Let's do away with elections altogether

By brett Submitted on 16 May, 2008 - 18:21

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I am becoming disillusioned with democracy. Elected leaders, all around the world, seem to be getting worse and worse.

In London they've just elected Boris Johnson, a bigoted buffoon, as mayor. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi was recently re-elected as prime minister. This is a man who is notoriously corrupt, and who in his previous terms in power ran the government like his private business empire.

Here in South Africa, many of us spent last year terrified of the prospect of a Jacob Zuma presidency. But lately, Thabo Mbeki has revealed himself to be so bad that Zuma is beginning to seem like a better option. That this is so, just shows how far our standards have dropped.

Of course it's our fault as voters, for electing every-more inept leaders. But it's not like we have a great choice. The calibre of candidates seem to be declining year by year, so that now electorates are faced with choosing the least bad person, rather than the best one. In any case, money and PR spin have long removed any semblance of real choice from the electoral process. No wonder the idealistic youth are sickened with what they see, and stay away from politics.

More and more I agree with the person who said that the very fact that someone wants to be elected, should automatically disqualify them. Hardly anybody seems to go into politics anymore with noble intentions -- they go into it in a quest for power for money, or both. These are just the people who should be kept far away from the reins. And the few people who may start out with some moral fibre and a backbone are either quickly corrupted by the whole dirty system, or they leave in disgust.

In my view, democracy is broken. And I have an idea about how to fix it. We need to look to the jury system that exists in some countries, and to the techniques used by public opinion and market researchers.

The jury system works on the premise that people should be judged by their peers. And behind that is the assumption that a pretty much randomly- group of ordinary people are competent to understand the issues involved, and to come to reasonable judgments.

So why not choose parliaments and governments in the same way? Present-day democracy is representative democracy. Representatives of the people sit in parliament and make decisions on the people's behalf. At present we choose our representatives through elections. But this isn't working, so let's scrap elections. Why can't the people's representatives be chosen through a random process -- every x number of years, through a random process, x number of representatives are chosen. It's like the Lotto. If your number comes up, you have to go and serve in Parliament for a term. When your term is over, you are released and can go back to your life. For the sake of continuity, every year only 25 or 30% of the representatives are changed.

This would still be representative democracy -- the chosen representatives would just be chosen in a different way. To see how it will be representative, we can look to the sampling techniques that market researchers use. They select a random group of people, but in a structured way, so that the make-up of the group mirrors exactly the make-up of the broader population. It's random in that every member of the broader population has an equal chance of being selected. In that way, they can get pretty reliable knowledge about the views of the entire population, by only speaking to about 2000 or so people.

So why don't we choose our public representatives (let's stop calling them leaders) in this way, and mandate them to discuss the important issues and make decisions on our behalf?

This has actually been tried. American political scientist Professor James Fishkin has already undertaken several experiments along these lines, using what he calls 'deliberative polling'. (See for example http://cdd.stanford.edu/polls/docs/summary/)

So, what are the benefits?

No more elections would mean no more campaigning, election violence, worrying about 'free and fair'. It would mean the end of political parties and the end of long-serving parliamentarians. It would thus cut out key motivators of and opportunities for corruption. It would mean the end of cronyism. Very importantly, it would also ensure equal representation. Instantly, 50% of Parliament would be women. A proportional number would be young, and old. Numbers of black and white would reflect the population. About 10% would be homosexual, and so on. What's fairer than that?

The 'jury'-like process means that those who are chosen in this way would probably be reluctant to do so, as it would mean disrupting one's regular life to serve in Parliament. Parliamentarians should not benefit excessively, as this would create an incentive to corrupt the process of selection. In fact, perhaps each person should get a salary linked to what they were earning in their everyday lives and careers.

This would have two benefits -- although serving in Parliament would disrupt a career path, it wouldn't lead to any financial losses. Secondly, this would avoid the problem that occurs now, where elected representatives become fat cats who lose touch with the concerns of their constituents. The rich would remain rich, the poor would remain poor. They would thus represent the perspectives and interest of rich or poor people respectively. But because there are many more poor than rich people, Parliament would tend to make pro-poor decisions.

But there should be some incentives to serving in Parliament, so that people also don't try to corrupt the process in order to get out of it. This benefit need not be financial. At any rate, ex-Parliamentarians from whatever background would be on a fast-track to good jobs, as their 4-year term would have served as an education in decision-making and a crash-course in leadership

One objection to this idea might be that a randomly-chosen group such as this would not necessarily be equipped to understand complex issues of public policy -- to deliberate on them and make good decisions.

My first answer to this is that most of the current bunch chosen through elections, aren't doing such a great job anyhow. Any randomly-chosen group of people is unlikely to do worse, and may well do better. And anyhow, democracy is already based on the belief that every citizen is capable of making informed decisions -- at least once every 4 or 5 years.

But my more reasoned response is that we already have examples of randomly-chosen ordinary people being able to understand and make reasonable decisions on complex issues. The jury system works on this premise. It doesn't always work well, but it works well enough for several countries to remain confident in it. Fishkin's experiments in deliberative polling also indicate that ordinary people do a pretty good job of coming to grips with and making decisions on complex public issues.

Some may say this may be true in the developed world, where average education levels are higher -- not in places with low average education levels, and high levels of illiteracy.

But this is nonsense. We also have examples in developing countries proving that the average person is perfectly capable of coming to grips with complex issues, no matter their level of education. This example is the work done by the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa, and similar organisations such as the Treatment Advocacy and Literacy Campaign in Zambia. Through training in treatment literacy, thousands of ordinary, often poor and poorly-educated people have been able to master extremely complex medical and scientific information. Sometimes to the extent that they put ill-informed doctors and nurses to shame.

The system that I propose would put in place Parliaments that are at least as competent as ours are now, but there's a good chance they'd be a whole lot better.