Sir Keith might not be a household name outside his native Britain. But his apt phrase neatly justifies how much societies around the world today need more democracy—and more citizen engagement.

When democracies limit citizen participation to voting for political parties, we can blame our misfortunes on the politicians. Under such circumstances, we easily fall prey to demagogues who promise the earth, but who merely are in it for themselves. What we need is a system of “responsible” government, and this means that we have to take responsibility ourselves.

Direct democracy offers a number of ways to make us more responsible. First, there is the citizens’ initiative, a practice in democracies including Taiwan, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Uruguay. In Uruguay, if 25 percent of the electorate propose a piece of legislation (by signing a petition), the entire electorate must vote on it in referendum.

In 1994, Uruguayan citizens gathered enough signatures for a popular vote on whether to protect old-age pensions. A majority supported the proposition; it seemed a balanced choice and one that the country could afford. In making this choice, a majority of the citizens of Uruguay opted for social justice, and as they had in a 1992 vote on a plan for privatization, defied the neoliberal political establishment.

So was there a liberal bias? Did Uruguayan voters default to supporting policies of the left? Not uniformly. Indeed, in the same year, when the nation’s teachers’ union sought to guarantee the allocation of 27 percent of the state budget to education, the vast majority voted “no.” Not, it should be said, because the voters were opposed to good education. Rather, the voters rejected the measure because the proposition was too blunt and lacked nuance. Also, on balance, setting a fixed percentage was not a prudent way to budget. The debate over the education measure became a practical exercise in responsibility. The citizens weighed the alternatives and decided after careful deliberation.

What is interesting about the Uruguayan example is that both votes were initiated by the people. In this way, it is different than the top-down referendums in many countries. Unlike California, for example, countries like Switzerland, Italy, and Uruguay do not allowed paid petition gatherers. Hence, the initiative process is truly bottom-up and less likely to be captured by those with the deepest pockets.

Too often, politicians hold referendums when they themselves are in a tight spot. As the economist John Matsusaka has written, governments often rely on referendums for issues that are “too hot to handle.” In the late 1990s, British Prime Minister Tony Blair held a referendum on a parliament for Scotland in order not to alienate voters in England, and in 2005, the French government submitted the European Constitution to voters for fear of upsetting the large segment of French voters who were skeptical of the EU.

This process of elected politicians submitting unpopular questions to voters is not direct democracy. It is an abuse thereof. And it is entirely out of step with the current moment and how people want to engage with the world. By contrast, over the past three decades, some local and national governments have taken a much more proactive approach to citizen engagement through participatory budgeting.

The idea is simple: the government distributes a percentage (typically 10 percent) of the local budget to the citizens, who decide what to spend the money on. “How would you spend one million of the City’s money?” asked a pamphlet distributed to New Yorkers in 2011 that introduced them to the process.

Participatory budgeting came to Tower Hamlets, one of the most unequal parts of London, in 2009 and 2010 in a project designed to help the area choose new social service providers. The borough was divided into eight smaller areas; in each, a representative section of community volunteers could question the providers on whatever they wished, including social responsibility and commitment to the community. Eventually, the citizens were able to negotiate with providers on the details of how service would work.

Finally, after this process, a vote was taken on which providers offered the best value and which were most likely to provide employment to local residents. This participatory project was a success. An evaluation by the local government association concluded that “a majority of participants said they had developed skills linked to empowerment, and the community overall felt they could better influence their local environment and services.” It was popular, too. More than 77 percent wanted the council to repeat the event in the future.” This level of engagement was considerably above the average for similar boroughs, where as few as 20 percent of residents even bother to vote.

The Tower Hamlets experiment—as well as participatory budgeting in places as different as Porto Alegre, Brazil and Paris, France—shows that citizens behave responsibly when they are given responsibility.

The money allocated in participatory budgeting is finite, and those involved in the process know that they have to make hard choices. Admittedly “trust” is a difficult concept to measure, but research by the World Bank suggests that citizen engagement grows trust in the political system. Moreover, citizens learn democracy by doing it. As Harvard political scientist Jane Mansbridge wrote, “Participating in democratic decisions makes many participants better citizens.”

Given the opportunity to make choices—and difficult ones at that—everyday people learn that politics is not a simple business. This realization lessens the allure of those who erroneously claim to offer simple solutions. The proof, as always, is in the pudding of facts. What is interesting is that populist parties have been less successful in countries that have experimented with deliberative mechanisms. Thus, in Ireland, there is no far-right populist party. The same is true for Brazil, where reports on participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre suggest that citizens who engaged in the process become more interested in the policy issues and less concerned about the tribal politics.

This realization is also a defense against those who would use plebiscites, ballot measures, or other campaigns to threaten minorities or immigrants. Stronger citizen decision-making, if well designed, can de-escalate divisive issues, and also keep debate civil and respectful.

Ireland offers one example of direct democracy protecting human rights. For decades, the European island nation was a conservative bastion that outlawed abortion and even limited the right to divorce. Politics was often polarized as right-wing parties competed to be more conservative than each other.

This changed when, in 2012, the government accepted the use of citizens’ juries (or citizens’ assemblies), in which everyday people gather, study an issue, and make a recommendation to parliament as to how to proceed. Soon, Irish politicians, seeking to end division, agreed that such groups of ordinary citizens would handle any proposed legislation on same-sex marriage and abortion.

The citizens’ assembly on abortion met in 2016. Because making sound decisions is about information, and weighing the pros and cons, the group got the same access to expert briefings as elected officials, and to suggestions submitted by other Irish citizens. The organizers of the citizens’ assemblies also invited advocacy groups ranging from the Catholic Church to LGBTQ+ organizations to offer input.

After deliberating, the citizens’ assembly proposed allowing abortion in the first nine weeks of pregnancy. This fell well short of what various feminist groups wanted but was also far more liberal than the existing prohibition, which made it a criminal offense to travel abroad to terminate a pregnancy. This compromise position was endorsed by just over 60 percent of the assembly, and subsequently ratified in a referendum by a similar majority of Irish voters.

The use of the citizens’ assembly was welcomed by both sides of the argument. Even senior Church clerics expressed support for the process of deliberative listening. “Concepts, in and of themselves, rarely move people emotionally. Relationships and stories, however, do move people,” Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin Michael Jackson said in a statement, noting that the referendum was decided after “the telling of and the listening to stories ‘on both sides.’” Independent evaluations of the citizens’ juries concluded that participants took their duties seriously and used their powers responsibly. Participants told evaluators and the press that they themselves had to live with the consequences of their actions.

Previously, Irish voters could blame politicians for their unhappiness with social policy—even if they had voted for the officials. Now that citizens had to make recommendations themselves, people’s stances became more nuanced, and they became more open to a plurality of arguments.

Society needs shifts like this now more than ever, both to escape our polarized politics and to capitalize on the way we live today. Just as out-of-print books can be printed “on-demand” if customers wish, democracy should be upgraded to reflect the wishes of the voters. In the age of Netflix and Spotify, people demand the ability to select individual playlists and policies. We are no longer content with the package deals offered by political parties. Majorities in all democratic countries want more decision-making power and deserve democracy on demand.

Almost 200 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville concluded, “the most potent, and possibly the only remaining weapon to involve men in the destiny of their country is to make them share in its government.” Apart from upgrading the antiquated gendered language, this conclusion still holds true.

The post The Secret to Making Democracy More Civil and Less Polarized appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Bundled up in layers of sweaters, I am reciting from an Urdu newspaper as I sit astride my neighbor’s pet goat. I am certain that the sequence of words or their relationships to each other made no sense to me. But my prowess in reading individual words made the exercise as meaningful and empowering as the ability to ride the goat.

That pride, perhaps, explained my ecumenical approach to reading texts in my native language. Possessed by the joy of recognizing words, I did not pass judgment as to the nature of the content, but devoured everything, from my grandfather’s homeopathy manuals to legal documents and exercise guides for warding off old age. A devoted reader does not discriminate between one arrangement of words and another, or between words and numbers. For someone in my situation, Anna Karenina and the railway timetable were one.

As I grew up and moved to Karachi and then Toronto, however, the order and meaning of words took on agonizing importance. I made language my career, becoming a novelist and translator of Urdu classics.

Expanding on the latter role, I eventually developed programs to reintroduce Urdu literature into schools in Pakistan and teach children the vocabulary necessary to understand them. Along the way, I would compile the Urdu language’s first online thesaurus. Oddly enough, it was not the early experience reading astride a goat that shaped my approach in working with children, but a more unfortunate early memory that served as a cautionary tale.

Though I had fallen in love with reading in Urdu at a young age, the experience of learning to read English not long after was radically different. My father’s Chambers Dictionary, bound in red cloth and writ in small print, was my gateway to learning the language. A 19th-century volume often used by crossword puzzle solvers, it represented all the metaphysical terrors the universe held for my seven-year-old, only partially English-literate self. It was not the fear of English letters: I could read them one at a time and had rudimentary grammar. It was the dependence I felt on this heavy, unwieldy book in order to read anything else.

While a dictionary masquerades as a book, it is most certainly not a book, nor can you read it. A dictionary is, in reality, an occult guide that remains unintelligible read in its entirety, and the perplexed may only extract succor from it one word at a time. If you were an unfortunate child who had to consult a dictionary to read story books, you would go sour on life early in your career. I had almost gotten there by the age of seven.

One day I cried in frustration sitting with the Chambers. On that fateful day, I closed it for good. Had someone told me then that I would someday be gleefully dragging around dictionaries to assemble a lexicon of my own, I would not have believed it. As a child, I saw the dictionary as a nasty piece of work, and its making an enterprise suited to a villain.

Musharraf Ali Farooqi, the author, in his goat-riding days (right), with his younger brother. Courtesy of Musharraf Ali Farooqi.

An arduous, lonely journey followed my closing that door. Every few words I got stuck, but I kept reading, sacrificing the pleasure of comprehending words for the joy of reading them. When I encountered an unintelligible word, I moved on but made a note of it. Thereafter, each time that I saw that word again, the context would unravel the word’s definition a little more, and my mind would tag all possible meanings together, slowly clarifying the word. Ultimately, I encountered all, or most, possible contexts in which a particular word was used, and a cluster formed of the many shades of meaning inherent in it. Before long, I realized I was reading and comprehending what I read. I had bypassed Chambers.

As an adult, my work as a translator of classical Urdu literature led me to realize several things about Urdu language and its literature. The Urdu classical narrative genres of the qissa and dastan—typically adventure tales and epic fantasies—offer some of the finest stories in world literature. But I understood that until a number of these works were translated into other languages, they would not be fully appreciated. Yet these works could not be translated on any large scale until they were first reintroduced and widely read within their culture.

Because of the lack of attention shown to them by critics in the last century, their reintroduction to Urdu readers required a transformation from existing lithoprint editions to typeset, annotated ones, as well as a reading program to teach them in schools. It became apparent, however, that neither translations nor modern annotated editions could be made without a single, handy, comprehensive language reference tool.

These realizations slowly came to me over the course of seven years spent translating Dastan-e Amir Hamza (The Adventures of Amir Hamza) for the Modern Library Classics series. While transforming Urdu’s best-known story into English, I daily lugged around five or six fat dictionaries to consult for my translation, commuting to and from work on public transit in Toronto and working during meal breaks in fast food kitchens.

My aching back begged for a solution, which soon came to me. If entries from hundreds of Urdu dictionaries—published during the blossoming of Urdu lexicography in the 19th and early 20th centuries—could be gathered into one electronic resource, no reader, translator, or scholar of Urdu classics would ever have to carry anything heavier than a cellphone. Upon returning to Pakistan in 2009, I began collecting all the Urdu dictionaries I could find from used book dealers and steadily built up a large collection.

Having learned English via a rather joyless process, I knew that a reading program should be simpler and more fun. Urdu stories—qissas, dastans, and folktales I had studied—would form the content of the program. But they would need to be integrated into a learning process that allowed children to quickly build vocabulary and feel a sense of progress. One way to do this was to embrace synonyms, familiarizing children’s ears with the context in which the new words were used. Later, the same passages and the new words would form part of an online synonyms quiz.

But such a program would need an online Urdu thesaurus. None existed.

So I found myself creating a second reference work. Compiling a thesaurus sounds like a more complex undertaking than compiling a dictionary, but, logistically, the opposite is true. A program for a digital thesaurus requires just a couple of grammatical fields to group the similar and distinct meanings for each word. Then you just pile in the synonyms and antonyms for each entry.

Over the next few years, I organized synonyms from different dictionaries in separate spreadsheets and had them proofread. Once the data was merged, duplications in fields were removed. Lastly, I organized the synonym entries in alphabetical order. Five years later, the data was in a form that could be shared via an online database.

All the work had been done with my own resources. When I got stuck at the stage of software architecture and development, computer scientist Awais Athar offered his help. After undergoing almost a year of testing, the first online Urdu Thesaurus (still in beta) and its android app were launched on July 16, 2016.

For now, the online thesaurus displays 50 percent of the data I collected and still requires a more detailed classification of synonyms, standardized spelling, the insertion of accents and other marks, identification of antonyms, and integration with a dictionary to improve search and filtering features. Several proofreading rounds must follow. But this thesaurus is already a powerful resource, indispensable for a translator. Google Analytics shows it is being used in 124 countries, marking the current extent of Urdu language readership.

I launched the pilot of the Urdu literature reading program known as Storykit in September 2017 in two branches of the Lahore Grammar School in Pakistan. By 2020, the children will read picture books, chapter books, and fully annotated original editions of selected texts, respectively during their primary, middle, and secondary school years. Currently, more than 1,500 students are enrolled in the primary program.

When children learn idioms in middle school, proverbs in secondary school, and conceptual proverbs in their undergraduate years, some eventually will want a Dictionary of Urdu Idioms, and a Dictionary of Urdu Proverbs. But they won’t have to carry one, or even see a dictionary, to be able to read books. Like the Urdu Thesaurus, these tools can be made available online, and integrated into instruction.

I have a conceptual diagram of how all of these reference tools will be linked together, and a dream of creating the most sophisticated word machine of any language. In it, children would learn from a literature reading program, and within a generation become readers, writers, and translators of the Urdu language.

The post How a Pakistani Novelist and Translator Learned to Love Dictionaries appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.