The Demarchy Manifesto by John Burnheim

Author:John Burnheim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Demarchy, sortition, government, public policy, politics, power, democracy, representation, moralism, authority, governance, committees, constitution
ISBN: 9781845408985
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2016
Published: 2016-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

Transforming committee work

I have spoken of councils rather than committees or juries, because committees have a bad name. It often seems that the only people who like serving on committees are the people that nobody else wants on a committee, the self-important bores, the one-track activists, those who ‘vote with the strength’ and those who have nothing better to do. To have to sit for hours being polite to such bores, trying in vain to get them to focus on the real issues or listen to what you have to say, is not an attractive proposition. It is not surprising that people tend to have little confidence in committees. They trust prime ministers and individual ministers rather than cabinet, CEOs rather than boards of directors, mayors rather than councils, and so on. They feel that an individual who is personally responsible for her decisions is more likely to arrive at good decisions than a council where each member can attribute responsibility for mistakes to her colleagues. Committees are often accused of preferring easy caution to hard confrontation with a problem.

There is certainly a psychological problem here. It is easier to grasp and react to what an individual person intends than the amorphous intentions of a committee. One feels able to understand where the individual executive is coming from and what considerations influence her. To a serious degree this confidence is misplaced, easily exploited by leaders who have the knack of projecting the right image of themselves, exploiting the tropes of popular myths and platitudes, wishful thinking and paranoid fears. The dangers of the leadership principle are easily forgotten.

I believe that the objections to councils as committees can all be met if their workings are open to scrutiny and evaluation by anybody who is interested. This is now possible in ways that could hardly have been envisaged even a generation ago. The whole course of the deliberations of a council can now be recorded in full online, available for comment to anybody who is interested. Members of the council who have to advance clear arguments and engage with those of others in front of a critical public cannot hide behind anonymity or confidentiality. Their evasions and misconstruals of what is at issue are out in the open. One can have an assured confidence that the real issues are being addressed, that all and only the relevant considerations are being considered. Comments from the public are available at every point in the proceedings. The council is no longer a place where decisions are taken for covert reasons. The councillors are chosen by lot and are not beholden to supporters.

That assumes, of course, that discussion is not dominated by parties with preconceived positions, as in our parliaments, where what is said in debate on the floor of the house is often merely a staged confrontation on issues that have already been decided elsewhere. The difference between genuine debate in a context of negotiation and window-dressing is obvious. No council that claims to represent all the stakeholders could get away with a mere pretence of negotiation.

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