Demarchy: The Ideal Democracy
By Kevin Albrecht
April 27, 2005
“All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” This famous insight by Lord John Dalberg-Acton has served as a warning to people for over three-hundred years, yet it is a valid warning even today. When Lord Acton wrote this warning, the world around him was filled with monarchs with varying degrees of power—some absolute, like the strong kings of France, and of course many others with some form of restraint on their power. His world was undeniably a world of great corruption. Today, much of the world is ruled by democracies that claim to represent the people of their nation, yet few would deny corruption is still a problem. However, even if corruption could be totally eliminated from these democracies, they would still exhibit some fundamental flaws that are endemic to electoral politics. Demarchy is a new form of democratic government that preserves, and even extends, the benefits of traditional democracy, yet eliminates its fundamental problems.
What is Demarchy?
Democracy, as it has been implemented in world today, is tied to the concept of voting. In these democracies, the populace conducts elections at specific intervals with the goal of choosing government leaders. The method used to choose these leaders is usually by casting votes, and the person with the highest vote count for each office attains that office. But how else might government leaders be chosen?
John Burnheim, an Australian political philosopher, proposed in his book Is Democracy Possible, an alternative method of choosing leaders, which he called demarchy. In a demarchy, leaders are not chosen by voting in elections, but rather by random selection. This process of selection, also called sortition, is meant to be a random sampling of the entire populace, with the primary goal of being truly representative of the people.
In a representative democracy, people elect leaders to represent them at different levels of government. These levels of government form a hierarchy over geographic regions (see Figure 1). In the United States, these levels would be municipal, county, state, and federal governments. Each of these levels of government have jurisdiction over all aspects of government in their respective regions. For example, at the municipal level, the government usually decides issues of sewage management, roads, and schools, to name a few. Another example: at the federal level, the government is responsible for issues relating to trade, war, national laws, and income taxes.
Figure 1 -- Regional Hierarchy of Governments in a Representative Democracy
In a demarchy, however, the governing bodies form a hierarchy based on issues. These bodies are called policy juries or functional groups (also known as consensus councils, planning cells, or citizens’ juries). Each community will have policy juries whose job it is to study come to decisions on particular topics. For example, a small community may have policy juries on street maintenance, water supply, and business development. The members of a policy jury are determined by random selection from the community at large to serve a set term, not dissimilar to the term of elected officials in a representative democracy. At the end of each member’s term, they return to the community as a normal citizen.
These policy juries act in a way very similar to the way court juries act in civil and criminal court cases. Both are formed similarly, by random selection from the community at large. The policy jury, like a court jury, hears testimony from expert witnesses on the topic being investigated. After the jury feels it has enough information to make a decision, it votes on the topic and comes to a conclusion on the best course of action to take.
Figure 2 -- Hierarchy of Functional Groups in a Demarchy
Two types of policy juries are proposed by Burnheim: first-level and second-level (see Figure 2). First-level policy juries deal directly with issues that affect the community, as discussed above. The second-level groups have no jurisdiction to take action on topics which are covered by the first-level groups. Their only job is to adjudicate disagreements that arise between the first-level groups. For example, if a policy jury on street improvements decides that a new street needs to be built to connect two parts of town, but another policy jury on zoning decides that the land should be reserved for farm use, a second-level group will hear testimony from the two groups and come to a decision as to which groups’ course of action is best.
What Form Should a Demarchy Take?
Three general forms of demarchy have been proposed. Each of these retain some of the fundamental characteristics of the demarchy proposed above, but differ in the amount of random selection used and in the structure of the government of the state.
The first and most radical form of demarchy proposed is that of John Burnheim. In this radical demarchy, all parts of government (with the possible exception of the judicial branch) are replaced by policy juries. There will be no national government and in fact, no nations at all, at least in the political sense of the word. Most important of all, the radical demarchy has no state. There is no bureaucracy and no concept of a nation-state. The policy juries’ decisions are not binding as they will have no means to enforce their decisions, which instead must be followed out of the persuasiveness of their argument rather than some threat of force. Essentially, the demarchy proposed by Burnheim is a sort of organized anarchy.
The second type of demarchy, on the other extreme from radical demarchy, is the conservative type described by Callenbach and Phillips in A Citizen Legislature. Although Callenbach and Phillips did not describe their proposal in terms of a demarchy, it has obvious similarities to the general concept. Their proposal, however, lacks policy juries entirely. In their book, they argue that the United States House of Representatives should be replaced by a randomly chosen body. This randomly chosen body would be very similar, even identical, in power and jurisdiction to the current elected House of Representatives.
The idea of changing the House of Representatives into a body chosen by sortition could easily be extended to the other parts of government: various state legislatures, the Senate—even executive branch positions such as mayor, governor, and president. While changing legislative bodies over to demarchy-style sortition may hold promise, executive positions are fundamentally unsuited to this change. By the nature of random selection, the result of a sortition will cut across all types of people. Many of the people chosen will make good jurors; however, there will also be some chosen who will inevitably prove to be poor jurors. When the body is significantly large, randomness will ensure that the good jurors will be able to balance out the ill-efforts of the poor jurors. But using sortition to fill a single-person office could easily lead to choosing a person unsuited for the job.
The third model for a demarchy to take would be a mixture of the radical and conservative models. In this moderate demarchy, the concept of policy juries is left intact from the radical model and the existence of a state is retained from the conservative model. Local governments would be largely replaced by policy juries, which would have the jurisdiction to enforce their decisions, much like the decisions of a legislature are enforceable today. The exact nature of regional and national governments in this hybrid system is still debatable. They could possibly be chosen by election of the populace at large, as in current democracies, or could be randomly chosen from people who fit a certain criteria, such as having served on a local policy jury for a set amount of time. This model seems to retain most of the benefits of radical demarchy, without the anarchic elements which would require a totally re-imagining of what a government is.
The Purpose of Government
Philosophers throughout history— from ancient Greece up until today— have debated on what the purpose of government should be. Some philosophers argued that government exists to protect the rights of its citizens. Others see its goal as determining and carrying out the will of the people governed. Modern western society generally accepts that governments exist for the people. The United States Declaration of Independence famously declares that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” All of these theories on the reason for government are satisfied by demarchy.
John Locke, whose writings on political philosophy strongly influenced the founders of the United States, argued that every person has rights and among these rights are certain inalienable rights. These inalienable rights (enumerated by Locke as life, liberty, and estate) cannot be taken away from an individual. The purpose of the government in Locke’s view is then to protect the rights of the individual from infringement. The government’s power derives from the consent of the citizens. He argued that since all governments are created by the people, the ultimate authority resides with the people and not with the created government. Demarchy ensures that the government is of the people, since its leaders are ordinary citizens. After fulfilling their duty on the policy jury, they continue their lives as members of the community. There are no career politicians that can lose touch with the real world around them.
Lord John Dalberg-Acton, an English historian, wrote in 1881 that “the danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.” Lord Acton, also noted for his statements about corruption, here exhorts that there is a danger in allowing any single economic or social class to control the government. In a demarchy, the random process of sortition prevents this by ensuring that a cross-section of the entire population is represented in the government. When every person from every class is not only eligible, but is practically able to achieve a government position, it is certain that no particular class can come to dominate the others completely.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th century political philosopher from France, was bitterly opposed to representative government. He believed that they made the populace free only at certain intervals (during the elections). The people were therefore powerless to make decisions at any other time. Another important part of Rousseau’s theory was that of the general will. A perfect government must seek to determine the general will of the people and enforce it on the people governed. While a direct democracy seems to be the only government fully compatible with Rousseau’s ideas, it is impractical to implement in anything larger than a small community. Demarchy, however, allows a modification of direct democracy to scale up to a larger population. This slight modification should represent the people better since it is not affected by the political maneuverings of a representative democracy, and will therefore be able to meet Rousseau’s criteria of determining the general will of the people.
Demarchy as an Improved Democracy
Because it puts the government in the hands of the people, not in some privileged minority, demarchy can be looked at as a type of democracy. The differences from the modern understanding of what democracy is, however, allow demarchy to have distinct advantages over elective democracies. These differences allow demarchy to fulfill the goals that representative democracy claims it is trying to achieve, but fails to do in actual practice.
Corruption is a major problem in many governments around the world, taking many forms such as biased influence by the media, influence by special interest groups, and outright bribery. Corruption is weakened in most democracies, but even there it remains a problem. In a demarchy, corruption is lessened due to the fact that those who are seeking power are only able to attain it as much as those who are not seeking power. In addition, because government officials in a demarchy are guaranteed to only serve for a small time before reentering their community, there is a strong incentive for officials to act in a more selfless manner than the corresponding officials might in a representative democracy.
The reason corruption is reduced in a democracy is that corruption—at least outright corruption—hurts elected officials in a democracy. The power of elected official rests in the willingness of the populace to trust the official. If they are found to be corrupt, they will lose the public trust and likely lose reelection. Realistically, however, corruption will still occur even in a demarchy. But the strength of a demarchy over a representative democracy is much greater than it ability to reduce corruption, for even if a democracy could function totally free of corruption, it would still have inherent flaws.
One way that demarchy alleviates the problems of a democracy is by eliminating the politically elite class. In a representative democracy, the elected officials themselves tend to become a privileged class. Because the people who attain power are those most willing to seek it, an elite group forms which once it attains power, is unwilling to give it up. In a demarchy, all people, regardless of social standing, have a realistic chance to attain positions in government, thus eliminating this tendency. Once in office, the primary goal of elected politicians must be to seek reelection, so their choices are likely to be made out of political expediency rather than what is best for the people they are governing. Again, demarchy eliminates this problem since there are no elections and the jurors will be immediately back in the community after serving their term.
The primary way that demarchy improves democracy is by how it affects the populace. In a representative democracy, the electorate is kept largely uninvolved and uninformed, problems that demarchy seeks to address. As Rousseau pointed out, representative elections restrict the populace to making decisions only when they participate in an election. This participation is even further weakened in a modern representative democracy by allowing the electorate to choose only from a pre-selected list of candidates. By spreading out decision making to many specialized bodies, the policy juries of a demarchy allow the populace to be much more involved in the business of government. If the size and number of the policy juries and the length of the jurors’ terms are tuned correctly, it is possible to ensure that nearly everyone serves as a juror at some interval, maybe every ten years. This could be even further tuned by only selecting jurors for a jury from a pool of potential jurors who have not served on a jury for so many years. By ensuring everyone in the community serves on a policy jury at a reasonable interval, the populace stays informed and active in government.
Another major problem of representative democracies is balancing voter involvement with the competing forces of voter fatigue. If the populace is allowed to vote for officials only at infrequent periods, they will feel disenfranchised. On the other hand, if they are asked to vote on too many issues—for example in referenda—they quickly lose interest in voting and may stop participating in elections all together. A related problem that representative democracies face is rational ignorance. Rational ignorance occurs when voters decide that the cost of becoming knowledgeable enough to vote on a topic outweighs the benefits of actually voting. For example, a voter may decide that it would take too much research to understand the best candidate for an office, since that office may not have a great effect on him. Demarchy is able to overcome both of these problems. Voter fatigue is eliminated because the populace as a whole is never asked to vote (or is at least infrequently asked to vote in a hybrid system). The system of policy juries allows small groups to become highly knowledgeable on a single group of related topics, allowing other policy juries to focus on their respective topics. The populace as a whole then no longer needs to attempt to learn the intricacies of many different issues that affect them, eliminating the necessity of the populace to choose rational ignorance.
Demarchy in the Real World
Although the discussion of demarchy has remained an abstract idea so far, there are multiple examples in the world, both today and in the past, that exhibit at least some of the ideas of demarchy. In ancient Athens, the Council of 500 was chosen by casting lots (sortition). Thus it seems the ancient Greeks were the first to use the random element of demarchy on a wide scale.
In modern times, court juries bear the closest resemblance to policy juries. Both juries are chosen by random selection of the populace, although in a court jury this is number is further reduced by the attorneys in the court case. They both hear evidence from expert witnesses that help the juries come to a decision. Court juries are thus an important model for how to construct and manage policy juries should they be implemented in the future.
Establishing a Demarchy
If the theory behind policy juries and demarchy could be made widely known, what is the likelihood that the necessary reforms would be implemented? The biggest opposition to a demarchy would likely be politicians themselves, since their jobs would be eliminated—at least in a pure demarchy as envisioned by Burnheim. Special interest groups would also be opponents, since they would feel their influence over government would be all but eliminated. Although special interest groups would cease to function as they do now, there would still be some place for them. Instead of using political pressure to further their agenda, they could evolve into educational groups which offer testimony to policy juries.
Two general approached could be used to change a state into a demarchy: revolutionary and evolutionary. Revolution would require a total uprooting of the existing system. Revolutionary change would be unlikely to occur in an already stable democracy; however, if a state were already in transition from some sort of authoritarian regime and was seeking a type of democracy to move towards, demarchy may be a promising alternative to representative democracy. Evolutionary change is likely the only option for change in an already democratic state, and is superior to revolution in such a case since the cost of a total upheaval of the government in a stable democracy would outweigh the benefits of a demarchy.
If evolutionary change is the best approach to achieving demarchy, two options for that change present themselves. The first method is a top-down approach. In this approach, at first local government bodies remain intact from the representative democracy. National-level government bodies are slowly replaced by their demarchic equivalents. This is the approach that is inferred by Callenbach and Phillips in A Citizen Legislature as discussed previously. A more promising method of change may be the bottom-up approach. In this approach, the national government, which people are most familiar with, remains elective. The local government bodies are gradually replaced by policy juries. This approach seems to hold the most promise since the areas that policy juries would be most active in would be local issues.
Whichever form the demarchy takes or the method used to arrive at it, the promise that demarchy holds is powerful. One day, a society may arise which is able to set aside petty politics and attempt to seek realistic and pragmatic decisions for issues facing it by allowing all parts of society an equal voice in the political process.
References
Burnheim, John. “Democracy, Nation States, and the World System.” New Forms of Democracy. Eds. David Held and Christopher Pollitt. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1986.
Burnheim, John. Is Democracy Possible? The Alternative to Electoral Politics. Los Angeles: University of California, 1985.
Callenbach, Ernest and Michael Phillips. A Citizen Legislature. New York: Banyan Tree, 1985.
Dalberg-Acton, John. Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone. April 24, 1881. 1913.
“Demarchy.” Wikipedia Online. 20 April 2005. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarchy>
Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980.
Martin, Brian. “Demarchy: A Democratic Alternative to Electoral Politics.” Kick It Over 30 (Fall 1992): 11-13. Also available at: <http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/92kio.html>
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Rousseau’s Political Writings. Ed. Alan Ritter and Julia Conaway Bondanella. Trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987.
US Declaration of Independence. 1776.