Against Elections: The Case for Democracy by David Van Reybrouck (PDF)

Description

Democracy is in bad health. The symptoms are familiar: the rise of fear-mongering populists, widespread distrust in the establishment, personality contests, and point-scoring in place of reasoned debate, slogans instead of expertise. Against Elections offers a new diagnosis —and an ancient remedy. David Van Reybrouck reminds us that the original purpose of elections was to exclude the people from power by appointing an elite to govern over them. He demonstrates how over time their effect has been to reduce the people’s participation in government to an absolute minimum, ensure power remains in the hands of those who already wield it, and force politicians to judge policies not on their merits but on their likelihood to win or lose votes. And that’s when elections go well. Yet for most of democracy’s 3000-year history governments were not chosen by election at all: they were appointed, much like the jury system, through a combination of volunteering and lottery. Drawing on vast learning, an international array of evidence, and a growing number of successful trials, Against Elections demonstrates how a sophisticated and practical version of this ancient system would work today and thus eliminate the underlying cause of democracy’s sickness. Urgent, heretical, and completely convincing, this book leaves only one question to be answered: what are we waiting for?

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Very persuasive . . . There are few new big ideas in politics and few answers to the serious challenge faced by democratic politics . . . invigorating and advance[s] a promising practical idea . . . fresh, challenging and uncomplicated.” —Times”This fine iconoclastic work could not be more timely … demonstrate[s] that far from safeguarding our right to self-determination, elections are actually impeding our democracy.” —Karen Armstrong, author, A History of God”Mounts a convincing case that we have wrongly conflated democracy with elections.” —Observer”Van Reybrouck wants to revive a system in which government is not just for the people, but really by the people . . . a persuasive description of a system designed to be soundly based in popular assent . . . A President Trump might focus attention on his views.” —Financial Times”Choosing our rulers by popular vote has failed to deliver true democratic government: that seems to be the verdict of history unfolding before our eyes. Cogently and persuasively, David Van Reybrouck pleads for a return to selection by lot, and outlines a range of well thought out plans for how sortitive democracy might be implemented. With the popular media and political parties fiercely opposed to it, sortitive democracy will not find it easy to win acceptance. Nonetheless, it may well be an idea whose time has come.” —J. M. Coetzee”A sovereign remedy for the raging crypto-oligarchy of our turbulent times.” —Paul Cartledge, author, Democracy: A Life About the Author David Van Reybrouck is a pioneering advocate of participatory democracy. He founded the G1000 Citizens’ Summit, and his work has led to trials in participatory democracy throughout the Netherlands. He is also one of the most highly regarded literary and political writers of his generation and the author of Congo: The Epic History of a People, which won 19 prizes and has been translated into a dozen languages.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐A must read for any one who is into politics or political science.The auther was clear and easy to follow

⭐A must for those who care with politics, society and democracy. One of the best books on the subject I’ve ever read.

⭐We should all read it!

⭐The diagnosis is correct but the proposed solution is quite absurd

⭐It must be clear to all that the current systems of elections around the world are dysfunctional. In this book, Reybrook clearly shows how elections establish a political aristocracy that is fundamentally undemocratic. Needed is a “deliberative democracy” where a large representative group of arbirarily selected citizens concern themselves with problem solving for a limited term of time. The somewht negative reviews seen here could well have been written by persons with a vested interest in the status quo. That would include memebers of political parties, lobbies, think tanks, and media who serve as gatekeepers keeping “ordinary” citizens from participating in the political process. Read this book and judge for yourself!

⭐A so-called public intellectual writes about democracy by lot, probably trying to be provocative by pushing an extreme idea. What the book proves is that he has only half-baked this idea, and democratic reform by public intellectuals is more rhetoric than substance. Reading a few philosophy books, and talking to a few people doesn’t generate expertise. Even his acknowledgements are flawed. He thanks Ken Carter for his information on British Columbia Citizens Assembly; it was Ken Carty. The real problem is that it will detract from real reforms that could help democratic process.

⭐An inspiring analysis of the many problems with our adversarial electoral political system – particularly where there are two dominant parties controlled by party machines. This year has brought even more evidence of how the system has become dysfunctional in the UK, the USA and elsewhere.I particularly liked his description of how adversarial electoral politics has exacerbated social divisions in many economically developing countries, (although he could have expanded on this further).There are good practical examples, not just from ancient Greece but from modern experiments as to how a degree of government by lot can be implemented. For those of us in the UK, we must start with demanding that our House of Lords is chosen primarily at random to forma genuine House of Peers just as we choose juries – then it will be genuinely representative of the people of this country. Simply making it directly elected would do nothing more than increase the power of the party machines which are too dominated by small cliques and big money.

⭐This useful book makes a case for “sortition” – the creation of a representative assembly (e.g. House of Commons) by lottery. It proposes a new constitution to abolish elections and conscription of the assembly like a jury. Possible practical objections are 1) it would take a long time to persuade today’s legislature to change the constitution, and 2) many people would avoid conscription (as happens with trial juries). An alternative to this approach suggests that voters should coordinate their votes to elect a truly representative assembly of volunteers.“Against Elections” argues that a representative assembly which is a ‘portrait in miniature of the population at large’ offers the greatest hope of true democracy. That vision is clearer and more powerful now than when John Adams articulated it in 1776, because it recognises ‘the wisdom of the group’ which was not so well understood in his time. Our new knowledge of human evolution shows that the wisdom of the group is the primary product of the human brain – a synthesis of the very disparate life experiences of the people that share our communication ability. Our new understanding of group decision-making also shows that the wisdom of the group, properly orchestrated, is more reliable than ‘expertise’. Condorcet’s theorem shows that the group is wiser than any individual in it. The wisdom of the group is a valuable asset to be mobilised in a democracy, not just a fairer way of apportioning the spoils of office.It is unfortunate that Against Elections characterises John Adams’s vision as elitist. When he urged people ‘to depute power from the many, to a few of the most wise and good’ he did not mean that the ‘portrait in miniature’ should be a selective one, with candidates restricted to arbitrarily-identified ‘wise and good’ people. He meant that this representative assembly should itself depute to a higher council and executive after discussion among themselves and their constituents. Although they might start out with the saloon-bar arguments of the population at large, the ‘portrait in miniature’ would become wiser through full-time discussion and research. Due to the superiority of group wisdom, they would elect a wise and good executive council. It’s not the only way to define wise and good but it’s the best we will ever have.Similarly, James Madison was not talking about this representative assembly when he said that the Constitution should ‘obtain for rulers, men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue the common good’. Neither Adams nor Madison foresaw the representative assembly as executive rulers. They wanted the representatives to elect the rulers by consensus. Majority rule by whichever group controlled more than half of the assembly? They abominated the idea. Today it has become the norm, in Britain at least. Poor us!When their follower John Stuart Mill argued for female suffrage, the book over-generalises by saying that ‘his contemporaries said he was mad’. Mill got a respectable vote for his female suffrage amendment in 1867. In 1869 females were enfranchised in local authority elections, which were much more important than now. The book’s patronising of Adams, Madison, Mill and their contemporaries is counter-productive. It would make a more effective argument for democracy if we were to say we want to reclaim their vision, and show how our modern politicians have shamelessly corrupted it. If the writings of these wise men seem to us inconsistent, we should try harder to understand them before summarily dismissing them as muddle-headed antique dead white males.It should not be held against these founding fathers that they did not foresee how badly their representative assembly would be corrupted by mass media (Madison’s ‘vicious arts by which elections are carried’) and by the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ first identified by Robert Michels in 1910. These are the evils. These are the forces that have led us to betray democracy. But the universal franchise and new ways to coordinate voting will correct them.

⭐Interesting remedies and ideas. But the academic writing made it a tough read.

⭐wanted as present

⭐very interesting book, goog service.

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