democracy - Vision the Italian Think Tank

BACK TO DEMOCRACY 1In progress paperRome - London, 01 May 2006Democracy and its forms (political parties, elections, governments and institutions,social phenomena and communication instruments) are in crisis. This view seems tobe shared by everyone (political scientists and politicians, public opinion and media).However, in our view we still lack an organized theory of what is happening. Weknow that what we have (the processes of parliamentarian democracy) does not workas it used to, and yet, we do not know how to replace it.With this project, Vision begins a study whose aim is to contribute to theunderstanding, with greater “detail”, of where the processes of “forming a collectivewill” became stuck, and to find out what specific innovations should be implementedas soon as possible if we want democracy to overcome its crisis.The paper is in progress. We identified five main components of “democracy” –elections as a tool to gather individual preferences, political parties, flexibility ofconstitutions and institutional frameworks, parliaments and places for elaboratingdecisions, media and opinion making – and our objective is to make sense of theimpact that Information Communication Technologies will have on each of them.The work is in progress because we have so far worked only on the first of these fiveinteractions, we will look for partners to elaborate on the other four and theconclusions must be read as tentative.1 Participants to Vision work group on Democracy include Anna Elisabetta Galeotti, University of Turin and VisitingProfessor Kennedy School of Government, Harvard, Natalia Leschchenko, Vision e Phd London School of Economicsand Political Science, Marco Grasso, Vision and Università Milano Bicocca, Francesco Grillo, Vision and LondonSchool of Economics and Political Science. The group is open to further contributions and whoever is interested to joinshould contact info@vision-forum.org .Vision mission is to contribute to ideas dissemination. However, it is to be reminded that the notauthorised utilization of any copyrighted document - like all the ones which are published by visionweb site - is persecuted in all States.

The value of democracy is – in Vision’s point of view - held in its superior ability tocapture and elaborate information (on people’s expectations, on their ideas andideologies, on their dreams and their needs, on the existing competencies andpossible projects) and to transform them into political will.The crisis that democracy is witnessing nowadays is determined – according toVision – by the increasing quantity and complexity of “information” that institutionalmechanisms, which have not changed for years, can no longer “process”.It is from this point of view that Vision starts, with this essay, identifying specificproblems and possible solutions that can be proposed through a smart combination ofinstitutional reforms and technologies.*****Does democracy still have a future?Such a question would have been unthinkable only ten years ago.The fall of the wall had just marked the beginning of the end of every totalitarismand democracy seemed set to take over what was left of the Empire of Evil withoutany resistance. A peaceful invasion that would have, according to some, marked theend of History or at least of the history of a long conflict between two differentconceptions of life and society.After ten years the situation seems to be very different.Large areas of ‘non democracy’ (as large as China) resist and in some cases theygather important economic successes that seem to consolidate their power. And evenif dictatorships continue to be overthrown by democratic “revolutions” (Ukraine andGeorgia), other even larger democratization process seem to have been recentlyreversed (in Russia) without any significant popular resistance. Recent attempts toexport democracy are being opposed by a large number of people (in the MiddleEast) and in very relevant parts of the world even slight forms of pluralism arerejected together with a modernization that seems to have never begun (in Iran).But it is in the Western hemisphere, in the Nations that invented parliamentariandemocracy that democracy seems to show more clear signs of obsolescence.It is particularly interesting to try to compare what is happening in the UK with whatare the developments at EU level.2

General elections UKShare of eligible voters backing the winning partyEuropean Parliament Turnout *33,4% 32,6%67,2%64,7%30,8%31,9%31,1%63,8%55,1%24,5%49,9%* Spain and Portugal did not join the first, Sweden, Austria and Finland the first three elections. In 2004 ten newmember states joined the EP.45,5%Source: Vision on BBC data21,6%Source: Vision on European Parliament data1979 1983 1987 1992 1997 2001 20051979 1984 1989 1994 1999 2004We have, in fact, calculated the share of British voters who have backed the winningparty in the last seven general elections; and the number of European citizens whobothered to go to vote at the elections of the EP since the start.In both cases the decline seems irreversible.Now the thing is that the comparison is particularly interesting because the two casesalmost represent the two extremes of the spectrum of parliamentary systems. On onehand, there is one the oldest form of democracy and on the other one of the mostrecent. On one side, you have one of the champions of the “Nation State” concept,and on the other, the most advanced, if not the only one, experiment of transnationalpolitical participation.The two institutions also correspond, according to many, to the two visions betweenwhich western democracy should choose its model. In fact, if British do, often,criticize Europe for being too bureaucratic and disconnected with citizens, EUadvocates blame the British for being too focused on economy and cynical.The results seem to say that neither idealism nor pragmatism is sufficient to avoid thedecline. The trend seems to anticipate (as we will develop further) that neither nationstates nor supranational organizations are escaping the crisis of citizens indifference.And it is a paradoxical outcome. Because, on one hand, democracy seems to fall shortof some of its objectives in a society that has recently distinguished itself by3

continuing to produce innovation and wealth increase (and this confounds the manywho reduce democracy health to economics); and on the other, we have an institutionwhose powers have been gradually increased and made more significant to thequality of life of people (and this seems to say that are wrong even the ones that seeinstitutional reforms as the response to the crisis).The outcome does, then, suggest that the reasons of the problem we are analyzing aremuch more structural than many seem to believe.And it is not only election turn out the statistical evidence we should look at.Vision is, in fact, looking to indicators that more broadly say about the importancethat citizens give to politics. As we will see shortly, the feeling is contradictory: theythink political decisions are very important, probably more important than ever; andyet they never felt so incapable to impact these decisions.Resignation seems to be dominating and it is resignation to a context in which manycitizens do not feel represented or often are not satisfied of their political élitèswithout knowing how to propose a different one.Feeling of powerlessness.It is not a feeling limited to segments of the population that are excluded, but it is asensation that many feel, and that almost everyone and sometimes even those whohold governmental responsibilities seem to share.The sensation of not being represented and even more the idea that democracy is notable anymore to solve greater problems.What is happening then? Does democracy exist in the future of advanced societies? Isit right to propose democracy to those societies that are not quite democratic?*****In reality the fact that democracy is still the “least worse” possible political regimeseems to be confirmed by the History of the past decades. It might be enough, maybe,to remember three facts, without doubt limited as success indicators, but anyhowsimple and meaningful:1. gross domestic product per capita 2 ; going through the list 3 of the twentynations with the highest income per capita only one 4 is not included in the list(moreover limited) of the parliamentarian democracies fully operational 5 ;2 Gross Domestic Product as indicator of wellbeing has, without doubt, some important limits (on these “errors” seeVision in “The paradoxes of GDP”, in Vision 2000 available on www.vision-forum.org). but when the differences areexplicit, of some digits, the number is, still able to mark the boundaries between “families of Countries” to a differentdevelopment stadium (and widespread poverty).3 The world fact book, Washington, D.C. – CIA, 2001 as for the statistics related to income concentration4 Hong Kong that moreover only recently has witnessed a lessening of its democracy “levels”4

2. the inequalities; if we try, moreover, to observe another chart, that of the mostunequal nations, measured from the wealth percentage that is the prerogative ofthe first decile (the 10% most rich) of the population, only three 6 – on thecontrary – of the Nations on the list are democratic Nations;3. the variation in time of the number of democracies in respect to the totalamount 7 ; if in 1975 “democracies” 8 were 35 and therefore less than a quarter ofthe total (23,8%), in 1995 they doubled (78) representing half (47,6%) of thetotal amount.Democracy seems to produce more wealth, to distribute it better and, consequently, itseems to obtain an ever growing consensus.The classics of economic theory explain to us the reasons for democracy’s superiorityin terms of capacity to produce wellbeing. A democratic Country, like Adam Smith 9seemed to remember when he thought of American colonies, naturally has moreresistant antibodies in respect to the danger of consolidating monopolies and unfairadvantage positions and it favours mostly the development of competitive conditionsthat are essential in allocating scarce resources to the most effective enterprise. Witha more elegant argument Amartya Sen reminds us that greater democracy meansincorporating more “information” in the collective decision making process andtherefore greater chances that those choices produce greater wellbeing for a greaternumber of people.But it is still Amartya Sen that yet says something more: democracy, or ratherfreedom, is not the best guarantee of development (that it is not just economicdevelopment as some Indian states demonstrate). It is also a worthy objective initself, apart from the reflection in terms of wellbeing, to be pursued and defended.Is all well then? Is the magnificent fate of democracy really unstoppable?Not really. In reality, if we go back to the numbers that we just saw, and if we changea little the perspective, they tell a different story:1. If instead of the absolute values of gross domestic product per inhabitant, weshift to growth rates 10 the list of the fastest growing twenty nations 11 presents5 Different would be the risult if one conciders the growth rates of which the special chart today shows, obviously,planet Cina in the first places6 All three have become democratic recently: Brazil, Messico and Souht Africa7 Potter et al., 1997 Democratization, Policy Press: Cambridge8 Intended like Nations that have free elections and of some other fundamental rights coded by researches like that ofDahl, Democracy and its cities, New Haven: Yale University Press.9 The Wealth of Nations, 1776, Cambridge, Penguin Books10 Source The World FactBook, Washington, D.C. – CIA, 2001 and US Department of State11 Last years leader was Turkmeinstan5

the opposite situation: only one of the Countries 12 with the highest growth ratebelongs to the group of consolidated democracies 13 ;2. The inequity; if again we shift from the absolute comparison to the in depthvariations and evaluations, not only western democracies experience growinggaps; but the most serious aspect is that a relevant part of the best resources areon the wrong side (the smallest and innovative enterprises, and a relevant partof the best graduates) while, on the contrary, many of the “newly rich” emergethanks to their private income or real estate investments which multiply theirvalue. Inequalities within democracies are not only growing but also themobility is decreasing, the shifting (based on merits) of individuals betweendifferent “income classes”; it seems, therefore, that the bond betweendemocracy and competition seems to be weakened 14 ;3. Finally, even if the number of parliamentarian democracies seems to grow, it iswithin the more advanced group of States that the confidence in such a regime,together with the turn over in the elections, diminishes more sharply.In reality, if it is true that democracy is the best regime possible, it could be that uncleWinston was wrong, that he was mistaken in his approach that was a little cynical andconservative. Most of all the feeling is that Churchill (or most recently Sartori orDahrendorf) is neglecting a fundamental element. Democracy is not an absolutevalue. It has to be judged in relation to the expectations of mankind and of thecomplexity of the problems it has to “govern”. Most of all, what some of the great‘elders’ are underestimating is the clear-cut separation between democracy’s formsand its substance, the necessity – that democracy has – to have to be always improvedto be able to survive.More in depth, to be persuaded of the supremacy of democracy does not mean oneaccepts its current configuration as unchangeable. If democracy – as a processthrough which the government answers to its citizens or as a mechanism that protectscompetition on a fair basis and not “disruptive” between groups that are fighting forthe power – is to be saved, it has to, in our opinion, make a leap in quality and such aleap will probably shed some of its characteristics – parliamentarian – that fordecades have defined it.What are the most serious limits of parliamentarian democracy? Which one emergeswith strength in respect to the characteristics of the new (Information) Society that weare building? And what does partecipative democracy really mean, which are thereform ideas that before long could be experimented to open new prospectives for thedemocracy that we know?12 Strangely San Marino’s republic (Italy) occupies the 17 th position with last year’s GDP variation of 7.5%13 Even if also Turkey and Albania are emerging democracies14 To this issue Vision has dedicated the work on the “Lisbon Strategy” for further details www.vision-forum.org6

The current limits of democracy’s forms are related to the moment of participation(and of formation of the political will) and to that of the government (and of realizingthat will).In both areas there are both opportunities that have not been taken as well asexpectations that seem to be ignored.Our analysis is articulated as follows (although as we said some of the chapters areonly framed):VISION’S APPROACH, THE QUESTIONS AND THE LIMITS OF THE ANALYSIS ................................................ 8The framework ............................................................................................................................................................... 8The limits ...................................................................................................................................................................... 121. ARE ELECTIONS STILL A LEGITIMATE INSTRUMENT FOR POWER ALLOCATION? .. ANDDEMOCRACY AS AN INFORMATION SYSTEM ...................................................................................................... 15THE PROBLEM OF ELECTORAL CYCLES. ........................................................................................................... 16THE ERROR OF THE ELECTORAL CONSTITUENCY BASED ON GEOGRAPHY ............................................ 20THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF THE GENERAL ELECTIONS. .......................................................................... 29THE QUESTION OF THE SCOPE OF OPINIONS .................................................................................................... 342. DO POLITICAL PARTIES HAVE STILL A FUTURE AND THE RISE OF NEW POLITICAL ACTORS? (to bedeveloped) ........................................................................................................................................................................ 373. ARE CONSTITUTIONS STILL USEFUL? THE PARADOX OF THE FLEXIBLE INSTITUTIONS (to bedeveloped) ........................................................................................................................................................................ 384. ARE PARLIAMENTS STILL WORTHY THEIR COST? (to be developed) ............................................................ 395. DOES TELEVISION STILL MATTER? THE OPPORTUNITIES AND THE RISKS OF THE “MANY TO MANY”MODEL (to be developed) ............................................................................................................................................... 40THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY: VISION 2020 ......................................................................................................... 417

VISION’S APPROACH, THE QUESTIONS AND THE LIMITSOF THE ANALYSISOur research will start from a framework we developed in order to structure ouranalysis. The approach we are going to use will make explicit a number of limitationsof the study that we will are going to gradually lift.The frameworkHow can we distinguish between substantial modifications in the performance ofdemocracy from the “rumour” that surrounds the concept of the “decline” ofdemocracy itself? How do we distinguish the concrete changes in a debate that ispolarised into the ‘doom-mongers’ (that maintain democracy is no longer tenable in aworld dominated by financial oligarchies) and those expecting miracles fromtechnology?Perhaps we should start from the beginning, by trying to describe what, in itsnarrowest sense, is a democratic ‘processes’. This is the basis for then understandingwhere and in what channels, lies the greatest potential and the biggest hope forchange.We mentioned earlier that democracy is an ‘information process’: this definitiondescribes one part of what democracy is but above all it describes the aspects that aremost striking and distinctive. Information are, then, the many single individualpreferences that together form the collective will that then becomes governmentlegislation and investment decisions. Such an activity, therefore, is a process in thesense that embodies a series of distinct moments meant to transform, in an orderedway (because it is regulated, therefore, legitimate and accepted) individual opinionsinto political actions, that then come back to the citizens in the form of services,rules, incentives.8

DEVELOPING AN INFORMATION BASED THEORY OF DEMOCRACYDemocracy as a process and ….PartecipationCompetitionAggregationSelectionINDIVIDUALSISTITUTIONSCommunicationDecisionImplementationGovernmentSource: VisionThe diagram shows the “value chain” that articulates the ‘policy’, or rather, theprocess of constructing and implementing policy (so called ‘policy making’). Sowhen we talk about collective choices and about policy, we are discussing activitiesthat are different from each other.There is therefore:1. A mechanism for aggregating individual preferences into collective decisions(thus, in parallel, a transformation of individuals into “communities” foundedon ‘social contracts’) and2. a procedure of translating such collective wills into government legislationmeant to impact the well-being of the society and in the last instance of theindividuals.Our way of viewing policy would be to segment the first activity into three phases,being the first:1. The aggregation of individual ideas and of people into fewer proposals that canbe presented as the available political options; followed then by2. the competition between such political products in some form of arenaa, andthen finally3. an election phase, choosing which proposal to adopt.But also the second activity can be divided into three steps9

1. The definition of the political decisions (to be taken by elected assemblies andthe governments);2. the implementation of the decisions taken; and finally3. the communication of the results achieved (which will then be measuredagainst the objectives given in the above first phase during which the politicalproposals were aggregated).Such a description is a simple, rational vision of what is meant by politics. Adescription which is somehow different from reality because reality is, in fact, morecomplex and flexible, capable of channelling ideologies and even of embodyingfeelings and values.In theory (and as we will see soon also “in practice”) globalisation and technologyimply discontinuity along the entire path of forming and implementing political wills.Even more radically, they impose a revision of the process which we have describedabove. We will see that in a ‘network society’, individuals and institutions are nolonger so apart from each other; information flows that transform – in theparticipation phase - people and ideas into governments and programmes, and thattransform such programmes - in the government phase - into decisions and publicinvestments, are no longer a ‘one-way’ flow. In a sense “institutions” dis-integrateand individuals increasingly self govern themselves blurring the boundaries between“participation” and “government”.This is not yet the reality that democratic procedures continue to represent, but it isthe logic where cost of accessing, elaborating and transmitting information has beenreduced of, probably, ten times in less than ten years.In any case our simplification, our, even traditional, scheme could still serve toarticulate an analysis by which understand the health of a system in its components,and identify specific solutions to be experimented.10

The changes of a democracy that ‘reacts’ to the progress (and to the threats) oftechnology can be, then, simplified as follows.DEVELOPING AN INFORMATION BASED THEORY OF DEMOCRACYDemocracy as a process and ICT driven changesModification into the mechanisms of“packaging” and representing individualinterests (political parties, trade unions,lobbies ..)AggregationPartecipationCompetitionQuantic reduction of information costs(elections, ..)SelectionINDIVIDUALSCommunicationTransformationintothe media marketstructure (dynamics between theInternet, TV, newspapers, ..)Transformation into the nature ofinstitutions (duration, scope, dimension,relationships with other bodies, ..)ISTITUTIONSDecisionModification of institutionalcommunication towards citizens(style, contents, dialogue directions,..)Source: VisionImplementationGovernmentICT based process redesign of decisionmaking procedures (parliaments, ..)Nearly all the fundamental vectors along the democratic cycle change. Morespecifically:1. The methods for aggregating and representing (that also work outside ofelections) and the traditional function of the political parties become severelymistrusted; technologies make it possible to communicate (and thereforeaggregate) opinions and people in much more efficient ways than traditionalpolitical parties did for decades; the internet has been, in fact, been longpredicted to be about to take the place of parties meetings; the story has beenmuch more interesting than the internet ‘prophets’ predicted but most recentAmerican elections do show that technologies are here to stay;2. The structure of the political arenas, that confront the different proposalsagainst each other, changes also; some predicted television would have died(after having been a protagonist in the revolution that 20 years ago destroyedthe importance of the ‘piazza’ in which most confrontations took place); theprediction was wrong in not taking into account that old champions do survive11

evolutions and yet in order to survive to the end of their life cycle they need toadapt themselves to the new situation; as we witness the progress of the‘network’ and its technology, from election to election, it becomes ever moreprobable that part of the political confrontation will take place in a virtualenvironment with completely different rules and lower ‘barriers to entry’;3. the electoral rules change greatly, or rather expectations have been raised thatthey should use the opportunities that technology provides and that they shouldrespond to an information complexity that has greatly increased; Vision’s first‘release’ on democracy is dedicated to this theme;4. the ways through which those elected take decisions should also change;obsolete structures ( in the sense that they are costly and ineffective) such asparliaments must be reconfigured to recuperate productive capacity (andconsensus);5. technologies do, also, modify - at an even more fundamental level - the“nature” of the institutions; the reduction to zero of the costs of accessinginformation gets rid of the most important competitive advantages ofinstitutions; the optimal level to which policies should be allocated can not beestablished for good and it changes continuously in “time” (in the sense that itis modified by technological advancements) and in “space” (meaning by thatthat institutions of the same formal level will experience different success intoretaining or expanding of the portfolio of their responsibilities;6. finally, the language change; technologies make much easier to monitor resultsand policy makers do feel that by establishing semi quantitative, semimanagerial objectives, they will establish a “contact” (this approach was firstlyexperimented by the UK Labor in the mid 90s and was transformed into aproper “contract” with the electorates by the current Prime Minister of Italy).As we said, the scheme has limits and for example, it is exactly the idea of‘specialisation’ ( between individuals and institutions) that has entered a crisis.However the frame is proving to be useful. It provides the points to be developed.We will start from the elections. It is the “elections” and its results to be increasinglyused by governments to legitimise their entire political activity: if we show thatelections are not any longer a reflection of individual preferences, we will havestarted with a powerful demonstration that will call for a reform like the one we aretalking about.The limitsVision’s consideration consciously chooses to limit the sphere of investigation to the“formal” plane where democracy is intended as a mechanism for the aggregation ofindividual preferences in collective decisions. And therefore it analyses the limits ofdemocracy as an informative mechanism. With this in mind, we assume that the12

minimum expectations that are associated to democracy are the grounds for verifyingits validity and its efficiency.In fact, democracy is, at its most fundamental level, a mechanism – called“elections” - through which citizens should be able to express their individualpreferences in a fashion so that they are relevant to the political decisions: does thisprocedure still work? Do elections work as a lever through which an enough largeshare of citizens express their preference individuals? And does the process makesure that these preferences are relevant enough for the political decisions to be taken?We are, then, at the moment focusing on elections as “core” to the democraticprocess. And we are not directly engaging with the other phases we have justdescribed. These constraints will be removed at a later stage of our study, but atmoment we are tackling participation and within participation the way people expresstheir votes and the way these votes are accounted for.This approach has two limits:1. Participation is not only election, since there are, in fact, many more formsand opportunities for joining political debate and influencing politicaldecisions.Participation consists of the confrontation of positions and this confrontationhas moved, in time, from demonstrations and organized political partiestowards media or internet enabled channels and civil society.However elections are still the most important moment, the only legally,institutionally recognized instrument for participation to be directly accountedfor towards the formation of politically relevant choices.This is confirmed by the many politicians’ rhetoric that justifies any decisionon the basis on the “investiture” obtained on the particular day on whichelections took place.2. Democracy is not only participation, even if we assumed the wider definition(not only elections, therefore relaxing the first limit of the analysis) ofparticipation.Democracy is also - as we have seen before - procedures that make sure thatpublic choices are implemented in a certain way so that continuous scrutinyand transparency and division of power can limit the excess of power. And it isalso a series of values (the sharing of a “common destiny” inside a certaincommunity and of individual rights) and of further rules (even those economicregulations) that make it possible for a community to live in a democratic, fairand peaceful way.However we once again limit ourselves to participation and more specificallyto the formal procedure through which participation is realized. If the outcomeof the analysis showed that even the formal procedures do not work, we wouldhave questioned the building block of democracy and it would then be rather13

plausible to expect that even the rest of the democratic infrastructure isaffected.We will speak of elections as a central moment of the democratic life, and as theunquestioned pole to which the legitimization of every choice is tied to.We will assume a point of logical consistency between objectives and procedures in afashion which is not very far from (even if with different means) the exercise thatArrow proposes with his theorem on the intrinsic impossibility to obtain democraticprocesses. However we will not concentrate on theorems, but on more evidentdemonstrations of the growing un sustainability of certain mechanisms relative tocertain other social and technological evolutions.We will not, thus, investigate other preexisting issues such as the creation ofindividual preferences (for example, that of the validity of the rational assumption asa criteria that guides the other individuals in their choices 15 ) or the consistencybetween individual preferences and individual behaviors (for example, that of thepossibility that the detected references diverge from the real choices inside theelectoral “game” 16 ).In the second part of this work we will, in fact, start to investigate whichtechnological and economic changes are impacting the second phase of policymaking and thus the decision making and decision implementation (government)phase. Nevertheless, we will start with the participation part of the problem.15 The thoughts on rationality that coincide with the correctness of the democratic outcome are posed on two differentlevels. In the fisrt level there is the doubt on the individual rationality as such in making choises that concern onlyhim/her and eventually, another individual with which me/she hold a market transaction (see for example, “The rationalfool” of Amarthya Sen where the inconstistency of a rationality is demonstrated in its consistency meaning in respect toou own personal interest); to another level there is the criticism on the ground of the trasformation of individualpreferences into collective choices and therefore on the comparability of expressed preferences from differentindividuals see Samuelson in “Foundations of Economic Analysis”, Harvard Press, 1947 or Bergson “A reformulationof Certain Aspects of Welfare Economics”, Qualterly Journal of Economics, 1938 or agin Robbins in “An Essay on theNature and Significance of Economic Science”16 We are reffering to the great games theory (see for example, the development made by the classical Von Neumannand Morgenstern in “Theory of Games and Ecomic Behaviour, Princeton University Press, 1947) but also to theintuition of the impact that it can have on the outcome, like the participation in a “game” (in this case electoral) whichconstitutes a pleasure in itself and that it can therefore play a role in the expression of the prefereces (in other words thepreferences are modified by the mean through which it is communicated in Veblen “The Theory of the Leisure Class”,The Macmillian Co, 1899)14

1. ARE ELECTIONS STILL A LEGITIMATE INSTRUMENTFOR POWER ALLOCATION? .. AND DEMOCRACY AS ANINFORMATION SYSTEMThere are four limits of participation and we will quickly mention them beforeanalyzing them one by one:1. We vote for a given institution with frequencies that are not efficient.2. The articulation of electorates is made exclusively on a territorial basis and thisentails the impossibility of capturing other forms of aggregation andcitizenship.3. Elections are exclusively general 17 and this makes it technically difficult toarticulate preferences and opinions of individual sectors .4. The choice is almost exclusively in terms of the acceptance or overall rejectionof a given political decision (it is the same thing that happens with a proxy).However, in reality, individual preferences in respect to a given politicaldecision are obviously distributed under the form of a configuration of anormal curve (Gaussian) in partial agreement with that choice.These are technical limits of specific institutional “mechanisms”. They represent aloss of “information” (from the point of view of whoever makes the decisions) and of“influence” (from the point of view of the citizens) that at every step/error the gapwidens between those who govern and those who are governed. They lower theoverall quality and the efficiency of the political action.We are exposing problems that are not new and that yet, become (which is the theorywe propose) no longer “tolerable” whereas the costs of participation are drasticallyreduced and therefore, our expectations 18 are increased by the same magnitude.Democracy is – at its most basic – an “information system” which transformsindividual preferences into collective wills and then these into political choices withina certain framework of regulations that will prevent abuses.The problem is that it is as if we are using one of those huge IBM calculators fromfifty years ago to process the amount of information handled by a modern PersonalComputer. The costs of accessing information has been reduced by many times, the17 With the exception of referenda.18 On the question of the exectation it is our opinion that in fact the request for democracy has grown and has becomemore complex. It is natural instead that it is like this in a world in which information is accessible to everyone and thatall the world’s problems enter with violence in everyone’s house. It is also true that the expectations not satisfied foldback on themselves and can transform themselves into their opposite - resignation and indiference.15

complexity has been multiplied and we are still using the same mechanisms toaggregate individual opinions into decisions relevant to an entire community.These are the limits of institutional mechanisms (especially elections) that were builtfor a Society totally different from the one we now live in. We should look more indepth at what the limits are and what could be the (very preliminary) hypotheses forsolutions that could be experimented with, using a smart combination of technologiesand politics.THE PROBLEM OF ELECTORAL CYCLES.We vote every four or five years and this generates a number of costs both in terms ofthe ability to represent and to be efficient.To be more precise let’s say that each of the major institutions that builds ademocratic system are chosen through an electoral moment that lasts one or two days.This is preceded by an electoral campaign that is carried out over two or three monthsand which is renewed every four or five years.In reality there are many ways for measuring the popularity of a given government(and thus of a given political offering including the alternatives to ones currently ingovernment).This normally happens using elections occurring at some institutional level for testingthe support of governments (and oppositions) at different levels which are not underscrutiny. This has been frequently the case for regional and European levelconsultations used to verify how well national governments were doing 19 .Opinion polls are also increasingly used not only to forecast election results andadjust political offerings and government behaviours to public opinions, but also toevaluate governments’ perfomance. It is not uncommon to see governments‘delegitimised’ by trends in popularity even before any proper vote-counting.The problem is similar to the one that is normally called the “political cycle”: Herewe are arguing that the error of such a cycle has become bigger than it used to be. Itimplies not only a reduction of the capacity of a given democratic system to reflectthe opinions of its citizens in the formation of the political will and therefore of itslevel of “democracy”, but also the reduction of the capability of the government tosolve problems.Let’s start with the first question and thus the impact on the level of democracy.The theoretical point (that has, as we will see, substantial consequences on a practicallevel) is that an election that is renewed every four or five years produces a loss of“information” on citizens’ preferences.19 This, in fact, a paradox: whereas economic and social forces seem to push towards an increase of the importance ofsub national and super national decision making levels, media, politicians and public opinions continue, de facto, toconsider regional and European political domains as somehow subordinate to national ones.16

Such a loss of information is, in theory, measured by the distance between the choice– made on the day of the elections – and the (weighted) average of the choices (or atleast satisfaction levels) that month by month, day by day (or whatever is the timeunit we want consider) the citizen would have expressed during the government lifecycle.If we express ourselves at moments which are apart in time, it is likely (natural) thatclose events (last week, last hours) have a greater weight than episodes that may haveinfluenced more the quality of our lives, but that have disappeared from our memory,that may have influenced our opinion for a longer period of time but are not relevantfor “electoral” purpose.The graph below gives a sense of the magnitude of the “error” in the case of the lastUS presidency.Current US President approval rate (2000-2005, %)100Election 2000Election 20046530Sett 2000Nov 2001 Nov 2002 Nov 2003 Nov 2004 Ago 2005Source: Vision on USA Today/ CNN dataIn the case of the most important political competition, it would have been enough tomove back or forward the election date to get completely different election outcomes.The theoretical issue has, clearly, heavy practical consequences.Electoral campaign experts have realized this for some time and are, by now, used toconcentrate the selling of different political products over the electoral period.17

Even more disturbingly is when random events in the run up to an election impactdirectly the elections results.The “mistake” is clearly smaller in a system dominated by ideologies in which peoplecan express themselves on the basis of convictions that are stable in time. It becomeslarger in a contest where the number of uncertain “voters” grows, or where the groupsof fully convinced citizens is large but yet of more or less equal size so that the lastminute swing of small amounts of mobile electorates turns out to decide the result ofthe election 20 .The problem of the fairness, of the capability of the mechanisms of democracy toreflect the “real” level of satisfaction tends to become self reinforcing. Theaccumulation of errors makes the trust of people, their perception of the relevance oftheir opinions even smaller and this reduces even further participation and thequantity of information that democracy processes.More over, as we mentioned before, there is an additional problem. Lower levels ofdemocracy are also (this is the concept that seems to consistently escape most of theanalyses) politics ever less capable of solving problems.The consequences of five year “political cycle” can be ‘bad timing’ for a number ofdecisions:1. short term decisions which produce an advantage for small interest groups anda cost for the general public tend to be concentrated in the first months of thecycle;2. short term decisions which can be popular among citizens and especiallycrucial segments tend to be concentrated at the end;3. medium term investments get damaged by the disruption of the “every fouryears” general election;4. long term investments risk to never materialize because the benefits that theymay produce go beyond the government cycle.The time frame of the normal renewal of government is, in other words, both too longto be able to avoid certain reallocations of resources from the general public tosmaller interests (and these decisions may take place at the beginning), and too shortfor policies whose realization is beyond the cycle. Moreover the disruption that takesplace every five – four years, can decrease the consistency of a number of projectsand the approach of policy making becomes short term oriented.20 This exactly the situation where the USA happens structurally to be.18

The issue we are talking about is not new. In fact many analysts have discussed thepatterns in terms of typical changes in public expenditures and related them to the“electoral cycle” typical of western democracies.However it is possible that today the problem is more relevant because of:1. the considerable increase of the “opinion”, not ideology driven preferences andthe corresponding, great difficulty that a voter encounters in foreseeing whatcould be the behavior of political parties in such a relative long time span;2. the increase in political marketing expenditures and therefore the increase inthe necessity to pay costs to special interest groups in the first “shadowed” partof the government life;3. the greater urgency to re-launch investments with long-term outcomesdetermined exactly by the fact that for years this type of expenditure seems tohave been constrained by the very logic of the “cycle”;4. last but not least, technologies have reduced the costs of collecting opinionsthus rendering the system we have been using for decades increasinglyobsolete.A real solution can only come from an articulated cultural process: theexperimentation of a smart combination of institutional reforms and the use of theopportunities made available by technologies can facilitate such a process.The idea is, in principle, to go towards a dilution in time of the mechanism ofaccountability.An experiment worthwhile doing is to progressively switch from a system that totallyrenews the members of its Parliament every five years, to one which partially renewsits components more frequently.An hypothesis could be, for example, to renew a tenth of the members of theParliament every year and in case one would like to preserve an electoral momentumof greater importance one could preserve the possibility for a substantial renewal (forinstance half) which could happen during a greater span of time (five years, for ourexample’s sake).Election periods may even be differentiated by policies: we could then experimentmechanisms by which progress in education or infrastructure, for instance, may bescrutinized in a period longer, say seven years, than in other policies, for example,health care systems performance or advancement in digitalization of administrativeprocedures. But we will come back to this point dealing with the third of the mistakesthat present democracy presents.It would, obviously, not be necessary that the whole electoral body express itself ineach intermediate deadline and, in effect, rather simple statistical mechanisms could19

the new world, the importance of the local community as a filter towards the effectsof globalization. And yet even this new localism is a challenge to a hierarchy ofrepresentations that finds in the nation state its most important unit and below thislevel the other geographic constituencies.Identities are, in fact, multiple and the way different individuals combine them todefine the community they belong to, should be taken in account by a moderndemocracy.The inadequacy of a system based only on territorial representation is a case thatadds also one more important element to our analysis: it is not democracy in itselfthat has become worse but it is Society who has “run” forward, has gone beyond thecapabilities that the processes of representation technically have.Once more the consequences of globalization are very heavy on the democraticprocesses and very practical. To understand the type of distortion produced by asystem based on exclusively territorial constituencies, it can be useful to give anexample.The example is the story of two people, two Italian citizens that have gone to thesame high school, in the same city of medium dimensions where the most part ofItalian families live. The same story may easily apply to any other country.The two individuals we are talking about, have the same attitude in making newfriends and the same political interests. We are talking about similar educationbackground and also of similar social status and yet the professional outcomes aresuch that they may as well belong to different worlds.One of the two is in fact a pediatrician who never left his home town; the other,instead, works for a bank in London.The two are, in fact, very good friends and were commenting recently their lives.They remembered that the banker’s yearly pay and his possibility to make a highquality experience in a foreign country had been for some time the most discussedand glamorous point of discussion when they met each other.The story has now been slightly changed because the doctor is today a member of thecountry’s congress: to be a politician had never been among the most fascinatingprofessional targets for their generation and yet this “condition” seems now to bringabout a number of possibilities that the international investment banker has nevereven considered.In fact, to become a member of the parliament is almost impossible for somebodywho is used to live abroad or to travel between different cities and time zones: suchimpossibility, the consequences on personal lives and careers, even the real validity23

of a much celebrated choice of being a “global citizen” were the issues that the twofriends were discussing few weeks ago together with the authors of this book.And it has been a very interesting discussion not only as far as this research, but alsothe strange story of an entire generation.What did, for a start, make so different the two individual professional paths?The only factor that seems to have really made the difference seemed to us the choicemade at the time of deciding where to go for undergraduate studies.The newly elected MP decided, in fact, to study as doctor in the nearby Universityand to continue his father’s activity. The second person, advised by his professors,chose to study at Bocconi University in Milan, to further his education with a Masterin the United States and to look for a job in London.The two had, in fact, attended the same schools and they were both good students,with the only minor difference of the latter being consistently the best of the class andthe former more regularly a good student.In reality, that small choice – to stay home, and consolidate the work of a parentrather than attending an excellent university, entering a mobile, flexible and vanguardclass – marks not only the drastic separation between two individuals.This small event is, in fact, to be multiplied many folds for many other individuallives of Italian and European young people.It breaks into two parts an entire generation. And it is probably the beginning of anumber of problems that Vision is analyzing.It is an episode, a small one but it says a lot about a system which is not able,technically able to recognize and to reward innovation and mobility, and which hasinstead – more or less deliberately – chosen to prefer continuity and experience.As far as this book is concerned, we are here interested to recognize the technicalfactors that make the institutional selection processes of the political managerial classto exclude the most mobile “part” of a generation, to paradoxically keep out thesegment of the population that should be, at least in theory, equipped with the largerexperience as far as understanding and governing modernity.A lot has been written on the issue of the (auto) “exclusion” of the youngergenerations from the processes of formation of political elites.And yet almost always we have heard a never ending discussion using obscuresociological categories and being about youth in an undifferentiated way. We areinstead concentrating on the institutional reasons that prevent one segment of thisgeneration to take political responsibility and, therefore, the renovation of rulingclasses to function in a proper way 24 .24 Much discussion keep presuming – and it is a dangerous assumption – that, after all, democracy is a romantic (andimpossible) “citizens’ government”, whereas, in the best of cases, in its best traditions, in the conditions that we have toknow how to recreate, democracy is instead a loyal competition between elites, between groups (professional, cultural…) that contend the possibility to govern.24

It is, for instance, technical, even banal features of the mechanism by which MPs getelected that prevent a number of people to be electable.The two people from our story, for example, even realized that - between many othercommon characteristics – they had roughly the same number of friends. Let’s say thesame number of people that, in theory, could in an electoral competition support eachof them.Yet the fact that the potential “electorate” of the more international person is spreadover four or five (Italian and European) cities renders this potential “political”support irrelevant. And makes such a constituency of (Italian and European) citizenswhich do not belong to any single specific city practically inexistent for politicalpurposes. Inexistent like the “transnational” political space that advocates of the EUor of some form of global governances see necessary yet which never materialized.A technical detail. Or to use an even more precise wording, an electoral technicality.And yet such a technicality not only belongs, but defines parliamentary democracy ina rather fundamental way. And it is, in fact, one of the limits we need to overcome ifwe want democracy to evolve and to survive.To tell the truth, nobody, almost none of the potential, international politicians seemsto be particularly sad for the lost opportunity; and even fewer potential voters of sucha theoretical transnational electoral body seem to mourn for not having the possibilitynominate one of their “class”.And still our banker could not hide his frustration for too long. The global citizens donot like the result. They see increasingly not tolerable, even illegitimate the power ofpoliticians that they blame mostly on the plane of competences: And they feel moreand more disengaged when they realize that they will continue to choose people thatdo not share their interests, their style of life, not even their tastes and ways to doshopping.It is a disengagement. And a “democratic deficit”. But we are here witnessing theexclusion of one of the most productive part of society and the accumulation of anumber of (psychological and economic and cultural) conditions that are almost prerevolutionary. Pre revolutionary meaning by revolution those fractures created by thecontradiction between the rise of a class in terms of economic power and knowledge,and its political insignificance.For sure, there are obviously also great pediatricians who are more able than asuccessful banker to bring value into politics. In our example, as our friend rightlyclaimed, to visit thousand of children and their families can provide a wider anddeeper sense of “common people” needs.And yet it cannot be denied that excluding a whole generation of managers, bankers,consultants, journalists, researchers that live between the European capitals is adefinite loss of representation and of skills. It is an evident failure of the shape of25

democracy today and specifically of its assumption that citizenship is a conceptstrictly tied to the terrestrial dimension.It is also true, finally, that international business men, diplomats and professors of thebest Universities, find in effect, other channels to “influence” the process offormation of the political will and even more that of lead pressure groups whosepower is often even greater that that of a simple parliamentarian. And, yet, thisconsideration defines with even greater clarity the terms of the question.To exclude a relevant and large part of the public opinion from the concretepossibility to participate in normal political processes means to leave such processesto the representation of the segment of population with medium or low possibilitiesand income. It also means postponing to a later moment, not institutional and thus notregulated moment the confrontation with the more advanced part of society.This entails a separation between on one hand the visible exercise of power which isincreasingly less relevant, and on the other, what instead happens outside thoseofficial forms of democracy 25 .Under these circumstances, to be “public opinion” becomes increasingly useless andalong with the poverty of the democratic process, we see a driftage of “classes” andsegments – a process in which society as a whole disintegrates.The greater becomes the harm caused by the problem we are analyzing, the wider isthe geographical scope of the institutions we are electing. In fact, the case of theEuropean elections is a rather extreme case of failure of mechanisms that –notwithstanding their increasing inadequacy on a national level – have beenreplicated on a continental scale.Even more incomprehensible is that the elections of a supranational parliament(composed by parliamentarians, that in theory, represent the entire Europeanpopulation) are done by computing the results of territorial-based competitions 26 .Between the victims of this mechanism there is the Transnational European PoliticalParty that, for some time, many have considered necessary in order to “articulate apolitical European area” (objective that the same constitutional treaty has greatlymissed after identifying it as its major priority).Let’s try to understand what would happen to such a political party in an electoralcontext such as the current one.25 This is, partially the analysis that Negri and Hardt, in the “Impero”, 2002, have developed in outlining thecharacteristics of new imperial hegemony26 To this paradoxical results of the last European elections, Vision has dedicated the “European Election QuickCollection” accessible on www.vision-forum.org.26

A party of this kind, would propose itself in every or almost every European regionsimultaneously, with the same program, the same or almost the same multinationallist of candidates.It is likely that such a proposal would initially present a strong tendency to obtainsimilar percentages of votes in most of the regions.It is foreseeable that the new party, if sustained by a strong electoral marketingcampaign (more costly if compared to national ones because it would have to bepresented in more languages), can capture the relevant electoral segment (young,mobile) which we have talked about before and probably obtain values between 1%and 3% in almost all areas and therefore, a couple of percentage points at Europeanlevel.A small percentage but, seemingly, it would be eighth - ten times greater than aformation that is dedicated, on the contrary, to take around 15-20% of the votes in acouple of regions only in a certain area and in a certain country.And yet the “regional” party would be rewarded with few (say between two and ten,depending on the results) seats whereas the much larger (but more disperse)“European” party would probably elect not even one MP.Not a very democratic outcome. But most of all not logical at all in the specific caseof elections meant to elect “representatives of the European people”. And not at all aneffective way to encourage the innovation that institutions (like any organization andbody) need to adapt, evolve and survive.Again the territorial based electoral mechanism encourages concentration and not thediffusion of the electorates. And this is a paradox.All of the prophets of the Network Society had thought that the links that make us tobe bound to certain area were weakening.And instead since those prophets forgot that politics has to be reinvented togetherwith “commerce” if a new model of society has to emerge, we are now findingourselves with mechanism of collective decision making that are even biased towardsthe conservation of the past.The paradoxical outcome is, in the case of EP, a mechanism that favor local lists (thatnormally are the most “euro skeptical”) and strongly penalize the affirmation oftransnational parties (that normally should have their major interest in creating that“European political space” of which institutions like the European Parliament shouldlive for).Technologies do, in fact, provide possibilities to make changes that are decisions ofan “institutional” nature. And even in this case, short term hypothesis have to bedistinct from those that can be imposed in the long term.In the long run in fact it is possible that citizenships and with them, votes become adivisible right. It is in fact technologically possible to imagine that each of us can27

decide to divide her/ his own vote and decide to use to express a preference withinthe constituency to which he/she feels to belongs.Such citizenships can be different because they can correspond to different cities, ornations. But we should also be able to demonstrate that we are instead “Europeans”or decide that we belong to communities that are not defined by any geographicalterm, but are instead referred to cultural, professional, or even single political issues.In any case constituency will have to be something different from an “interest group”and will need to correspond to a political arena divided internally in more than onepolitical position.There are obviously a number of problems to be solved: regulations will provide forthe possible constituencies to be limited to a list of significantly enough group ofcitizens (and thus electors will have to choose among such a menu of possibilities)and to avoid fragmentation of the system into “corporations”; the choice of theconstituency will stay the same for a number of years and rules will avoid abuses ofthe system such as changing electoral body just for the purpose of giving the vote tosomebody who is candidate in that body.These are, in fact, long term possibilities because such radical revisions of therepresentation mechanisms are, evidently, correlated to more complex changes in thefiscal system and into the distribution of competencies between distinct institutionallevels.In the short term however, we need to do something and to experiment some form ofdeviation from the geographically based constituencies.Voters have to be able to, and even more to those of the European elections, choosebetween regional and European or national based constituencies. And more rapid,flexible and concrete has to be the chance for any European citizen (or foreignworker) to participate in the elections in the country he/she works. We also need tofind the mechanism that makes possible to distribute one’s vote among more localelections if one commutes between different places and pays taxes to more than onecity council.These operations are all possible even if these institutional changes require a strongwill to bring innovation in mechanisms that many think unchangeable. And even ifthe electronic vote, and more precisely, the electronic choice of the constituency tobelong to that would be necessary for the reforms we are envisaging, still presents anumber of technical difficulties.The technology that would replace the electoral list as a physical archive (and thevoting station as a physical place for expressing their preference), makes it possibleto realize what previously was extremely expensive and complex.Certain costs have become a fraction of what they used to be and it is certainlytechnologically possible to imagine electoral boards that in a more flexible wayreproduce the articulation of a Society that in the mean time has greatly evolved.28

THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF THE GENERAL ELECTIONS.Another great problem of democracy, in its current form, is that it makes citizens toexpress opinions on government actions and on a political program as a whole. It is infact in terms of general choices that one is normally required to manifest his will 27 .The situation that we are about to describe, in reality, is similar to the one we alreadyhave analyzed in relation to the “electoral cycle”.The informative mistake that general elections make is, similar to the one we weredescribing as far as the issue of the “electoral cycle”. Such a mistake is equal to thedifference between the (weighted) average of the satisfaction levels that a citizenexpresses on the different policy areas and the “general opinion” that he/she managesto represent at the moment of the elections.Once again, though, as in the case of the “cycle”, the problem is even greater and infact the real issue is that large parts of the government activities are not judged andare not even judgeable with such mechanisms.The point is that – normally - a person is interested in politics because her/ his life isinfluenced by political choices or at least by some policies or some services thataffect that person’s life. We can, then expect that different people has different needs,they ask different “services” or public goods and, therefore, they have differentlydeveloped opinion of the performance of a government or of a public administrationin different areas.It is then plausible to think that whereas she/he can express more sensible evaluationsif is called to express a judgment on a determined service area or a specific policy, itis much harder, as any human behavior scholar can demonstrate, for that same personto express synthetic and equally conscious opinions on the entire set of policies/public services/ collective choices that a government has produced in a certain timeperiod.We can certainly ask normal citizens to have an opinion on National Health Serviceand we may even provide for the opinion of patients to be more important than theone of individuals who had nothing to do with the system. We can also ask a vote onthe education system to scholars, their families and the rest of society which is stillimpacted by the quality of the schools. We can ask evaluations on the quality of theprograms of public television, or even on the conditions of urban traffic and oftransportation systems.27 As a consequence, even institutions that we elect with elections of a “general” type, tend to be “universal” supposedto respond to any problem may require political action. On this concept and on the possibility of institutions project orpolitics based we will further speak in the fourth chapter.29

It would then be much more realistic to expect the voters to express individualpreferences for each policy, whereas they are instead asked by “general elections” tomake an ‘average’ of their preferences in the different areas. An unrealistic requestthat is probably one of the prize we pay to an unrealistic (“idealistic”, in fact) conceptof politics and of the State. And a loss of informative power because it is perfectlylegitimate that our opinions may make us prefer a right wing party in four out of tenpolicy areas and a left wing one in the rest of them.A loss of information that was a rather understandable sacrifice at a time when votingwas very expensive and ideologies were rather good to tell policy options in any areaand in a consistent way; and that now it is increasingly less acceptable becausetechnologies have changed cost structures and that problems to be solved has exposedideologies’ obsolescence..In fact, the problem we are talking about produces two possible failures: 1) theelector may be not able to do the weighted average that general election require andthis may produce a vote different from the one she may have expressed if called tochoose one of the possible governments by policy; 2) some (actually) most policyareas may simply result not to account to anybody and the performance of agovernment in, say healthcare or even economics, may go practically not evaluatedby citizens (because a different priority – say terrorism or security – may have takenattention out of media).Once again democratic are still assuming a number of hypothesis that were valid for aSociety that maybe has existed but that surely does not exist anymore. They stillassume that the world can be divided by ideologies and models and these models canexplain most of possible political choice; therefore they also assume that each modelcan correspond to some political party or some alliance that will implementconsistently that vision.They assume an Hegelian romantic hypothesis of the formation of the will of aModern State. Hypotheses that appear totally not true in a context like the actual one.The consequence is, even in this case, paradoxical: the romantic, idealistic conceptionof politics has apparently reduced democracy to the ghost of what it was meant to be.In a post ideology world, the citizen faced by the daunting task of reducing all herpreferences into a synthetic judgment, frustrated by the impossibility to have anyserious say on specific issues that do impact her life, decides not to vote or – if sheconsiders a moral obligation or even a rewarding experience to still be part of a game– to use as criteria factors have nothing any more to do with the “impact of politics onlife”: the sense of belonging (more or less similar to the one soccer fan express whenthey try to explain why their team is so distinct from any other else) that has replaced30

ideologies 28 ; the sympathy or personal distaste for the main characters of the soapopera (in some countries actors and media tycoon are even taking the place ofprofessional politicians) that sometimes seem to have replaced the dynamic ofpolitical confrontation 29 .In a sense the survival of ideology in their new form and the personalization ofpolitics respond to the same question: they both fill the vacuum left by theimpossibility to express as citizens significant enough opinions on things that matter.The most important election – that of the President of the United States -demonstrates how articulated can be the opinions of citizens and how narrowdefinition such “left” (or “liberal” or even “progressive”) and “right” (or“conservative” or “liberalist”) are incapable to predict opinions in specific policyarea.PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES APPROVAL RATE, USA, 2004(9-10 October week)Education4348Helthcare3850LeadKerryTaxes4648Economy4549Iraq4451LeadBush jrTerrorism39560 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80Source: Vision on Gallup Polls dataLike for the above chart, almost all of the Americans believed Mr. Kerry to be betterat dealing with economics (whereas some majority, by the way, seemed to dislikedemocrats’ ideas on taxation), and again a large majority of them thought Mr. Bushto be better to cope with terrorism (and yet the majority were opposing the war in28 Ideology has, then, became a “brand” that gives to the affiliates an identity that sometimes has little to do with actualpolitics pursued by the parties: an example of such contradictions are the UK labour party or even the Americanrepublican one.29 An extreme example of how personal stories may replace policies is the capability of the sentimental or military storyof candidates to take the centre stage in the last US presidential election31

Iraq). The vote was “obviously” not divisible and incapable to articulate opinions soto register disapproval for handling of economics and a specific encouragement onthe war to terror.For sure, we are not suggesting to have a system by which it may happen that two(theoretically a number of them equal to the number of policies) presidents may beelected according to the relative strength of candidates on different issues. And yet itis difficult to accept that a rather rich set of opinions (and thus of information, ofpersonal experience and sometimes of individual know how) that an individualexpress has to collapse to a single vote; and even less acceptable that large pieces ofpolicies (large as the decision of moving a war or increasing public deficit) do,practically, go not accountable to citizens or at least they are bundled in a muchlarger and thus rather into very meaningful feedback. We still may have one presidentand one premier but it is increasingly less acceptable not to have some form ofaccountability on some specific policies or even for the responsible (being themministers or secretary of state or assessors) of their implementation.We are not questioning then the validity of the existence of a “general” election. Anysystem does need to have somebody who is in charge of establishing prioritiesamong different policies and different public services. However, the point is that onceagain, democracy cannot be based solely on moments (more or less cathartic) ofgeneral elections.In a certain sense, if the “federalism” interprets the real need for greater participationmoving power vertically to general institutions on lower levels (regions, town halls),the next democratisation phase could be one where power are instead re allocatedhorizontally still at the same level but towards specialized policy makers 30 .Market researches do reflect this type of articulation. People are asked not only tovote (this is, in fact, not even one of the most popular polls), but to express personal(almost a sort of consumer’s) satisfaction by question (security, jobs, immigration,family, ..). And it is the never ending demand for polls that points to citizens’ formore “informative” mechanisms. In a sense, the possibility that we are discussing isto construct a process that is able to reflect in a legitimate way feedbacks provided insome regulated fashion.As said before, however, to change electoral processes imply a change in theinstitutions and the way government operates. This makes the entire exercise muchmore fundamental and difficult than the one that some e-democracy experiments haveattempted.30 This is, in fact, what already happens with the multiplication of “agencies” which do work rather well, and yet are notaccountable to any body but the general institution that rented to them decision making capabilities.32

Policy based and single issue elections would, in fact, not be entirely new. In someyears in states as different as California and Switzerland you can count up to onehundred referendary consultations; in some American counties there are, even, realsectoral elections such as those in which a sheriff chosen to be responsible for thecommunity “security”.One possibility would be to expand the innovations that some city councils in Europeand elsewhere (among which Basel in Switzerland, Gotenborg in Sweden and Seattlein the USA) are experimenting with.Among such experiences, is the increasingly frequent approval of a number of cityplanning programmes and more interestingly, programmes for urban mobility. Such aprogramme is a general plan where in principle all investments and decisions are tobe taken in multi year period and which are supposed to impact the quality oftransportation and the level of congestion in a given urban area. The consultation ofcitizens in order to get the approval of the plan is normally expanded in scope so thatcitizens are involved in the discussion, the evaluation of alternatives and theestablishment of priorities (for instance between reduction of car accidents andspeed).The development of such a practice would be to expand further the scope of theconsultation and even consider the transformation into an elective body of theauthorities that in many cities are already in charge of managing public transportationand regulating private traffic.The very metrics of such political debates make much more sense - as opposed to theideological battles that we are used to witnessing in “general elections”. Proposals,projects, candidates would be measured in terms of targets they propose to achieve(for instance reduction of average time to commute to work and of average waitingtime at bus stop) as opposed to money that taxpayers would have to spent to reachthem. Likewise citizens would have many more concrete facts (once againcongestion, quality of public services) upon which to develop their judgment.Even in this case, the idea is to institutionalise, regulate an already existing trend.A trend which is evident also looking to the manifestos (the labour party pioneeredthe concept) and even contracts (like the one proposed by the current Italian primeminister to the electors) that, more and more frequently, articulate the politicaldiscourse and that are based on targets by policy, specific promises and timing fortheir fulfilment. This tendency shows how big the demand is from citizens forspecific facts upon which they can really keep politicians accountable for the use thatthey make of public money.Once again technologies constitute the real element of discontinuity: the cost ofcollecting data and monitoring the progress of a certain community on the promisedresults, and are hundreds of times lower that of only ten years ago.33

Similar innovations may then be experimented at other institutional levels: regions,nation states, and the European Union.In Italy and Germany, it is healthcare the public service area which could be moreusefully exposed to public scrutiny at regional or Laender level. The scheme could besimilar to the one we mentioned for urban mobility at city council level. The overallresponsibility for providing healthcare services in such a way that quality andaccessibility to all is maximised, is in many cases already mandated to some regionalagency. The possibility here is to call elections where alternative programmes andteams are chosen directly by the citizens and once again to give citizens thepossibility to witness a competition whose metrics may be much more “concrete”,closer to the quality of their existences than the one which is typical in “generalcontests”.At nation state level, similar sectoral competitions may be called in areas such aseducation. The example of “education” can also respond to another need forrationalisation that modern democracies show. Some areas – education is a clearexample of it – seem to demand much longer term strategies as opposed to others.In fact, the separation of political competitions for different policies, may also meetthe need of establishing different political cycles (see above point 1) for differentsectors. The length of each political mandate for agencies working on a multi yearprogramme of transforming the schooling system may then be longer than the periodallowed to other elected bodies.Similar reasoning for the European Union and in this case areas such as publicresearch projects and regulation of private ones, may be the issue upon which todevelop specific European wide political competitions.In each of these cases we may undoubtedly realize that most people are notknowledgable enough to express an opinion. However this is even more the case ingeneral elections, as we explained before. The very realization of the lack ofknowledge that we as citizens (and politicians) display when it comes to developingspecific needs and opinions, will be an even stronger incentive to start expandingthese sorts of innovations. Their value will, in fact, be mostly in terms of a learningexperience for a public opinion and for a society who often seems not to be used anymore to the responsibilities that democracy demands.THE QUESTION OF THE SCOPE OF OPINIONSThis is the fourth mistake that the parliamentarian systems makes in respect to theobjective to gather citizens’ preferences for technological evaluation that is possibletoday (and, in our opinion, politically desirable).In fact, not only do elections occur with sub-optimal frequency, questions that are tooboard and in constituencies that are unrealistic.34

The problem is also that consultations effectively require citizens to choose in a waythat incurs further information loss. We can, normally, indicate only one candidate(and only one political party between the many available options) and in case of areferendum we can only express a “yes” or a “no”.The reality is that human opinions do not respond to a YES or NO format. Each of uscan be naturally more or less pro or against a certain candidate, in favour of someparts of a piece of legislation and against other parts of it. An election whichimplicitly assumes that we can make a choice on a pattern of either total acceptationor total rejection also assumes a simplification that, once again, scatters much of theinformative power that a modern democracy should exercise thus sacrificing part ofthe expectations that voters potentially express.Once again an avalanche of market research and polls fill the gap left by the inabilityof elections to record preferences. We are asked to express “level of satisfactions”(which in fact are scaled on a number of metrics which allows for being more or lesssatisfied).And it is the most famous electoral time series to give an idea – in the below diagram- of the information we are loosing.78Approval rate of the would be winner of the US Presidential one month before the election(Per cent, 1960 - 2004)7266666060616257555353Kennedy Johnson Nixon Ford Carter Reagan Reagan Bush sr. Clinton Clinton Bush jr. Bush jr.Source: Vision on Gallup Polls dataYes we are able to choose. But, for instance, we are not able to say how high is ouroverall satisfaction of available political offerings. It is rather normal that somebodymay win because of her own merits or because the limits of her opponent. The two35

situations are not equivalent, and by not providing democracy of any mean (we, forinstance, could start give some value to the number of people choosing not to vote foranyone) to register overall satisfaction (or dis satisfaction) we are losing a piece ofknowledge to which we could, for instance, associate actions (reforms in the politicalmarket rules, for instance, or in the financing of political parties) that may increasethe innovation (or, otherwise, the stability) of the “system”.36

2. DO POLITICAL PARTIES HAVE STILL A FUTURE ANDTHE RISE OF NEW POLITICAL ACTORS? (to be developed)….37

3. ARE CONSTITUTIONS STILL USEFUL? THE PARADOXOF THE FLEXIBLE INSTITUTIONS (to be developed)…38

4. ARE PARLIAMENTS STILL WORTHY THEIR COST? (tobe developed)…39

5. DOES TELEVISION STILL MATTER? THEOPPORTUNITIES AND THE RISKS OF THE “MANY TOMANY” MODEL (to be developed)…40

THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY: VISION 2020Is there still a future for democracy? Actually it almost seems that the statement canbe turned upside down and that in fact it can be said that if there is a future foradvanced societies, such a future is with democracy.Nevertheless if democracy is to be saved, we have to – with courage and even withcreativity – commit ourselves to a radical effort to modernise its processes.In reality the reasoning that we have so far developed is based on a series ofhypotheses that have to be explained.The strongest hypothesis can be maybe found in the same definition of “democracy”that we are assuming.It is a hypothesis that in reality belongs to the classical elaborations of the conceptand that yet too often is forgotten, leaving room for demagogy the enemy ofdemocracy.We do, in fact, assume that “democracy” is not “citizens’ government” (it neverwas, maybe not even when Athenians gathered in the Agorà), but competition.Loyal, not traumatic, based on the merits and therefore on the ability to conquercitizens’ consensus – but still competition between alternative elites.The problem democracy is facing, is not that it is not any longer the “government ofcitizens” (because it never was that), but that elites are not even competing any longerfor political power.The politicians’ class has become a professional order. Not so different fromorthodontists or accountants or solicitors. A professional order, not even an elite.Unable to “represent” a significant part of the interests and even less to aggregatetalents around a project. An interest group, in fact, that defends itself in a corporateway and that because of a lack of real competition and exchange becomes ever lessable to produce innovation or to manage growing complexity.Self exclusion of a significant part of the generation to which Vision belongs to, iswhat has inspired many of the proposed arguments.Tied to this definition, there is also the idea that in reality if we want to savedemocracy, we have to step away from the belief that in democracy equality isartificially obtained by compressing “institutional” moments of participation. Wehave to increase the opportunities, instead; we do need to unlash, multiply, diversifythe channels to access politics; we just need to allow every body to participatefollowing her own interests, timing, skills; we just need to permit the utilization ofthe potential that technologies provide and societies demand.We do have to democratize democracy because forward is the only way to save itfrom an increasing irrelevance.The crisis of democracy is due to a lack of it, a shortage of its quantity and diffusionrelatively to what one would expect from an Information Society.41

We, in fact, also, think that the democracy’s performance is not an absolute concept,but it has to become relative, evaluated in reference to the expectations andpossibilities the change throughout time. The deluge of information that has been themost distinctive feature of the last ten years has “simply” produced an increase in theexpectations that the democratic “information systems” can not respond to.After all, this is the only intuition/ ideology that has oriented Vision analysis of thedifferent structural limits (four) of “elections” as an informative mechanism to collectcitizens’ preferences.This research has not proposed a new institutional architecture. That was not what weintended.We think that such a scope is not realistic. And we also believe that such an illogicalpromise was the real reason for the failure of most recent constitutional effort atnational, European and UN level.Democracy is a “learning process” as we have been saying many times during thisresearch.Its configuration has to be, therefore, in a continuous evolution and its “reforms” willalways be experiments.The name of the game of modernization is to make democracy able to reinvigorate(and save) its original values by continuously adapt itself to transformations whichmay kill them if not understood correctly.42