Tag: How it works

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.]

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.

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.]