1.5 million people on Brazil's Participatory Governance Platform, The Long Road to Enfranchisement
In this week's installment we go over a new engagement process in Brazil, a Proposal for an EU citizens assembly, and we review chapter 2 of Fukuyama's Trust: The Twenty Percent Solution
How to Change the World is a weekly blog about reversing American decline. I will (1) study successful models of governance throughout history, primarily in the West, (2) highlight what’s going wrong leading to institutional decline or ‘political decay’, and (3) present models of democratic innovation that could lead us into a prosperous, peaceful and abundant 21st century.
Brazil to do a nation-wide PB
Brazil, the birthplace of Participatory Budgeting has launched a nation-wide participatory governance platform to allow the population to prioritize government programs. According to a press release on gov.br, they had 1.4 million participants who submitted 8,254 proposals. The process also touted 4 million hits online - quite a feat for a government run participation process. But the more important question is how effective was it?
How it works:
They utilized the popular open-source platform Decidim developed in Barcelona and utilized all over the world.
“When entering the platform, citizens can choose three government programs as priorities, from a set of 28 major programs presented. You can also present three proposals of your own and vote for three others from different authors.”
The authors of the five most voted on proposals were invited to debate the topics in August.
What won?
Results can be found here in Portuguese. According to the report, these priorities were the “highlights,” in order of popularity:
Coping with the climate emergency
Primary Healthcare
Specialty Healthcare
Labor Promotion Dignity, Employment and Income
Tourism
Food safety and nutrition, combatting hunger
Promoting Ethnic-Racial equality and combatting racism
Family Farming and Agroecology
Basic Democratic Education
Youth: rights, participation and quality of life
Not a surprising list. Is democracy boring after all?
My thoughts: One of the dirty secrets of participatory democracy is that it can often turn into a dog and pony show designed to boost the profile of the host while minimizing actual impact. In other words, these democratic processes can effectively raise awareness, but rarely if ever disturb the status quo.
In Brazil’s case, while the participation numbers, if accurate, are commendable, the results admittedly feel a bit flat. Climate, health, employment, etc. are subjects that could have been guessed in advance. Sometimes these processes are run with the purpose of giving the government the go-ahead to do what they were going to do anyway. But with 1.5 million participants, they now at least have the blessing of the people. But it will cause no disruption. It will force no alteration and things will continue to be done the way they’ve always been done.
When I see results like this, I’m skeptical that they really wanted guidance from the population to begin with. I’ll try and get an update on this process someday and see if, after all the fanfare, it’s really changing policy. More information here
Proposal for an EU Citizens’ Assembly
There’s a new policy paper released by the European University Institute, Democratic Odyssey, and Democracy Next titled “The European Citizens’ Assembly: Designing the missing branch of the EU Government” (here’s a much more manageable summary). The paper describes “how to build a political institution of everyday people from across the EU selected by sortition, why it should share real power with other institutions of the EU, it’s core principles and design features, and pathways for implementation.”
If you read last week’s post, you’re familiar with sortition, it’s roots with the founding of democracy in Ancient Greece, and why it combats a lot of the ills we’re currently facing with our democratic systems. One thing that makes me bullish on new institutions that increase citizen voice, even if they start small, is that that is how the decentralizing of power has successfully evolved in the past.
Reading about this small step in representation made me remember the long march toward enfranchisement in the UK that I learned about in Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order. It helped me understand that small steps, while imperfect, are necessary progress toward an end goal of further enfranchisement and transparency.
The following is summarized from Anglotopia.net.
A thousand years ago, the UK was an absolute monarchy.
1265 - The only voice that mattered was the king until the Magna Carta opened the decision-making process up to the barons and Parliament formed. The members of this parliament were chosen by the King until 1265 when Members of Parliament started to be elected from the various counties.
1432 - The Knights of the Shire Act in 1432 was the first parliamentary legislation to establish who was enfranchised to vote for the members. The act gave the right to vote to “Forty Shilling Freeholders”, meaning that only owners of real property who paid taxes to the Crown of at least 40 shillings per year (roughly £2,500 in today’s money). This represented ~3% of the population. This remained the status quo for another 400 years.
1832 - The Reform Act 1832 (also known as the Representation of the People Act) was the first piece of legislation to expand voting rights in the United Kingdom. It firmly established that men above the age of 21 who were freeholders of property could vote and standardized this franchise across all boroughs. However, it specifically stated that only men could vote, laying down a statutory bar disenfranchising the nation’s women.
1867 - A further Reform Act in 1867 enfranchised householders, expanding the category of eligible voters to include the working classes for the first time. Combined, the acts pushed the number of voters to 6 million, just over 20% of the population.
1918 - In the 19th Century, the Women’s Suffrage movement got started and kept political pressure on Parliament through non-violent and violent means until the passage of the Representation of the People Act in 1918. The Act didn’t go far enough into establishing the right to vote for all women as it still required them to own property, but it did do away with the property requirements for men, giving the right to vote for all men regardless of race or class.
1928 - The Representation of the People Act 1928 did away with the property requirements for women, finally opening the door to all persons 21 years of age or older.
1969 - The final major piece of legislation to expand the franchise came with the Representation of the People Act 1969, which (much like the 26th Amendment in the US) extended the right to vote to all persons aged 18 to 20.
A lot is left out in the above, such as the strategies employed, and the heroic ongoing fight for representation that eventually got us to the universal enfranchisement we have today. But the bottom line is that progress in wrestling power from the entrenched is a slow, step by step process that can and does win over time.
So when I think of this new EU Citizens’ Assembly, I’m encouraged. Each step toward true democratic rule is important, and democratic progress is needed now more than ever.
Trust
Today we’re going to look at the second chapter from Fukuyama’s Trust entitled ‘The Twenty Percent Solution.'
In the chapter, Fukuyama talks about Neoclassical economics, the leading economic theory of America in the 1990’s. What he means by the ‘20% solution’ is that Neoclassical economics nails 80% of it’s assumptions about human nature, but leaves out a critical 20%. A quick definition:
“Neoclassical economics is a broad theory that focuses on supply and demand as the driving forces behind the production, pricing, and consumption of goods and services. It emerged in around 1900 to compete with the earlier theories of classical economics.” - basically free market economics which we think of when we think of late 20th century American Capitalism.
In Fukuyama’s opinion Neoclassical economics sees individuals as too utility maximizing, i.e. selfish. This contributes to the (fair) criticism of capitalism that it excuses selfish and antisocial behavior. So the 20% that’s left out is the way that culture shapes economic decisions and can lead to much more egalitarian decision-making than raw utilitarianism.
“The problem of neoclassical economics is that it has forgotten certain key foundations on which classical economics was based. Adam Smith, the premier classical economist, believed that people are driven by a selfish desire to “better their condition,” but he would never had subscribed to the notion that economic activity could be reduced to rational utility maximization. Indeed, his other major work besides The Wealth of Nations, was The theory of Moral Sentiments, which portrays economic motivation as highly complex and embedded in broader social habits and mores.”
I’m glad that in Fukuyama’s opinion, Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism, was right on the subject from the beginning. It was later economists who overlaid their theories on top, giving capitalism a bad name along with it.
“Current economic discourse needs to recover some of the richness of classical, as opposed to neoclassical, economics, by taking account of how culture shapes all aspects of human behavior, including economic behavior, in a number of critical ways.”
“Not all economic action arises out of what are traditionally thought of as economic motives… In one social experiment, a large group of people at a university were given tokens that they could exchange for money that they would receive personally or for money that the group as a whole would have to share. It turned out that between forty and sixty percent of those in the experiment contributed altruistically to the group’s well-being. The only exception was a group of entering graduate students in economics.”
I’ve heard similar examples to the above, and I love them. They imply that selfishness is actually a learned behavior. It’s not necessarily that the economics graduate students were selfish, but more likely that they had a model of the world as full of selfish actors to tried to behave ‘rationally.’ Meanwhile the actual humans in the study were altruistic.
“In Mark Granovetter’s phrase, people are embedded in a variety of social groups – families, neighborhoods, networks, businesses, churches, and nations – against whose interests they have to balance their own.”
What seems to be left out of Neoclassical economics is communitarianism, a “social and political philosophy that emphasizes the importance of community in the functioning of political life, in the analysis and evaluation of political institutions, and in understanding human identity and well-being.”
When we think about the community as an extension of ourselves, and it’s health as an extension of our own well-being, we don’t only make better decisions but expect better decisions of others. This helps prevent us from adopting the cynicism of the grad students mentioned above who, because of an improvised vision of economics, wound up more selfish than their neighbors! So much for the value of education :p
Okay, that’s it for this week. I swear I’m going to start that podcast soon. I have all the equipment and have run some tests, but the internet at my apartment died this week. Once it’s up, I’ll make a recording of the above.
Until next time, remember that democracy’s best days are ahead!
Matt Harder runs the civic engagement firm Civic Trust, where he helps cities strengthen their civic environment by helping residents, civic organizations, and local government work together to create public projects. Follow him on Twitter.