Contents
- Index
Larry and Bill Dialog Regarding Limits on Participation
LIMITS ON PARTICIPATION?
October 21, 2003
This dialogue between Larry and Bill addresses important issues involving constraints on and incentives for participation in a participatory democracy.
Dialogue Part I Further Constraints on Participation?
October 19, 2003
Compiled by Larry Boyd
Bill and Larry decided some time ago to spark their research and communication with each other by taking turns at being the gadfly. So far, Bill has been mostly doing the probing. I will get my turn later. This and the previous dialog will be posted in the emergent democracy proposal in the Fifth Estate Website at
http://www.pasadero.com/5thestate/. Click View Full Text or one of the links to the proposal and click on "Constraints on Participation Dialogue" in the table of contents. Bill's text is in dark read and Larry's is in dark teal.
Bill:
I just finished the Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin essay on Deliberation Day (in the Debating Deliberative Democracy book). I found it quite useful and also provocative. You probably already know what their argument as you have made various references to such work. I found the rational ignorance point especially interesting. It leads me to wonder if our argument that the solution to the ailing democracy is more democracy is incomplete. As Ackerman and Fishkin argue, increased participation must be in the direction of deliberative and informed participation and there must be incentives to move in that direction (or disincentives to exercise the choice offered by rational ignorance). It
seems we (you and I) should discuss whether there is a need for such incentives (or disincentives) and, if not, what they might be. Ackerman and Fishkin offer a paid national holiday during which citizens gather to deliberate an upcoming election as a step in the right direction. P.S. Ackerman is a Yale law prof with whom a former colleague
collaborated, but I didn't pay much attention to the work of either.
Note: In the following discussion, I use "Moveon" as a stand-in for the online Internet advocacy phenomenon. Also, I might point out that I tend to use "paternalistic" to describe traditional liberal (representative) democracies because Lakoff's book seemed to resonate with Wes. Besides, it is quite descriptive of a worldview.
As I understand it, the question Bill asked was whether "more democracy" is both a necessary and sufficient condition for fixing an ailing democracy. I assume that Bill agrees that participation is necessary as the only independent check on the abuse of power in the system and as the only arrangement that can develop community and self-actualization. His concern is whether participation has to be of a certain kind or quality (deliberative in the present context). That concern stems from the fear of "the mob" and all of that. The question comes down to, "Should conditions be put on participation and if so, what kinds of conditions?" The softer and in my view more provocative version of this question is "Should there be incentives for certain kinds of participation (like deliberative)?"
I am pleased that Bill posed this question at this time because it gives us an opportunity to determine our stance on this undertaking before going much further. Aside from his gadfly role, there have been times when I sensed that Bill was not entirely convinced of the arguments I put forth in response to my list of anticipated concerns. If Bill raised the issue, then we can expect it from other astute and reflective people and we should address it in our writing - however it comes down.
By stance, I mean "predisposition" or tendency in the face of uncertainty. That is, which way do we come down when the "truth" is not known? One predisposition says people need to be taken care of. The other says people need the opportunity to take care of themselves. Bill once asked for some assistance on the background to the discussion of democracy and the Internet. As he likely expected, there are great discourses and arguments on democracy. But, in my mind, this difference in predisposition is the major theme underlying all discourse. On one side is a paternalistic, elitist, conservative, nay-saying, guardianship, care taking approach to the masses. On the other, is a let them learn for themselves, yay-saying, "democratic" approach. I say "democratic" instead of "liberal" as the opposite to "conservative" because virtually all large-scale democracies come down on the side of protection and freedom "from" and are often referred to as "liberal democracies." To avoid that semantic problem, I will call them "paternalistic democracies."
You recall that Robert Dahl uses two dimensions to categorize political systems, freedom and equality (the right to contest and participation). The conservatives (paternalists) come down heavily on the former (freedom), while democrats come down heavily on equality (participation). Obviously, one requires the other to be meaningful and sometimes there is a tension between them. Benjamin Barber describes five types of "thin" democracies, all of which are paternalistic in one way or other and then describes a "strong" democracy as one that is squarely based on citizen participation. He argues that the philosophy of the thin democracies (he calls "liberal)" works against democratic (participatory) institutions. Note that this is exactly the reverse of the more popular argument by the paternalists that equality/participation is the enemy of freedom - which is in fact the argument behind the question of putting constraints on participation that we are addressing here. As an aside, note that the word "Conservative" in the above refers to "philosophical conservatism." Obviously, there are many other notions of conservatism, including the "keeping what I got" kind, which often uses the conservative philosophy as an excuse or cover.
Interestingly, George Lakoff in Moral Politics posits a social/psychological basis for these two predispositions in child-rearing and parenting - the "paternalistic" and the "nurturing." Who knows, perhaps someday that humorous piece that was making the rounds about scientists discovering a genetic basis for these predispositions might not be so far-fetched. Or, perhaps the conservatives really are from another planet.
Now, how does one "choose" or argue for one or the other point of view? My position is as follows: 1) the paternalistic approach does not work or "works" only in the very narrow sense of providing a measure of stability. All paternalistic democracies are inherently flawed and are prone to the concentration and abuse of power, while the democratic approach is the only thing that can maintain a balance of powers and enable humans to achieve their potential as individuals and as a collective. 2) There is no longer any excuse not to extend participation - if there ever was one.
Only a few democratic theorists had the courage to stick to their guns about widespread participation in large-scale political systems. Benjamin Barber was one of the "magnificent" few, my mentor, Arnold Kaufman, was another. Regarding the scaling constraint, Barber points out the obvious - as the impact of the steam engine, printing press, telephone, telegraph, and modern communications technology demonstrate, scale is elastic and is continuously becoming more elastic - reducing the globe to villages. Then he says in a truly prophetic way, "Once it is understood that the problem of scale is susceptible to technological and institutional melioration and that political communities are human networks rooted in communication, scale becomes a tractable challenge rather than an insuperable barrier. This was in 1984 before the Internet and well before the Moveon phenomenon. By 1996, in the second edition of his work "Models of Democracy," David Held proposes as one of his "experiments" the enhancement of mechanisms that inform professional politicians about citizens' views and preferences through email and bulletin boards.
Like other participatory democrats, Barber and Held envision the means to solving the ills of paternalistic democracies and of achieving a healthy civic culture and they have a distant albeit unspecified vision of the technological and institutional means to achieve a solution by participation. Our position is that the Internet (and related communications technologies) is the technological solution and Moveon-like networks are the institutional solution. Why should we believe this any more than all the other idealistic and idyllic schemes? The lynchpin of our whole argument is that Moveon institutions are completely DIFFERENT from anything in the past and from anything ever envisioned before it emerged. Moreover, Moveon is different in precisely those ways that make it the potential solution to democracy's ills. In other words, the Moveon phenomenon represents a completely new paradigm in democratic discourse and should not be evaluated using the old paradigm. As I have said, "This is a whole new ballgame."
I truly believe that the fact that this phenomenon is totally different from anything we have known has yet to sink into political or philosophical consciousness. Most people still think of the Internet and applications of the Internet as high tech gadgetry, at its best in email or eBay or stock market quotes and at its worst in dot coms. So, exactly how is it different and how do those differences make possible what has always been out of reach?
The Moveon phenomenon is a bottom-up phenomenon. Everything including leadership emerges rather than being imposed from above. People's views and preferences make for leaders, not the other way around. The role of leaders is entirely different from traditional organizations. Rather than passing down and enforcing commandments, the role of leadership is to facilitate the political expression of people. The job of leaders is to "frame" the issues in such manner as to give people the information they need and to capture their preferences. This whole idea of "framing" and the difference from persuading needs development. While talking is the primary mode of the salesman, listening is the primary mode of Moveon leaders. Barber sees listening as an essential ingredient of participatory democracy for leader and citizen alike. From listening comes empathy and understanding. He associates liberal (paternalistic) democracy with talking and participatory democracy with listening. "It is far easier," he says, "for representatives to speak for us than to listen for us" (or to us). Regarding its relationship to equality, he says, "Listening is a mutualistic art that by its very practice enhances equality."
Paternalistic (salesman-type) leaders will not do well in Moveon institutions. In fact, they may not emerge at all and may not be recruited by them. It is quite clear from Wes' comments that Moveon does not take on people whose skills are in talking and salesmanship. The implicit test of leadership in these new institutions is that if leaders resort to traditional roles, stop listening, or otherwise get out of tune with their peer members, the network will simply stop getting attention and wither away.
Moveon itself is a catalyst, not a command center. It is the means in a process, not the prime mover. The Moveon phenomenon completely turns the marketing or salesmanship model on its head. Instead of sales pyramids that "persuade" more and more people, the Moveon phenomenon is a pyramid that processes ideas from a broad base to a narrow top where ideas are turned into action. Equality is reflected in the non-traditional organization of Moveon, where leaders are peers and members and leaders are colleagues. Non-traditional organization is also reflected in the fact that Moveon nets are largely self-organizing; they are more organic than mechanistic, and they are organizationally flat (collegial), rather than hierarchical. Moveons not only emerge from the bottom-up but command ultimately flows from bottom-up.
Another monumental difference between Moveon institutions and ALL previously proposed participatory institutions is that Moveon is completely independent of the political system in the sense that its existence does not depend on the sanctions of other players in the system and requires no authority to exist other than the Constitution. In fact, it did not even have to be invented. Until the Internet and Moveon institutions all proposed participatory institutions would have to be imposed from above with only the authority of moral suasion and good will - which cannot stand up to the real world of vested interests of the status quo in a paternalistic system. That is, until the Moveon phenomenon, all proposed participatory institutions had no independent means by which to come into being.
As I indicated in my earlier message, I would include "deliberative institutions" in the category of top-down, paternalistic, elitist (exclusionary) institutions, and until Moveon, impossible. However, I also have said that deliberative institutions might now be feasible because of the Internet and Moveon and could be implemented by Moveon institutions as a part (not the whole) of participatory democracy. In fact, a host of participatory institutions, such as the ten proposed by Barber might now be feasible.
Now for the interesting part, what are the answers to Bill's questions? Should participation be limited to deliberative institutions? I say emphatically "No." The Moveon phenomenon greatly enlarges the possibilities for expanding participation. Can it go too far and should there be any constraints on participation? Yes, but by and large adequate constraints already exist. They are contained in the Constitution, the balance of powers, and representation - and all other constraints implicit in a paternalistic political system. Given the nature of the Moveon phenomenon and built-in constraints, the probability of cataclysmic consequences such as anarchy are extremely small, while the potential benefits are virtually infinite.
Should there be additional constraints imposed on the inclusionary activities of Anets, like Moveon? I say "No" to this too. The argument that people are not qualified to make choices about their own lives, if ever true, is simply not true in the United States today. In fact, the argument could be turned around to say that people are collectively more technically skilled and knowledgeable than a relative handful of representatives. Moreover, as we verge on new territories of inclusion and are uncertain about the risk of adding more participation, the benefits vastly exceed the probabilities of risk.
Inevitably, "mistakes" (by somebody's standards) will be made. But, as John Dewey put it, only the people know where the shoe hurts. This was well demonstrated in the outcome of the California recall. By paternalistic standards, the result was a mistake, but even while the process was tainted by money, the people still got across the message that they wanted a change and that it was their right to a change. Theoretically, if Moveon, as a totally new medium for people's political expression, were in place earlier and more highly developed, a better solution would have emerged through participation - not by desperate options such as a badly tainted and misguided example of direct democracy.
I believe that Bill's question about incentives is much more relevant and provocative. "Should we be concerned about providing incentives for deliberative kinds of participation?" I would lean toward saying, "Yes," but not in any exclusive way. For one thing, I am not clear about what "incentives" might mean. Monetary incentives? Privileges? Somehow, I feel that Fishkin and Ackerman's notion of incentives is embedded in the old paradigm, including the paternalistic perspective. Is an incentive system any different from a system that constrains participation? If the incentive to participate is the satisfaction that one gets from participation, then I certainly would say, "Yes indeed." But, as I indicated above, the "programmatic" dimension of Moveon institutions should include, but not be limited to mechanisms like deliberative juries and deliberative polls. I don't know that any incentives beyond participation would be necessary - and whether they even would be desirable. If the question is whether participation should be "steered" in certain directions, I think this is more appropriately handled by the "framing" functions of Moveon institutions. This certainly needs development too.
This is the kind of question that should be addressed by our demonstration "experiments" in our eDem project. When I think of Barber's 10 participatory institutions that are now theoretically feasible because of Moveon (or any other of the participatory institutions proposed in the literature), I begin to see the relevance and importance of Bill's question about incentives. Obviously, there is lots of work to be done!
Back to the question of stance, when it comes down to it, who says our argument is the correct argument? I say, we do! I don't believe there are grand absolute truths and invincible theories behind our arguments, anymore than I believe in the grand truths and theories behind the paternalistic models of democracy. That is, no grand scheme fits all of reality. Inevitably, there is great noise and uncertainty. Moreover, one can argue as many have that politics and democracy begin where philosophy leaves off and ultimately philosophy doesn't inform or make political choices - people do. So, I would put my bets on participatory democracy before armchair philosophers any day.
The ultimate question is what exactly do we do in the situation of new ideas and uncertainty in which we find ourselves? What is our stance? I say that we have a very good insight into a complex and very human phenomenon involving politics, democracy, and the impact of new technological and institutional inventions. Our arguments are every bit as good as the arguments of Dahl and Barber and Held and other contemporary pundits - and in my estimation they are better because we have a solid foot in the past (Bill and I, that is) and through Wes a solid foot in the future. So, why should we hang back and play it safe and thereby give into the paternalistic perspective on the future of man? I believe man at least deserves a fighting chance. Besides, speaking for myself, I don't give a damn whether people think that I am naïve. I am not going anywhere anyway.
What does this mean for our writing? I suggested that this stance (way of thinking) should set the tone. In the spirit of deliberation and collaboration, I am open to a complete change of mind. But, as Harry Truman said, "Show me." But, in the meantime, I will take my own advice and stick to my guns. Obviously, a lot has to do with the prose we use in our writing and I am certainly open there. Whatever comes of this discussion, we will be the better for it.
Dialog Part II. Is Moveon a Democracy?
October 18, 2003
Larry Boyd
This is the second part of a block of dialog between Bill and Larry on participatory democracy in which Bill plays the gadfly and Larry tries to respond. The topic of the first part was "Further Constraints on Participation?" The topic of the second part (growing out of the first dialog) is "Is Moveon a little democracy?" (See attached) This exchange should produce yet another round of questions and answers. Bill's text is in dark red and Larry's is in dark teal.
Great reply. It is my nature to question, even when I am basically sold on a position. You have nicely positioned open participation against a history of paternalistic and limited participation thereby "redefining" democracy.
There still are a few loose ends, most of which you touched upon. I have yet to read either Barber or Held and until I have done so I can only respond as if I understand where they are coming from.
There may still be the question of an incentive sufficient to overcome rational ignorance, but my response based upon your reply is that rational ignorance is a concern that makes assumptions about how people will act that are tied to the constraints of limited participation and governance by and for a few. If participation were opened up then people would not be acting out of a belief that their actions make no difference. In this way, as you say, participation could be its own incentive.
Yes, I believe the difference in paradigms is the key to the issue of incentives and rational ignorance - and better said than I. We can still sharpen these ideas as we proceed and learn. In fact, this is a good time to remind ourselves that much of what we have to do is to put ideas into headlines, buzz words, and familiar metaphors to capture and communicate to people the ideas we are trying to convey.
The whole question of incentives in emergent democracy needs careful examination, as does leadership (below). I think we can say that the decision to participate (take political actions) requires incentive, opportunity, ability, the means, and meaningful choices. As in all human behavior, these are all tangled up. I would guess that we are mixing up external incentives from internalized incentives, the former being inducements to make people do something they don't want to do, either for practical or ethical reasons or they simply don't believe it makes any difference. People were given an opportunity and a choice in the California recall and they had the ability and the means. They also had the incentive - the most immediate being Davis signing into law a sharp increase in the cost of driving their cars. No outside incentives were necessary. So, in the case of deliberative jury or polling programs (in Moveon nets), it seems reasonable to assume that it is important that people perceive the opportunity to act as being something relevant and important in their lives and the health of the community. However, I think this may be falling into the trap of paternalistic thinking. If people do not see the relevance of choices and acting, there would be no Moveon. It is important to add to our list of differences from traditional organizations is that Moveon networks do not recruit. They serve - which brings us to the question of bottom-up processes and leadership again.
I am not entirely sure that MoveOn (or the entities it is being used to represent) is in fact truly bottom up, at least as it presently operates. I do not feel as though I have much say in what issues bubble up or what actions MoveOn asks me to take. A great deal of what comes out of MoveOn is "behind the scenes."
You realize of course that IF Moveon is not a "bottom-up" phenomenon, then one might conclude that my argument about why anyone should even care about this phenomenon is shot down and we are left with business as usual with a few wrinkles. So, it is important to address these questions up front. What we are experiencing is the effects of plunging ahead in an uncharted area of thinking and the vocabulary to make arguments is simply not yet developed.
Like everything else in an uncharted area, "Bottom-up" is a somewhat murky and slippery idea. First, we should differentiate between "bottom-up" meaning the coming into being or emergence of an entity or movement and "bottom-up" as an on-going information or decision-making process (democracy). (Note: Eventually, we should also go a step further and examine that part of the decision process having to do with "governance" and this may or may not be "democratic.")
I am arguing that Moveon is an emergent bottom-up phenomenon (part of a larger phenomenon). I have at times used the words "grass roots" to distinguish it from the "establishment," the latter referring to all forms of top-down organizations. If Moveon is not an emergent phenomenon, then I don't know what is or could be. I suppose that one could imagine a totally spontaneous happening of millions of people somewhere, but just because one can imagine it does not make it real - that is, without some leadership and some organization. Moreover, even if such an event just "happened," without leaders and organization, it would eventually disband and people would go home. And so, some kind of organization and continuity must be involved in the concept of an emergent entity like Moveon.
I suspect that the question comes up because our minds say, "Well, if there are leaders, then a movement or organization can't be bottom-up." I attribute this to the long shadow of the traditional (paternalistic) perspective on organizations and leadership. "Obviously, leaders are above followers," we say. But, let's take a look at the birth of Moveon as a case study. Wes and Joan were busy with their lives when they became extremely concerned about their futures and the futures of their children because of an ill-conceived effort to impeach a sitting President.. They knew that there were many others who felt exactly the same way and they knew that their concerns and the concerns of thousands if not millions of other people were stifled by the political system. And so they used the Internet to connect these people. Their purpose was to try to make their own futures better and to serve others who felt the same way. Their motives were not to make money, achieve fame, or to create an organization or a product. They had no degrees in "public advocacy organization and leadership." There were NO relevant differences between them and other potential Moveoners. They and the people who responded once enabled were peers.
Perhaps the metaphor of the pearl and the oyster might be useful here. All of the potential, the ingredients, and the means to produce a pearl exist in the oyster, but it takes a grain of sand to allow it to happen. The grain of sand is the catalyst and in the political environment Wes and Joan were that speck of sand. They did not make Moveon anymore than the grain of sand made the oyster. That is, the oyster and Moveon made themselves and in this sense both are also self-organizing.
To keep our basic argument about the implications of Moveon for participatory democracy at the forefront of our thinking, let me reiterate that the foundation of that argument is that the Moveon phenomenon is DIFFERENT from anything that ever existed and different in ways that theoretically have great promise for solving the (previously unsolvable) problem of an ailing paternalistic democracy. Bottom-up/Emergent formation is one of those differences - among a constellation of other properties that are different. A totally different kind of leadership is one of the key differences. Financial, political, and legal independence from the government and other institutions is another. Again, these properties are all interwoven, as in a bundle. The bottom-up nature of the Moveon phenomenon is what makes it independent of other actors in the system.
You can see from this formulation of the argument how important it is to recognize the great difference between the Moveon phenomenon and pre-Internet participatory proposals. If this argument is way off base, then I really want to hear about it to save my own breath and other people's time. I am not certain about many things and I am not certain that the Moveon phenomenon will be a watershed or panacea in participatory democracy, but I cannot believe that life and politics in this country and the world will be the same after the Moveon historical event.
As noted above, the issue of whether Moveon has a bottom-up information and decision-making process is different from the issue of the (big bang) genesis of the Moveon phenomenon. One way to think about this is to ask, "Are the dynamics that formed Moveon still the same in the on-going life of Move?" Does information flow from the bottom up? In short, is Moveon a little democracy? Good question Bill! In fact, we have all the problems and joys that we have been having in our discussion of participatory democracy - including the issue of qualifications and problems of scale.
My immediate reaction is that we can expect considerable continuity between the dynamics of the emergence Moveon and the dynamics of the on-going processes of Moveon. I think we can also expect some differences to emerge that come with operating in a political system and the effects of history. Unfortunately, we don't know what these differences will be. I think continuity can be expected because demand for expression and action continues, members continue to act pretty much as in the first instance, and the motives and perspectives of leaders tend to persist. Again, we have the problem of conceptualizing leadership. Does the simple fact of having leaders mean that the system cannot be bottom-up? Does not having one's preferences registered on every issue and not having one's sense of priorities always reflected in collective actions mean that the system is not bottom-up or democratic?
Once again, I think the pivotal concept is the difference in leadership. The concern about democracy in the A-Nets are the result of the inertia of the top-down/paternalistic paradigm and its notion of leadership. First to put this thing in perspective, there is no great gulf between "leaders" and members in emergent nets. In the case of Moveon, itself, there are only four or five regular staff people, but there are literally thousands of "leaders" among the members. They coordinate, contact people, inform them of activities and times, and many other things that leaders do. In fact, virtually every participant in Moveon at one time or other has been in a leadership role - even if it is calling or emailing family or friends about political news and events. In important respects, leaders are peers first and leaders second. In traditional top-down organizations leaders are leaders first and then may or may not have collegial or serving "leadership styles." Some of the key words describing the kind of leadership found in the Moveon movement are "facilitator," "issue framer," "listeners," "catalysts," "instruments," stewards," and an old fashioned word, "servants." What a leader is not is a "salesman," "motivator," "evangelist," "father-figure," "guardian," and so forth. In top-down processes, leaders use people to achieve personal, organizational, or political ends. In the Moveon phenomenon, people use leaders to achieve their ends.
In researching this response, I found something quite interesting. There are many roads to the grand notion of a participatory democracy. One of them is this leadership thing. That is, I found that the notion of leadership found in the Moveon incarnations of online advocacy preceded the phenomenon in which it is finding its greatest (perhaps only) expression. The notion has many names and forms, but a very popular one dating back to 1970 at least was called "servant leadership" coined by Robert Greenleaf. It is worth reading a passage verbatim:
"The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. He or she is sharply different from the person who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions. For such it will be a later choice to serve - after leadership is established. The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature. The difference manifest itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people's highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will they benefit, or, at least, will they not be further deprived?" (From the "Servant As Leader," 1970.)"
In 1995, Larry Spears, CEO of the Greenleaf Center, describes servant-leadership on the center website this way. Note the use of the word "emerging" in this passage.
"As we near the end of the twentieth century, we are beginning to see that traditional autocratic and hierarchical modes of leadership are slowly yielding to a newer model - one that attempts to simultaneously enhance the personal growth of workers and improve the quality and caring of our many institutions through a combination of teamwork and community, personal involvement in decision making, and ethical and caring behavior. This emerging approach to leadership and service is called servant-leadership." (From the Introduction to "Reflections on Leadership," John Wiley, 1995.)
Bill's question is "Does information about preferences flow from the bottom up in Moveon?" I suspect there is another framework problem involved here. In what real or idealistic world could Moveon be a perfect direct democracy in which every member registers his/her list of issue priorities and preferences on each issue - and enable jury-like deliberation? In reality, what they have are mechanisms for learning what members want. The issue forum is one such mechanism. Polling is another. Responding (when possible) to individual emails is another. How much Moveon meets some ideal of bottom-up decision-making and democratic processes is an empirical question that is a prominent part of our study. In any case, there is absolutely no doubt that current mechanisms can be improved and new ones implemented and they should be. Some of these can be part of our experiment/demonstration projects.
But, I would add that there are both time and spatial framework factors at work here. The temporal consideration is that leaders are getting continuous feedback from previous campaigns. They learn what the members want over time. There is metric information in this situation. "Wrong message…sharp reduction in members, donations, and hits." It is as simple as that. The spatial factor is that no single A-Net can be thought of as an inclusive democracy. The whole concept of "membership" is much different in Moveons than in traditional association and organizations and should be added to our list of differences. Membership, like leadership, is a much more fluid phenomenon. For one thing, participants generally work "through" more than one advocacy net. Unlike the United State political system, if you don't like the general approach of one Anet, you can "leave" and work with one more to your liking. "Joining" an online advocacy net is not like joining a church or professional organization.
As context for this question about democracy within Moveon, we might be barking up the wrong tree. That is, we might be making the mistake of using the wrong paradigm for what Moveon IS. Although I have used the words "little democracies," Moveon and many emergent entities like it are not political systems at all. In fact, they are not really "groups," "organizations," or "institutions" in the traditional sense. They are less structured, more amorphous, and memberships are more revolving. They are a bundle of ideas, messages, and campaigns rather than a place to work or do things. They serve a more "instrumental" purpose than a "home" for participants in campaigns. They are more spread out and in fact are literally "virtual." They are closer to pure information flow dimension abstracted from traditional organization. They are individual "social networks," which is exactly why I proposed the label "online public interest networks" and "advocacy nets." This is also why I used the word "phenomenon" and "movement" to describe the collectivity of Moveons.
Wes and Joan have from the beginning studiously steered away from "institutionalizing" Moveon. They have known from the beginning that there are high costs of doing so. There are costs to using the wrong paradigm to think about the potentials and issues of the Moveon phenomenon and there are practical costs to trying to make social nets into traditional organizations or political systems. However, the meaning of "institutionalization" is complex too. The meaning leading to undesirable consequences is the traditional meaning of creating structure and hierarchy, defining roles, and specializing and routinizing operations and tasks, as in bureaucratization. A critical question for us is whether to anticipate trends toward bureaucracy because of the working of the "iron law of oligarchy"?
Nevertheless, there is another dimension of "institutionalization" that focuses on self-awareness and "other" awareness that we want to know about and will likely want to encourage in the evolution of the online advocacy movement. How much exists among A-Nets already? How much is "emergent?" How much is desirable? Self-awareness and awareness by other political actors along with some codification of technologies is probably essential to a future in which people are a continuous force in the political system acting to restore and maintain balance and provide the ingredients of self-development. This suggests that becoming a political institution probably requires something more than competitive nets as in high levels of communication and cooperation among A-Nets. There could simply be a loose affiliation with ad hoc alliances on campaigns of common interest. On the other hand, more unification, as in a federation may not be desirable.
We should focus on the costs of institutionalization in another discussion, but it can be misleading to try to discuss issues like bottom-up (democratic) decision-making without being fully aware of the cost/benefit nature of institutionalizing an emergent phenomenon.
Maybe the point is that the phenomenon COULD be truly bottom up and we are only at the beginning of that happening.
Of being at the beginning, we can be certain and discovering better ways and better mechanisms for progress toward the democratic ideal should be high on our agenda. However, this endeavor should be fully mindful of the costs and benefits involved in such proposals. In short, the question may not only be how to make Moveon more "democratic," but whether the proposed policy or mechanism is the best thing to do.
Or, maybe there must always be leadership that gives direction without being "paternalistic." I hope you get my drift.
Giving direction without being paternalistic is nicely put. As you see from the above, I could not address the earlier parts of your question without making facilitative peer leadership the very core of what is different about the Moveon phenomenon.
Before going on to your last set of comments, let me briefly address the second part of your concern about whether Moveon is truly bottom-up. That is,
"I do not feel as though I have much say in what issues bubble up or what actions MoveOn asks me to take. A great deal of what comes out of MoveOn is 'behind the scenes.'"
This conjures images of the old smoke-filled back rooms. The issues behind this question are definitely factual (as above), but in this formulation there also is a strong "perceptual" dimension - and it is critically important how people do perceive the process and their spot in it. Learning about these perceptions will definitely be part of our membership surveys. But, perhaps we can begin framing the question right here. Do you think that other regular participants in Moveon feel the same way as you (say)? We might get a leg up on our research and recommendations to Moveon and other groups by asking ourselves what would make us feel more like we have a direct line to the top leadership and more direct evidence that we are setting the agenda and timing of events.
Inevitably we have to bite the scaling bullet. That mystical thing up there called the Moveon leadership consists of four or five full-time people. They are four and we are two and a half million. As they say, you do the numbers. Is it realistic to think that Moveon should put its resources to work on local issues and candidates, unless the issues have been "nationalized" such that they impact national politics? In two instances, Moveon did turn attention on local issues - the Texas 11 and the California recall, both of which involved attempts to steal power. Were Moveon participants brought into these decisions? We have said that the Moveon phenomenon has the potential to solve the scaling problem in American democracy, but our first big challenge is to meliorate the scaling problem in one advocacy network (without undermining it by not weighing the costs). Given the constraints of the scaling problem, perhaps the first personal yardstick for the evaluation of responsiveness of a network is the number of times that it had acted contrary to one's wishes. Gail made an interesting comment about this when she said, "Moveon seems highly responsive to me. It is like they read my mind. Events occur, Moveon sees it and comes up with an approach to impact the situation."
By the way, I have been meaning to inject into the discussions my involvement with MIS and a technology referred to as "group systems." I can provide more detail if and when it is appropriate, but the technology is very much designed to facilitate group decisions. It has been used in some very interesting settings, ranging from military decision making to labor disputes. Not long ago we submitted a proposal to NSF seeking funding for a system that would facilitate reaching a level of "shared understanding" as an alternative to traditional dispute resolution. My record continues intact and the proposal was not funded, but I think it was a worthy idea and has relevance to our work.
This "group systems" thing you are involved in at the university is definitely of interest as one of the virtually unexplored potential "mechanisms" or "programs" that Moveons can test and implement to expand participation in the political system. It likely has to be "re-spun" for emergent democracy. You say that you didn't get funded to do that project. Perhaps if you gave it the participatory democracy spin you could get funded.
Looking back now over this discussion, I see an interesting irony emerging. My response to the first question, "Should we impose further constraints on participation (quantitative or qualitative) in the American political system?" was a categorical "NO" - at least not in principle. Yet, in this second discussion, I suggest that within A-Nets we may have to yield to the scaling problem and not do some things that theoretically could extend bottom-up agenda-setting processes and the likes in order to avoid the bureaucracy problem (which may reduce both effectiveness and participation). Is this a contradiction? I don't think so. They are two different things - the American political system and Moveon A-Nets. Moveons are not political systems. As an aggregate, the latter serve the former.
Returning now to Bill's comment about what Moveon should aspire to, which was:
Maybe the point is that the phenomenon COULD be truly bottom up and we are only at the beginning of that happening.
I don't know that Moveon CAN be truly bottom up (in process, not genesis), even if that were the goal. Nevertheless, there is no reason to believe that Moveon could not become more responsive to the views and preferences of participants - which after all is the central objective of Moveon.
Dialog Part III. Bottom-Up in the Genesis of Moveon and in the On-going Process?
1. Writing Styles and Publication Decisions
As I said, I really like your latest revision of the democracy paper. It is interesting to me the differences in our writing styles -- and Wes' style is different from both of us. My discussions are discursive, but my articles are not and I don't tend to use long compound sentences and long sections without sub-topics. My work on contextual analysis is a good example. This style tends toward syllogisms and mathematical arguments, the other toward historical and legal discourses or treatises. I am predisposed toward the former, though I am not very good at that either. Frankly, I think my forte is more in "letter writing" and working through complex questions, informal discussion of ideas, and an occasional quotable quote or turn of a phrase. As you know, Wes is a great popular communicator and his writing is distinguished by the way he gets to the guts of a problem and inspires action. Great team!
All three styles are perfectly legitimate, depending mostly on the objectives of the paper and the intended audience. Ideas and attention may pose a scaling problem too. If our purpose is to popularize the ideas, anticipate application, and generate controversy, then the long style is not the best way to go. Only a selective few people will read the paper. But, I enjoy your style and it is the appropriate one to start with for documenting our work and making a strong (for the record) public claim to a complex and innovative argument. Also, a very "serious" document should invite "serious" responses and not knee-jerk comments. The alternative was to put something punchy out there (online), anticipate reactions based on stuff we didn't elaborate or cover and then respond showing that we had considered those positions or had learned something new from them.
I think the point here is that once one decides on the "comprehensive" approach, the piece becomes vulnerable to anything left out. You know this general principle for legal documents and other such documentation. So, we should go the extra mile and cover the bases and the details in the body, footnotes, and references. Of course this will take longer than the alternative. Another implication of our differences in writing style is that I will be predisposed to the one way of thinking and I don't want it to unduly influence what you say and how you say it. So, I will give you feedback and I suggest you take it purely as something to think about, not necessarily incorporate and it will tend to be general, rather than word substitution. I can do this because I have great faith in your writing. OK? Obviously, we can and will do the other thing too, in which case we can cite ourselves when the inevitable questions pour in.
In law, as distinguished from other social sciences, the tendency is toward long (too long) and heavily (overly) documented writing such as is found in law reviews. That difference is largely attributable to tenure standards. In law one to three "major" articles are the standard. In other disciplines, many shorter articles and essays are required. Frankly, I am inclined to the latter. As to our project, I probably have been unclear about what I am attempting to do. I have not seen my drafts as leading directly to a publishable article or whatever. Rather, I have been trying to pull together the many, many threads of our individual and collective thinking and research. I have difficulty getting a good grip on any part of an argument or analytical effort until I can grasp the beginning, the middle and the end. I seem to need a map of sorts. This does not mean that all the details need be included, but I like to be able to have a sense of flow and how one piece fits with another and vice versa. Once I have this overall picture, I can more comfortably break out pieces for treatment in separate articles, essays or whatever. I realize that what I am describing is rather more idealistic because we do not always know how all the pieces fit and most of us have had the experience of starting in one direction and ending at another place. Moreover, I have no attachment to the prose or style or formulation of ideas as they emerge in any given attempt.
Interesting description of conventions and so forth. Note my comments at the top. I think we are close to a really good publication.
2. Local Versus National Level Participation.
You had trouble with my flat contention that local participation is and always has been greater than participation at the national level - and this time you asked for a citation. First, it would help if you elaborated questions like this. What exactly is it that bothers you? To me this proposition is deductive and follows from the proximity principle. People do not participate on a change in the commercial code at the national level, but they do on a proposal to locate a waste disposal plant next door. This is the NIMBY principle. The proximity principle involves all precursors to participation - motivation, opportunity, relevance, ability, and the means.
Perhaps you and I are using some sharply different yardsticks for participation. Perhaps yours is an abstract ideal (For example, "Even at the local level people do not participate broadly enough"). One solution is to quantify participation - which we have not done yet, but fully intend to. I am working on this now and will take it up with you later and Wes in his interview. I have said from the beginning that having some metrics for participation will dramatically help to make our basic arguments. What we would like to be able to say is that political acts in metric units per capita have increased algorithmically by (100, 200, 500, 1000) percent since 1990. On the local versus national issue, we want to be able to say something like political acts in metric units per capita at local levels is such and such greater than at national levels (and then the assertion that I made that the Internet and Moveon technology has dramatically changed that because of the elasticity of scale).
In the meantime, here are a couple of citations from Barber's book to use until I get from some good primary sources, quotes and citations to support this claim for the paper. James V. Cunningham, "The Resurgent Neighborhood" (Notre Dame, Ind.: Fides, 1965) and Douglas Yates, "Neighborhood Democracy: The Politics and Impacts of Decentralization" (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1973). Barber himself says,
"Every democracy rests on what de Tocqueville called the local spirit of liberty, and every democratic revolution has begun with a commitment to pervasive local participation - in town meetings or communes or revolutionary societies or committees of correspondence or soviets. The township may not have come 'directly from the hand of God,' as de Tocqueville liked to say, but it has always been the basic building block of democratic societies, the indispensable local forum that made talk possible. Without talk, there can be no democracy. Whether in a marketplace, a public square (like the ancient Greek agora), a country store, a barbershop, a school board, or a town meeting, democracy must have its local talk shop, its neighborhood parliament."
The distinction between local and national has both intuitive and, seemingly, empirical support. I have reacted mostly from personal experience with various local matters, ranging from elections to homeowner's associations. I am also aware that turn outs for local and national primary elections are often abysmally low. I suspect the need is to be clear about exactly what we mean by local. Moreover, the references you offer appear adequate for our purposes.
Agreed. I am beginning to see the reason for our initial "apparent" differences on this. There is generally more participation at the local level for the reasons I suggested, but as you say, it might literally be a matter of the difference between a NIMBY issue and a city or county election - in which the latter might as well be in Washington.
While poking into this, I began to see another related set of connections involving community and citizenship. At the center of participatory democracy theory is the idea that citizenship describes social ties and interactions not rights of birth or territory. Barber says, "Citizens are neighbors bound together neither by blood nor by contract but by their common concerns and common participation in the search for common solutions to common conflicts." The word that caught my eye here is "neighbors." The closer one gets to an actual neighborhood, the more the idea of interaction and social bonds is literal and immediate. The larger the context (like a nation or globe), the more the concept is an abstraction. "Brotherhood" is such an abstraction. I think this is another twist on the idea of the "localization of national and global politics" through the Moveon phenomenon. That is, strictly symbolic relationships can be made literal by the emergent technical and social technologies of Moveon.
The neighborhood idea is appealing. I wonder if it is somehow at odds with a massive cyber network of folks who really do not know each other and probably have no desire to do so and what brings them together are common views on specific issues and a shared sense of civic responsibility.
Another really good point. Hang onto that. I have a feeling that physical analogies and metaphors break down when they are generalized or "virtualized."
3. Moveon technologies at local levels: Incredible potential for the future
Our discussion of local versus national has really turned on my interest in the local application of Moveon technologies. This is probably the largest totally undeveloped potential in this whole thing. It is true that social and political interactions are more immediate at local levels. Nevertheless, the same problems of being too busy sharply inhibit participation in decision-making and therefore the technologies of Moveon have very great potential!
Agreed. I think Dean's campaign folks have sensed this already as manifested with the Arizona Dean website and the Dean Meet ups (which, incidentally, also reflect the online and offline dimensions we have discussed).
Good point about the online and offline part of this thing.
4. More on Leadership - also picked up from my closer reading of Barber.
Barber devotes a large section of his book to the qualities of leadership in a strong (participatory) democracy. To his credit he does include "facilitating leadership." For example, he says, "Like the teacher and the judge, the facilitator is responsible to a process rather than to specific outcomes." However, Barber heavily weighs a leadership quality that is contrary to our notion of leadership in the Moveon phenomenon. That quality is moral and inspirational leadership, the meaning of which is captured in the following, "In the ideal participatory community, moral leadership must be exercised outside the political arena, in a public but non-political fashion that is conducive to fraternal affection and common values yet hostile to conformity." On this, Barber's ideas on leadership sharply diverge from ours. Nothing in the experience of Moveon suggests to me that the role of Wes and the others is to work on the heads of people and create some kind of Moveon culture. It is simply inconsistent with the listening/facilitative role that we have attributed to the leaders of Moveon. The image that I have of leadership in Moveon is one of a few people trying like hell to catch up with their followers. Again, Moveon is a process, not an organization. This does not mean that Wes may at times act as an ambassador and it does not mean that Moveon does not have a culture. Moreover, this does not mean that developing the culture should not be part of the effort to bring about self-awareness. It also does not mean that other A-Nets do not have the traditional (moral/cultural) view of leadership - and may in fact turn out to be one of the explanations for Moveon's success and other networks failures.
It seems ironic that Barber, perhaps the grandest advocate of participatory democracy, should have a notion of leadership that is so close to that of Philip Selznick's classic portrait of leadership (in corporations) that envisions the ideal leader as a statesman, ambassador, promulgator and guardian of corporate culture. For a good review, see
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/erozycki/Selznick.html.
But this apparent "irony" is easy to explain and underscores a message that I have repeatedly emphasized in this project, which is that people like Barber are "PRE-MOVEON" and therefore have the same unsolvable problem as other participatory democracy proponents - which is the "problem of the missing antecedent." Barber, like the others, knows what is necessary to the self-fulfillment of man (participatory democracy), but does not know how to get there. Consequently, he, like all of the others, has to put the burden on education and a new civic culture through inspired moral leadership. I believe that emergent democracy as embodied in Moveon can change this forever.
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Agreed. I must read the Barber stuff. However, your recent long message about bottom up and leadership were very helpful regarding this and other matters.
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As you could tell, some of the earlier "democrats" wore better than others from my point of view. Barber is one that continues to impress me. Fishkin and even Dahl to a lesser extent.
5. Deep Pockets.
You do include a sentence from my work mentioning that the new people's movement has deep pockets, but I think in our argument that Moveon, et. al. should be taken seriously, we should really emphasize this fact (and of course put it high on our list of research topics). This is an attention getter! We can already point to the stunning results of the fund raising of Moveon and other nets, like the Dean campaign. Money talks and politicians (and pundits) listen.
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Agreed. I do wonder at what point we interject our concern that money talks too much.
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In one sense, it should be right at the top and every other sentence. But, I think we see the excessive power of money as a symptom rather than a cause. Again, I don't think good will and moral suasion is going to do much good on this front.
6. How to bring in our research.
I suggest that we use the phrase "Preliminary results of an on-going research and development project by the authors indicate such and such." It is a fact that we have been conducting research now for several months. After getting feedback from our "experts," we can justify the term preliminary results. I don't know that it is necessary to include a separate section on research.
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Good suggestion. If I can ever get the road map to which I refer above complete enough to allow me to grasp the bigger picture, I want to go through and identify specific points at which we already have some results and others that can become research questions.
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As you suggest, this should be a high priority now - even while we are collecting data. Fun - aye what?
7. Ambiguous Statement.
"Philosophical discussions of democracy date back to…." Does this imply that people were discussing democracy back then or that contemporary people talk about democracies existing back then? Actually, there were people (like Aristotle and Plato) talking about democracy back then. This line is mine and I did not resolve the ambiguity at the time.
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I had the some thought. Both are true. But, for our purposes, I assume we mean that contemporary discussions about democracy often begin with the city-state model and move to scalability.
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Exactly, you make it seem so easy - although Aristotle and Plato did some great thinking on this and there was a hell of a long dark ages between them and "contemporary" thinkers!
8. Diversity as the Key to Healthy Democracy
You capture the ills of American democracy very well, but one aspect that I emphasized and Wes brought in a different way dropped out (I think). An important observation is that a critical symptom of an ailing system is the shrinking of acceptable issue debate and meaningful choices. This is the flip side of the ideal of unfettered flow and competition of information and ideas in emergent democracy. Wes suggested that the key to a healthy democracy is "diversity." This has some desirable connotations from other areas, such as bio-diversity or eco-diversity or gene pool diversity. I don't know whether we should try to work in this idea or not, but it does provide another angle from which to analyze events. For example, the effect of Moveon technologies in the Dean Campaign was to widen the agenda of issues and positions that could be discussed and was a true departure from the "me too" phenomenon which you do mention.
There is a bit of a problem of a causal nature with this idea. Is the restriction of ideas really an effect or a cause? I would say both. It is an effect of an unbalanced system and it is a cause of a lot of problems, such as public apathy, etc., etc.
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I have to re-read what I said most recently, but I agree completely and if it was omitted it must be reinserted. On a related note, Cass Sunstein, in arguing that there is a risk of polarizing in groups, refers to limited "argument pools," which I understand to mean that ideas get excluded.
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I don't have any suggestions on this off-hand. Interesting about Sunstein. I like that "argument pool" thing.
9. Use of direct quotes
Somehow long direct quotes like the Ito quote don't appeal to me. I guess I would prefer our own words with citations and perhaps a shorter quote.
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Again, we are in complete agreement. The Ito quote is from an earlier exchange. I regularly beat up on my students for relying on quotes, especially longer quotes, and insist that they be able to put the thought into their own words and use the quote, if at all, for rhetorical impact (depending on the source).
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Gotcha.
10. Tiny little comment
Search for the words "proponents of more democracy." In that long sentence, you use the words "generally" and "typically." Is that what you intended?
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I would have to re-read the section to which your refer, but I often find myself struggling for words that capture citizens generally, the populace, citizenry, etc., especially when I am referring to a wider group and also talking about what that group generally does or thinks.
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Actually I see the distinction now - disregard comment.
In Response to a Moveon message about the new Moveon book
Bill and Wes (and Joan),
Ya know, here is the problem with talking rather than listening. I just sent some comments to Bill on our new draft paper and got into another discussion of leadership in the Moveon phenomenon - in which I said rather summarily that unlike Benjamin Barber (A venerable pre-Moveon advocate of participation), moral suasion and promulgator of group culture were not defining qualities of Moveon leadership and that in fact they are somewhat contradictory to the facilitating role. Then, I got this Note from Noah and
Joan in which they remind us about the exciting new Moveon book entitled "Moveon's 50 Ways to Love Your Country: How to Find your Political Voice and Be a Catalyst for Change." My point in the earlier communication was that before Moveon the ONLY way that courageous advocates of participatory democracy could come up with was to change the culture and that took education and leadership. The problem is that this was not a real option because it begs the question, "How do you change the culture?" The answer
is through participation - which is circular.
Anyway, I still see the emphasis on moral leadership in Barber's work this way. There may be some distinctions between "rewarding or reinforcing" participation behavior or creating the conditions for participation (in Noah and Joan's work) and seeking to create a civic culture - but I'm afraid they might be distinctions without a difference. So, this has to be a case of my face-saving comment to the effect"... this does not mean that developing the culture should not be part of the effort to bring about self-awareness" and
I am not surprised that Joan is providing that kind of leadership as well as the facilitating one.
Besides, never let it be said that I cannot carry two (seemingly) contradictory thoughts in my head at the same time. (Actually, the reason that it sometimes looks like I can is that I cannot hold a single thought in my head more that a microsecond.)
Larry