should be easier among more homogenous groups. And, indeed, on the rare occasions when these same disproportionately rich, white, straight, tall, male, urban, educated, extroverted, silver-haired and silver-tongued types find themselves together in a room with the right incentives, they can typically work together just fine.
Sadly, when elections are involved, the incentives are almost always horribly wrong.
And that is the core reason why the elected deliberate so poorly: elections poison discourse. Elected officials have strong incentives to focus their attention on donors and lobbyists and branding and past and future soundbites and almost no incentive to listen to each other with humility. Elections make deliberation a quaint little sidebar to a grand aristocratic game. The game penalizes listening, connection, depth, personal growth, and complexity; and it rewards caricature, hyperbole, gotchas, zingers, wingers, and all flavors of cynicism.
To understand how electoral poison works, consider the one vestige of citizen deliberation baked into modern governance: the jury system. Jury selection has flaws, but selected jurors routinely report being impressed by the process, the other participants, their sincerity, and the quality of the discourse. In an era when Americans supposedly can’t agree on anything and when only the most contested cases go to court, some 92% of petit jury deliberations in US criminal cases end in unanimous verdicts on at least one count, despite the fact that only the most difficult cases ever reach a jury.
Now imagine that jurors were chosen by elections. Imagine juries were more like houses of Congress, with jurors serving multi-year terms, sitting for all kinds of trials rather than just one, and guaranteed lucrative private sector careers after service. Potential jurors would campaign for months ahead of time, declaring how they would vote in various situations and belittling other candidates with attack ads. They would strategize about how their votes might affect their reelection chances. They would, in short, become politicians.
Elections would quite obviously ruin the jury’s deliberations if not the entire judicial system. No matter what a juror learned in the course of a trial, she couldn’t modify her position without suffering embarrassment – and a potential electoral loss – from contradicting what she’d said beforehand. Rather than working to understand each other, the jurors would hunt for opportunities to undercut each other in future elections. Juries would be so frequently hung that requirements for unanimity would have to be dropped in favor of majority votes. Deliberations would become battles. They would become politicized – a term that has become shorthand for poisoned by elections.
Such is the state of our air-quoted “democracy”. Our “representatives” can “deliberate” only in the shallowest, most performative sense of the word, because they operate under the influence of electoral venom. And the venom spreads far beyond the fancy chambers, poisoning political discourse among citizens everywhere. Though we tend to see the bitterness of our politics as a consequence of a divided populace, it’s at least as much a cause.
Politicians have found that voter antipathy is highly useful; anger drives up turnout, and so does fear. A politician with enough constituents who are deeply angry and fearful of the others has his election in the bag. When you listen to dread-inducing music behind every doom-laden political ad, it becomes clear: the exorbitant spending on US elections, including almost 16 billion dollars in 2024, largely goes toward scaring us and pissing us off. Shocker: it’s working.
Longer and longer campaigns give more and more sophisticated political operatives ever bigger budgets to make us angrier at and more afraid of each other. The professionalization of electoral politics, the elongation of the electoral cycle, the astronomical fundraising, the media saturation... These facets of today’s American democracy have something very important in common: there is no good reason to believe any of them will naturally change direction.
If you’re hoping American elections will heal themselves, please stop. Hope won’t help here. The forces that have made electoral democracy poisonous are unidirectional, not cyclical, and they will not relent. The 24-hour-news cycle won’t revert to the daily paper. Campaigns won’t suddenly drop effective tactics due to negative societal side effects (or, if they do, they’ll lose to those who keep using them). Scorched-earth politics won’t roll back to the front-porch campaigns of yore.
To hope that time will naturally heal elections is to use hope as a painkiller, but we don’t need opiates; we need to counter the poison.
And here at last we get to some good news: we’re making progress on an antidote. There is no real hope that electoral democracy will heal itself, but there is hope that democracy will.
The best hope to cure elections’ poison is what Yale political scientist Hélène Landemore calls "open democracy". In her framing, the Athenians practiced Democracy 1.0, the American Revolution ushered in version 2.0, and we now can and should transition to open democracy, version 3.0. Some Democracy 3.0 features, like use of lots, harken back to Athens. Other features, like the heavy emphasis on participation rights, transparency, and healthy deliberation, constitute significant democratic advances over anything practiced by either the ancient Greeks or modern electoral democracies.
Open democracy is not mere academic speculation. In 2020, the OECD reported on a "deliberative wave" of mini-publics of all shapes and sizes. Participedia.net, a compendium of participatory democratic projects, contains over 500 international case studies involving deliberation by randomly selected citizens. Mini-publics are tackling budgets, city planning, climate change, gene technologies, cable cars, electoral reforms, and more.
As successful as these early applications have been, we'll need much more practice before we the people have enough experience with mini-publics to trust them as a fundamental engine of democracy. And more of these experiments must happen in the US, where democratic reform is so desperately needed.
The Lots to Gain newsletter will explore how we can and why we should advance mini-publics in America. It will advocate for moving swiftly to a new phase of richer and deeper adoption. It will frame democracy as a system design challenge and propose new wholes constructed of the parts, by the parts, and for the parts.
The potential upsides are immense. Better deliberated policy decisions would on their own justify reform, as would the squelching of many of elections' many vulnerabilities to corruption. But even more important is the possibility of the people realizing they actually like and respect the people. This is how we counter the poison. This is how we build a democracy we genuinely believe in. This is how we heal.