I’ve often talked here about the inherent tension between democracy’s two personalities – democracy as the will of the people and democracy as the rational system of government. The tension can sometimes come in the question: “If people are generally ill-informed and only a small number are well-informed, how can they collectively take decisions that are likely to be right?”
There are several ways of answering that challenge. Here are three:
(a) Representative democracy smoothes the up-and-down passions of the people and allows individuals who are roughly representative of them (and also accountable to them) to become well-informed across a range of issues. They then are delegated the power to take decisions.
(b) Being well-informed is an illusion: general common sense is a better guide to what’s right, because expert arguments have become detached from reality, or are guided too much by theory and ideology;
(c) Ill-informed individuals can still participate in collective decision-making because they are sensible enough to understand their limitations, and will listen to experts. In this way well-informed opinions can sway the judgements of large numbers of ill-informed people, producing reliable decisions while still enabling mass participation.
Let’s call the three arguments Representitative, Populist and Participatory. Personally, I believe in (a) leavened with a good deal of (c), but a lot of the discourse online tends towards (b).
Take the comment thread on this article by Vernon Bogdanor in today’s Guardian. Prof Bogdanor is, I think it’s fair to say, one of the leading experts on the constitution. Professor of Government at Oxford, advisor to a large number of governments on constitutional issues, Council member at the Hansard Society. If there is a single person who knows constitutions and constitutionalism, it’s him.
So what was the commenters’ response to a well-argued article about Parliamentary Privilege as it related to Damien Green? Not favourable, to say the least. Here are a few examples:
The article is a joke. The author cannot tell the difference between wartime and peacetime for a start. Nor information which is an Official Secret and that which isn’t.
Pull the other one mate.
A perfect example of Ivory Towre remoteness, the Professor has clearly got the wrong end of the stick and presents a bunch of strawman arguments that nobody has presented on any of the threads in the Guardian.
Now, no-one is claiming that the blog commenter crowd, or CiF commenters, are representative of the people in any sense, thank heavens. But the question arises, if not them – then who?
Does the oppositionist selection bias (people with strong views against something are most likely to comment) make participation an exercise in pain for all concerned? And does that push us towards reaffirming pure representation unmodified by comment or participation?
It’s one possible future, a reverse of what Government policy and current political trends favour. My personal view is that the current tenor of political debate online needs to develop into a more helpful and open dialogue, but that the tools and the levels of participation needed are not there yet. Reading Guardian threads like that, though, makes me wonder how long the journey’s going to take.
[...] on December 2, 2008 by Paul Evans Over at the Democratic Society blog, Anthony has written a very good post on the balance between decisions that have a democratic flavour to them (in the crudest sense of [...]
Didn’t see much wrong with the Bogdanor article. It was, as ever with him, a fairly closely argued skim over the relevant precedents. It was hardly partisan, it was just a “them’s the facts” report that very much reminded me of the kickings he used to give me over my essays.
I simply can’t see why it has attracted so much vitriol.
Don’t such comments on CiF (and there are of course countless worse examples) undermine your point c?
Ill-informed individuals are not sensible enough to understand their limitations. Quite the opposite. They are the most dogmatic, most over-confident, and so most likely to pollute public discourse with their shrill prejudices.
@Chris
Yes, a bit I think. On the other side, I’d say that the subgroup of the ill-informed who appear on CiF are self-selected for (a) having strong views and (b) being bothered to post them. Not wanting to be Nixonian about it, a majority of people don’t behave in that way, and we don’t know what their attitudes and beliefs are.
By way of example, one of the vitriolic commenters on Vernon Bogdanor’s piece mentions Gus O’Donnell (the Cabinet Secretary) without reference to what his job is. Not only is the poster revealing himself to be in the tiny minority of people in the country who’ve heard of Gus O’Donnell, he’s also making the assumption that others on CiF will know who he’s talking about.