Politics

We need deliberative spaces that allow people to truly listen to one another and to be heard, to recognise and acknowledge each other, even in difference, to grapple with complexity and spark curiosity – in ideas as well as in why others believe what they do; to have empathy and also to be able to do the hard work of finding common ground on the sh... See more

Darrell Bouldin • Assembly required - RSA Comment

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Could citizen assemblies be a new model for the future of political decision-making, to overcome some of the challenges of our democratic crisis?

I continued to read the article and want to add the below, to build on the above question.

The more fundamental issue is that a system defined by elections, with political parties and politicians, is designed for short-termism, for debate, for conflict and for polarisation. It puts re-election goals and party logic ahead of the common good. Adding on new forms of democratic institutions like citizens’ assemblies to an electoral system does not address the underlying democratic problems of an elections-based system.

Web3 Is the Opportunity We Have Had All Along: Innovation Amnesia and Economic Democracy

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TTimour Kosters

Polarization and gridlock have become increasingly synonymous with democracy. This is not for lack of opportunities. Recent decades have seen social movements and technologists develop numerous experiments in more textured, responsive, and participatory forms of collective decision-making. These include participatory budgeting (Cabannes 2004), liquid democracy (Hardt and Lopes 2015), sortition (Gastil 2000; Bouricius 2013; Pek 2019; Fan and Zhang 2020), citizens’ assemblies (Niemeyer 2014; Chwalisz 2017; Giraudet et al. 2022), crowdsourcing (Hsiao et al. 2018; Bernal 2019), and various alternative voting systems (Posner and Weyl 2014; Emmett 2019). A growing field of platforms for online citizen engagement has emerged to facilitate these processes (Stempeck 2020). Yet in even the most advanced applications of technology-enabled governance, from Madrid to Taiwan (Hsiao et al. 2018; Smith and Martín 2021; Tseng 2022), the new mechanisms serve in solely advisory roles; participatory budgeting processes, while more likely to be binding, apply to only small fractions of public budgets. Governments could be eagerly transforming themselves into the vibrant, creative, networked institutions that the networked world arguably needs them to be, but they are not.