Probabilistic Direct Democracy

DRAFT

I’ve been thinking about how we go about government lately. In particular, I’ve been thinking democracy, and representative democracy¹. For those of us in the Anglosphere, we often conflate the two, using the word “democracy” when what we’re really talking about are representative democracies. I think there are definitely democratic moments in representative democracies; this is the whole point of general elections where (depending on the system you live in) you vote for members of your legislative and/or executive body. After those democratic moments we end up handing over our vote to the people we elected; they get to make decisions on our behalf. I guess the people comprising the legislative body of our governments practice democracy if we were to pretend that society consisted entirely of the senators/representatives/MPs in the legislative body.

So, what is democracy? In short, I think it’s a system in which everyone gets a say in making the rules that we all agree to live by. I’m being sort of vague here; I’m not talking about voting, nor am I talking about making laws. I’m also making some assumptions about how I think people should behave when living in a democracy. I’m assuming that if everyone makes a decision about how people should act, then most people living under this system will voluntarily choose to abide by that rule². If we put things in more concrete terms, a democracy is a system of government in which every person votes on every bill that gets proposed.

I think we’re now poised to start wondering to what degree representation is a valid substitute for democracy. In a very strict sense, it’s a terrible substitute. In most representative democracies the average person never votes on any of the laws that they are expected to abide by³. If we take a more charitable view, we could make the argument that by voting for a candidate or political party whose views align with our own, we end up with the same outcome as in a democratic system. In other words, if members of party α vote in a way that closely aligns with my own views, then it’s as good as if I had voted myself. I think this is the view that allows us to legitimize the notion of representation, despite knowing in the back of our minds that the societies that we live in are profoundly undemocratic.

Now let’s get to the real seitan and potatoes: Why can’t we live in a democracy in 2024? We have the technology to institute democracy at any scale we’d like. Why not just make an app or a website that allows citizens to vote⁴? We’re well positioned to remove the middleman standing between the people and true political agency! I actually like proposing this idea to people who live in “democratic” (using the Anglosphere understanding of the word) societies. A lot of people have the knee-jerk reaction that they wouldn’t trust their neighbor to make important decisions. I love this, because it highlights the degree to which the word “democracy” has become synonymous with “representative democracy”⁵. It’s also more than a little bit cynical; you wouldn’t trust Raquel from downstairs but you would trust whichever schmuck the Greens are sending to the Berlin Senate? C’mon! Raquel looked after your kid last week, and you got shit-canned with her on her birthday last year! Just because she believes in crystals and drinks a hemp smoothie every morning doesn’t mean she can’t make informed decisions about city budgets. I think the professionalization of politics coupled with the extremely esoteric wording found in most laws is partially to blame for this cynical take. I trust Raquel, and so should you!

You can imagine how this democracy app would work. Anyone would be able to propose a “bill”. As soon as the bill is proposed, it has a certain amount of time to get enough upvotes so it can be put to the general population for a vote. If it doesn’t reach the threshold of upvotes, then it gets canceled. We could imagine that we’d want to institute a “cooling off” period before the same (or a similar) bill could be proposed. Once the general population has voted on a bill, how do we decide whether it becomes a law? This might seem obvious: if a majority of people vote for the bill then it becomes a law. I propose a different mechanism. Instead of using some predefined threshold (50%, or two-thirds), let’s flip a weighted coin. If 60% of people vote yes, then there is a 60% chance that the bill becomes a law. The advantage of this system is that the majority never gets to dominate the minority – the minority always has a chance of winning.