Directer Democracy

Full Transcript:

Introduction:

Hello and welcome to the Rules of the Game podcast, where it is my job to discuss democratic institutions.

Democracy needs to be defended. Democracy needs to be defended not only against autocrats and authoritarian forces, but also against so-called anti-democrats that think the political and intellectual elites know better and should decide in lieu of the rest of society. Democracy needs to be defended against those who want to restrict the right to participate and the right to decide.

With Roslyn Fuller I discuss how democracies are under threat. Direct democracy offers a powerful option to give people more decision making power and hence more control of the political process, but it has to be applied and used with caution and we seek to correct some of the misunderstandings around this powerful political tool. 

Roslyn also shares her experiences with citizen assemblies that are currently organized all over, and explains why she does not support them as a tool to strengthen democracy. Finally, we also discuss the risks and opportunities of digital technologies for democratic institutions.

Dr. Roslyn Fuller has written several books on democracy, the latest titled “In Defence of Democracy”.  She was educated in Germany and Ireland with a PhD in International Law from Trinity College, in Dublin. Roslyn’s experience as a lecturer, author, and political consultant has given her unique insights into structures of public governance and, above all, the mechanics of political power. Her relentless defence of people power has seen her articles and interviews published in countless newspapers and magazines, and I link to her website in the show notes where you find all her research and contributions.

I am your host, Stephan Kyburz, and this is the thirteenth episode of The Rules of the Game podcast. I am a political economist with a PhD in Economics from the University of Bern in Switzerland. And I previously held positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Center for Global Development.

You find a full transcript of the conversation on my website rulesofthegame.blog. If you enjoy this episode, please leave a review on your preferred podcast platform and share it with friends and colleagues. Now please enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Roslyn Fuller.

Interview:

Stephan Kyburz: Roslyn Fuller, welcome to the Rules of the Game podcast. I’m very happy to have you on the show. 

Roslyn Fuller: Yeah, well thanks for inviting me.

Stephan Kyburz: So as usual I start with the question that I ask all my guests on the podcast. What is your first memory of democracy?

Roslyn Fuller: Yeah I think my first memories of democracy aren’t really that high flow and I’m from a rural area in Canada and I guess the things I really would associate with that would be kind of the everyday things of life. So for example, we would bank at a credit union which is where members make the decisions. I worked at a cooperative company which was founded in the great depression and our religion was kind of like a kind of Quaker religion so we didn’t really have any priests or anything. We had this kind of religion where we just went to a meeting host and people talked for the most part. So there was this really kind of open discussion and that’s how so many institutions in my everyday life are constituted that when I think about democracy I think of those things of people like just kind of making the decisions that are important for their lives and I think that’s kind of a difference between how I think of it and a lot of other people who are in political science. Because we hear a lot of things about you know, democracy should be inclusive and it should be fun. It doesn’t seem like a lot of fun to go down to the credit union, or not to mention to go to like essentially to go to church or to media or whatever. But these are things that kind of had to be done and there were things where like the members would make those decisions for themselves and have a level of self-determination in their lives. So that’s one thing. The other thing is that half of my family immigrated from Spain to Argentina and then to Canada. So I guess because of that I had a more developed sense of dictatorship than a lot of people in Canada would, and I kind of had this understanding of that as being like a very, very real thing. And politics being a potentially very very hard hitting business as well that you shouldn’t get involved with it unless you were prepared. To see things through all the way. So I think those are two things that kind of affected me in my early life that are probably a little bit different than maybe some other people.

Stephan Kyburz: So that is kind of a strong sense for local democratic institutions as well, right? As I understand you.

Roslyn Fuller: Yeah I mean myself actually I favor national reforms. I think sometimes people get a little bit affected by local. You know this emphasis on the localness but at the same time at the time in my life I grew up in this rural area. It was before the internet. I mean national politics were something that happened very far away from our little town so we would read you know watch the news. We knew it was going on but we didn’t expect to partake in those things necessarily ourselves.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, and so your family story through Spain, Argentina and then Canada did that affect your sense of okay there can go stuff really wrong with democracy and and we need to defend it which also maybe led you to write like several books on democracy and the latest one “In defense of democracy” in which you really defend the the principle of democracy itself. Like at what point did you kind of realize that you need to fight and defend democracy.

Roslyn Fuller: Yeah I think that definitely did have an impact on me because for my grandparents and for my mother, these events were just events that happened to them in their lives. You know like they’re not, it’s not like people put out an official announcement. You know, like one thing leads to another, leads to another. And I think that a lot of the time people in Western countries are quite complacent about their democracy far more so than they should be, you know? And they think also like of democracy is everything that’s good and dictatorship is everything that’s bad. My family who really fledged the dictatorship in Spain, they had a really hard time under it. But at the same time they sometimes had good things to say about it. You know there wasn’t, they’d sometimes say like well there wasn’t any crime and you know, things like that. So I kind of think I had a more differentiated view and an understanding that even people who left I mean they left and they never wanted to go back. Even they would say well you know there were a few okay points and and there are things that it’s not a matter of saying okay, that’s evil that must be anti-democratic, this is good, this must be democratic. It’s all pros and cons and there can be very seductive reasons for people to choose a society that’s not democratic, you know. So I think that’s definitely an impression I had, I felt that I really need to start defending democracy and not just talking about it but defending the concept of democracy that we should live in democracies after 2016 with the Brexit vote and the Trump election of Trump. Not because I felt like oh those things are terrible and they make us live not in the democracy but because of the number of people who came out at that time and published wave after wave after wave of articles and books saying okay, if this is how people are going to vote then there shouldn’t be democracy. There’s too much democracy. You know elites need to rise up against the masses. We need to stop this somehow and there was just this incredible wave of this. I almost felt like I’m the only person left who thinks it should be democracy and some things they were saying were also quite off the ball as well. You know, these kinds of really strung together stories and statistics. So I kind of wanted to disprove some of that and that’s why I wrote my book.

Stephan Kyburz: Okay, so the question about too much democracy I think is a really central one, and also we hear it again and again also among political scientists, right, who say, you know if people have to make too many, too many decisions or I don’t know maybe they can’t make good decisions when they have like a referendum etc and in your book you you go to some length to defend how people make decisions and also try to argue against like work that says that people make bad decisions. Obviously we know that nobody always makes rational and perfect decisions but neither do the elites, right? So how do you really answer the question of is there too much democracy?

Roslyn Fuller: Yeah, I don’t think there can be too much democracy as you may have guessed. I think that people sometimes misunderstand the word democracy. It comes from Greek and it means people power. It doesn’t mean like people work so you actually don’t need to be involved in every aspect of a decision. All of the time this is kind of like the Swiss model but like the CEO of a company you have the power to look at something if it’s not going okay, so you might not 24 hours a day in your life be completely up on every last building regulation or every environmental regulation. But if there’s an issue, you have the right to zero in on that and to deal with that issue. That’s kind of the place of a people in a democracy to be that kind of I think in a way CEO on top of it that says okay, I’m not involved I’m not every one of my one hundred thousand workers in this company. But I can always if there’s a problem in the accountancy department or if there’s a problem in the sales department, I can always just zero in on that and fix that. I have the power to do that. So I think that’s important. I think that’s why some people say democracy can’t work because they think it means everyone has to do everything all of the time together. That’s not the case. It’s mainly troubleshooting and preventing problems. So that’s one thing as to your point: can people make good decisions? Yes, I mean as you say no decision is perfect. Every decision has pros and cons. Every decision is a matter of interest, it often depends on what your interests are. So an example that I went into in my book and is often used, is this example of proposition 13 in the United States and California. And this was back in the seventies; property prices in California were skyrocketing and this referendum came up called proposition 13, that wanted to limit property tax hikes because property tax is quite expensive in the United States compared to most places in Europe. So the reason this was an issue is because a lot of retired people were having trouble paying their bills and staying in their homes. But California was running a surplus at the time. But later on because the property tax fell away, California got into some budget issues and I mean that wasn’t the only factor of those budgetary issues either, there were a lot of other issues as well. But people like to use this as this kind of stellar example of why people should never decide anything. Well we all live in time anyway. This is like the fourth dimension. You can’t just make a decision to vote on property tax and say well, that’s it, you know now everything else is the same. We can’t make any adjustments. We can’t say all right, cool, we’re not going to boot these elderly retired people out of their homes because their property tax has gone sky high and their income hasn’t changed. We’re going to maybe rebalance the tax load, right? If it’s not coming from property tax, maybe it has to come from something else or maybe expenses have to be cut back. So this kind of way of cherry picking these things and sort of not allowing things to take their natural course leads to a lot of difficulties I think and this kind of perception of oh it was a bad decision. You know, in the end, sure like 50 years later after a lot of other developments have occurred and no one has done anything to correct it. So that’s also an issue I think of democracy as well, as being a lot of little adjustments you know and when you write a law – I’m coming from a legal background – criminals don’t just sit there and go oh well, they made a law I guess that’s it then you know they think of a way around it. So you have to make another law and then they think a way of I’m around that one and you make another law, right? So that’s life. It’s always just making laws and closing loopholes and moving on.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, exactly and also what we often forget is that if we have direct democratic decisions, for example, right? Then if you just ask the people once for some question but not for another question then how should they kind of make the system work, right? Like the Brexit example is actually quite telling because the people were asked once about Brexit just like in a very general way, right? But then there wasn’t a second decision on what actually the people wanted or how they would like to implement it. So as I also write in one of my blog posts about principles of direct democracy, actually that you know direct democratic decisions should be reversible or should be adjustable. Like if the people think oh this first decision was not maybe quite right or was not specific enough then they should be able to have another say and obviously also what we saw during after the Brexit referendum that after while it became clear that there are so many different solutions on the table or possibilities that a lot of people ask for a second referendum, which never happened unfortunately and I think it would have been great to have like a follow-up decision.

Roslyn Fuller: Yeah, well I mean I guess it also depends a lot on who is the initiator of these referendums. So in most countries like in Ireland for example, the government decides when we will have a referendum. We don’t have citizen initiated referendums. Those can also be used in kind of like the opposite way of Brexit like quite opportunistically to try to get the votes they want on the European Union and we don’t really have this kind of ongoing dialogue as you want. You know you get a question on the referendum, you have to answer that. You can’t pick something like a third choice, right? So this is also kind of an issue of manipulation. It’s like sometimes when you have um, you know when the government is able to pick the time of the election as well. That’s always an advantage you know that’s also an advantage that you can use to your advantage. So those are all factors and yeah I mean with a Brexit referendum. Obviously they thought they were going to win it, the if you want remain side thought they were going to win it. Um and they didn’t really I don’t think they really took it seriously enough. You know their entire campaign, they didn’t take it seriously enough and they didn’t take it seriously enough trying to convince people of really why they should. You know why they should chose remain at all. They just kind of took it for granted. And that’s obviously also a cardinal mistake when you’re running a referendum, is to take people’s vote for granted and not go out there and try to explain why it is good for you. Why should you do this? So yeah.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, it was quite quite a risky game by Cameron and they lost it, right? It didn’t go their way and also what I write in that blog post is actually that a referendum should be  bottom-up not top-down. So the people should decide when they want to decide on something and not you know like politicians deciding as an agenda setter when people are allowed kind of to to decide on issues. But maybe that’s also another discussion obviously.

Roslyn Fuller: Yeah, I think even in that example though, with Brexit, like there has been a certain amount of goodness come out of it like there has been this really intense discussion about Britain’s place in the world. Like first of all the European Union but also the world for like the last five years. Really and it’s really gotten quite in-depth and really opened up I think a lot of space to discuss a lot of different aspects of government in Britain you know in the direction of the country in general, which really weren’t on the table before so even in that example, where yes, there’s a lot of things around it that aren’t what you would want to see in, ideally in a referendum citizen-led democracy. It still led to a kind of revitalization I think of democracy in Britain actually in some ways.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, the discussion definitely became way more intense than it was before and it’s also it was a fundamental decision even though the consequences could be quite dire and we’ll probably only be able to make a judgment in a few years. But so in your book you also you say a lot about so-called anti-democrats; you call them anti-democrats people who are not really in favor or don’t want to give the people a lot of power because they think, for example, that the elite or educated people can can make better judgments on what is good for the people right? So who are these anti-democrats and they think this is like just you know, ah kind of a decentralized, kind of you know some people are in favor of more democracy or less, or is there is more strategic, is there more organization behind this? you know, what is your opinion on that?

Roslyn Fuller: Yeah, people ask me that a lot. I Do think it’s more just like a combination of interests. I think our societies have become much more stratified. So when I was a kid 40 years ago. Most people were middle class people and you didn’t see very wealthy people too often and for poor people there were social services. But if you ran into someone they probably didn’t have an income too much different than your family’s. You know that’s changed a lot. So people now are very, very stratified. You know whether or not you go to university now depends more and more on the family you came from, the kind of house you live in, the kind of lifestyle you have um and I think those people have kind of created a kind of parallel world for themselves. And that parallel world is now suddenly confronted with like the other half of the world really or more than the half really because in any society more people are poor than are rich. So you’re kind of suddenly confronted with people who are not happy about how society is going for example, for example, maybe aren’t happy about free trade, right? Or aren’t happy about some of the European Union policies, right? These are all things that are sources of deep dissatisfaction and when they’re confronted with that, I think because it’s so out of their wheelhouse and their experience of life. They think, well it’s wrong. And I have a degree, and in fact I have an advanced degree, so I must be right, I am more educated objectively. So therefore I’m right and your disagreement is caused by ignorance. It can’t be caused by anything else. It must be caused by ignorance and so you know what maybe giving you a say in this wasn’t a very good idea after all, right? So I think, this is kind of what’s happening, I think it’s a consequence of this stratification of society where you have a kind of, I call them courtier sometimes, a kind of layer that sort of removed itself from everybody else and has benefited a lot. But not to the point where they can actually afford to ignore everybody else. But they think they can and so a lot of the, a lot of academics and journalists and politicians would fall into this category because I think that they are people who are also threatened by more participation because they kind of depend on having a certain status. You know I’m an expert. What I say is what experts think in a way and and so I think it kind of threatens them to have more participation as well.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, of course. I mean it kind of questions their expertise in some way or they think you know they studied so much, or they learned so much about the topic that they can actually better answer the topic. And I mean this might be true, but still, people know much more about their own lives and what is good for their own life in the sense that they know their struggles. They know what’s hard and what decisions actually would probably make their lives easier. That’s kind of my opinion. So also the question of: can there be too much democracy? Well you have to ask the people what is too much democracy or how much they want to participate in a decision, right? So It’s really hard to say what is too much democracy if you don’t know whether people are happy with how the democracy is working.

Roslyn Fuller: Yeah I think experts and expertise is obviously very important in a democracy and experts actually have a really important role to play but only to the extent that they’re actually engaging with people, right? I mean why is it important to you and why and are you willing to be grilled by another expert, right? you can’t just say this is what I think so this is what all experts think, now shut up and obey it, right? You’d have to make a case for someone to try to understand like what’s important for you and yeah, why? Why would you care what I’m saying you know and and I think increasingly there’s just been less and less willing to do that. You know, so there’s kind of little clicks in a way and I notice this really in academia as Well. There’ these little clicks like we’ve all decided this so that’s the way it is, and I’m not going to explain myself to someone else like that’s weird. Why do you exist? But why do we pay you? I mean that’s literally your job description just to go out there and explain your things to other people. You know, so of course I mean some people might be mean to you or nasty to you I mean that’s going to happen. But I think you know most people won’t most of the time you know.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, so one way out of that, especially in political science, has been taking more room in the discussion are citizen assemblies. So for those who don’t know: citizen assemblies are essentially group of citizens that are selected by pretty much by sortition, by a random lot. So people join a citizen assembly that might be I don’t know, maybe you probably know much more about them than I do, like could be forty, sixty or one hundred people that join together for a day, or several days and discuss certain topics and then make recommendations to the official government institutions. And that for political scientists is often a way to bring in more participation more deliberation, to make democracy more democratic even though my main concern is that actually, you know, they might even distract a bit from the main democratic institutions that are still a long way off from being the optimum, that, you know, a lot of our official democratic institutions could be improved to make them more democratic, right? Especially also direct democracy obviously would be one of the solutions. So what is your opinion on citizen assemblies or your experiences with them?

Roslyn Fuller: Yeah, okay, so I was actually on the advisory board of a citizens assembly in Northern Ireland and we’ve had citizens assemblies here in Ireland as well. So I’ve really had an up-close look at them over the years. I do not like them at least as they’re presently constituted. For a couple of reasons, the first is that they’ve kind of taken an institution of Greek democracy which was random selection and completely mangled it and that leaves us unfortunately with all kinds of issues when it comes to them, what you’ve kind of sort of touched on which is the participation rate already. A hundred people sounds like a lot of people. It’s like nobody, I mean I think as I said in some article I wrote like you go into a London tube. There’s like 900 people on a tube. I mean I ran in an election here, you feel like you are talking, you know like the Queen of England, right? Like as if you’ve shaken more hands than you ever wanted to shake. And yet there’s still people you don’t know, you know, there are so many people in the world that one hundred is like not very many people sure they may participate deeply they may talk to each other but you’ve left out 99.9 percent of people and you haven’t allowed them to participate because they are selected as you mentioned kind of like with the jury service, right? You get a letter and you know your neighbor doesn’t get it. So maybe you’re selected and they’re not. It is like winning a lottery ticket. Okay, but in our democracies our understanding is not that we’ve won a lottery to be allowed to participate. We do have a right to participate and this is I think where the fact that my family came from a dictatorship comes in, right? I feel like they didn’t go to Canada for this right for a chance to participate. We came here because we have rights and that’s I think a very very fundamental difference. You know Democracy is about self-determination. It’s about saying I have a right as a citizen and a duty as a citizen to participate in this discussion right now. And to participate in decision making so that’s one issue that I think is a big issue and because they’re so small they can’t be accurately representative either. So their big claim is that they try to be more representative but these are bodies so small like that’s not possible, right? It’s too small to be accurate. The other thing is that of course, so a lot of the time politicians will just cherry pick the answers. The recommendations that you get so before maybe 6 or 7 years ago now we had a constitutional convention in Ireland and actually their job was to think about constitutional changes now our constitution means we have to have a referendum so their job was basically to just come up with referendum with recommendations that would potentially be put to referendum later on but of course the government has put like I don’t know maybe three out of forty recommendations ever to a vote. Like this was you know they picked the parts they wanted and especially some of the more interesting radical parts like housing which is the biggest single issue we have in this country housing which is very expensive just like who knows what happened to that, right? And it’s eight years later. So these things aren’t necessarily able, of course they don’t have any legitimacy, they don’t have the backing of people. Most people haven’t participated, so how are you going to really move this up the agenda and get something done even if it’s a great idea that potentially would have everybody’s backing. And this happened again with the French assembly. You know they were all going on about how great the French citizens assembly on climate change was that was recently had. Okay well Emmanuel Macron is not an idiot. The guy worked at Goldman Sachs, he’s running a country when he’s like my age I mean he’s a smart person. Okay, like he politicianed you, right? They had these recommendations. One of them was to impose a tax to pay for all of these climate recommendations that they made; to impose tax on wealthy or corporations and that’s the first thing he said well we’re not gonna do that, like within hours they said we’re not gonna do that. Well of course not I mean, you know a politician politicianed you, like you made a system that made that possible. So of course that’s what happened, right? So this is an issue as well and just another thing, I won’t go on forever, but another issue is this kind of question of legitimacy. So if you say, and this is a question of should these recommendations be binding or not be binding, right? So there’s two schools of thought, one would say they should be binding and another one would say they shouldn’t be binding and things should go on to be considered by the government or maybe a referendum. Fine, well if they are binding, you’ve basically recreated communism which is a system where some unaccountable small group of people is making decisions for you. It’s completely depressing and there’s no accountability, right? If you’re not willing to have accountability for what you say? Why should anyone else care if you do make it non-binding. We also have that, it’s called a focus group and governments do those all of the time so you haven’t told them anything. They don’t already know. You know I think a common problem of citizens assemblies is they think well if the politicians only knew what people wanted – as I said I’ve run in an election I’ve been canvassing – you get bored within three days. You know everything you know like I’m not disrespectful, but you practically know the color of people’s underwear. You know after three days like there’s nothing left. You know, so the idea that politicians are unaware and that they just need people to tell them, I think is a bit naive, frankly.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, I totally agree and also I think you know democracy is about power. It’s really about who makes decisions, who is sitting in our official government institutions, or in government. And when I first came across this concept, because from a Swiss perspective also, it feels somewhere, it’s a bit you know like I don’t know where to locate really these citizen assemblies and for me it was always like well shouldn’t our parliaments be citizen assemblies you know shouldn’t like our parliaments be full of citizens who make decisions, right? On behalf of the whole population and also because I guess in Switzerland we have the municipality assemblies which only work because I think our municipalities are very small. So it’s actually possible that all the citizens who want to join the assembly can join. And make decisions for the municipality. So for me it always seemed like the citizen assembly doesn’t, it’s quite hard to fit them in and I don’t say like they have no, I mean there’s probably some possibilities where they could be useful, but for me, they distract in some way from from the more important questions of how can we make our democracies more democratic. Would you agree with that?

Roslyn Fuller: Yeah I mean you say citizens assembly in Switzerland but you mean something very different by it in a sense, right? You mean these assemblies where everyone can go to you? Um, so yes, like they take this idea of sortition which was used in ancient Greek democracy but it was used in a completely different way. The Greeks had pretty much what you do in a municipality in Switzerland, they had these meetings where you know you just show up and you can make amendments and you can discuss them and you vote on them, right? Like that was about that was their assembly as well and then however they wanted to prevent corruption which is a really big issue. And so they chose their officials via sortition. However, the important thing to remember and this is I think what they never bothered to look up is that officials back in ancient Greece, 2500 years ago were very different than officials today. They really didn’t have any power. It was like you told them the assembly told them what to do. You know they maybe were in charge of keeping the streets clean or like making sure the measures in the marketplace were correct. When they had a rather important job like being a general in the army which was probably the most important job in Athens they elected that person because they had to have someone who is quite competent at what they were doing, right? So you can use sortition. In this sense to get a lot of people involved if you have a lot of people who are randomly involved in things. It becomes very hard to bribe people because it’s so hard to keep track of them and there’s too many people, right? It starts to get very risky so you can kind of batten it on to democracy in a way and it could have its potential uses. Like a non-representative democracy for that reason, but this is totally different when they’re doing, they actually want it to be small people if you go to some advocates of citizens assemblies and say we could do this but just with like a lot more people I mean a lot more people we could do it over the internet. They don’t want that. Like they want it to be small numbers of people because they think that’s the only way they can have this kind of carefully controlled discussion. You know where everything is deliberate I mean this is like really different than what was happening in confidence.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, and also I guess during these citizen assembly meetings, there are a lot of experts who kind of lay out the arguments and stuff so they must have also huge, huge influence.

Stephan Kyburz: In your view, what would be the most significant changes in our current democratic institutions, if you think about and combining elements of representative and direct democracy?

Roslyn Fuller: Yeah, I mean I’m probably more of a direct democrat than a representative democrat myself ultimately, but there are two things you could do if you wanted to do that. The first is to have a system where you would instruct your representative how to vote, right? So you could have a situation where you could say I’ll ask my constituents before I cast my vote. The downside to that is it can be quite inflexible, right? You need to negotiate with other members sometimes and it’s very hard to go back and forth and get those instructions all the time but it’s possible. Another thing you could do is have more referendums obviously where you have the ultimate control, you have representatives making most of the day-to-day decisions, most of the detailed decisions. But as a group of people in the country, the people of the country direct the general policy. Right, generally we’re going to do this, okay, your representatives figure out the details of exactly how we get there but you can’t contravene these kind of general principles and general decisions that we’re getting. So yeah, you can do both of those things and I think both of them, the first would probably work the second I mean would probably work better than the first. But you can see ways to do both of those things if you wanted to quit easily like you could do but both of those things would be completely easy to implement. You could also do participatory budgeting where people decide on the budget which is I mean the most important for it like that’s like 95 percent of politics is deciding on the budget. So that’s another thing that people could do, is make those budgetary decisions as well. I’m more for making decisions on a high level.

Stephan Kyburz: So in your book, you also write about new technologies and possibilities of digital solutions. I see in Switzerland the only concern is trust. You know, do people trust in digital democratic decisions obviously because we hear so many stories of you know, systems being hacked, etc etc. I truly believe you know digital technologies could be a game changer in some way in a democracy but important is it to have a really serious implementation where people trust the systems and we had like systems developed for example in the city of Geneva which were again discarded because people kind of didn’t seem that it improved the whole decision making process a lot, and then also they didn’t probably trust the system enough. So what are your concerns and what are your hopes in terms of digital technologies?

Roslyn Fuller: Yeah, I think when sometimes people say oh digital democracy they think you’re like a tech utopian or something. I’m like definitely not a tech utopian if anything I think technology can be a real threat to democracy because of course it just opened up these possibilities of surveillance and possibilities of intense centralization. So I think those are actually quite big problems we have to deal with and I think that’s why we need to kind of more get control of technology right and use it for purposes we decide rather than purposes that come from above. As far as trusting, ideally, for me, you should try to eliminate trust from your system to the greatest extent possible. You know when you vote directly like let’s just say when the Athenians voted they counted hands. I know you do that in the municipal assemblies as well. You don’t have to trust anything, you can trust your own eyeballs, right? So you’re there ideally, this is what a system should be. So when it comes to I know a lot of technology that do elections, I think that just doing that electoral bit is a risk. I mean you’re right, why would you trust that any more than any other kind of election where you can also cheat, right? You can also ballot box stuff and things like that also in other elections. But I agree, like that probably that wouldn’t be my ideal either. I think they’re great because that’s one piece of it if you want to have people participating more often, more deeply all of the time. Obviously it’s cheaper and efficient to do that online doesn’t mean you have to do it that way but it is cheaper and more efficient right? So It is very handy for that. But I think to just do the elections without the decisions, the dialogue coming from people without being able to reverse decisions you know without being able to see transparently how people are discussing I do see that. That’s an issue for people to trust it weirdly. I think I probably trust it less than most people, I don’t know why like I understand how it works on blockchain can be something that’s very useful here. But for myself I don’t know, I’m always the person who thinks there’s the unknown unknown, there’s always a thing you don’t know about and you don’t know you don’t know about it. So if anything I’m more paranoid on that. So it’s not just a system of just replacing what we do and do it online. It’s a system of making everything more transparent and more accountable and people being involved more transparently in that in a way that kind of eliminates the need for trust.

Stephan Kyburz: Okay, thank you. So I actually see it in the way we collect signatures in Switzerland, right? Because that process is already kind of part of the dialogue because the people who collect the signatures on the street, so that is all on paper so far, and there are new systems developed now that make the process possible online, which I fundamentally support. But we have to make sure that people really trust it and also we might have to adjust you know the number of signatures that are collected to and that are sufficient to make an initiative come to the ballot box, because obviously, as you say, digital solutions make many things much cheaper and also, as I say the the process of collection is already part of of convincing people of a certain issue even though that’s overall quite a small part – but fundamentally I’m in favor of new solutions if they are safe and trustworthy and everything and because eventually I think they will they will appear. They will come, it’s more a matter of time and how well we can solve the issues around trust.

Roslyn Fuller: Yeah,, that’s a good point because the point of collecting signatures is to make sure that there’s enough interest in society that having this referendum is worthwhile. And that’s, it’s a very good point. There are some software that does kind of imitate that to some extent as well. You know and it can kind of iteratively see like is there interest in this and if there is a kind of bumps up to the next level and if there’s interest in that it bumps up to the next level and there have been some very good petition software as well In Eastern European nations that has been really integrated with the parliament and has kind of helped to drive that but you’re right I mean you don’t want to be bogged down by every little detail. I mean nobody wants that everybody wants the least work possible in life so you have to make the system that kind of flags things that are of interest to people and that do have support and eliminates the ones that just kind of fizzle or maybe you deal with them at some later point as well.

Stephan Kyburz: And so far actually there are already solutions in place in Switzerland where signatures are collected digitally just to make that clear. So cool, thanks a lot for for all your thoughts. That has been a very interesting conversation I think. So what books or articles would you recommend on the topic of direct democracy or kind of you know that topics you are discussing also in your book. Obviously I will link to your website obviously, and to your book “In defense of democracy”. But maybe you have some other suggestions.

Roslyn Fuller: Yeah, okay, so a really good one is “Ruling the Void” by Peter Mair which really goes into how like especially European Union institutions but also central banks have kind of eroded a lot of decision making and democracy. So before the 1990s a lot more things were under control of parliaments than there are today. I come from an international law background much as I like international law, it has unfortunately played a role in removing a lot of topics from parliamentary and from democratic agendas so this is a really good book about that. Another one, “Company of Citizens” by Brook Manville and Josiah Ober. They’re historians and it’s a really interesting look at how democracy in Athens ran kind of in a really simple way. So I think it’s a really good book. Then there’s a couple that I think are very interesting as well. One is called “No such thing as a free gift” by Linsey McGoey, and then there’s another one called winner-takes-all by Anand Giridharadas who’s an American commentator and these are both about the role that wealth has played in NGOs recently. So it’s about like philanthropy as a kind of controlling mechanism of democracy. This is a substantial role that they play in this day and age definitely not something to overlook. So yeah, so those are all really good books.

Stephan Kyburz: Thanks for sharing all those suggestions and especially last one seems something I should read as well. Because also like philanthropy, fundamentally I think it’s good, but then there is also a lot of money involved and where is money involved, there are also you know interests. So I’m happy to go and look for that. Okay, So Roslyn, thanks a lot for being a guest on my podcast. It has been a great pleasure. And yeah, hopefully we’ll be able to make maybe another discussion later on in the future.

Roslyn Fuller: Great. Well thanks, very much for having me.

Outro:

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