Our democratic infrastructure comprises the cultures, rules, systems, and practices that facilitate collective deliberations and cooperative problem-solving across society. It involves far more than electoral arrangements, and covers opportunities to engage, learning, communications, adjudication, support, and enforcement that can impact on people’s ability and disposition to engage with others on an informed basis to shape outcomes that affect their wellbeing.
Politicians who rely on the support of plutocrats and fundamentalists have increasingly sought to weaken our democratic infrastructure – propagating lies, ensuring the wealthy dominate elections with their campaign donations, widening power inequalities, spreading malicious conspiracy theories, raising barriers to voting by the poor and disadvantaged, cutting support for inclusive community action, undermining political education, adopting authoritarian practices. This has helped them blocked many policies which are needed to deal with numerous pressing social, environmental, and economic problems. If these regressive tactics are to be overcome, reformists should recognise that our democratic infrastructure must be renewed and sufficiently strengthened so that people can engage effectively in formulating the collective actions needed for their wellbeing, and pressing for their implementation.
What would such renewal entail? For the group of writers behind the book, Tomorrow’s Communities, and many others who share our outlook, the elements that are integral to any robust democratic infrastructure – participatory decision-making, collaborative learning, openness, power sharing, safeguards against deception and intimidation, mutual support, processes for transparency and objectivity, state-citizen partnership – constitute a holistic set that should be advanced together. These elements should not be treated in silos as subsidiary issues, but developed as inter-connected components of a top priority reform programme.
The effectiveness of any democratic infrastructure is to be judged on how well it supports informed, sustained, cooperative interactions. Such interactions have been found to be most conducive to mutual improvement in human communities – as confirmed by anthropological studies, game theory experiments, examinations of cultural convergence on the golden rule of reciprocal behaviour, findings from developmental psychology, and projections of evolutionary adaptations. We have also learnt from outcomes in diverse fields that success is generally dependent on three conditions:
· Mutual responsibility – whereby people appreciate that they need to give respect and support for others as they want respect and support from others, and recognise the pursuit of their common wellbeing can help avoid divisive dispositions.
· Cooperative enquiry – whereby people can rely on objective exploration of claims through transparent processes of collaborative exchange and learning, structured adjudication with built-in capacity for re-examination, and protection from manipulative distortion and malicious rumours.
· Citizen participation – whereby people can give informed and meaningful input into shaping decisions that affect them, and are assured that their influence is safeguarded by arrangements that uphold accountability, counter corruption, and curtail power inequalities.
In order to bring about these conditions for robust democratic infrastructure, we need to engage in a programme of continuous improvement that gives ongoing support to and removes barriers from their development in education, media management, science and research, democratic institutions, law and order, public service provision, and community action. In each case, the challenge is to promote better understanding and relationships, facilitate objective and critical learning, and ensure that everyone – especially the marginalised and vulnerable – can influence how decisions affecting them are made.
The approaches that can help advance the development across the different policy areas are set out by the contributors to the following books:
· Tomorrow’s Communities – what lessons should be learnt from democratic collaboration that has brought about effective community-based transformation.
· Whose Government is it? – why and how cooperative relationships between citizens and state organisations are to be renewed to improve our common wellbeing.
· Who’s Afraid of Political Education – what kind of learning is needed to raise civic competences and the level of democratic participation.
· Time to Save Democracy – why we need to reinvigorate democratic culture and practices, and what changes should be implemented in nine key areas of socio-political development.
There are other works that provide more evidence and guidance as to the kind of policies and arrangements that should be brought in to improve our collective capability for solving the most pressing and difficult problems we face. For too long, community initiatives, collaborative learning, participatory decision-making, and other related practices have been seen as adjuncts to the ‘key’ political commitments, when in fact the democratic infrastructure they connect together is the indispensable foundation of all societal problem-solving. It is time we recognise them as a cohesive set of developmental ideas that should be implemented for the sake of Tomorrow’s Communities.
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From now until 31 October 2023, Henry Tam’s democracy-related books will be available at 50% discount when purchased directly from Policy Press using the code TAM50.
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