Most generically, and from the root words, democracy refers to
situations where authority rests with the people. Yet common use of the
term refers to a wide range of situations and circumstances, each with
different interpretations of what this means in practice.
In questioning what democracy is, then, perhaps it is more appropriate to consider what conditions give
rise to democracy or what qualities are characteristic of
democracy. Consider, then, the following questions:
- What conditions or qualities need to be supported to manifest democracy?
- What conditions or qualities need to be tolerated in manifesting democracy?
- What conditions or qualities cannot be tolerated in manifesting democracy?
Some of these notes were initially articulated as part of a 'homework' assignment for Democracy Circle - KW. (Follow to www.civics.ca/talk/. More specifically, for my contribution follow: elsewhere.)
participation
What degree of participation should be supported in a democracy? In other words: Who counts? The glib response is 'everybody': A democracy is evidenced by open and inclusive participation: Authority rests with the people. Yet we all know that 'everyone' cannot or does not participate - through legal constraints or personal circumstance or by choice.
Typically, conditions for participation have been a mix of capacity and right. For example, in Ancient Athens - often attributed as the origin of democracy - only men born in Athens held the right to participate. While this may seem rather archaic today, even modern 'western' democracies have had comparable rules until quite recently. In Canada, for example, women were not allowed to vote until 1918 and Canadian Status Indians were not allowed to vote until 1920 - and then, only if they gave up their status. The latter condition was not changed until 1960. And it was only three years ago, in 2002, that a person who was homeless (i.e. had no fixed address) was allowed to vote in a Canadian federal election. (See history of the vote in Canada and Canadian electoral firsts)
In addition to the sexist and racist restrictions noted above, age restrictions are a common delimiter of capacity. Voting ages were lowered in many jurisdiction due to complaints that a person could be old enough to fight for their country, but not old enough to vote.
"Being of sound mind and body" is a catch-phrase pointing to the standard
for judgement of capacity. It immediately raises a question: Who judges? Only decades ago, being gay was considered a
mental illness and was dealt with in such extreme ways that the treatments may well have rendered people incapable of enacting their democratic right to vote.
Similarly for other people who, on first glance, appear not to be of
'sound mind and body'. Special measures to ensure voting access
for people who are
differently abled were not enacted in Canada until 1992. How many
Stephen Hawkings have been - and still are - relegated to the
'incapable' category?
Paradox 1: Despite an emphasis on inclusion and broad participation, manifestation of democracy (necessarily?) involves some form of exclusion. The question, then, is who gets excluded and why?
...the myth of democracy speaks of diversity, but the practice reveals homogeneity... (Grant 1994:ref 201)
[Democracies] therefore rest on a particular method of calculating, judging and assigning a place to every individual and in so doing, refer to a particular narrative which renders legitimate the tool used to calculate...
All calculations are in fact 'miscounts'...(Labelle 2001:ref 87, 90).
deliberation and decisions
What modes and methods of decision-making or reaching agreement should be supported, tolerated or not tolerated in a democracy? Direct participation? Representation? Consensus? Modified consensus? Simple majority? Super majority? ...?
Many point to Ancient Athens again - applauding their direct democracy. Yet the participants - well looked after by their wives and slaves, had ample time to become informed and engage in deliberation. Practicalities on a personal level - regarding the time available for participation - and on a population level - regarding the logistics of involving everyone - have lead to representative democracies. In some cases, however, these involve such farcical 'representativeness' and such minimal 'participation' as to make 'democracy' a misnomer.
While direct democracy is often pointed to as most democratic, it does not necessarily correspond to consensus (modified or otherwise), which I would advocate as 'most' democratic, in part, because it seems more likely to arrive at decisions everyone can work with, perhaps more because it seems more likely that everyone gets an opportunity to speak.
I wonder if "making-the-decision" is the key to democracy or does it lie with the presentation of information and deliberation around preferences and values? The 'decision-making' part is a mere technicality ' the heart of democracy lies in the processes that enable people to contribute to the agenda, to present information and argument, to voice their own values - and to have them heard. This, then, leads to questions around voice, power, reason and argument.
...the norms of deliberation are culturally specific and often operate as forms of power that silence or devalue the speech of some people (Young 1996:ref 123)
Paradox 2: Decisions on decision-making authority are made by those with decision-making authority; decisions about what sort of process 'works' are made through a process that 'works' - at least for those involved in the process.
Democracy is generally taken to be founded on reason. Yet this raises questions: What sort of 'reason'? Who's sort of 'reason'? Is the reasoning about Truth? about what is right? about what is good? Is it based on logic? on values? on intuition? This, of course gets us back around to the 'being of sound mind and body' criterion and the self-reinforcing paradox above.
coercion and power
Political institutions become oppressive when they act to preserve the unquestionableness of their foundations (Krippendorff 1996:ref 17)
When is coercion justified and who holds (or should hold) the power to limit and enforce?
Given the discusison on this page, I think it is easy to see that democracy is not straightforward - either philosophically or in practice. There are always going to be differences, so there will always be situations where some must act against their will or where some will have their needs/values compromised. I think the paradox articulated in the following quotation is critical to consider:
...[T]his essay argues that coercion must play a large, valuable, and relatively legitimate role in almost any democracy that functions well. But... this essay argues that any justification for coercion will necessarily be incomplete. In conditions of lasting disagreement there is no unquestionably fair procedure for producing a decision to coerce...
Recognizing the need for coercion, and recognizing too that no coercion can be either incontestably fair or predictably just, democracies must find ways of fighting, while they use it, the very coercion that they need (Mansbridge 1996:ref 46).
Paradox 3: Coercion is never justified, but democracy cannot operate without it.
rights and responsibilities
Are there 'inalienable rights' that democratic process cannot supersede? What are they and who determines them? What basic rights and responsibilities should be supported, tolerated or not tolerated? Most of the societies we consider as democratic are constitutional democracies: Authority is limited by a set of principles that describe individual rights that cannot be overridden by majority rule. Is this essential to democracy? Or is this a bastardization of democracy?
Aside from rights, what also strikes me as important here often seems to be forgotten. Rights and responsibilities go hand in hand. Why, then, do we never hear of incontestable responsibilities as well as inalienable rights? Which is more important: the right to speak or the responsibility to listen? the right to assembly or the responsibility of assembling and of ensuring to people can assemble - and safely? the right to vote or the responsibility to vote - and responsibility to be adequately informed to do so? the right to individual freedoms or the responsibility of individual freedoms and the responsibility to ensure that others have their individual freedoms? the right to rule by majority, or the responsibility to rule by majority...?
And what of those situations where responsibilities rub up against rights and vice versa? Or those situations where equity across a population means inequity for personal circumstance?
Paradox 4: Inalienable rights imply incontestable responsibilities.
dissent
There is one final consideration that I think is essential to democracy: the rising of the excluded - most particularly to the point where their voices are heard and legitimated as part of the deliberative forum. Some have pointed to this - rather than the direct participatory involvement of the privileged - as the origin of democracy. (Interestingly, others have pointed to the more cooperative/collaborative processes practiced in hunter-gatherer groups as the origin of democracy.) This suggests that the 'democraticness' of a democracy might be evaluated by the way in which it deals with dissent.
According to Ranciere, democracy emerges from a 'dis-agreement' between the demos, which defines itself as having 'no part' in the polis and against which a 'wrong' has been committed, and the 'police' order� (Labelle 2001: 87).
Democracy... is the name of what comes and interrupts the smooth working of this order... (Bennett 2003)ref
Democracy is not about where the political is located but about how it is experienced. Revolutions activate the demos and destroy boundaries that bar access to political experience. Individuals from the excluded social strata take on responsibilities, deliberate about goals and choices, and share in decisions that have broad consequences and affect unknown and distant others. Thus revolutionary transgression is the means by which the demos makes itself political (Wolin 1996:ref 38).
Paradox 5:Democracy arises from creative tensions: consensus by dissent; dissensus by consent.
Democracy, then, does not lie in the civilized process of voting, in the political repartee of parliament and councils, or in the principled bureaucratic processes that encourage public participation and civilian delegations. These all fit in the 'middle' despite disparate leanings to left or right. Democracy is liminal. It lies in the tensions that arise at the margins; it creeps in through backdoors, basement presses, online windows. It arises from placards and protests but more so from trying to understand different languages, narratives, reasons; from listening to ideas we don't want to hear; from considering values we don't want to legitimize. It arises from recognizing ourselves as power brokers - even (perhaps especially) in subtle ways - through language and circumstance; through our choices to hoard or distribute, to lecture or listen. Democracy is paradoxical. It includes by excluding; empowers by wielding power; upholds rights by enforcing responsibilities; enables decisions by enabling dissent. It is messy and confusing and always almost there... While the language of rights tends to be individual and that of responsibility, to be of-group - the reverses are also the case: rights accrue to groups and responsibilities to individuals.
I have raised many questions here - and answered few. As a final note, I provide two, albeit indirect, responses.
1) 'Democracy' has the qualities of a (Wittgensteinian) 'family resemblance category.' In some cases you might readily identify a whole bunch of people as members of the same family - everybody looks different, but there is something about the noses, and the set of the eyes, and they way they turn their head when someone speaks... In a similar way, you might readily identify something as 'democracy' through equally inconsistent but identifiable qualities - something about the decision-making, and the participatory process, and the way people turn their heads when someone speaks... Coming up with an absolute definition seems pointless and futile - whereas clarifying the range and qualities of democracy may feed the very notion of democracy itself.
2) My answer to the questions I have raised are quite simple: it depends. For example, across a population, I think direct democracy would actually be less 'democratic' than representative democracy because very few (namely the rich and resource-full) would be able to participate. In a small group, I think consensus is more �democratic� than voting because it decreases the likelihood of a tyranny of the majority and does not have to give in to a tyranny of the minority. Yet then there are questions about how small groups are position ed within the larger society? Do they represent the privileged and the disenfranchised? How are differences redressed? Does eveyone have a voice? Is everyone listening?
Rather than generating consensus, democratic participation nurtures contention and dispute... Grant 1994: 4)
The perils of democracy in practice are many. So are the perils of democracy in definition. Even in the West where we think we use the word rationally, few people give it the same meaning. And many people give it no meaning at all. They use it as a talisman, or charm which if worm conspicuously will make them better citizens. Vain hope, for the charm is useless until its intricate workings are understood (Ayar 1965 in Grant: 199).
...also see:
- constructing the citizen
negotiating conditions for democracy:
- participation
- deliberation and decisions
- coercion and power
- rights and responsibilities
- dissent
-
a few quotations
2003 - 2007