Creating Democratic Politics

Creating Democratic Politics
Joe Costello
6/1/06

The force of five decades of broadcast media shattered the infrastructure of American democratic politics. A pre-broadcast era political infrastructure comprised of local newspapers, county party organizations, and associations such as organized labor was replaced by a loathsome triumvirate of television, money, and polls. Today, politics is manipulated by a cynical professional political caste, and without the input of a healthy democratic political process, our institutions of self-government are increasingly crippled by corruption and the inertia of established interests

Today, politics is associated exclusively with campaigns and elections. The majority of Americans have little do with it. In a healthy democracy, most of what is defined as politics would occur well before any campaign and before any election. Yet in our contemporary republic, the ability for the average citizen to participate in any meaningful way in pre-election politics is basically nonexistent. In looking at how to structure self-government for the 21st century, we must first look at how to revitalize the politics of democracy.

Throughout our history, American democratic politics have been a mixture of participatory and representative processes. The participatory aspects, besides voting, have been at the local level, such as the town hall meeting. However, at the end of the 20th century, with a fully industrial society, the rise of broadcast media, and the disenfranchisement of local with the growth DC, politics became overwhelmingly representative. To revitalize democracy in the United States we need to create participatory democratic institutions and processes.

For the sake of simplification, the processes of democratic politics can be divided into four categories: 1)information creation; 2)communication; 3)deliberation; and 4)decision making. Information creation is simply the thought, words, and materials, produced by individuals or associations.(Associations defined as any formal organization of people, whether public or private, for example the local PTA or a global corporation.) Political communication in the broadcast era overwhelmingly is the domain of radio, television, and mass mail. Political deliberation has also mostly come to be carried out through the news media. An easy example, the news media plays a active role in deliberation by simply deciding what news to cover or how it is presented. Informal political deliberation continues to a lesser extent around the kitchen table, at a bar, or on the work break, yet by the end of the 20th century, the majority of the citizenry had been removed from any formal process of political deliberation. Finally, political decision making is accessible to the American people in a very limited way with the election process. However, with the collapse of pre-electoral politics, the vote has become an increasingly empty gesture. The ballot initiative remains the one true participatory decision making process, but again, the degeneration and incapacity of the rest of the political process has severely impacted the value of the ballot initiative.

A major question for democratic politics in the 21st century is how do we evolve or devolve these four processes from representative to participatory? We can begin by understanding that political processes in the 21st century are either in part or entirely about information processing. Using the four defined categories of democratic politics, we need to consider how individual citizens become political participants, what are the associations of participatory politics, and what are the processes of participatory politics?

Information creation is the first component of democratic politics and one that will be ever more ubiquitous in the 21st century. Each day ever greater amounts of information are created, thus we are producing a political environment of basically infinite information. Information creation necessitates education. The idea that education is a life long endeavor for every individual must become both a societal ethic and societal practice. However, the practice of education must be freed from its straitjacket association with school and evolved to an understanding that in an information rich society, education is a constant unending necessity. Indeed, every aspect of life in an information rich society has an educational component -- work, politics, consumption, entertainment, and recreation – all require education.

Communication is a necessary component of education. To bring about participatory political communication, we will need a much different architecture than our present representative and broadcast models. The broadcast and representative models are basically one direction and one person to many. What is necessary for any kind of participatory democratic politics is constant two-way communication based not on a hub and spoke architecture, but a distributed network, the best example being the Internet.

As an example of traditional representative political communication, we can use our government architecture. In this system, states don't talk with each other, they communicate via DC. Cities and counties in areas of mutual interest don't talk with each other accept through state capitals. There are certain quasi-government exceptions to this, but for the most part it is the rule. In a participatory distributed network structure these various institutions can interact with each other without having to go through a centralized hub.

In a distributed participatory political network, each individual is a node and can communicate with any individual node or with associations. A person's political enfranchisement will in many ways be manifested through associations. Yet, these associations will be controlled not like traditional top-down hierarchies, but from the bottom up through participation. We need to develop processes that facilitate interaction between individuals, between individual and association, and then finally communication from association to association.

Political communication based on a distributed network architecture necessitates the major political activity of the 21st century – editing.

The editing of information has always been an important component of politics. In it's most authoritarian practice it's known as censorship. Today, with no real political organizations, political information and communication to the public is mostly edited by corporations, be it the remaining newspapers or the major broadcast outlets. The government is also a source of political information, mostly in what it decides to draw attention to by what information it releases. But for the most part, the government relies on the news media to communicate the information it chooses to release. Today's news media editorial power comes both in how something is reported, and much more importantly, deciding if something is reported. In this sense, the role of the lobbyists is also mainly that of the editor. For any specific issue, the lobbyist gives the government representative an edited view. The lobbyist's power comes from their ability to buy access to a very narrow communication line, unavailable to the public as a whole.

In our representative politics, the editing process is highly centralized, whether it's the corporate newsroom or the government committee room, the decisions on what is released and covered are made by very few people. But in a participatory network structure, these decisions will be made by all. A distributed participatory network needs each individual and every association responsible for communicating information. There will be more direct connections between individuals, between individual and association, and association to association. How information is presented in a digestible form will be a major challenge for every node on the network, too much information proves as useless as too little. The traditional role the established political media now plays will not vanish so much as be distributed across the practices of every political entity.

We already see this process developing with the Internet. Individuals communicate via email both creating information and passing onto others information they have gained, thus becoming editors. Blogs and email lists become associations, editing and communicating information, while group blogs or larger Internet associations, such as OhMy news create edited bottom-up news services. Inside such associations we begin to see the development of distributed participatory editing practices, the best example being Wikipedia. This is a quantum leap from traditional hierarchical editing, in which decisions are made at the top, however, we're still at the very beginning of both understanding and implementing these processes. The greatest point to understand is editing, as part of political communication, will be an essential practice of every individual citizen and every political association.

Editing is the initial step of both the deliberation process and decision making processes. What is deliberated or how it is decided is completely dependent on what information is provided. In fact, the essential political power of broadcast media has been it's ability to define the political debate.

Once the information is edited, it gets communicated into a deliberation process. Again, in our contemporary representative structure deliberation is centralized and the majority of citizens play no part. In traditional news media, deliberation is conducted by editorials and commentaries, while in associations deliberation is handled in meetings, sometimes with greater membership input, but mostly conducted by staff and representative boards.

Again we can look to Internet blogs and their comments sections as the beginning to developing a more participatory process to deliberation. It can also be found in passing documents across email. However, anyone who has participated in these deliberation processes knows they have long way to go before becoming satisfactory. It is also likely that with a distributed network, small geographic based nodes, where face to face interaction is possible will likely carry the heavier loads of deliberation.

A distributed participatory network can have several methods of decision making. First, the individual will have great autonomy about many decisions. In many cases an individual can simply act, for example in the act of purchasing, after they've made a decision based on a variety of information from other individuals or associations. Today, the consumer purchase is highly manipulated based on exploitive marketing and advertising created by centralized economic power. Second, the association or group decision making can take place in smaller geographic nodes or across large trans-territorial networks. This was most effectively demonstrated by the Dean for America campaign when its supporters were allowed to vote to opt out of campaign financing support from Federal funds.

There is a vast variety of ways participatory political decisions can be made, from millions of autonomous individual decisions, to decisions taken by multiple associations, but beside the actual methods of decision making, participatory politics will result in diverse conclusions. Representative decision making needs a certain definitiveness, a decisive end, and by its very nature demands homogeneous results. For example, the proliferation in so-called omnibus legislation or the need for the homogeneity of bureaucratic accountability. In a participatory distributed democracy, decision making can be more dynamic and organic, that is decision making may occur constantly and in parts. Instead of needing representative homogeneity, politics can allow more participatory diversity.

In order to revitalize our politics and truly engage citizens in politics, we are going to have to evolve our old representative political systems and create new participatory associations. We need to recreate news services and political organizations. The news model will have more in common with the town square, local newspaper, and pamphleteers of the 18th and 19th centuries, than the broadcast models of the 20th.

It is imperative that individuals and associations begin the processes to create the multitude of connections needed for a distributed participatory democratic network. Associations need to start talking directly with people or other associations and invite them into the process. The evolution of technology and politics will be symbiotic.

To minds cast in the industrial representative era, a participatory distributed democracy will seem anarchic. A participatory politics will evolve it's own culture, ethics, and principles that will in many ways be different from representative politics. It will necessitate much greater openness and transparency for all systems, political, cultural and economic. Participatory democracy will only work with a new citizen ethic of participation held by each citizen and upheld by every association. A politics of participation will necessitate society value our role as citizen at a similar level we now value economic participation. Participatory political values include not just rights but responsibilities, just like working it will require discipline, part will be drudge, but also rewarding.

226 years ago a revolution birthed the notion of self-government into the modern world. That generation created systems and principles for a representative democratic republic. But today we see that system failing at every level. It has become captive to established interests and power at the federal level has become dangerously centralized. We see a representative system drowning in a flood of information and incapable of addressing the challenges of our era. We need to begin a wide spread citizen movement that will not overthrow our politics, but evolve it by bringing democracy into the 21st century. Every citizen's participatory rights must be acknowledged and each of us must embrace our citizen responsibilities. We all must reengage or engage the political system with the understanding that democracy where politics is only defined by voting annually or biannually is no democracy at all.