Assembly Project

In my previous and first post, I explained what a people’s assembly is. This is the first of a two-part post in which I discuss why we need them. This first part discusses the problems that lead us there in order to understand the broad argument for assembly democracy. The second will discuss the benefits of people’s assemblies in more detail.

Crises

I’m writing this in a time of not just one crisis, but several interlinking ones. A polycrisis, as it is not being called. Covid may have gone, but much of the world is mired in economic stagnation and a cost of living squeeze. The climate crisis continues; it remains touch and go as to whether we can prevent a major disaster. There are many others: wars, the rise of China, future pandemics and the unprecedented change that AI and other new technologies will cause.

And then there’s the rise of the far right. With the return of Donald Trump and record support for the far right nearly everywhere, one thing is clear: this is not going away. It’s getting worse. The risk is a death spiral for democracy: the public’s faith in politics is eroded, so worse politicians come to power, so government get worse, so the public’s faith is eroded further still. Meanwhile, the climate crisis and economy are worsened by their mismanagement.

The far right might be wrong about nearly everything, but what drives their growing support is an idea that’s actually very left-wing: for too long, political power has been concentrated in a very small political class that does not represent the people, and we need to take power away from them. It’s an idea that resonates in countries like Britain, where in a 2023 survey, less than 10% said they trust politicians.

Are the political class really that bad? A case can be made that we’re too harsh on them. The politicians that my friends and I have met tended to come come across as good people who only wanted to do right for their country and communities.

In my view, we need to look at the system. We see politicians putting party interests above the national interest, as well as supporting and voting for policies they don’t personally support. It hardly comes across as representative and honest. Compared to, say, how you might run a tennis club or Rotary branch, the way we run our government is utterly bizarre.

But the system exists for a reason. Virtually all democracies have parties. This is partly because parties have a greater motivation to organise and raise funds than independents, and can pool their national resources. Many people would like to vote for an independent but don’t, because they never appear to be contenders. But parties aren’t just an inevitability. They also offer two key advantages: they offer clear choices to voters and organise the lawmaking process. If all politicians were independents, it would likely take ages to pass something as routine as a budget.

It is, however, a flawed system. That was certainly the impression I got from Rory Stewart’s memoir Politics on the Edge. What comes across clear was that while the growing support for right-wing populism made things worse, the existing system is byzantine, sclerotic and frequently absurd. Stewart writes about how he shunted from one ministerial role to another, never having time to understand the subject matter nor have an impact, as well as how his colleagues were encouraged to put personal ambition and the party over the common good. The logjam has been even worse in the United States, the only rich country that has not managed to legislate for universal healthcare.

But whatever can be said of the existing system, the public’s declining faith and trust in it is a fact. We have a representative democracy but we increasingly don’t like being represented. But to understand how to solve the problem, we have to see what caused it.

Causes

If the system has had flaws for many years, why is it only becoming a crisis now? Political parties have been around for over a century. Divisive partisan media is nothing new. Nor is the complaint of politics being an insular, out-of-touch and unrepresentative elite. This is exactly what’s portrayed in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a film released in 1939.

In many ways, the system has been getting better, not worse. While most Western countries underrepresent women in their national parliaments, the general trend has been towards equality. From 2010 to 2024, the number of women in the British House of Commons rose from 22% to 41%; in that time, there was decrease in the number from the elite ‘Oxbridge’ universities. In that time there was a smaller increase in women in the United States Congress. Meanwhile, the age of the Internet means that it is easier than ever for politicians to find out what the public is thinking.

Rather, it is more likely to be factors like these:

• We’re more exposed to politics — and its failings. Despite the decline of traditional newspapers and TV news, we now hear about current affairs than ever thanks to social media. In addition, social media often encourages us to get into arguments with those with differing views.
• We’re being isolated by technology. This trend in motion before the 1990s, with the rise of television, but has been exacerbated with the Internet and social media. Meanwhile, less people go the places for face-to-face interaction in the local community, such as pubs in the United Kingdom and bowling leagues in the United States. Social media promises to be ‘social’ but it is no substitute for face-to-face interactions. Loneliness has been linked to support both for conspiracy theories and for demagogues.
• We want more individualisation in our lives. In almost every corner of our lives, we want to customise the world around us. This is something that has affected everything from music tastes to spirituality to funerals. Monolithic political parties are struggling to represent us, just like unified churches and music fandom. As The Economist noted in February 2015, voters are used to “shopping around” elsewhere, but can’t get it from politics. This makes it harder for a government to please the public.
• A stagnant economy. Another part of the polycrisis bleeds into this one. This didn’t cause the decline of democracy on its own. The decline can be traced back to earlier decades and intensified in the 2010s even as unemployment declined. But economic fortunes correlate with trust in politics. What’s also important to note is that there is a lack of an inspiring vision on what to do next. As Roberto Unger puts it, we live in a “dictatorship of no alternatives”.

Answers?

There is no single answer to solving the political aspect of the polycrisis. I don’t think any conventional party can do this. Neither the centre-left nor centre-right have shown they can solve it; the far right have fared worse. Only left-wing alternatives are largely untested, but there’s little sign they have the political capital to attain their goals. We’re going to have to reform the political system.

Of course, there are many good ideas: decentralising more power to a local level, fair voting systems for countries that still use first-past-the-post, breaking the power of Big Tech and offering vouchers to the public to fund political campaigns and the media. But these won’t change the fundamental problem: people increasingly don’t like being represented.

Fortunately, there are alternatives. Through history, human societies have operated democratically without elections. In the democracy of Athens (not actually the first in history), the supreme lawmaking body was not an elected assembly, but one open to all citizens, while other offices were mostly decided by random selection. For centuries, we have entrusted juries with the power to send someone to jail.

Moreover, they are hidden in your everyday life. We don’t think of tennis clubs and Rotary branches as democracies, but they are in a sense; some may even have an elected board. Of course there are differences. A state has to govern a much larger and diverse population and can’t be run by consensus. It is also easier to quit a local association than emigrate. Still, we can learn from it.

I think a big part of the solution, perhaps the biggest, will be assembly democracy.

Two Complimentary Types

Assembly democracy is a method of making decisions by bringing ordinary people together in an assembly and directing them to work together. This can be achieved in two ways, through either randomly-selected citizens’ assemblies or people’s assemblies that are open to everyone. As I noted in my previous post, they are complimentary alternatives, not competing ones. Whereas citizens’ assemblies are better suited to advising higher levels of government, people’s assemblies give them a chance to participate in a democratic process at their local level. If people take part in people’s assemblies, it will encourage them to support, respect or even demand citizens’ assemblies at higher levels.

What can assembly democracy accomplish that elections, referenda and opinion polling can’t? Both election and referendum campaigning are elitist in nature, dominated by the media and the narrow section of the population who can organise campaigns and raise funds. Elections force voters to choose parties even if they don’t agree with all their positions. Meanwhile, opinion polling can give a snapshot of what the public thinks but has limitations of its own. As Mark Pack notes in his book Bad News, opinion polls can be drastically swayed by how the question is worded.

In addition, voting and polling means asking for an answer by people who aren’t enthusiastic or especially well-informed about politics. It’s not that voters are dumb — you wouldn’t call someone dumb for not being well-informed about medicine, firefighting or criminology. The problem is that they’re just human. Opinion polling for a 2016 Dutch referendum on a treaty with Ukraine found that while most likely voters would vote against it, as they did, those who actually understood what the agreement meant were mostly in favour. Elections have the same problem. As Jonathan Rauch noted in 2019, one study of the 2008 United States presidential election found that voters were only slightly better at finding the candidate that best represented their views than a random guess.

By contrast, assembly democracy offers the best of both worlds. It allows a decision to have the legitimacy of being made by ordinary people while also giving them a chance to study a subject, listen to differing perspectives on it and make a better-informed decision than what they would have done if asked on the spot. As the experience with trial juries shows, it is possible for a sample of ordinary people to become experts on a topic that they probably don’t know much about. While people’s assemblies are less studied, one study in Ireland found that a citizens’ assembly conducted a better-informed debate on the issue of abortion than a committee of the national parliament.

Assembly democracy isn’t necessarily an alternative to representative democracy. People’s assemblies are not suited for making decisions above a local level. Citizens’ assemblies are, but unlike an election, they allow only a limited number of citizens to participate. Lawmaking can be a complex business, so professional politicians may still be needed. Finally, giving citizens’ assemblies power over a parliament, let alone replacing it, is simply untested in modern times.

So for now, assembly democracy is best suited to providing advice to elected politicians on all levels of government, as well as being a beneficial experience to those involved. Perhaps in future, a permanent citizens’ assembly will resolve the burning political issues of the day, with an elected parliament acting as the servants who fulfil its wishes, while people’s assemblies play a similar role at a local level.

In my next post, I will discuss why you should start a people’s assembly.