Democracy was first built on a lot of loose rock.

Can democracy now be rebuilt on that very same ground?

Recently, I spent a long afternoon on a dusty and rocky Athens hill called the Pnyx for the first meeting of a novel assembly inspired by the past.

It was the most audacious and beautiful democratic event I’ve ever witnessed.

The Pnyx rises just west of the Acropolis. There, the ancient Athenian Ecclesia, consisting of local citizens mostly chosen by lot, gathered more than 100 generations ago to make all important government decisions. No assembly had met there since 322 B.C.E—until that warm early fall night.

This new People’s Assembly was open to anyone, unlike its ancient Athenian predecessor, which excluded women, slaves, and foreigners. Indeed, the 92 attendees I counted were roughly split between men and women, and included people from more than 15 European countries, plus a few visitors from other continents.

But the transformational potential of this People’s Assembly goes far beyond inclusion. If its members can establish their assembly in the governance of Europe, it might change everything we think we know about democracy.

“Citizens of Athens, citizens of the world,” declared Kalypso Nicolaidis, a Franco-Greek scholar who helps lead the assembly and is chair in global affairs at the European University’s School of Transnational Governance, “we would like to invite you to change yourselves.”

Around the world, democracy is seen as a system in which the public, through elections, chooses its representatives. But the People’s Assembly wouldn’t consist of elected politicians. Instead, it would be composed of everyday people, chosen by lottery processes that ensure that the body is a demographic mirror of the people it represents.

These wouldn’t be just the people of one city, or one province, or even one nation. The People’s Assembly would be a transnational body, with members selected by lottery to represent all of Europe. There’s no body like that on Earth.

But what truly sets apart the idea—and what would make it revolutionary—is its permanence.

Assemblies chosen by lotteries have become increasingly common around the world, especially in Europe and Japan. But almost all of these assemblies are temporary bodies. They are convened to answer some big question or reckon with some thorny problem. They meet for weeks or months or even a year or so. Then they issue their plan or recommendations—and dissolve.

The People’s Assembly would never go away. Certainly, its members would change frequently, often after just months, with a new lottery to refill posts. But it would become a permanent feature of the landscape, its own branch of government.

It also would signal that the age of the elected politician is fading. Politicians are already an unpopular group almost everywhere—corrupted, incompetent, ineffective. Democracy by lottery is appealing because it offers a model to allow citizens to check politicians, and perhaps one day to replace them.

A move away from elected politicians, and toward representatives selected by lottery, also would mean a greater diminishment of elections. Ironically, eliminating or reducing the frequency of elections might be a way to save democracy.

In many places, elections no longer reinforce democracy. They are too compromised—by diminishing social trust, by money in politics, by the outsized power of parties and interest groups. Their outcomes often lead to conflict, violence, even war. And elections are routinely used by authoritarians and dictators to gain popular legitimacy.

Which is why a successful, continent-wide People’s Assembly would likely inspire the creation of more such permanent bodies—at the national, provincial and local levels in Europe and elsewhere. In turn, the spread of such assemblies would require changes in political infrastructure, new modes of lobbying, and new kinds of technocratic agencies to support lottery-selected representatives.

How might government and democracy be different in an era of these assemblies? Camille Dobler, a veteran facilitator of assembly processes at the Paris-based Missions Publiques, answers that question in a word: “trans-localism.” By that, she means a fusion of transnational and local governance.

Which makes sense. Assemblies by lot, from those Athenians gathering 2,300 years ago to the new versions today, are fundamentally local tools. Because it’s easiest to assemble with your own neighbors. But in a deeply networked world facing planetary problems of climate and health and war, there is a need for transnational governance.

So, we are likely to see new networks of local and national assemblies that collaborate through transnational bodies, like the People’s Assembly. How such collaborations might best work is one of the most urgent governance questions of the future.

It’s easier to foresee the failure of current democratic structures than the journey to the next forms of democracy. There is so much to figure out—new systems, new demands on everyday people, new modes of collaboration.

So, the people and organizations behind the People’s Assembly have announced that they are embarking on a “Democratic Odyssey” to talk to people across Europe about how they want their assembly, and the future, to work. Next fall, they plan to return to Athens to reconvene the Assembly, and begin its formal work.

“We are ready to get our boots dirty,” Nicolaidis said while standing on that rocky hill.

The post On a Rocky Hill in Athens, a ‘Democratic Odyssey’ Begins appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Maddeningly, many Californians who claim to be defenders of democracy persist in calling this democratic triumph an expensive waste of money. (Some of these thoughtless critics even have the gall to call themselves Democrats.) If they don’t want to look like hypocrites, they should stop complaining, reconsider this election’s math, and reflect more deeply on the price of democracy.

Let’s start with the number: $276 million is almost nothing in a state California’s size. That figure represents less than 1 percent of the current budget surplus, and about one-tenth of 1 percent of the overall state budget. To put it in another context, the election cost $100 million less than baseball’s Los Angeles Dodgers are paying their right fielder.

Media commentators have spent the past two weeks claiming, falsely, that the recall took $300 million away from schools or healthcare or homelessness. The truth is the exact opposite. The recall helped increase funding for those core government services to historic heights—in part because of the pressure the election put on our state’s ruling Democrats as they negotiated a budget this summer.

And let me blunt: If legislators and the governor had had another $300 million, it’s quite possible they would have blown it on a giveaway to their own political backers. In fact, that’s precisely what happened in July, when some of the same Democratic politicians questioning the recall’s cost spent $330 million to double the size of an unnecessary and ineffective tax credit for wealthy Hollywood producers.

Those same politicians could have reduced the cost of the recall by $60 million if they hadn’t insisted on moving the election date up to September 14 to give Newsom a political advantage.

But let’s not get too upset about that bit of hypocrisy, because even with the additional cost, the recall was worth it.

Spending more on elections has never made more sense than it does right now. California’s election system is in the midst of a historic transition to make voting easier. New practices, like opening vote centers for weeks before elections and sending everyone a mail-in ballot, are so far a success, with turnout up. But this progress is fragile because of a rising wave of disinformation attacking elections and democracy. The people who run our elections—county officials and volunteers—are facing harassment and threats because they do their jobs honestly.

More than 80 percent of the $276 million cost of the recall is going to those same county election officials—who, in running the recall election, get to reinforce new election infrastructure, find new ways to bring out voters, and take measures to protect themselves and their elections against threats. The rest of the money (more than $30 million) is used by the state to do things like print and distribute voter guides in the different languages that Californians speak.

Think of the recall’s cost as money spent on infrastructure—democratic infrastructure. And instead of complaining about it, think of how much more we could invest in it. If we’re serious about saving democracy, we should create funding for every California municipality to have a robust office to support public participation and civic engagement, as foreign cities often do. We also should raise and stabilize election funding, hire more public workers to help hard-to-reach people participate and vote, and provide more public financing for campaigns, with an emphasis on supporting greater information and debate on ballot measures.

More people paying more attention to democracy can help reshape history.

Just look at the dramatic transformation of our governor, who was flailing and unfocused—until it became clear the recall would qualify. Then, Newsom made personnel changes in his team, and curbed his bad habit of creating working groups or commissions or task forces to address tricky problems rather than managing them himself. (The nadir of Newsomian delegation was a “task force” to study…pause for a breath…oxygen in late 2020, instead of simply getting more to hospitals.)

Facing recall, Newsom started taking big, direct actions—and never stopped. After keeping kids out of classrooms for too long, he pressured to force schools to reopen. He replaced a miserly offer of loans to struggling businesses with a system of generous grants. He junked the confusing COVID-19 colored-tier system and reopened the state in June.

If this sounds like cheerleading, well, Newsom saved that too, reversing a ban that initially kept cheerleaders off the sidelines after high school sports reopened.

The hip-hip-hoorays didn’t stop there. Newsom reversed himself and moved aggressively to shut down homeless encampments. And his recall year budget made too many historic investments—from health coverage to college affordability—to list here. To pick just one: after 25 years of California politicians promising and failing to deliver universal preschool, Newsom’s recall budget plan actually provides for a full year of transitional kindergarten for all 4-year-olds.

When you understand this context, Newsom’s landslide victory does not mean that the election was unnecessary. To the contrary, his win shows the recall’s value. The election affirmed the governor’s big impactful acts of governance, and set the stage for more aggressive action, especially around the pandemic. Newsom framed the election in part as a choice about pushing hard for more vaccinations—meaning this recall will almost certainly save lives.

Now, we Californians just have to keep Newsom—who is prone to distraction and flights of fancy—disciplined, vulnerable, and on edge. He has been more effective in 2021 as his public personality grows saltier, angrier, and wounded.

And if Newsom gets complacent after being re-elected next year, perhaps some civic-minded Californian can qualify another recall to improve the governor’s focus—and give us another opportunity to spend $300 million on our democracy.

The post California’s Recall Was Worth Every Penny appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Even before the voting started, Democrats and California elites were crying foul. And when they say we need to change the way we do recall elections, they are half-right.

The recall—the question of whether to remove a governor—works just fine, despite what you may have read. But the election piece—the second question on the ballot, in which voters must pick a replacement for the governor if he’s recalled—is an anti-democratic mess.

And worrying about an undemocratic result in this one election understates the problem. All California elections, be they recalls or not, don’t match how human beings think, choose, and vote.

For one thing, humans do best when we have a lot of information about a few clear choices. But our elections give people dozens of possible candidates, about whom we often have very little information. Low-information elections are also deeply vulnerable to misinformation.

Over the last decade, we California voters eliminated party primaries for state and federal elections. The change was supposed to discourage political polarization and give us more moderate candidates. It’s done the opposite.

In the party primaries of old, a voter could study their party’s relatively short list of candidates, then choose one. The process gave us a greater sense of the people for whom we were voting.

Our current “top two” system, sometimes called an “open” primary, confuses and overwhelms voters. We put the dozens of candidates for a single major public office all together, regardless of party, with 30 or more names running over multiple pages. It’s impossible for voters to know anything about more than a handful of the candidates—much less to find the choice they prefer in that thick jungle of names.

The recall replacement election, with 46 candidates, is thus a typical California electoral clusterfuck, and voters are confused about how or whether they should vote on this second question. Democrats, unable to come up with short and clear messaging on the matter, have given up, and told voters not to name a replacement for governor. When the largest party in the state is telling people not to vote, something is seriously wrong.

Such confusion and mixed messaging also tend to discourage voter turnout. But this is hardly the only problem; these big, all-party, open elections can be easily gamed.

The main argument against this recall is that a person could become governor with a slim plurality of the vote (the current leader’s vote share is 20 percent in polls), and with far less popular than the governor, who could get 49 percent of the vote and still be removed from office. That’s awful, but it’s not the only awful possibility in these too-many-candidate California elections.

A party that offers more competition, and more compelling candidates, can end up losing despite having the support of most voters. Imagine either a recall election or a regular election in which 60 percent of the voters want to vote for Democratic candidates, but there are six viable candidates who get around 10 percent of the total votes. All six candidates could easily finish behind two Republican contenders who divide up just 40 percent of the votes, getting 20 percent or so each. In such a case, the winner—or the top two candidates—would have a tiny plurality of support, from the party that has only a minority of support.

That isn’t democratic. And it doesn’t fit how we vote. Humans are party animals—party affiliation almost always determines our vote, studies show. And if you doubt that, just try to remember the name of the person you voted for in your local State Assembly race last year. (Unless you are incredibly active politically, you won’t be able to.) But can you remember the party of that candidate? Probably yes. Most Californians vote for candidates of the same party.

Our reforms should make it easier for us to vote by party. The simplest and fairest way to do that would be to adopt a system of proportional representation, in which Californians vote for a party or slate of party candidates. Whether it’s a recall or a regular election, the party with the most votes would get the office—and a number of representatives equal to their percentage of the vote.

If that’s too radical for you, another alternative would be to replace the current election system with ranked choice voting, which was used recently in the New York City mayoral election. Ranked choice encourages coalition building, and elevates candidates with broader support—unlike the top two and the recall jungle election systems, which are better for candidates with narrow but intense support.

Unfortunately, these types of reforms aren’t on the table. The leading Democrats, and California elites who are angry about this recall, are proposing reforms that in fact limit democracy.

So far, there have been calls to make it harder to qualify recalls for the ballot, even though it’s already very hard—requiring nearly 1.5 million signatures in a short time frame. (This year’s recall had an extra four months to qualify, because of a judge’s unusual ruling; in the normal time frame, it never would have made it.) Making recalls harder to qualify would only make them more expensive—meaning that only the richest people or interests could pursue recalls.

Another argument is that there shouldn’t be an election at all—that the lieutenant governor should succeed a recalled governor. That may be what previous constitutional framers in California intended, but that’s not very democratic. Lieutenant governors are often allies of governors, so replacing one with the other isn’t change. Shouldn’t people have the right to choose the successor of any official they want to recall?

Still other elitists are arguing for limiting the basis for recalls—requiring that a politician be guilty of violating the law or corruption to be removed from office. But that would make the recall like the federal impeachment process—a quasi-prosecution to meet a standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors”. And as we learned in the Trump era, it’s impossible for politicians to remove even the most abusive fellow politician from office in a process like that.

People should be able to remove their governor for incompetence, failure, or any other dereliction of duty. In this apocalyptic century, a governor who can’t respond effectively to emergencies might need to be replaced. California’s recall, which can have any justification, might save lives.

Making it harder to use recalls also would diminish some of the positive effects of the tool. Gavin Newsom’s performance clearly improved earlier this year when it appeared he might face a recall. He was more responsive to the public, replaced failing staff members, and took more aggressive actions to aid needy Californians.

Regardless of whether Gavin Newsom wins or loses, California may win—if this recall election forces us to reform all of our elections.

The post Your Recall Confusion Is Part of a Much Bigger Problem appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.