In late 2018 a massive protest movement shook French society. Named for the yellow vests, or gilets jaunes, worn by demonstrators, the movement was initially sparked by opposition to a fuel tax hike, but its demands soon expanded. Among them were reforms to enable more direct popular input into political decisions.
Within weeks, President Emmanuel Macron rescinded the fuel tax increase. He soon offered ambitious democracy initiatives of his own: first, a “Great Debate” involving more than 10,000 local meetings and 2 million online comments, and second, a Citizens’ Convention on Climate (CCC), which asked 150 randomly selected citizens to propose solutions to the climate crisis, with the promise that their proposals would be put directly to a referendum.
Each side in this drama claimed the mantle of democracy. Defenders of the fuel tax pointed out that it was implemented by representatives who had been duly elected by the people of France; the gilets jaunes, they complained, were attempting to circumvent this legitimate process. Meanwhile, protesters criticized modern representative government, charging that it favors wealthy elites and insisting that genuine popular rule requires direct input via tools such as initiatives and referendums. And Macron’s own proposals aimed at transforming adversarial confrontation into respectful deliberation—reflecting an ideal of democracy as a process of reason-giving, collaborative discussion, and mutual learning.
These three visions—representative democracy, direct democracy, and deliberative democracy—represent intuitive and popular ways of thinking about what democracy means. Each has clear virtues, highlighting certain decision-making tools—elections, referenda, and citizen’s assemblies—that can help to ensure public power serves genuine public interests. By placing so much emphasis on the search for the right procedures, however, all three visions ultimately sell democracy short.
Consider what actually happened with the CCC, whose participants produced a highly ambitious program of climate mitigation policies. Sadly, but predictably, Macron vetoed their most radical proposals—including a 4 percent corporate dividend tax—and watered down many others, before allowing the promised referendum to proceed. For defenders of representative democracy, this was a vindication of the system: the policies crafted by ordinary citizens would never have worked, they argued, so it was right for elected leaders to step in. For advocates of deliberative and participatory innovations, the outcome was a tragic missed opportunity to rethink the way we make decisions together. And for many of the gilets jaunes, Macron’s betrayal was further evidence of the need for a direct popular voice in government.
This reaction is quite natural. Whenever powerful interests thwart popular progressive goals, it is tempting to blame the specific institutions that enabled them to do so—and to valorize whatever alternative procedures might have yielded different results in that case. Indeed, an emphasis on finding the right decision-making procedures follows naturally from the ideal of collective self-rule that has long defined our democratic aspirations. And in various ways, generations of liberals, progressives, and radicals have all chased an ever-receding mirage of genuinely collective self-rule—giving rise to a cycle of democratic innovation, reform, and disappointment.
To escape this cycle, we must reconsider that ideal itself. No matter how responsive, deliberative, or inclusive our decision-making processes may be, those with systematic advantages in background power will always find ways to shape outcomes to their advantage. Such power imbalances compromise any procedure for collective decision-making—even the most participatory, like those envisioned by the gilets jaunes. We must focus instead on addressing these imbalances directly.
This cycle of disappointment dates back at least to the eighteenth century, when many early advocates of republican self-government favored localized control, on the grounds that this arrangement would enable the ruled to keep a tight leash on their rulers. Some thought true self-government was possible only in small-scale societies, while those resigned to the reality of large-scale modern states sought to ensure that they were governed by representatives accountable to particular local communities—as in the “first-past-the-post” system that the United States and many other democracies inherited from medieval England.
Yet claims of local governance also enable insiders to hoard resources and power. Similarly, a first-past-the-post electoral system allows elites to entrench their power through gerrymandering, and favors a two-party system that makes it difficult for genuine challengers to emerge.
Partly in response to these disappointed hopes, subsequent reformers tended to eschew localized control in favor of responsiveness to mass public opinion. In the early twentieth century, for instance, the Progressive movement in the United States demanded mechanisms like recall elections, direct primaries, initiatives, and referendums as crucial tools for undermining the outsized influence of “Gilded Age” oligarchs. Around the world, new democracies increasingly replaced first-past-the-post voting with proportional representation of national constituencies.
But the legacy of such electoral reforms has been mixed; in some cases, they even made matters worse. In a fully proportional system with many parties—like that of Israel—the need to form majority coalitions can give enormous bargaining power to tiny extremist parties. Advocates hoped that popular majorities would use initiatives and referendums to override corrupt, elite-dominated legislatures, but in practice, such plebiscitary processes often have the opposite effect. Think of Proposition 22, which overruled the California legislature’s attempts to ensure that gig workers enjoyed standard labor protections—after tech giants spent over $200 million on misleading advertisements.
Though such campaign spending is often the most visible way that wealth shapes political outcomes, it is also arguably the least important—especially in European democracies like Germany or Sweden, which already employ many of the policies idolized by U.S. progressives. Whether it is by offering “golden parachute” jobs to retired politicians and bureaucrats, funding think tanks and writing sample legislation, subtly influencing the cultural milieu and technical assumptions of decision-makers, or simply through the structural threat of capital withdrawal, wealthy elites and other powerful groups will always find ways to pursue their interests behind the scenes.
To be clear, this does not mean that the structure of electoral institutions is entirely unimportant. Rather, the point is that as long as some groups enjoy outsized access to informal power, they will reliably adapt to whatever formal procedures are employed. Partly for that reason, indeed, the prominence of such efforts at electoral reform has largely been eclipsed in recent years by an alternative paradigm of democratic innovation—one which emphasizes direct, deliberative engagement by ordinary people in decision-making outside of elections.
The ideal of “participatory inclusion” responds to the failures and deformities of modern mass politics by returning to the core intuition of early civic republicans: the idea that genuine self-government requires widespread participation by ordinary citizens in small-scale, face-to-face decision-making procedures. Conceding that modern states cannot be governed entirely in this manner, however, this vision sees local popular participation as an essential complement (rather than substitute) to larger-scale representative institutions.
This ideal is arguably the most practically significant contribution of twentieth-century political theory. It has inspired countless reforms and experiments across the globe, under a wide variety of headings—ranging from “negotiated rulemaking” and “collaborative governance” to “participatory budgeting,” “deliberative mini-publics,” and “citizens’ assemblies.” By now, the paradigm is so dominant that the very idea of “democratic innovation” is often understood as synonymous with direct, deliberative participation by ordinary people in processes of collective decision-making.
The United States was an early adopter, building participatory procedures into New Deal policies as early as the 1930s—for instance by inviting local farmers to shape the policies and priorities of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. This focus expanded with the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) of 1946, which required agencies to invite public input during a “notice and comment” period before implementing new rules, and with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969, which mandated that agencies actively seek input from affected communities. Both models have since been widely imitated by governments across the globe, from the European Union to Ghana and Sierra Leone.
More recently, other regions have taken the lead. Since the 1980s, democratizing countries across Latin America have developed a rich and distinctive tradition of participatory experimentation. Perhaps most famously, the process of participatory budgeting pioneered in 1989 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, has been adopted by thousands of municipalities worldwide, including many in the United States. Meanwhile, to combat declining membership and trust, parties across Europe have raced to adopt ever-more inclusive, deliberative, and transparent internal procedures. And some, like Macron in France, have experimented with high-profile citizens’ assemblies.
Across these diverse contexts, the core promise of participatory inclusion is that a process of mutual reason-giving led by neutral facilitators will enable the progressive resolution of differences, yielding broad-based agreement, compromise, or at least a majority decision that everyone experiences as fair. Not only are the resulting decisions likely to be better, because they incorporate full information and diverse perspectives; they are also likely to attract greater allegiance, on the grounds that they reflect a genuinely fair process of co-authorship.
And sometimes, to be sure, this promise is fulfilled. When our political disagreements reflect information deficits or communication failures among people with different perspectives, collaborative discussion can advance democratic ends by removing those obstacles to collective decision-making. When our disagreements instead reflect deep conflicts and power asymmetries, however, these same collaborative processes can instead serve to deflect legitimate criticism and channel popular opposition into purely symbolic rituals of inclusion.
Consider the consultation procedures required by NEPA. In theory, community concerns about the impact of proposed development and extraction projects should influence agency decisions about whether to green-light those projects. By the time they solicit this input, however, agencies and their private-sector partners have typically invested significant resources into the projects in question. As such, they more often use these obligatory consultations to gather information about potential adversaries, buy them off if possible, and build a paper trail to insure against future litigation.
Far from enabling participants to determine the rules that govern their lives, such participatory rituals transform them into compliant subjects, reconciling them to outcomes that are largely pre-determined. By opening certain questions for discussion—like where to dump the waste products of resource extraction—those who set the agenda and scope of participatory procedures can pre-empt others, such as whether the project should go forward at all, or how its profits should be distributed. Participants are conscripted into narratives that serve elite interests by presuming certain “shared” problems, and framing the solutions as collectively authorized.
This dynamic is hardly unique to U.S. administrative agencies. In her study of the Canadian government’s policy toward Indigenous groups, for instance, Jaskiran Dhillon finds that its practices of “inclusionary governance” serve to reposition properly political problems “in the neutralized space of ‘blended interests,’ where colonial goals are masked under the cloak of neutrality.” The state is presented as a co-creation of white settlers and Indigenous peoples, rather than an imposition upon the latter by the former, and Indigenous participants are encouraged to see themselves—all evidence to the contrary—as equal coauthors of its laws.
Finally, consider the case of participatory budgeting. When first introduced in Porto Alegre and elsewhere in Brazil, it was only one part of a much larger democratic agenda championed by the Workers’ Party (PT) and its power base in the labor movement. Reformers who exported this model to thousands of cities around the world neglected this context, however, focusing only on replicating certain decision-making procedures. The result has been that in the vast majority of cases, participatory budgeting is primarily used to allocate limited funds for things like street repair and school supplies. In other words, rather than serving as a venue for organized groups of ordinary people to extract real concessions from entrenched elites—as it arguably did in Porto Alegre—participatory budgeting in these other contexts has enabled elites to outsource responsibility for contentious decisions while diverting critical resources and participatory energy away from unions, parties, and other groups with long-term, large-scale ambitions.
In these and countless other contexts, collaborative participatory forums serve both as pressure release valves—tying up opponents in complex, time-consuming, and ultimately toothless consultative procedures—and as exculpatory narratives that conceal and legitimize elite capture. Indeed, the rapid spread of participatory inclusion in recent decades owes a great deal to the growing recognition by elites around the globe that it ultimately serves their interests. From Macron to Mark Zuckerberg and the Chinese Communist Party, the wealthy and powerful now eagerly employ such procedures to gather valuable information from their subjects, while deflecting responsibility for unpopular decisions and sapping energy from more threatening forms of opposition.
In aiming to ensure that ordinary people have greater voice in hidden and often informal processes of agenda setting and implementation, the paradigm of participatory inclusion improves upon democratic agendas that are focused entirely on the design of electoral and legislative procedures. But by relying on a different set of procedures for constructing and aggregating individual preferences into collective decisions, its advocates ultimately trade one overly narrow conception of democracy for another. Participatory inclusion grants ordinary citizens access to new decision-making forums, yet it does nothing to ensure they have sufficient resources or organizational capacity to make use of them effectively.
This may be a hard lesson to swallow. For many of us, nothing feels more democratic than reasoned discussion by ordinary people in small-scale, collaborative processes of decision-making. Yet such intuitions are not a reliable guide to what best advances democracy on the whole. And unfortunately, participatory inclusion is no less susceptible to capture by powerful interests than the localized control that felt like self-government to eighteenth-century republicans, or the direct forms of mass participation favored by their nineteenth-century descendants.
In order to escape this cycle of democratic innovation, reform, and disappointment, we must stop thinking of democracy primarily as a matter of procedures for collective decision-making. Most basically, modern electoral democracy is simply a way of forcing competition for power into peaceful channels—and incentivizing the winners not to ignore the needs of too many people at once. While this may not sound like much, it does limit the ability of any group to capture state power entirely for itself.
More importantly, this understanding of the democratic ideal—as principally a matter of resisting state capture—suggests a more fruitful agenda for action and reform, one focused squarely on power rather than process. (Indeed, this vision offers a more realistic account of what many familiar democratic practices already do.) If competitive elections with universal suffrage provide insurance against the most brazen and egregious forms of authoritarianism, kleptocracy, and apartheid, the unequal terms of competition for state power in all existing democracies ensure that many other forms of capture continue to thrive. Our overriding democratic priority must then be to address this failure directly, by pursuing a more egalitarian balance among social forces.
Practically speaking, this implies that aggressive redistribution of resources is among the central demands of democracy. For instance, sharply progressive taxation—on wealth as well as income—could limit the general advantages enjoyed by wealthy elites and other categorically privileged groups. Putting this revenue toward universal public services or unconditional cash transfers, conversely, could further mitigate resource asymmetries across groups. And by ensuring greater balance among the different groups competing for state power, crucially, both sets of policies would help protect that power from capture by any particular group.
The same applies to policies targeting the organizational capacity available to different actors and groups. As Louis Brandeis and other Progressive-era trustbusters recognized, the extraordinary material and structural power wielded by monopolies like Standard Oil reliably enabled them to use public power for private ends. And their insights are rightly being revived by contemporary neo-Brandeisians like Federal Trade Commission head Lina Khan, who argue that modern-day analogues such as Amazon and Meta are appropriate targets for antitrust action even if their outsized power is not obviously reflected in higher consumer prices.
Similarly, reforms to the intellectual property regime, financial regulation, and corporate law—among many other disparate policy areas—could seriously limit the ability of powerful actors and groups to hoard resources and coordinate to pursue their factional interests. Meanwhile, shifts in labor law, housing policy, health care, and banking regulation could facilitate collective organization—and broader forms of solidarity—among disempowered groups. Whatever other costs and benefits such policies might have, the ideal of resisting state capture gives us strong democratic reasons to pursue them. By facilitating greater balance in the organizational capacity available to different groups, they help to protect state power from capture by any particular group, and thus keep it more closely tethered to broad public interests. Recognizing this fact might broaden the coalition favoring such goals—and indeed, something like it has plausibly motivated the Democrats’ recent turn (however tepid) toward more pro-labor policy.
Of course, few of these reforms are likely to succeed given the current balance of power in the United States. For democratic actors aiming to shift that balance, the more immediate task is to find ways of leveling the playing field without presupposing such dramatic shifts in substantive policy. In part this may entail redesigning certain decision-making procedures to accommodate broader input. But rather than aiming to maximize inclusiveness on the individual level, participatory institutions targeted at the goal of resisting capture would be carefully designed to contest the power of—and resist co-optation by—wealthy elites and other powerful groups.
Where it is feasible and appropriate, random selection and rapid rotation of participants can help eliminate selection biases. And in order to further level the playing field, the policies and questions under discussion ought to be maximally simple and transparent so that ordinary people might understand the stakes and make good judgments without relying too much on potentially corrupting elite facilitators. Citizen oversight juries, for instance, could empower randomly selected ordinary citizens to judge whether administrative decisions serve the public interest. This model illustrates all of the design principles for procedural reforms targeted specifically at contesting elite capture. While no institution can be entirely insulated from co-optation, these features help to minimize the danger it poses—maximizing the likelihood such reforms will advance genuinely democratic ends.
Still, even the best procedural reforms can only take us so far. To achieve a truly level playing field, the competitors themselves must ultimately be on far more equal footing. And in contemporary democratic societies characterized by vast asymmetries of power, that requires the development of organized countervailing power. Our only real hope for reversing pervasive capture by wealthy elites and other hegemonic groups, in other words, is for disempowered groups to match their strength in the competition for state power by building powerful and independent organizations of their own.
Not all groups that lack political power deserve our support, of course. Self-identified neo-Nazis may lack formal power, for instance, but since their primary aim is to entrench white supremacy—that is, to deploy state power to advance the interests of one group at the expense of others—helping them build power would clearly undermine democracy in the sense developed here. Dispensing with the pretense of total neutrality toward all powerless groups, the ideal of democracy as resisting state capture emphasizes the need for greater organization specifically among those groups whose interests are structurally opposed to those of wealthy elites and other hegemonic groups—including workers, debtors, and tenants, as well as those systematically disadvantaged along lines of race, gender, caste, and so on. It is such counter-hegemonic groups that could, with the proper support and organization, pose the most consistent and effective counterweight to the hegemonic forces whose interests are currently best served by state power.
Substantive policies to protect and facilitate organizing among such (potentially) counter-hegemonic groups must therefore be at the center of our democratic agenda. In the United States, for instance, the single most important priority for lawmakers concerned about the health of democracy should not be campaign finance reform, multi-member districts, national referendums, or even abolishing the electoral college—though each could probably help on the margins—but comprehensive legislation to protect and facilitate organizing, along the lines of the PRO Act. And with or without such legislation, the most critical task for the rest of us is simply to do the work of organizing itself—in our workplaces, communities, and beyond.
The power of broad-based organizing is that it enables ordinary people to wield the only advantage they reliably have over wealthy elites and other powerful groups: the power of numbers. Crucially, though, widespread participation itself is not enough. As organizers from Saul Alinsky to Ella Baker to Jane McAlevey all recognized, rather, participation most reliably serves democratic goals within independent organizations that are grounded in lasting face-to-face relationships and solidarity against concrete opponents, rather than supposedly neutral forums for deliberation and decision-making. In a world of pervasive inequality and capture, where the deck is so heavily stacked in favor of wealthy and powerful elites, such seemingly minor distinctions in strategy and orientation can in fact make all the difference.
It was once common sense on the left to prioritize organizing, solidarity, contestation, and collective action over more individualized and deliberative forms of political engagement. And after decades in retreat, this approach finally seems to be regaining traction. Still, these practical commitments will always sit uncomfortably with an ideal of democracy as collective self-rule.
So long as we primarily think of “democracy” as a way for individual citizens to come together to make collective decisions on equal terms, we will always be tempted to spell out its demands in procedural terms—and to ignore the balance of social forces that ultimately shapes whatever procedures we use. Democracy deserves better than the mirage of collective self-rule.
This essay is adapted from the author’s recent book The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy, published by Oxford University Press.
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