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It’s hard to disagree with some harsh criticisms of the British political system made this week by Dominic Cummings. Democracy that forces voters to choose between prime ministers Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn has gone “very wrong,” the former Downing Street aide said. This poor binary option is the political equivalent of the cookie marks on a website, which gives voters the illusion of consent, but provides no other option than to accept non-negotiable terms and conditions.
Can we imagine a better democracy on Mars? The great virtue of thought experiments is that they expand the field of discussion. That’s why Hale University professor of political science Hélène Landemore recently challenged her students to write a constitution for Mars (her previous assignments to re-imagine the U.S. constitution occasionally caused unresolved conflicts). In addition to being impressed by travelers like Mars-based SpaceX founder Elon Musk, politicians should be impressed. Rather than repeating the standard template of an elected parliament and government representative, the students outlined a much more participatory policy.
Not surprisingly, with a focus on universal values, the Bill of Rights of Imaginary Martians echoed the U.S. Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But the students ’31-page constitution also reflected more contemporary concerns, such as the integrity of body and psychology, government privacy and non-interference, and sole ownership of personal data, among others. It also explicitly extended constitutional protection to animals and the environment.
But the most distinctive feature was that it implicitly rejected the electoral model of democratic politics by establishing six “mini-publics” of 250 randomly elected Martian citizens to legislate on economic, social and environmental policy, civil rights, government oversight, and interstellar politics. relationships. Fifty representatives from each of these audiences would sit in the main central chamber, approve the government’s budget, and have veto powers over the legislation.
The students were clearly awake in class because Landemore was one of the most credible advocates for this kind of “open democracy”. His argument is that traditional electoral policies have often been caught by the rich and dominated by narrow elites who have not succeeded in networking. “You have to be honest at some point and say that there is not much that can be recovered from this electoral model,” he says.
His idea is to build on old ideas citizen assemblies to ensure that as many perspectives as possible are respected in the implementation of a political agenda that includes a random sample of the population. “The best way is to diversify your team composition, rather than trying to maximize their ability. It seems counterintuitive, but when you have to solve tough problems you think better of a variety of thoughts than of very, very intelligent people who think the same way,” he says.
A good illustration of the failures of traditional politics, as well as the promises and mistakes of the citizens’ assemblies, came to France yellow vests 2018 protests. Poor car-dependent voters protested that a touch of political class in Paris had been hit by rising fuel prices, ignoring their concerns. In the face of this, President Emmanuel Macron launched it national debate which led to climate agreement of the citizens.
The French example highlights the difficulties of translating beautiful theories into practical policies. Some members of the Assembly he felt betrayed because parliament did not accept all of his suggestions, although Landemor stressed that they had moved the scoreboard significantly in the public debate. In his view, the demand for democracy remains almost universal but the supply is too limited.
This argument would certainly resonate political conference In Moscow this week Andrei Sakharov, a pro-human rights activist of the late Soviet era, was born on the centenary. Their fear was that Vladimir Putin’s Russia was a “messenger of the future,” and showed how it was possible for an authoritarian regime to reject universal moral values and international norms and build a “managed democracy” behind the facade of an electoral system.
This risk is real in many other countries as well. We shouldn’t wait until astronauts reach Mars to experiment more with participatory politics to strengthen democracy.
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