Late last year I had a brief online exchange with
, author of a recent book The Problem of Democracy. Shadi is an academic and writer (you can find him on Twitter here), and our exchange focused on his interest in ‘democratic minimalism’ (he prefers not to call himself an “advocate” in order to leave space to change his mind, which I really like, and just one of the reasons I chose to follow him).There is more to it, but a simple take on Hamid’s contention is that for those of us that want to promote democracy around the world, we should not be pre-occupied with the outcome of a democratic process, only that the process itself is democratic.
His argument is compelling, particularly when you consider it in the contexts in which he is most interested: American foreign policy in the Middle East. He is very critical of the US tacit support of the coup against the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 2013, for example, which he sees as the US choosing ‘liberal values’ over ‘democratic values’ (Hamid himself is an American Muslim of Egyptian background, but personally opposed to much of what the Muslim Brotherhood stands for). He criticises the US for making convenient choices which he sees as promoting friendly dictatorships and withdrawing support from democracies which produce undesirable outcomes.
It is an argument he extends to the United States where he finds the at times existential fear of the other side winning unhelpful in a democratic environment. He is a Democrat, but has been a vocal critic of Democrats calling Trump (or more recently Ron DeSantis) “fascist”, for example.
There are echoes of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s identification of “mutual tolerance” (accepting the ‘other side’ as a legitimate alternative government) and “forbearance” (the intentional restraint of one's power) as the crucial norms of a democratic system (see their excellent 2018 book How Democracies Die).
However, I think there is a central (and probably circular) unresolved problem here. That is, how do we decide if the process of democracy is in fact democratic? And are some processes ‘more democratic’ than others?
I put a version of this question to Hamid, who (true to his democratic minimalism argument) commented that “as long as the mechanism itself is a product of a democratic process, that's fine with me”.
And further, “the fact that ranked-choice voting might produce a different result than first-past-the-post doesn't, for me, have any bearing on the legitimacy or democratic nature of the mechanism”.
There’s a reasonable point here. Afterall, we still call places that have FPTP voting “democratic”. However, I started this occasional newsletter because I was interested in understanding how democracy is working around the world, and importantly, how it can be better.
To define better, we have to have something to measure it against. So this question feels pretty existential (to this newsletter anyway). If we can’t define ‘better’, then what is all this about?
In my exchange with Hamid I commented that different mechanisms express the collective will differently (being accountable to a collective will is as close as have gotten so far in defining “democracy”). Indeed, individuals will often reach different conclusions on the same topic if they are placed in a different decision-making environment (take for example, the way a person might react to a headline on social media, versus that same person reading and understanding the essence of the problem that headline captures through investigation, dialogue and discussion).
So what is the ‘democratic process’ that the (presumably electoral) mechanism is decided by? I think how that is chosen, and yes what outcome it produces, matters.
For example, a democracy could choose to change the mechanism by which a government is formed and policy enacted. Let’s say it develops a number of models and puts these to a ‘vote’. That vote could happen in a number of different ways. One option is to put the models to a vote in which every person with red hair has 10 votes, and every other person 1. I think we would all agree this is ‘undemocratic’. A second option would be to put all models up and have the highest voted outcome chosen. A third option would be to put all models up and allow a single transferable vote, which may produce a different preferred model to the second. Or finally, the models might be directed to a deliberative process and the outcomes of this deliberative process shared with the wider population before they vote. Which could also produce a different result to the second and third.
If all of the last three meet a minimum threshold to be deemed “democratic”, then on what basis might we choose one over the others?
To me this is the problem with democratic minimalism. Not that we should pick and choose the mechanism that produces the outcome that we want. Rather, that a minimalist definition of what matters in democracy provides no direction for improvement.
Most democracies have sought to improve their democratic processes over time (albeit some more actively than others). The most obvious examples include extending the franchise beyond land owning men, but also reforms such as preferential or ‘ranked-choice’ voting (now essentially universal in Australia, from where I write), proportional representation, dedicated minority seats (see New Zealand Maori seats), and more recently, deliberative democracy.
Many of these advances seem self-evident now, but were active processes of improvement. Indeed some of what was considered ‘democratic’ in western states 150 years ago would be considered ‘undemocratic’ now. I wonder what absences from our democratic processes future generations will shake their collective heads at? And which are the elements that most need protecting?
It seems clear to me that a democratic system has to evolve to ensure it is still producing the best democratic outcome for its citizens. We are seeing right now the limitations now of democratic models designed for very different media and social environments.
But what should such improvement be measured against? What is democracy exactly?
Leave a comment. Or get in touch. I’d love to have this conversation.
PS: If you’re interested in going deeper, there is a fascinating series on the science of democracy by the European Consortium for Political Research. I love the discussion and deliberation in here, whilst I retain some reservations about some of its practical applications (and ability to talk to everyone who is the subject of democracy!).