Democracy is meant to be a guarantee – to ensure that no one person or a single group can impose their views on everyone else as to what should be done. But it is not enough to tie decision-makers to a mass electoral system. It has long been known that there are political leaders who are adept at manipulating people into acting against their common interest. Under a superficial democracy, the public can be misled by an unscrupulous few into accepting false claims about the threats they face, and backing the wrong collective responses.
If democracy is to function effectively, it needs to operate as citizen democracy – whereby people can share power equitably and engage on an informed and inclusive basis in cooperative problem-solving. It needs to create the conditions that would make action research feasible. In turn, the ethos of continuous learning inculcated by action research and the provisional findings it generates, would help to sustain a truly vibrant democracy.
Citizen democracy is not just important in the context of a national government; but also in the running of a city or a neighbourhood; in schools or housing associations; in community groups or NGOs; in trade unions or businesses; and in international government institutions. At all levels of society, unless we can together develop solutions that reflect our shared understanding of how to respond to the social, economic, political, and environmental problems facing us, those problems may end up being dealt with in ways that are driven by ignorance or vested interests.
In order to develop citizen democracy, it is vital that its key ingredients are better understood, widely promoted, and increasingly adopted. Set out below are nine areas where policy makers, educators, community activists should pay special attention to:
A. Civic Togetherness
[1] Community Development
To enable more people to overcome misunderstanding and learn together through shared projects, there should be better support for tried and tested forms of community development, including community organising and community mediation.
[2] Cohesion & Diversity
To tackle discriminatory activities that fuel social divisiveness, there should be clear and transparent rules, reliably enforced, to ensure that mutual respect is protected and violations are dealt with fairly so people can interact with others with confidence.
[3] Shared Rights & Responsibilities
To ensure people appreciate what their entitlements and duties are in common endeavours from local collaborations to society-wide commitments, the benefits and requirements of their roles should be clearly defined and explained.
B. Informed Deliberations
[4] Critical & Democratic Learning:
To facilitate learning in cooperative problem-solving, educators at all levels should aim to inculcate open, deliberative learning, and increase knowledge of public policy issues and the implications of democratic governance.
[5] Objective Public Discourse:
To counter attempts to undermine scientific expertise, professional assessment, and judicial impartiality, there should be better support and protection to secure objectivity and independent scrutiny in all major processes for evaluating public assertions.
[6] Regulation of Irresponsible Communication:
To prevent research from being corrupted by deception or misinformation, there should be more robust regulatory restraints to curtail irresponsible communications that are designed to mislead public understanding and collective decisions.
C. Shared Power
[7] Participatory Decision-Making:
To promote deliberative engagement, more support and opportunities for participatory decision-making should be provided for people to be involved in a wider range of collaborative projects and policy decisions.
[8] Curtailing Civic Disparity:
To reduce the gap in wealth-based influence, there should be tighter controls of political finances, along with better support for those hindered by economic insecurity through civic guarantees such as basic income and quality decent public services.
[9] Fortification of Public Accountability:
To ensure those in public office take account of objective research findings, scrutiny arrangements should be put in place to expose any undue influence and penalise any attempt to put vested interests above the common good.
Improvements in the nine areas outlined above are necessary to create more supportive conditions for effective action research and informed public deliberations. People cannot learn through acting together if they are deflected by social divisions, misinformation, or lack of efficacy. Citizen democracy aims to connect people in shared pursuits of solutions to common problems. More details of the reforms required can be found in: Time to Save Democracy. Short articles on diverse aspects of citizen democracy can be accessed at: Citizen Democracy.
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Links:
Time to Save Democracy: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/time-to-save-democracy
Citizen Democracy: https://citizen-network.org/library/category/citizen-democracy