Elections have become nearly synonymous with democracy. We invest so much hope, energy, and money in elections and keep ending up with out-of-touch politicians, legislative gridlock, and violent polarization. Even if our candidate wins, the broken system remains. And yet, we have trouble imagining what else democracy might be. We keep searching for magical electoral solutions, whether voting for a savior or electoral reform, but we rarely think about the terrain beyond elections.
Drutman correctly observes that our party and electoral systems are broken. He proposes a smart electoral reform: fusion voting. I’m fortunate to live in New York, where fusion voting is relatively established. It’s wonderful, letting voters more clearly express our political beliefs. But Drutman goes astray in claiming that a single reform is the systemic solution. This is the same “solutionism” that plagues the technology and media sectors—the “to save everything, click here” gambit, as Evgeny Morozov puts it.
Systemic solutions to our democratic ills require a much broader approach beyond elections. We certainly need to defend and improve electoral systems, but a single-minded focus on elections is itself part of our democratic malaise. Most people don’t believe that elections are delivering actual democracy—government by and for the people—and they’re right.
Of course, it may seem foolish to say we should focus less on elections, especially with so many critical elections happening now. But we say the same thing every couple of years. There are alternatives. Cities and countries around the globe have used practices of participatory, deliberative, and direct democracy, alongside elections, to enable government by and for the people. We need to stop obsessing over one single flawed aspect of democracy and embrace different ways for people to decide different issues in different contexts. The only solution is many solutions. And to understand these solutions, we need to reckon with a deeper problem.
The fundamental problem is that throughout history, elections have generally not resulted in genuine democracy. As the work of scholars like Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page has shown, elected representative government has given economic elites and business groups oversized political influence, while average citizens have little or no influence. This is oligarchy, not democracy. Even worse, elections have tended to attract and put in power people who are more narcissistic and psychopathic than average.
Most people also hate how electoral democracy works. According to the Pew Research Center, most people in electoral democracies say that “their political system needs major changes or needs to be completely reformed.” In the United States, a majority across nearly all demographic groups and ideologies believe that the country’s system of government does not work. People around the world agree: only 17 percent consider U.S. democracy a good model.
Even in places that have adopted powerful electoral reforms like mandatory voting, proportional representation, and remote voting, such as Brazil and Australia, trust in democracy is declining, polarization is rising, and people are increasingly rejecting government institutions. The moral is that electoral reform is necessary but insufficient.
This argument dates back to ancient Athens, whose citizens found that elections ended up benefiting elites and preventing government by the people. To prevent rule by the elite or the most charismatic, Athenians set up additional ways for the people to govern. They designed an ingenious alternative to voting for representatives: lotteries. As with modern-day juries, any Athenian citizen could be randomly selected to serve on the city’s governing councils. At the same time, Athens enabled direct citizen voting on policies, through a broader “popular assembly.” This combination of voting, lotteries, and direct participation is the bold system that the word “democracy” originally denoted. Athenian democracy was far from perfect, of course; many people—women, enslaved people, and others—were excluded from citizenship. But the basic idea of resisting rule by the elite was a good one.
Over the last few decades, the “lottery” approach to democracy has started to make a comeback through a wave of deliberative democracy. Since the 1980s, over six hundred lottery-based democracy initiatives have launched around the world. These programs convene a randomly selected but representative sample of the public to learn about an issue and identify solutions. They have contributed to major policy changes, such as overturning Ireland’s ban on abortion.
As an alternative to selecting representatives, citizens have also voted directly on policies and laws, through direct democracy. Historically, this first meant face-to-face assemblies, such as town hall meetings in the United States. Many cities, states, and nations have invited citizens to vote on policies at a larger scale, through ballot initiatives, measures, or referendums, such as votes on abortion regulation or animal rights in the United States or on environmental protection and marriage equality in Taiwan.
Governments have also used participatory democracy to enable people to decide policies, laws, and budgets, by mixing methods of representative, deliberative, and direct democracy. Participatory budgeting is the most widespread example, letting citizens decide how to spend public budgets in over seven thousand governments around the world. Community members propose and discuss spending ideas, then vote to decide which ones to fund. The winning proposals are then implemented by the government.
Moreover, many cities and countries are experimenting with weaving together these democratic practices, to build stronger ecosystems of democracy. In 2021 Paris’s City Council created a permanent citizens’ assembly, a randomly selected body of citizens with real governing power. Among other roles, the citizens’ assembly picks the annual theme for the city’s participatory budgeting program, which lets residents decide how to spend €100 million each year. Participatory budgeting, the citizens’ assembly, and city council are stronger together.
South Korea has scaled up this approach. Its national participatory budgeting program, My Budget, combines participatory, deliberative, direct, and representative democracy. Citizens submit, discuss, and prioritize programs. The government then screens them for feasibility and sends them to a randomly selected Citizens’ Budget Committee. It discusses and prioritizes the proposals, and the government includes them in the national budget. In 2021, 63 proposals were funded, with around $86 million—a relatively small amount measured against the nation’s total budget, but a microcosm of what’s possible.
These programs begin to show what a more functional democracy might look like. They effectively let ordinary people—not just elected politicians—decide policies, laws, and budgets. But these are baby steps. Meanwhile, another global movement is making giant strides in a different direction, turning democracy into oligarchy.
The greatest threat to democracy is not our broken party system—it’s the surging movement against democracy. Billionaires and autocrats are bankrolling a global network of think tanks, universities, media, hackers, activists, and lobbyists to prevent government by the people, as Jane Mayer and Nancy MacLean have documented. They are funding efforts to sow division and distrust, prevent people from voting, overturn election results, and downsize government. Even the minimalist democracy of elections is a threat to oligarchs’ accumulation of wealth and power.
When antidemocratic movements attack elections, our natural response is to defend elections. But in doing so, we opt into the discussion that antidemocratic forces want to have, in one of the few areas where they enjoy popular support: “Elections aren’t working so well, are they?”
Rather than just defending elections, it’s time to advance a bolder vision of democracy. Antidemocratic movements have won support by calling for a radical transformation of government. It’s time for pro-democracy movements to counter with an equally ambitious transformation, from a dysfunctional system dominated by elections to a healthy ecosystem of diverse democratic practices. It’s time to get over our obsession with elections, to win the democracy that we deserve.
