21st Century Democracy

A new answer to an old question

In 1955, the American science fiction writer Isaac Asimov wrote a short story set during the 2008 U.S. presidential election. In Franchise, a computer called Multivac selects one person to be the ‘voter of the year’, asks a series of random questions and automatically decides the result of every local, state and national election. Inspired by the first general-purpose computer that accurately predicted the election of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, Asimov envisioned an ‘electronic democracy’ enabled by computers.

Since the ancient Athenians first met in the Agora, the idea of democracy has presented a technical challenge; how are the interests of individuals translated into group decisions? The Athenians voted directly on matters of state but this became impractical as populations grew so the Romans traded power for convenience, and elected representatives. While the representative democratic system has prevailed, with the arrival of computers and the internet in the twentieth century, new systems were born. 

From the nineteen fifties, ones and zeroes began to replace ink on paper and people found new ways to make, use, and sell information. As the product of the democratic process, the law is information and changing the format of the law can change the way that democracy works. The culmination of countless decisions made by generations of politicians voting for or against each piece of legislation, the large number of documents that constitutes the law can instead be contained in one digital file, with every statute in force. 

Those who want the law to change would copy and edit or “fork” this file, like a nation’s operating system, adding or removing legislation to make an alternative version. Instead of electing representatives, each person would support one version, and the version with most support would be enforced. This describes a method of democratic decision-making that combines lots of individual choices in one decision. Unlike a one-time vote between two alternatives, each person would support one version, and could change their decision at any time. When the version with the most support changed, authority would pass from one file to another and the law would change. 

New legislation would be put forward as an alternative version of the original file, not as an individual proposal so political organisations would be free to develop complex answers to complex problems. Constant competition between organisations to meet the needs of citizens would surface the best ideas and raise the capacity of the state. With no representatives to elect, power would remain with the people and the law would always be what most people wanted it to be. This solves a fundamental problem of representative democracy, that power is concentrated in the hands of the few and checks and balances are needed to stop that power being abused. 

While checks and balances make it hard for tyrants to change the law, they also make the law hard to change. As a result, more harm is caused by the inaction of politicians than by the actions of tyrants. In 1989, Warren Quinn described this as the doctrine of doing and allowing. If someone is pushed into a river and they drown, harm has been done but if they’re drowning and no-one throws them a rope harm has been allowed. The guilt of the perpetrator may vary but the victim, killed through action or inaction is dead either way. As harm is caused both by the actions of tyrants and the inaction of politicians, checks and balances simply swap one form a tyranny for another. 

In the 18th century, worried that democracy would allow the poor to take land from the rich, James Madison argued that government should “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority”. While the notion of a tyrannical majority persists, the will of the people has always been interpreted by their elected representatives. Instead, ideas can be expressed as legislation, all legislation can be contained in one file, and the file with the most support can be enforced. This legislation would become law but those behind it would not be in power. 

As a new version gained support, its contents would be scrutinised by journalists, experts and political opponents and people would use what the French sociologist Lucien Karpik called judgement devices to make informed decisions without understanding every piece of legislation. In 1872, seventy years after the invention of the steam-driven paper machine the Ballot Act introduced anonymous paper ballots in England, paving the way for universal suffrage. Seventy years after the inventions of the transistor, technology can once again improve democracy.   

jon.nash@demos.co.uk