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The Civil democracy book in overview (pt. 1)

Posted on July 20, 2023 - 5:46 am by

The book starts with an understanding of the way in which we got into the current problems. Having a problem is having something to do: so it is about the possibilities to shape the world and the decisions that are necessary for doing so. And it is about the „we“, hence the structure of human societies in relation to such decisions. Such decisions are never simply private, but they always influence other people. Thus it plays a role who has how much influence there, spoken in relation to the other: how much power. All big current problems of mankind have to do with power. Understanding how we got there hence needs a short history of power. It forms the first part of this book.

And this history of power presents itself in such a way that it is best told in four chapters that unfold in historical sequence. The „Beginnings of Power“ (chapter 3) lay down some foundations: man’s basic predisposition to freedom and responsibility, the technological distinction between concentrations and more equal distributions of power, the sources of power stemming from physical coercion, from scripture and from differentiation, and the „Axial age”  in which institutions were formed everywhere in the Old World to bring the sources of power from physical coercion and from scripture into different equilibria.

Chapter 4 takes a closer look at one of these equilibria, namely the specific form in which power became balanced in Europe. Europe became Europe by developing a very specific structure of society in the early Middle Ages. I call them „groups under roofs“: the structure that evolved in Europe divided people into groups and trained them to fit into these groups on the one hand and to accept higher institutions on the other. The innovation in the third century were the higher-level institutions, but what became specific about the European model in international comparison was that it retained groups in the denser and more densely populated continent that remained largely free of overlap. Mathematicians use the term partitioning here, and this aspect is so important in the current problems that I will continue to use this rather technical term in the following. For more than a thousand years, Christianity played a decisive role in partitioning „groups under roofs“. And by turning them into organisations and creating competition between them, this became a tremendously successful concept that co-founded Europe’s success.

In „The 20th century” (ch. 5) we see how the „groups under roofs” concept emancipated itself from Christianity and, in and after the great modernization crisis of 1914-1945, laid the foundation for the development of those institutions which quite successfully mastered the complexity of the emerging industrial societies. These institutions gave the blueprint for a Eurocentric understanding of modernization that spread sometimes for better, but often for worse, throughout the world. The year 1968 stands symbolically and practically for the fact that finally also in the West itself the society of groups and predetermined positions, with its necessary authoritarian aspects in daily life, was questioned. In between, a half century has passed in which the Western societies became structurally more individualistic, distancing themselves from the partitioning structure of the old Europe and, without noticing it, becoming similar to the rest of the world.

Political institutions, however, are still those that were designed for and fit the partitioning group structure of old Europe. We still vote in elections by assigning ourselves to one and only one partitioning group. And by running or not running for an election, and winning or not winning it, we partition ourselves into either participating or not participating in decision making – while group affiliations and desires to have a say in decisions, have become so diversely distributed for long. If, however, partitioning institutions meet a social structure that is not (or no longer) partitioning, but structurally individualistic, then various „Problems of partitioning representation” arise (ch. 6).  We will see how this combination automatically leads to ignorance of issues, to alienation between citizens and politicians, to unfulfilled expectations of representation, to the impression of a democratic deficit, and to polarization – completely independent of participants’ individual morale, simply because the institutions do not fit the structure of society.

For the second part of the book overview which discusses Civil democracy, its applicability, introductory requirements, and implementation strategy, see the next post.

To read more, buy the Civil democracy book (from which this excerpt was taken) or continue on this website.

What is Civil democracy?

Posted on July 20, 2023 - 5:45 am by

Civil democracy is an improved type of democracy that uses the technology of the 21st century to tackle the challenges of democracy in the 21st century. Its core is the flexible storage of trust that allows every political actor to take responsibility and every voter to decide for every decision whether to express their democratic responsibility in the choice of their representing political actors or in an own direct-democratic participation.

One may say that Civil democracy brings the ballot to the 21st century. The ballot was ingenious in overcoming the grassroots-overstretch problem and enabling large-scale democracy through storing trust. But digital technologies allow, and are necessary, to overcome the ballot’s two rigid boundaries, between politicians and voters, and between voters of different parties. Digitally, trust can be stored so that all political actors can contribute, including specialized civil society organisations, and voters can decide case-by-case to be represented or to participate. We call such a system a Civil democracy. It is the necessary answer to the problem that “we will not solve 21st century problems with 19th century institutions built on 15th century technology.” (Pia Mancini 2014)

The ingenious invention of the ballot enabled large scale democracy by overcoming what I call the “grassroots overstretch” problem: Democracy implies every citizen’s involvement in politics, but daily participation exceeds most peoples’ abilities. Since Plato’s famous prophecy on that subject, history has seen some attempts of democracies trying to involve everyone on everything that went wrong. In some cases, these attempts simply collapsed – a nice recent study shows how Italian socialist workers, who had gained some control over the enterprises they worked in in 1945, “were more concerned with day-to-day survival than with participation [or] self-management”. (Jan de Graaf 2014) In the worse case, they turned into some kind of tyranny because some political actors declared themselves to be representants of those remaining survival concerned and silent, in the absence of institutions that allowed to check and if necessary correct that representation.

The solution was trust turned into representation through storing trust relations in the ballot. A division of labor emerged between politicians and voters, in which politicians were able to concentrate on making political decisions and voters confined themselves to the decision whom of the actors in the first category they would trust most, giving them the permit to making decisions on their behalf.

But the paper ballot is rigid in two ways. The ballot erects rigid boundaries between politicians to make decisions and voters to be doomed to trust. And due to the fact that the number of actors one voter can support is severely limited, it erects rigid boundaries between the supporters of different trusted actors. The one mark on the ballot forces every political actor to have answers to all questions and every voter to take sides and choose one package. These two rigidities are not optimal, in case it is possible to overcome them.

Digital technologies can do better. They offer this option: It is possible to store trust in political actors in a way that is flexible with regards to both aspects named above. Digital technologies allow voters to express their trust in all political actors they deem trustworthy instead of forcing them to choose exactly one package. And digital technologies allow to store and retrieve this trust whenever necessary, enabling voters to decide on a case-by-case basis for which decisions they prefer to be represented and for which they want to participate.

The second aspect allows ordinary citizens to become as involved as they ever want, without losing the stability of representation. The first aspect allows political actors to take responsibility just in the area of their expertise, hence allowing the whole wealth of civil society actors who are very knowledgeable in the specific fields to enter political responsibility. For these two aspects, addressing individuals as cives, the Latin word for co-deciding and co-responsible citizens, and involving civil society organizations into formal responsibility, such a form of democracy is worthy to be called a Civil democracy.

These two rigidities were less of a problem in specific historical situations – that will be addressed in later posts. They are, however, a real problem right now. Many important problems, from the apparent inability to tackle climate change over the instability of many advanced democracies to the blocked perspective of societal modernization in many non-Western societies, rest on the rigidity of the ballot and other forms of what can be called “partitioning representation” because it is based on artificially dividing individuals into non-overlapping groups.

Civil democracy is hence a very powerful concept. It makes hopes come true that have been formulated again and again over the last two and more centuries, and frustrated almost as often. It is demanding, challenging individuals, organisations and societies around the world to change their culture. But it is worth the price, and necessary for our common survival.

To recapitulate:

The ballot’s ingenious invention enabled large scale democracy by overcoming the grassroots-overstretch problem:

  • Democracy implies everyone’s involvement in politics, but daily participation exceeds most peoples’ abilities.
  • The solution is trust turned into represen­ta­tion through storing trust relations.

But the ballot is rigid.

  • The paper ballot erects rigid boundaries between those to make decisions and those to be doomed to trust.
  • It erects rigid boundaries between the supporters of different trusted actors. The one mark on the ballot forces every political actor to have answers to all questions and every voter to take sides and choose one package. .

Digital technologies can do better. They allow to store trust in political actors in a flexible way:

  • Allowing voters to express their trust in all political actors they deem trustworthy,
  • thereby allowing political actors to take responsibility just in the area of their expertise,
  • and allowing voters to decide on a case-by-case basis for which decisions they prefer to be represented and for which they want to participate.

For addressing individuals as co-deciding and co-responsible citizens and involving civil society into formal responsibility, such a form of democracy is worthy to be called a Civil democracy.

Where Civil democracy starts

Posted on July 20, 2023 - 5:44 am by

Civil democracy is powerful, it is a solution which brings problems into a solution-oriented setting involving as many individuals as possible, and its complexities can be handled.

Civil democracy is however a systemic solution that demands a large number of different actors to align to a new concept of interaction. No actor alone can start it.

With this feature, Civil democracy shares the challenge of every social change, albeit on a level that is a bit higher than in other cases: Social change always includes challenging conventions in which actors are, in a way, mutually trapped. Conventions always entail coordination gains, and any actor willing to endorse social change as to let go these coordination gains for some time.

As all social changes, it hence requires a social movement. This term describes the process in which individuals who share a common view on a social problem unite and find internal institutions that allow them to implement new social facts that always have a conventional aspect. At the same time, the term social movement is used to describe the collective of these individuals.

Starting a social movement is never trivial. Doctors and even government agencies concerned with the social cost of smoking pressed for almost 50 years until the non-smoking movement finally gained momentum to ban smoking from the public. And although loving a person of the same gender is a deeply personal decision that can be done without the consent of the very person one loves, same-sex activism went a long and painful way since its very beginnings in 1920s’ Berlin.

Starting a social movement, and making it successful, requires a clear view on the obstacles on the way and how they can be removed. The movement that managed to eliminate smoking from the public sphere was able to see as main obstacle the general perception to see smoking as a free choice of self damage. As much truth as this perspective contained, smoke at the same time harmed others, and not only the general public, but individual relatives and especially children. The movement that managed to very broadly free the right to possess weapons in the USA from its restrictions was able to see as a main obstacle the view on weapon-based violence. As much truth as this perspective contained, weapons at the same time are powerful means for people who feel threatened to re-gain a sense of control over their lives. And the movement that successfully managed to make same-sex relationships in most Western countries largely equal to heterosexual relationships in legal recognition was able to see as a main obstacle the heterosexual view of having their own concept questioned. This imaginary perspective could be countered with the perspective on same-sex relations as a form of personal responsibility to live ones’ lives as chosen.

For a Civil democracy movement, such a reframing is necessary as well: While the current perspective on digital participation is shaped through for-profit actors using data in intransparent ways, we need a focus on Civil democracy as a community-owned and community-steared enterprise that allows for efficient and quick and at the same time broadly-based participative collective decisions. While the current perspective on civil society organisations, as well as their self-perception, is shaped by just informing and at most protesting and proposing, we need a focus on their ability to support individuals in making well-informed political decisions. While the current perspective on global governance is shaped by UN conference with NGOs protesting at their doors, we need to see that individual citizens globally, with the help of their NGOs, need a voice and representation to negotiate with the representatives of national governments on eye level.

The interrelated main obstacles for Civil democracy however are different. The lack of imagination and experience, the systemic interrelation of necessary actors, and the confusing breadth of its applicability, occur as challenges even before framing questions become relevant.

The lack of imagination and experience is an obstacle that neither nonsmokers nor weapon activists faced, and even same-sex actvists only to a much smaller extent. Even in the smoky halls of the 1970s boheme, everyone knew how fresh air feeled. Even on peaceful Rhode Island where the relation between population to registered weapons is 1:226, Americans are generally able to imagine, and gun owners are willing to assert, the feeling of power a gun can give. And while it took some time (and in some societies it still takes some time) to replace false fantasies of same-sex relations with more realistic images that include as much responsibility as any other intimate relation, imagining same-sex partners interacting very close to how heterosexual partners do is not that complicated either, and experiences of such relations, despite of suppression, go back centuries.

On these two, imagination is just a matter of personal willingness and investment. One can describe the practice of Civil democracy, and if they use enough images and recurs to enough past experiences, any other can arrive at a likewise imagination.

Experience however needs to be created. At the time of writing, Civil democracy is only imagined, derived in its necessity and form from theoretical considerations, but noone has ever experienced its working, and the creation of this experience stands out. Such a creation needs the interaction of different actors, and this is the second challenge that is greater than the challenges the above-mentioned movements faced. Gun-owners and queers need only themselves, and the non-smoking movement that indeed needed to bring together researchers and parents was started by individuals who in most cases were both in person. A Civil democracy movement however needs actors in at least three categories to start: It needs individual voters, it needs political actors willing to serve as open actors (OAs), and it needs “makers” who offer the Civil democracy platform on which the two can match – not to speak of the different subcategories of the “maker” type which at least requires coders, designers, and initial funders.

The breadth of the applicability of Civil democracy is however a third challenge that has do be discussed before coming to this triangle of voters, political actors, and makers however. It is a concept and procedure that can be applied from small communities with 300 members up to the global level, with all kinds of membership-based organisations, local communities, state, nation-state, or supra-national levels in between. Where do we start here? Common-sense intuition says that one should start small – in small contexts, you can make experiences and correct them in other instances before going to the next context and possibly to a next and larger level.

Reality however defies this common-sense intuition. In 2017 to 2019, together with colleagues I have led a number of talks with representatives of small and not-so-small organisations about introducing Civil democracy within their organisation. All these talks followed about the same pattern: We described Civil democracy, and the representatives were interested, up to the point when they asked “And, where is your pilot study?” In every single case, we had to reply that their organisation would be the pilot study, and they all waved off – “Come back when you have a pilot study!” No wonder they did – as representatives of their organisations, they felt the responsibility for their organisations. And existing decision-making structures are at the very heart of an organisation – if organisation members become used to new decision-making structures and these structures turn out to be unsustainable, the organisation as a whole can break down in the worst case. Additionally, in most cases the individual fate of these representants hinges on the specific decision-making structures. Another argument is that pilot studies always provide information as a public good, bearing cost for which they are not directly compensated, and a third is that in today’s media society it is not easy to direct one’s members to concentrating their imagination to a new concept within one’s organisation.

These four arguments, however, already pave the way to an obvious alternative solution – but be prepared to take a deep breath when you read it. The awareness argument: Which is the application to which media societies and their civil society organisations are already directed? The argument of innovation as a public good: Which application can be mandated to provide the public good of developing a new concept? The argument of avoiding conflict: In which application are the individual fates of high representants relatively unimpressed when new structures emerge? The innovation acceptance argument: Where are current decision making structures already so much under discussion that even the very people that work in their core admit the need to have improvement?

The answer: It is the global level. Here, the four stated conditions are valid: Thousands of organisations already aim to influence global decisions, and media and the public are used to take global governance processes in view. The global level is the level on which noone can shy away from the provision of public goods. UN structures are so deeply interrelated with national governments that representants can see the development of new structures in a relaxed mood, and their own feeling for the suboptimality of their structures is so high that ideas for UN reform are abundant. This is why Civil democracy starts with a Global Sustainability Council (GSC) that serves as a concentrated voice of global civil society. The core of Civil democracy are decisions with meta-decision freedom, so the GSC’s role is more an adminstrative one to prepare decisions and to communicate and negotiate them vis-à-vis nation state based UN structures. Nevertheless, its symbolic power will be great, and the decisions preparing and accompanying its constitution will be the first Civil-democratic decisions to be made. With the existing UN institutions in place, the GSC allows to create the necessary experiences on how Civil democracy works and will attract participating voters and open actors worldwide who can, based on these experiences on the global level, start to consider the application of Civil democracy in their specific contexts.

Now we can come back to the triangle of voters, political actors addressing global issues, and makers: Where is the right point to start in this field? The necessary heuristic here is a closer look on the mutual dependencies between the three groups of actors: Does indeed every one of them need all both others? The first differentiation that can be applied here is the one between the makers on one and the other two on the other side. On both sides, the dependence is not complete. It will become much easier to convince programmers, designers and funders if they see how voters and OAs demand it, but it is possible that some foundation will develop the imagination necessary to become willing to support Civil democracy, and give the money needed to pay coders and designers for the first pilot study platform. But this depends on chance – all visible foundations have to define specific programes to prevent to be overburdened by applications, and these programs do seldom include global innovations. On the other side, however, the lack of imagination and experience is put into perspective by the sheer situational strain – the more individuals and organisations are affected by the global stagnancy in tackling climate change, the more they will be open to imagine new ways. Another and even more important argument for starting with the voter/OA side of the triangle is that on this side a movement building are possible: Actors who are not fully convinced but find Civil democracy a good idea can relate to others, ask for their impression, and positively influence each other.

On this voter/OA side, we indeed need both. Voters willing to use Civil democracy without civil society organisations serving as OAs are thrown back to grassroots decision making with all his problems, overstretch and instability. Civil society organisations ranking decision options without voters supporting them have no measure that allows for quantitative tieing and are thrown back to the current situation of NGO conferences with all their likeable inefficiency. Even with voters willing to use Civil democracy, their organisations need a jump start to overcome the fears of excessive demands and being too top-down. It is impossible to drop either of the sides to come to a unique starting point. It is however possible to unite them.

The good news is that organisations and voters have an intersection: the local suborganisations of larger, well-organised and visible civil society organisations. These suborganisations are mostly driven by local activists who are very still very close to a voters’ perspective. They accept ambiguity, they are oriented towards ends and not yet committed to specific means as developed in the organisations’ history, but they nevertheless are able to provide a profile in which other members and finally a reluctant organisation top can recognise themselves.

These local suborganisations can start by finding a overall organisation position by using Civil democracy. They can start ranking options and aiming for voter support, and the organisation’s preliminary option ranking will be calculated as average of their rankings weighted by the voter support they have gathered. As many organisations have in their statutes implicit weight calculations giving more relative weight to smaller suborganisations, such a correction mechanism has to be made possible for this process, as well – the effort to win an additional supporter is lower when you already have a lot of them.

One alteration has to be included: The normal Civil democracy procedure uses the assumption that open actors are able to rank all available alternatives. In such a distributed opinion formation over local suborganisations, it is necessary to allow for suborganisations limiting themselves in the assessment of decision options without wanting to disqualify all unconsidered options. Think of the very first decision coming up, about searching for possible GSC candidates to ask if they are willing to run. The field of global activists is huge (the list of persons labelled as activists in Wikipedia contains almost 1500 entries and is clearly incomplete), and single local suborganisations will be overwhelmed with this. Thirty or even fifteen suborganisations within an organisation can savely split the complete list into chunks that are manageable for any single suborganisation. The counting procedure used builds on the normal Civil democracy counting procedure, since in this case all suborgs trust each other and use the other’s evaluations as indirect evaluations of their own.

One last question remains.

Which the suborganisations of which organisations shall be addressed first? The aforementioned has narrowed the field to medium to large well-organised civil society organisations with global perspective. The willingness to embrace institutional innovation adds a certain degree of progressiveness, but we have to be cautious: Progressiveness with regards to being able to imagine new institutional settings is not necessarily the same as (although somehow correlated to) that on the left-right scale. And the breadth of perspective needs to be with regards to the perspective on change, as well: Organisations with a very narrow focus on environmental questions may lament climate destruction and nevertheless be too anxious to give an innovation as wide-ranging as Civil democracy a chance. On the other hand, we need organisations willing to accept modernity’s demands: Organisations that still dream of an eco dictatorship as the quicker way to save the world will still waste time with trying to find the powers to establish such a dictatorship instead of accepting that it is time to convince people worldwide of sustainable solutions. With these considerations, we have the complete description of where Civil democracy starts: At the local grassroots sub-organisations of well-organised progressive civil society organisations with a broad, global and democratic perspective. This definition does still include some variety of organisations, and we will dive more into this diversity in a later post. But a focus is set.

Scholtz-How-Civil-democracy-starts   Download

Civil society Q&A

Posted on July 20, 2023 - 5:40 am by

In discussing the concept of Civil democracywith civil society organisations,  number of frequently asked questions have come up.

1.            Question: Isn’t the dissatisfaction with politics an argument against Civil democracy?

Answer: The widespread dissatisfaction comes from the feeling of powerlessness, and this feeling not being able to change anything will change with Civil democracy.

2.            Question: Democracy even in it current form is much more than elections.

Answer: Yes, but only for active individuals. For the average citizen, low-threshold opportunities for real participation, as compared to just being consulted without being part of the decision-making process, are very limited.

3.            Question: What is the difference to liquid democracy, as used by the Pirate parties?

Answer: The principle is similar, but several important aspects as the involvement of civil society organisations, the ability to have more than one trusted actor, and the direct-democratic correction of proposals are not fully thought-out and implemented in LD. And if you start with one party instead of claiming to make decisions for society as a whole, you restrict the potential of the CD to a certain clientele.

4.            Question: Isn’t consensus finding central for democracy? And doesn’t consensus building require groups? Answer: Yes, absolutely correct. More precisely: It requires actors who are able to think up compromise solutions and the willingness to engage in compromise solutions. But “groups” in that regard are necessarily political actors, it is not necessary that their supporters do not have overlaps: Imagine a question in which environmental interests and labor interests clash. An environmentally interested union member could trust and support two groups who in this specific question have fundamentally different views and need to find a compromise that works for both of them.

5.            Question: The term “party democracy” is not used in active discourse.

Answer: It is not a new word, with 135’000 Google results and various encyclopedia entries, but yes, it is currently not much in use, its Google results equalling less than 1% of that for “liquid democracy”. It is used to make it clear that the present form of democracy is not the only conceivable one. The most specific term for the predominant form of institutions is “partitioning representation” as that also includes nation-state representation in supra-national institutions, but this is really a term newly coined in the Civil democracy discourse.

6.            Question: Division of labour is an important principle, so what is the problem with the division of labour between voters and politicians?

Answer: We completely agress with regards to the general importance of division of labor. Within this division of labor however, the politicians only act as agents on behalf of the citizens as their principals. (Dictatorships tend to justify themselves with this division of labour assuming themselves as the best-knowing agents of their citizens, buut we know better.) The communication between principals and agents however needs meta-decision freedom, and the agents within the division of labour are unfairly limited without actor openness. With regards to meta-decision freedom, the inadequacy of group-based institutions can be compared to a hearing barrier that precludes politicians as agents to hear exactly what the citizens as their principals want, and that precludes the citizens as principals to know themselves exactly what they wanted. In such cases, it can be better that citizens do the job of decision-making themselves, because the communication loss exceeds the efficiency gain. Actor openness simply allows that all possible agents contribute – we see that in terms of global discourse, global CSOs are better able to communicate .

7.            Question: Is direct democracy not simply a matter of practice and training?

Answer: It is, but not only. Diverging real interests will always lead to decisions that are so important for some people that they want to participate in direct democracy, and for others “medium unimportant”, i.e. so unimportant that they do not go to the polls, but not unimportant enough that a result unpleasant to them would not cause dissatisfaction with the system afterwards.

8.            Question: Is the possibility of co-decision making not again only used by certain interest groups and at certain educational levels?

Answer: Regarding interest groups: (a) I think it would be used by all interest groups in the medium term; (b) through the possibility of direct-democratic assumption of responsibility, even those interests for which there is no lobby have protection. Regarding educational levels: This will probably be the same as with all other forms of democracy. However, CD sets the incentive for groups to pay special attention to supporting people with less capital resources, because they are more likely to remain with the trust once it has been granted.

9.            Question: Who wants to have a say in everything anyway? Who has the time to delve that far into issues?

Answer: Nobody, that is exactly our argument! But there is a large area of middle interests, where one is overwhelmed with conventional methods, but would still be able to look through and confirm or, if necessary, change a proposal prepared by the groups of one’s own trust.

10.          Question: Why must civil society bear responsibility? Will individual organisations not again represent only particular interests?

Answer: Yes, it is their job to bring in their particular interests! They are required to take responsibility afterwards for the ranking they gave before the decision was made. If they have ignored acceptable compromise solutions a few times beforehand and thereby sabotage them, the anger of the audience will soon lead to a loss of their support as correction mechanism.

11.          Question: What happens when astroturfing (the attempt to fake grassroots campaigns) becomes stronger?

Answer: Not much, because it takes time, effort and trustworthyness to build trust. New movements attract some initial interest, but every person asked to spread the word is a potential tester who may research and check the trustworthyness of a movement. Under such a closer view, astroturf is quickly detected.

Special thanks to Fred Miehlert, board member of the Baden-Wuerttemberg branch of the CSO BUND. A list he prepared for the interview with Carolin Ziegler was the first and still remains the most important base for this Q&A list.

The power of Civil democracy

Posted on July 20, 2023 - 5:38 am by

Civil democracy is a very powerful concept. It will change every individual, many organisations, and the culture of every society in the world. Of course, not Civil democracy alone – it has to go along with a cultural change that is already on its way and will need to proceed. But it is a necessary means to bring the powerful dynamics of our human mastering of our own fates into a stable setting.

Why is Civil democracy such a powerful concept? For the same reason that made representative democracy such a powerful concept a century ago: Because it offers an institutional setting in which individuals can enter responsibility for the collective. And for the reason that it avoids the specific cultural traps that limited representative democracy’s success story seventy and sixty years ago.

As mankind, we are at the end of eight thousand years of forced domination. About eight thousand years ago, a first man used a bronze sword to force acceptance of others to his will, and a era began that was marked by the difference between dominators and dominated, between kings and subjects. Over millenia, this concept was injust and cruel on one hand, but stable and productive on the other. Population density, division of labor, and interlinkage through exchange and externalities have however brought both this stability and this productivity to an end.

This general insight has been made already in the American and French revolutions almost a quarter of a millenium ago, and it led to the impressive success story of democracy between 1789 and 1989. In its specific form, it was however bound to a specific European culture of group affiliation. Consequently, it was much less successful outside of the realm of European culture, and it is not able to solve the environmental challenges we currently face – and finally, individualisation has changed even Western societies in a way that it does not longer work as it did.

Civil democracy annuls this restriction. It extends both the democratic promise and the democratic responsibility to the whole mankind, irrespective of their cultural background. Every individual that is willing to enter the common culture of collective responsibility is invited to participate.

This promise entails large demands. In binding us all into a common culture, we all have to bid farewell to some of our cultural exceptionalisms. People with Western cultural heritage have to finally accept that they do not longer reign the world. People with non-Western cultural heritage have to finally accept that many concepts do and will continue for the better to reign the world that have first developed in the West. On both sides, we are already acknowledged to these painful truths. But time and again, we are reluctant to let go our old images when it comes to specific realisations. Individual rights and responsibilities are valid for a number of non-Western peasant workers that exceeds the Western population. But these rights and responsibilities bear historical experiences that have been made in Western history but are applicable to mankind in general despite of cultural differences.

Civil democracy will change all our lives. It will make us more conscious for what we do, both as individuals and in our relations with others. It will do so by constantly reminding us of the constant responsibility we have for being able to hand over the world to our grandchildren. It constantly reminds us that there are collective decisions to be made, that these collective decisions rest on the individual decisions we make, and that we can influence them, even beyond our individual contribution to decision-making, by influencing others, together with others. We can join civil society organisations and serve as helpers to our fellow world citizens by providing them arguments, and as world citizens we can hear and weight and judge these arguments to come to our own conclusions and provide these conclusions. It will hence draw us out of fatalism. We can make a difference, and we need to make a difference.

Two Steps to Modernity: What Crises, Terror, and Other Parallels Tell for Understanding the 20th and Shaping the 21st Century

Posted on July 20, 2023 - 5:35 am by

In the 2020s and the 1940s, two global crises see their climax and solution. This conclusion results from analysing a current dejàvu: Terror started a war in 2001 as it did in 1914. Likewise are economic crises, globalizations and democratizations, increasing inequalities and shifts in the global resource distribution recent phenomena with parallels a century ago. This book shows: this is no coincidence. It is a key for understanding world history from the 19th to the 21st century, and shaping it to the better.

Between 2025 and 2035, institutional innovations bring a climax of crises as long as innovations in organizations are not yet matched on the macro level, and their solution when they finally do. In the current second transition of modernity, modern interaction principles have been introduced within organizations since 1968, but the general acceptance of individualized responsible linkages in democracy and career development as base for regained stability and prosperity still stands out.

This book presents the analytical base of why Civil democracy is needed, in a broader picture that gives overviews over important strands of sociology unified in one single argument.

Two Steps to Modernity: What Crises, Terror, and Other Parallels Tell for Understanding the 20th and Shaping the 21st Century

Why sortition is not the solution

Posted on July 20, 2023 - 5:34 am by

In recent debate, some discussants have turned to the idea of lot-based representation drawn from the whole population, described with the term “sortition”. Sortition has been used to determine public officials in the antique Athenian democracy and is used for citizen-based juridical juries in many democracies, and since the pioneering works of Peter Dienel in the 1970s and 1980s[1], it has been discussed as a solution to the shortcomings of representative democracy, increasing under the new term “deliberative mini-publics” in the deliberation discussion since the 1990s, and very prominently in a recent turn of the advocacy group Extinction Rebellion.

Although sortition’s long tradition is a good thing, it may already evoke the question why something that has been discussed and even used so long may out of a sudden turn into being a broadly helpful solution to current problems. The longstanding usage in determining public officials means that many individuals concerned with the quality of the political process have already come into contact with it, so if it would provide an outstanding new quality, we could expect that it might already have been tried and shown.

These decades have indeed produced a body of evidence, but unfortunately one that has not supported all hopes. Especially in United Kingdom and the Unites States, since the 1980s a large number of iniatives have been created which have done few to alleviate or reverse the deteriorating trend in the satisfaction with British and especially American democracy. Those who participate are generally satisfied[2], but given that these participary bodies are generally assigned an advising role without factual decision-making, they, in the words of one recent study, “fit a description of (mere) citizen activation – an elite-led engineering of citizen engagement that, beyond the control of citizens themselves, not only fails to lead to empowerment, but can even work to perpetuate existing structures.”[3]

There is, however, one systematic place where a deliberative minipublic can make a difference. In a system with established direct democracy under the condition of threat through a polarised public sphere, a sortition-based deliberate mini-public can play the role to cool down heated public debate and provide help for advice-searching citizens. This has been true for the successful example in Oregon.[4] But this is another case where sortition-based deliberative mini-publics do not make the final decision.

But why is it that sortition has not been a more productive solution? What the mechanisms behind this lack of power?

I see two of them.

First, let us imagine for a moment that a magic insight would have placed sortition-based deliberative mini-publics into a position or real power, say, as a global assembly to decide about policies to save the climate. Would it be powerful? I fear it would not. In the world of representative democracy, parliaments are not isolated bodies. They are embedded in a huge network that processes information necessary to solving problems – knowing about details of policy processes, developing an intuition for consequences of political action, having relations built on mutual commitment with executives that will later be responsible for putting decisions made into reality. All this lacks for sortition-based assemblies. Designs of these assemblies try to overcome the first of these problems by going to lengths in providing impartial assistance, and they may be partial successful with that. They cannot, however, solve the other two problems because in order to achieve unbiasedness, sortition deliberately cuts developing political careers and networks. In terms of an important political science distinction developed by Fritz W. Scharpf[5], I hence expect sortition-based assemblies to lack external legitimacy – they will simply not as good as either representative bodies or as direct democracy.

Second, let us do away with the thought experiment of a magic insights setting sortition-based assemblies into power. In the real world, no social change takes place without a social movement, be it invisible and only described by later research or, as today in the majority of cases, a struggle visible and consciously been followed by any interested observer. Can we imagine a social movement to installing sortition-based assemblies to replace existing institutions? Well, in fact such a movement does already exist. There is a group of political philosophers and political scientists that argue for sortition-based assemblies already for over two decades. Outside of academia, however, this movement has largely failed to get traction. And this is not only due to the absence of already existing powerful cases of sortition-based assemblies already solving real-world problems. To gain traction, such a movement would have to provide a perspective for individuals and groups to connect their own life stories with this idea. Only such a perspective would make it worthwhile for people who are not motivated by academic career goals to invest their resources into such a movement. Even given the deterioration of Western democracies and the inexistence of any other meaningful alternative (aside of the non-meaningful alternative of falling back into authoritarianism) we have seen in the late 2010s, this did not take place. And based on the insights into human motivation developed in psychology and sketched in the first chapter of this book, we understand why.

After all, can you imagine investing a lot of your personal time and energy and other resources for something of which you know that in the case of success it will make you not more powerful but less? Because this is what sortition-based assemblies would do. Based on a deep mistrust into the dynamics of political competition, in my view a mistrust based on a misunderstanding, sortition-based execution of real power does away with democracy in exchange for a new hope set into enlightened rule, just this time created by statistical representation and short-time terms. In Scharpf’s words, sortition lacks internal legitimacy, as well. If in any country, not to speak of the world as a whole, power would be exerted by sortition-based assemblies, the misfit between the mass of information received and the inability to base meaningful action on it that is behind all the agitation and the trolls and the hate outside would only be further increased.

Civil democracy avoids these two problems. Based on a deep analysis of social relations in principle and their historical realizations, it knows why we could trust the dynamics of political competition. Through allowing open actors to hand on trust placed in them to other political actors, it creates a dense network that processes much more information compared to today’s representative democracies, instead of less. And through giving individuals and organizations a perspective of being and staying empowered in taking responsibilty in the long run, it has the ability to start the social movement with the speed we need to prevent our environment to crash.

1.             Dienel, P.C., Die Planungszelle : der Bürger plant seine Umwelt : eine Alternative zur Establishment-Demokratie. 1978, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.

2.             Johnson, C., Local Civic Participation and Democratic Legitimacy: Evidence from England and Wales. Political Studies, 2015. 63(4): p. 765-792.

3.             Hammond, M., Democratic innovations after the post-democratic turn: between activation and empowerment. Critical Policy Studies, 2021. 15(2): p. 174-191.

4.             Felicetti, A. and D. della Porta, Joining Forces: The Sortition Chamber from a Social-Movement Perspective, in Legislature by lot : transformative designs for deliberative governance, J. Gastil and E.O. Wright, Editors. 2019, Verso: London ; New York.

5.             Scharpf, F.W., Regieren in Europa: Effektiv und demokratisch? 1999, Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus.

Civil democracy starts with you

Posted on July 20, 2023 - 5:31 am by

Implementing Civil democracy begins with local sub-groups of civil society organisations (CSOs) and their supporters helping in the search for candidates for a Global Sustainabilty Council (GSC). (See here why.)

  • These local CSO sub-groups will start to convince their organisations to serve as open actors.
  • They will start doing the work of preparing a position of their organisation as a whole in the Civil democratic process. Ranking options for a GSC will not be something that a national party organisation or an international CSO headquarter will see as a top priority from the beginning of the process. But one or four or twenty local sub-organisations can apply Civil democracy to assemble a decision ranking.
  • They will gain voter support in their environment. This support will count both for them as local sub-group as an open actor in making a proposal for the whole organisation’s position, and for the whole organisation.

Together, we win GSC candidates

The first decision to be made will relate to the first composition of the GSC. Whom do we ask first? To run for such a position is a decision that prospective candidates will have to decide for themselves, but we can freely discuss whom we might want to ask. And being asked by a first hundreds of engaged world citizens to run for such an innovative position may play a role in being willing to serve as a candidate. GSC candidates and GSC members will be in close contact and exchange with CSOs and other open actors about what decisions are pending and what options already exist, and they will receive new proposals for decisions and options for decisions from the Open Actors.

  • A search for candidates may start asking some of the meteorology professors who first brought climate change into public discourse. We approach them being aware that their role will partly be one of transition: Academics argue on the basis of their special knowledge. They are used to making their expertise understandable to others, but they rarely see themselves as group representatives. At the same time, they have by far the longest lead in pointing out issues of global sustainability, and some of them have already gained some experience in the political process.
  • Alongside with these professors, we will turn to activists and publicists working on global sustainability issues, combining expertise and networking with a variety of stakeholders. The aim is to get a list of people here who are ready to really run for office – that is, to undergo a competitive selection process in which others may end up being chosen and not them. Contributing to making the world a better place should be worth to accept such a challenge.

You can look at the candidates yourself and consider which of them you would like to support, and to what extent, in order to be an open actor yourself by revealing these assessments. Maybe you will join forces with others to form a new open actor. It is certainly helpful if you give yourself a distinguishable profile that will enable you to evaluate options for upcoming decisions in the future and thus participate in them.

As long as we do not have the means to set up a Civil democracy platform, we will start making the necessary calculations manually – as a local CSO sub-group, fill out our CSO form and ask your supporters to fill out the Civil democracy support form. We will calculate the results.

Together, we win CSOs

Together, we will convince your central organisations to serve officially as open actors for the GSC. Those political actors who have the knowledge, reputation and public trust to choose between them as options are the actors of global civil society, CSOs like Greenpeace, the WWF, Friends of the Earth. A profile that combines knowledge, awareness and trust must be built with energy over time, and individuals always have limited resources available, while organisations can bundle the energy of many people over a long period of time and bring them together in an internal tradition. National party organisations, despite of their embeddedness in the traditional rigid system of partitioning representation, are still to be acknowledged as important places of expertise in decision making and communication.

Yet it is innovating to address them: CSOs, despite some experience of participating in political decisions, are not used to stand for this in a transparent electoral process. Their organizations will have to change internally if they are to compete not only for resources of active and financial support, but also for the support of voters, and if at least this support from voters (and in the long run probably also the financial support) is transparent to the outside world. For many of them, it is not too much of a change, but it is definitely a change for them. But as long as large civil society organizations are adamant about assuming this responsibility, the splintering of civil society will continue.

Some civil society actor will find it exciting to be the first to support certain candidates and later certain decisions as the mouthpiece of a global electorate. And when the first NGOs get involved, others will follow suit.

Together, we fund the platform

With some initial support from local CSOs, central CSOs, and some initial candidates, we will be able to fund coding  the first Civil democracy platform. In order to make sure that when counting the votes no one writes some code snippet that unfairly favors certain options, the entire civil democratic process will have to be pursued as an open source project. Other programmers can hence join. Open source projects have their own dynamics, which I’m almost completely unfamiliar with now that I’m writing this. But maybe you are? In this area, support would be very helpful.

So far, Civil democracy as a decision making model only exists as an idea. It is hence a real challenge for your imagination. How exactly is it possible for voters to give their support to Open Actors? And how can these evaluate options and let voters understand what has been done with their support? The available texts I have answered these and other questions in the fifth chapter of this book, up to pictures of what it would look like on your mobile. But this is still hypothetical. We need the opportunity to experience it. That is, we need money.

Maybe you’re in the lucky position of helping us here with a larger amount, maybe even one that already makes it possible to start with a prototype. Maybe you are only able to help with a very small contribution. But in any case you can, and civil society actors who participate in the GSC as Open Actors can, spread a call for crowd-funding.

Until we start this crowdfunding, we need more to describe the civil democratic model than this book and the texts I have written in recent years. This website could be improved. We need a better video. If you are familiar with videos or websites, helping in this area would be a great way to support us.

Such crowdfunding will perhaps bring enough money directly to enable coding a civil democratic platform. In any case, it will open the door to raising money from foundations. One of the aspects of the current world situation is that there are many very rich people. But at least this has the advantage that some of them have recognized the seriousness of the situation and are willing to give something back to society from their privileged position and establish foundations. Such foundations have the problem of always being confronted with a very large number of projects, all of which may be worth supporting. That is why foundations use limitations and fixed schemes, and that is why it is difficult for really new ideas as Civil democracy, i.e. ideas which do not fit to pre-existing schemes, to be considered by foundations at all.

Many foundations however are willing to give a try to projects that have already been able to set up a crowdfunding campaign. In that case, their boards of trustees do not have to bear the responsibility of judging the project on their own. You have already relieved them of this responsibility, in a small part.

Together, we code the platform

With the money raised we can start coding the core of a civil democratic trust storage and decision-making system.

This will only be a core, as civil democracy will soon need offline interfaces as well, since for good reasons many people do not want to entrust such private decisions as trust in civil society actors to the internet, or because in some societies the norm is not sufficiently observed that nobody should be persuaded to disclose what he or she enters on his or her mobile phone in terms of trust transfer or option ranking. These are challenges that a civil-democratic movement, must see and address, but they shall not inhibit it to start.

An essential core of civil democratic trust storage and decision-making will always be internet-based and will work using the mobile phone as interface. At least among the more educated and younger people in wealthy societies there are enough who are able to defend the privacy of their decisions and not be deterred by entering of what they really think – not even by the unlikely but existing possibility that their data could be hacked. For those who don’t have that assurance, we will find other, more secure ways to enter. But to demonstrate what civil democracy can do to save the world, it is enough to start with this core group.

For them, and hopefully also for you, we will program a civil society platform with the money raised.

Together, we constitute the GSC

Once this platform is programmed, it starts with presenting, negotiating, and making decisions for the Global Sustainability Council.

  • Depending on how fast the funding process has been, the platform will be used to search and address more possible candidates that would be able to represent the views and positions of world citizens and global civil society, and transform them into decision proposals and actual decisions that can be implemented to improve the world.
  • As a next step, the actual election will follow. Which of the candidates will be mandated to be the first GSC to represent the world’s population? This step will already bring the Civil democracy process out for the first time into the perception of global media. A council that represents world society as a wholem, with the humbleness to give all important decisions back to world citizens and their civil society actors, is a large promise that will not stay unheard.

The GSC constitutes itself. But its most important rule is that at any time a qualified minority of its members or the open actors supporting them can cause a decision to be made in the Civil democratic process, so that ultimately the participating world population can directly make the decision on this issue.

  • When the first GSC will have constituted itself, it will start preparing the Civil-democratic first decisions on agenda-setting and procedure. How will the GSC work at the beginning, what internal structure will there be, how many and which topics will be addressed in the first round? This is a whole field of questions that are at least in part important enough to be included in civil society decision-making. As now that I am writing this, I do not have a complete overview of this field. Perhaps you have similar experience and can help in advance?

One of the functionalities of the civil democratic platform will be that participating open actors can address the supporters they currently have access to and ask them to support them within the Civil democratic process to serve as their trusted actors. And on the other hand, it will also mean that voters who know and find a civil society actor trustworthy who does not yet participate will be able to ask him to also participate as an open actor in the Civil democratic system. In this way, participation in the Civil-democratic project will grow soon.

Another important part of the realization will be further research. The social and political sciences have for such a long time been preoccupied solely with the existing institutions of partitioning representation that Civil democracy is far from having answered all questions. The number of related research questions is large, so if you as a researcher or in a position to organise and enable research have the opportunity to support this research, use it!

Together, we overcome the hurdles on the way

Now the GSC and with it global civil democracy begins to work. GSC members will find a way of cooperation and a form how they can behave and be perceived externally as the voice of the world population and global civil society. They will find a working rhythm in which they present upcoming decisions to the world’s population and global civil society, and will thus regularly draw the attention of global media to how many people in the civil democratic model participate in these decisions and what they decide together.

In this stage it is important to stick to the project – the idea of the representative democratic part of civil democracy, and thus the basis of its stability, is that the semi-interested people are also involved through their representation in civil society. But in contrast to representative democracy, the special advantage, apart from actor openness, is the possibility of participating responsibly in decisions of interest. The more people actually participate responsibly in decisions and thus show their willingness to bear the costs associated with a decision that they consider to be good in their daily lives, the greater the persuasiveness of the civil-democratic project.

Direct participation in civil democratic decisions also increases the contribution to saving the world. Saving the world will not be possible if we are not prepared to change our individual behaviour in important areas. Once the work of civil democracy has begun, make it a habit to see what decisions are pending, what your Open Actors think about it, what arguments there are and what you think of these arguments, and use the opportunity for direct democratic co-decision making.

Together, we start this process

One part of the current social crisis is that the tradition of group-based social organisation has fostered a culture of irresponsibility. Many people assume that for every aspect of society there should be someone else responsible. But they overlook the fact that new public goods are only produced if someone starts the social movement to make them. And they forget Niklas Luhmann’s insight that oftentimes the inner logic of social systems is not related to their function but only to their codes.

  • Unfortunately, normal social scientists and normal universities are primarily interested in in safely applying established methods in established contexts, even if this goes against really understanding the current crisis.
  • Unfortunately, normal NGOs are primarily interested in creating incentives to their supporters to continue support along established lines, even if this goes against changing the big picture.
  • Unfortunately, normal young people are primarily interested in keeping their degrees of freedom, even if this goes against really making a difference.

Civil democracy is a game changer. It is not normal, and it needs you being beyond normal.

Wedecide! Network-based collective decisions

Posted on July 19, 2023 - 8:02 am by

Can the Internet contribute to improving political processes?

This question initially sounds “so 1990s” – perhaps one would have liked to ask it in the 1990s, when the Internet was still new. But that was the time when people tinkered in garages to become billionaires, and we didn’t have a lot of the experience we have now – including the experience that in real politics, quite independently of the Internet, certain things no longer work as stably and naturally as they did in the 1950s or even the 1990s.

So now is a good time to think again about the Internet and politics. I aim to do this in six steps.

Step 1: Politics is about counting – namely legitimate collective decisions. Power, decision-making, deliberation, social learning, implementation, execution and so on are also part of it. But the core of politics are decisions that are made collectively and ideally accepted by all. Options are weighed against each other by counting support for them based on conscious individual decision and individually responsible for them – usually based on the principle of equality between individuals, but not necessarily limited to it (one man, one vote vs. one share, one vote etc.) And counting is something that works well with the help of the Internet. Web-based surveys, download statistics, advertising rates based on access statistics, many counting processes use the net today. But for every count you need an input. So the support based on conscious individual decision has to get on the web.

Step 2: Support is always evaluation-based. In politics, therefore, different possible forms of a future reality must be weighed against each other and evaluated. And evaluation is something that works well with the help of the Internet. Hotels, restaurants, professors and public toilets are today evaluated with the help of the Internet, and many industries have changed a lot because of this. But these evaluations that we know are all based on direct experience. To evaluate something that can only be realized in the future is much more difficult. That is why grassroots democracy works so rarely: Not everyone can or wants to have a detailed opinion on every issue. There is a problem of the cognitive effort behind the evaluation of options.

Step 3: Cognitive costs can be reduced by trusted actors. In politics there are many actors in whom individuals more or less trust and from whom they more or less accept the assessment of options in individual decisions. These are individual politicians, parties, but also associations, interest groups, NGOs, citizens’ initiatives, lobbying organisations. And the expression of trust is something that works well with the help of the Internet. On Ebay, strangers achieve significantly lower prices as sellers of a good reputation, and even on Tripadvisor, hotel ratings look at those whom one can trust because they indicate similar interests. But trust in politics is much more multi-dimensional than hotel bookings: so it depends on the structure of trust relationships.

Step 4: Trust relationships form networks. Representative democracy is almost always based on a special structure: everyone places themselves in a group with one mark on the ballot paper for the next four years. And the assessment of options is then undertaken by a party, an organisation that represents this group in all matters. But in Europe, individualization processes dissolve these clear classifications, and outside Western Europe the cultural traditions on which they are based have hardly existed. Everyone has many different and, in individual cases, even contradictory relationships of trust with the aforementioned actors, from politicians to parties and NGOs to lobby organizations. These relationships form general networks. And mapping general network structures is something that works well with the help of the Internet. We see this on Facebook, LinkedIn and all the other social networks that store on large servers who is connected to whom in trust.

Step 5: Network-based collective decisions are possible. On the basis of the secure storage of individual trust relationships, political decisions can be made by dividing the one vote into many small flows of trust to actors, who in turn pass them on to options. This will by no means replace all of today’s political processes, but it is a more legitimate way of doing complicated, contested, confusing, supranational or, conversely, very small transactions that require more involvement of individuals. For if political actors and their option evaluations are integrated into the net and the trust relationships of individuals with them are stored, every voter receives a represented position for every decision, which can either be left as it is or changed, with less cognitive effort than if one starts from scratch. And storage is something that works well with the help of the Internet. With Dropbox and other cloud services, a lot of sensitive data has been stored for a long time now, and we do banking almost exclusively over the Internet.

Step 6: The connection between startup and social movement. Let’s go back to the beginning again: Why hasn’t this been thought already in the 1990s? On the one hand, because everyone expected representative democracy to continue to exist forever and overlooked the connection with group-based social structures. On the other hand, because on the organizational level everyone continued as before: computer scientists recruited venture capital to make themselves and their financial backers rich, social movements fought for individual causes without seeing how important appropriate institutions are – and constitutional lawyers had too little knowledge of computer science. The introduction of network-based collective decision-making needs a mixture of startup and social movement. And startup and social movement are both something that works well with the help of the Internet. You just have to connect them. Certain things have to be programmed. But even if the social gain from better and more accepted decisions is great, no one will get rich from them. After all, profit orientation would in turn be detrimental to the indispensable trust in the process. Every individual and every organization that joins a system of network-based collective decisions as a voter, trusted actor or developer is part of a social movement that, in times of globalization and individualization, will continue to enable trust in order to make democracy better and fit for these challenges.

[Update note, August 2020: In this short paper, dated from July 17, 2017, Civil democracy is still termed “network-based collective decision making”. The term “Civil democracy” got used from Spring 2018 onwards.]