The Problem with Democracy...

I have always believed that in its purest form, Democracy is a step above anarchy.  In a democracy where everyone is given a vote and majority rules will lead to a tyranny of the majority where 51% of the people can decide what 100% of the people will do.  The minority voice gets lost in the cacophony that is the majority.  In this way, we all become lemmings and as the majority pour over the side of the cliff, the rest of us are along for the ride in spite of the fact that we do not necessarily think that this is the best course of action to take.  Of course, I am not alone in this line of thinking as our founding fathers recognized the problems of pure democratic forms of governance and opted to form a representative republic in which minority voices could still be heard and good sense could prevail over groupthink.

Aside from all of the above, during the time of our founding, a pure democracy where all the people could vote on every decision that needed to be made was impractical.  There were far too many decisions that had to be made on a daily basis and there was no means to allow all of the people an opportunity to understand the implications of the various choices that could be made, much less an opportunity to vote on those choices.  Fast-forward 236 years into the future from the signing of the Declaration of Independence, technology could potentially allow everyone a vote on every issue through the Internet.  We are now faced with another question… if now, because of the technology that is available to us a true democracy is now possible, is it practical to change our system of governance?

The one problem that our technological advances do not address is the problem that there is still a potential that the minority could be enslaved by the will of the majority.  In the words of my mother, “If everyone else jumps off a bridge, does it make sense for you to as well?”  My mom is a pretty sharp cookie.  To paraphrase her a bit, just because something works well in one part of the country, does it make sense for everyone in the country to do so as well?  As an example, if we can agree that most people live in the various large cities in our country and that fewer people live outside of those cities, does it make sense that a majority who live in cities make decisions about how people who live in the country live?  Just because a rule or a law makes sense in the City, it does not necessarily equate to making sense in the country.

Worse yet, in established semi-democracies where every citizen is entitled to vote, only a small minority actually exercise that right.  What this usually means is that the majority of a very small minority can decide the fate of everyone.  If our representative republic worked as the founding fathers had intended, representatives of the people would be beholden to the will of the people.  If they did not, the election cycle would ensure that those people would not be re-elected for another term.  Instead, more often than not, we end up with a system of government that is beholden to a small minority and impose their will upon the majority for the purposes of advancing the will of that minority.  The system eventually collapses on itself as the interests of the majority are ignored over the self-interest of the few controlling minorities.

Given the problems present in semi-democracies, it would seem that a movement towards a pure democracy using technology as the foundation is a suicidal race towards anarchy.  A democracy lives and dies by the level of participation of those who are entitled to vote.  In the 2008 Presidential election, a record 63% of the eligible electorate turned out to vote.  President Barack Obama won 52.92% of the popular vote.  When we do the math, it was estimated that the total eligible voter population in 2008 was about 208,323,000.  The popular vote count garnered by President Obama was 69,456,897.  In other words, President Obama was elected by approximately 33% of the electorate.  A far larger majority (37%) of the electorate remained silent by not exercising their right to vote and is now beholden to the will of the 33% who did exercise their right to vote.  A disinterested electorate has lead down a path of an oligarchy where a small group of people now decide the fate of an entire country.  How can a democracy survive when those who are responsible for its fate do not participate?

In their paper, New Agora: New Geometry of Languaging And New Technology of Democracy: The Structured Design Dialogue Process, Vigdor Schreibman and Alexander Christakis seek to address some of the problems I address of the tyranny of the majority by proposing a structured design dialog process (SDDP) that prevents the voice of the majority from undermining good decisions by advancing meaningful dialog between disagreeing parties.  The SDDP architecture proposed by Schreibman and Christakis consists of 31 component constructs grouped into seven modules:

1. 6 Consensus Methods: (1) Nominal Group Technique (NGT), (2) Interpretive Strutural Modeling (ISM), (3) DELPHI, (4) Options Field, (5) Options Profile, and (6) Trade-off Analysis;
2. 7 Language Patterns: (1) Elemental observations; (3) Problématique, (3) Influence tree-pattern, (4) Options field pattern, (5) Options profile/scenario pattern, (6) Superposition pattern, and (7) Action plan pattern;
3. 3 Application Time Phases: (1) Discovery, (2) Designing, and (3) Action;
4. 3 Key Role Responsibilities: (1) Context-Inquiry Design Team, (2) Content-Stakeholders/Designers, and (3) Process-Facilitation;
5. 4 Stages of Interactive Inquiry: (1) Definition or Anticipation, (2) Design of Alternatives, (3) Decision, and (4) Action Planning;
6. Collaborative Software and Facility; and
7. 6 Dialogue Laws: (1) Requisite Variety, (2) Parsimony, (3) Saliency, (4) Meaning and Wisdom, (5) Authenticity and Autonomy, and (6) Evolutionary Learning.

While it would be impossible in this very small blog to explore all of the component constructs (I did mention Nominal Group Technique and Delphi in an earlier post), I would like to kind of look at the 6 dialog laws that the authors’ refer to.  The six laws of dialog are broken down thusly:

1. Appreciation of the diversity of perspectives of observers is essential to embrace the many dimensions of a complex situation.
2. Disciplined dialogue is required so that observers are not subjected to information overloaded.
3. The relative importance of an observer's ideas can be understood only when they are compared with others in the group.
4. Meaning and wisdom of an observer's ideas are produced in a dialogue only when they begin to understand the relationships such as similarity, priority, influence, etc., of different people's ideas.
5. Every person matters, so it is necessary to protect the autonomy and authenticity of each observer in drawing distinctions.
6. Evolutionary learning occurs in a dialogue as the observers learn how their ideas relate to one another.

The six dialog laws identified by the authors are intended to allow participants to fully understand the various perspectives of the other participants and then to allow for a majority consensus on a decision that creates an outcome that serves the greater good of everyone involved in the process.  An educated, concerned, and considerate electorate can utilize these six laws of dialog to arrive at an equitable solution that in fact looks out for the interests of the whole.  While this does not fit the current paradigm of the human condition as it exists today, it does represent a path forward to achieve a sustainable democracy once we find a way to overcome the issues that prevent us from achieving a meaningful dialog between disagreeing parties.