Fixing Democracy - Listening to the people with the data

Good things (and bad things) have been given to us by crowds of people. When things get better in society, most voters think it was because of them. Pats on the back all round. WE made the right decision, WE voted the right people in for the job.

And, for the most part, everyone would be in a worse place if crowds didn’t push as hard as they do. There is still a lot more work to be done on many fronts and, thankfully, some of us are still trying to get there.

But the aggregate for a healthy society and the realisation of Plato’s Just City really does seem to move in a positive direction. Especially in societies with democratic values and processes. But it is difficult to unambiguously laud politics and the electoral process as the method responsible for many of these societal evolutions.

To take just one successful example, the Rights Movement was mostly a bottom-up approach.

Each started in the hearts and minds of normal, every-day people moving as one to create a critical mass. Eventually finding someone to elect as their representative from within their own ranks, they push their cause into or out of law through sheer weight of numbers using the voting process.

Yet it seems more truthful to say that both the miniscule and giant societal leaps happen not because of the process of voting, but mostly in spite of it.

That’s because having a champion rise from the ranks of a movement is not always a desirable outcome for the good of a society. Perhaps a Ghandi or Martin Luther King Jr. will appear, sometimes gaining ultimate power in that country. Those leaders come from a bottom-up movement, not a top-down approach, that’s the key.

They were an unmitigated good for huge numbers of oppressed people in their countries. (Of course, they probably weren’t so useful for the political hegemony they dislodged but the force of numbers and determination of the public pushed their societies in better directions nevertheless.)

On the other hand, this same system can grease the platform for politicians buying their way to the top by taking campaign donations to influence whichever sector of society they say they will support. Both good and bad politicians are always beholden to their fickle masters in the voting public.

Should they stray, or respond to other competing sectors of society, alternative leaders can always be found. As quickly as they reached the top, both the good and bad leader’s wings can be clipped. If the public doesn’t like what they see, all they need to do is vote to change it.

At least this is what’s advertised on the cover.

A noble enough cause

In reality, the quagmire of politics and the minefields of ideology get in the way. The tendency to recognise the most influential parts of society over the least influential is human nature, especially if it agrees with pre-conceived notions of politics and ideology.

It gives leaders the incentive to bend their decisions towards the public with the most influence or power. While they appear to listen to the cries of the people, their ears are bent only towards those with the loudest voices.

Popular movements often become special-interest groups manipulating the democratic outcome in their favour long after their initial goals have been realised or diverted.

If it starts as a noble cause, it can morph when the sand slips from beneath the feet and mission-creep sets in. And this is supposed to be the benefits of politics and voting?

What if we’re mistaken and our idea lacks verifiable data? It might put fire in your belly and frustrate you with how simple and obvious the fix would be. Not every good observation comes from common sense. But common sense tells us the world is flat too.

This is the problem with a system set up to listen to those who shout the loudest with the most influence.

Self-filtering power-drives run by movements or activists, neglect the needs of the many for the wants of the (relatively) few. Or the system neglects the needs of the few for the needs and wants of the many. Neither are good outcomes if you’re on the sharp end of getting nothing.

To say it another way, if our world really is complex with layered chaos, why should one of those sectors dictate how the rest of us should live? Decisions by governments informed strictly by what their voters “believe” out of “common sense” is asking for trouble.

Moral panics, revolutionary fervour, ideological ferocity, or political myopia are all useless and destructive if they snowball before the data is truly in.

So many sections of society get a disproportionate share of attention for their needs, while others get trampled, but why? Simply because those people choose to vote. Is this fair when such flaws exist in the democratic process?

We are each of us just as guilty if we vote on what we think would be best from our perspective, when most of us cannot point to the necessary data or methodology to prove ours is the perfect societal model. And they can’t all be the perfect model.

Few people listen to the folks who actually have the data, because our two old friends Politics and Ideology stand in our way. Changing our minds is both the most difficult and most important part of education, yet so few of us appear ready to embrace objectivity to find the balance.

A common response is that if you don’t like it, go out and vote for your own ideals. If you don’t like it, try to counterweight the prevailing lean and push the decision a little more towards where you think resources should be spent.

This misses the point entirely.

Measuring the best path for society

Without an objective process to determine methodologically which model best suits the greatest amount of people, there will always be corruption in a democratic system. Those with the clout will direct society every time, even if they’re wrong.

Gaining clout as a counterweight to the prevailing winds only lumps the same problem on your shoulders, it does nothing to fix it. People always believe their views are the right views. They wouldn’t hold them if they thought they were bogus.

Of course trying to please everyone inevitably pleases no one. There must be a balance, and to find it we need to start recognising the importance of science and methodology in government, and its superiority over politics.

There will always be someone who comes off worse if one model is preferred over another, but refusing to do nothing out of fear of hurting even one person is not the recipe for a healthy society.

Well neither, surely, is choosing the direction for your society based on arbitrary politics or through a manipulating voting process.

The voting public usually doesn’t care whether the politicians they support stand on foundations of sand or rock. Some just vote from reflex. Even the politicians themselves cannot point in every case to rigorous studies by experts which back up their policies or decisions.

The way the brain works explains this. Beliefs are formed in a human mind before reasons to believe them are researched. We go out and get data only after we’ve made up our mind. It’s crazy, but it happens all the time.

Getting involved in government is honourable, and interest should be applauded. But running an intricate system like a country or city is hard. It takes guts, time, and brains to figure it all out.

That’s why treating the questions of society like they have simple answers by ticking a few boxes based on what your “common sense” tells you every few years might actually do more harm than good.

Nathan Smith has studied international relations and conflict at Massey University. He blogs at INTEL and Analysis