Participatory Democracy

Universal Participation in Public Service is the Chief Pillar of Democracy

By John Taylor; 2009 Aug 14, Kamal 14, 166 BE

Participatory Democracy


The ancient Athenians understood that the great virtue of democracy is universal participation by ordinary citizens in every phase of governance. They would have been shocked by the professionalism that dominates every aspect of our nominal democracies. For them, democracy was not just the right to participate in elections. It meant a system where each citizen actively served the public good by means of rotating public service. The question as to who served when was decided not by elections but randomly, by lot. When Aristotle briefly defined democracy in the Rhetoric he did not even mention the vote, he talked about drawing lots.

Our modern representative democracy is highly specialized and reductionist compared to the Athenian kind. Our right of franchise is a sort of "fire and forget" smart bomb where citizens vote and forget their duty until the next election. In the meantime they can only hope that the person they voted in will not forget them. This maximizes freedom for the individual, but it dulls the sense of having a stake in the public thing. At the same time, it also makes the system vulnerable to evils like bureaucracy, specialization, over-centralization, tyranny and corruption.

Universal public service was practicable in Athens of old, which was a relatively small city state whose voters were further narrowed down by excluding women, the poor, colonials, foreigners and slaves. Today's governments rule over millions rather than thousands, and almost every issue they deal with is more complex. On the other hand, we should expect that as information technology becomes more sophisticated, as, for example, robotic personal assistants become universal, it will soon be possible to simplify many presently intractable technical problems. This would allow us to re-introduce some of the better elements of older, purer democracies, including amateurism, universal participation and choice by lot.

Another advance, the UCS, or local government within a cosmopolis, that we have been discussing this summer, would take us much closer to the Athenian ideal without need for leaps forward in technological capability. In his 1670 masterwork, Panorthosia, John Amos Comenius predicted that the formation of a democratic world government will create a demand for two new levels of local governance, household and neighbourhood government.

Being close to daily life, these new levels of local government will take us closer to pure face-to-face democracy. Face-to-face democracy is a system where citizens serve together in many different capacities, long enough get to know one another in action, as it were, rather than just in social situations. This direct personal knowledge would make reduntant political campaigns, and especially the pre-selection of candidates by parties. Their common experience in cooperative labor and public service projects would attune local citizens to the moral demands of democratic values. Conscience would dictate that votes be based not on image, attraction or even common ideas, but solely upon ability to serve as witnessed by direct personal experience.

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