8

Democracy

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

Imagining the perfect democratic city does not exempt us from acting in the present scene of imperfection. . . . On the contrary, this imagining is what enables us to act, that is, to exist in freedom from a despair of democracy.

—Stanley Cavell (1994)

If we want to understand the relationship between digital technology and democracy, we need to start with democracy. The word comes to English and many other languages via the Latin democratia from the ancient Greek δημοκρατία for popular government, composite of δῆμος (the commons, the people) and -κρατια (government, rule). It is often associated with classical Athens, though the Greeks had at best an ambivalent relationship with democracy, and the patriarchal, class-stratified, slave-owning city-state had no form of government we today would recognize as such. More broadly, historians have traced the roots of the idea of popular government back to “assembly democracies” first appearing in the region of what is today Syria, Iraq, and Iran, spreading to the Indian subcontinent, and then via the Phoenicians to the Greek world we today associate with the origins of democracy.¹

Today, actually existing democracy is liberal and representative. It is liberal in being based on the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the recognition of basic civil liberties. It is representative in being based on universal suffrage and periodic relatively free and fair elections of representatives who in turn control government. Democracy in this basic sense offers no guarantees in terms of outcomes. It ensures neither peace, prosperity, nor personal fulfillment. It is a multifaceted and symbolically laden term at the center of a discursive formation that can be put to many, sometimes contradictory, uses. At its most simple, it offers a particular way of trying to structure politics—struggles over some of the defining questions facing us (Who are “we”? How do “we” live together? How do “we” distribute scarce public resources?)—that sees popular government through broad-based and in principle equal participation by all members of the polity as the only legitimate form of government.

Liberal representative democracy is in this sense not only a name for a certain set of political regimes that approximate or lay claim to the above ideals to varying degrees. It is also a truly radical and revolutionary idea. It is today and has throughout history been a notion that challenges the very roots of illegitimate exercise of power both in actually existing democracies that fall short of their self-professed ideals and in regimes beyond them that pay at best lip service to the notion of democracy. The vision offered by liberal representative democracy may seem to be a minimalist vision when compared to various maximalist visions for more deliberative, direct, and/or participatory democracy. But it is a vision nonetheless, and for those inclined to consider such factors, it is a vision that has the relative advantage over maximalist alternatives of being able to offer not only theoretical arguments but also proof of concept from a wide range of different countries around the world, including poor, culturally diverse, and deeply unequal places like India.

I open with these basic observations about democracy because my argument in this essay is that much of the discussion around the relationship between digital information and communication technologies and democracy has focused too little on the question of what connections exist between digital technologies and actually existing, minimalist-vision democracy, and too much on extensive discussion of the possible connections that might be established between digital technologies and alternative, maximalist visions for democracy. In my view, this is a problem in two ways. First, emphasis on alternatives at the expense of the actual limits our understanding of the world we live in. Second, abstract discussions of what digital might do for democracy seems to sometimes be allowed to serve as a stand-in for what it does do in and for democracy, in turn distorting and exaggerating its role. We need to find a different starting point if we wish to understand the relationship between digital technology and democracy. Actually existing liberal representative democracy and a focus on practice over potential might provide such a point.

Liberal representative democracy is, as Amartya Sen has argued, a “universal value,” and historical antecedents, ideas and practices of various forms of popular government, can be found across the world with no direct lineage to “classical,” let alone “Western” notions.² Democracy is not agreed upon everywhere, let alone practiced everywhere, but it is an idea that is available everywhere. It was a powerful part of Asia’s intellectual response to Western imperialism around the turn of the century, as it was of struggles for universal suffrage and rule of law in Europe and the United States.³ In reality, it is never all that we want it to be. Democracy in the full sense of the word will, as Václav Havel put it in his address to a joint session of the US Congress in 1990, “always be no more than an ideal; one may approach it as one would a horizon, in ways that may be better or worse, but it can never be fully attained.” Indeed, seen in light of even a minimalist vision of liberal representative democracy as an ideal, polities even approximating democratic regimes are really a twentieth-century phenomenon. It is an ideal whose partial, imperfect, and precarious realization depended upon successful struggles for women’s suffrage, for decolonization, and for the recognition of a wide range of civil rights building on the gains of the bourgeois and popular revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is an ideal that is never fully realized, as rights are always violated, as some people are always excluded, and as democratic regimes sometimes lapse or even collapse.

Freedom House estimates that 43 percent of the world’s population lives in more or less democratic countries by the basic standard provided by liberal and representative democracy. The number increased sharply in the early 1990s after the fall of Soviet communism (also the period in which the self-styled “people’s democracies” ceased to effectively contest the term democracy), but has changed little in the 2000s and 2010s.⁴ The figure includes not only little seemingly picture-book-perfect pockets of peace and prosperity like the Nordic welfare states, but also more complex cases like Brazil, Ghana, India, Serbia, and the United States. In total about three billion people live in such actually existing democracies. They face challenges enough to fill their days, but also enjoy a degree of respite from the combination of domination, exploitation, and arbitrary violence that characterizes much of human political history, and many more around the world have in recent years struggled for this kind of minimal democracy, including people in China, Egypt, Iran, Myanmar, and Ukraine. As much explosive political potential rests in the combination of the Chinese (Mandarin) characters and as in the combination of demos and kratos, popular and government, in many other languages.

Digital technologies are increasingly part and parcel both of the everyday political processes of actually existing democracies and of the organizing and mobilization of movements for democratization, just as they are increasingly part and parcel of many other parts of life. In the twenty-five years since the World Wide Web made the internet a more accessible medium for ordinary people, many in high-income countries have moved from occasional access via desktop computers and dial-up modems to constant connectivity via smartphones and mobile broadband access, and digital technologies are increasingly ubiquitous as parts of family life, friendships, work, leisure, consumption—and of politics. More and more people use digital technologies as one of several ways in which they engage with political processes. More and more organized political actors, including political parties, political campaigns, and various sorts of interest groups, have integrated digital technologies in their own operations.⁵ On a number of occasions, from the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street in the United States to the austerity protests across much of Southern Europe and the anticorruption Hazare movement in India, digital technologies have been an important part of how people have organized and mobilized politically to democratize democracies they saw as falling far short of their own ideals and aspirations.⁶ Similarly, people organizing and mobilizing for democracy in other contexts have, in countries as different as Iran, Egypt, and Ukraine, relied in part on digital technologies to connect with other activists, coordinate their activities, and publicize their struggle (digital technologies may well have played a more important part in some struggles for democratization than in already-democratic contexts).⁷ Spend a day with people actively involved in politics—an elected official, a trade unionist, a movement activist—and you are likely to see them rely on their cell phone, their email, perhaps social media, and almost certainly a whole suite of back-end tools, whether tailor-made software packages, off-the-shelf desktop applications, or cloud-based services, for managing their work. (This practical reliance is of course the motivation for censoring, monitoring, and blocking such tools either permanently or from time to time, just as other means of expression and assembly are restricted.)

It is not clear, however, that the widespread practical use of digital technologies means that they have played the kind of revolutionary role in actually existing democratic and democratizing political practices that has sometimes been forecast. The precise claims made vary, and it seems unnecessary to rehash them here or single out any one futurist. The overall thrust has been clear and broadly shared in a certain genre: digital technologies were expected to facilitate public debate, increase political participation, and challenge incumbent and often hierarchical and exclusionary organizations by making it easier for people to express themselves, take part in things, and organize without formal organizations.⁸ Years later, it is not clear that there is empirical support for these hopeful hypotheses. Research till now suggests that digital technologies have so far had (1) modest, (2) mostly internal, and often (3) indirect and institutional implications for democratic and democratizing practices. A few words about each aspect in turn.

First, in terms of the scale and scope of the implications, attempts to assess the effects of digital technology use on political participation have again and again found only modest effects and often a “reinforcement” tendency where digital technology use may correlate with political participation, but mostly in ways where already-engaged groups are even more engaged and less engaged groups are no more engaged.⁹ Digital technologies offer easier access more than anything else, but for many, apparently, access is less of a barrier to political participation than inclination (or confidence that even trying is worth one’s while).

Second, a number of studies have shown that digital technologies are part of internal (and incremental, gradual, supplementary) changes in how political parties, political campaigns, interest groups, and social movements organize, mobilize, and communicate.¹⁰ In contrast, the track record of digitally first forms of political participation so far seems sporadic and uneven, at least outside the area of tech activism.¹¹ The movements hailed in recent years by some as “Facebook movements” are at least as much “city square movements”—focused on contesting “meatspace” more than “cyberspace.”¹² And while self-expression and attempts at creating an alternative sphere for democratic decision making and political practice have been part and parcel of many of these mobilizations, trying to be the change one seeks is not new and certainly not unique to the digital environment.¹³

Third and finally, digital technologies are integral to much wider decades-old economic and social shifts that are indirectly changing the very position of democracy in the social order in various ways: through the rise of transnational corporations with far-flung supply chains and the globalization of financial markets; through changes in the news industry that, for all its imperfections, help people follow politics from afar; and by enabling and underpinning the maintenance of extralocal communities of cosmopolitan white-collar professionals as much as of diasporas and migrants.¹⁴ (The combination of political deregulation and a globalized and highly unequal economy enabled in part by digital technologies may well change democracy far more, through what seems to be a secular decline of popular government relative to the rise of the administrative state and private corporations, than any number of online opportunities to express oneself, organize, and get involved.) All these large-scale processes at least problematize the traditional (never unproblematic) democratic assumption of a rough overlap of an economy, a state, and a people.¹⁵

The point here is not that digital technologies mean nothing for democracy, or that the role they play is unimportant or not worthy of consideration. It is simply that the effects are never unambiguously or unproblematically pro-democratic. Serious analysis has left behind the utopian/dystopian dichotomy some time ago in favor of what we, for lack of a better phrase, might call complex realism, whether with a slightly optimistic bent or with a slightly more pessimistic one.¹⁶ We have arrived at the “it’s complicated” phase of our understanding of the relationship between digital and democracy. The questions now concern how it is complicated, where, under what conditions, what it means, and for whom. No evidence-based and rigorous analysis that I know of has lent any credence to the more bombastic pronouncements made and sometimes taken by policymakers (and perhaps parts of the public) to represent actual analysis.

Why, then, have digital technologies fallen far short of the democratic visions that have accompanied them (as such visions have accompanied many other new information and communication technologies in the past)? I would suggest that there are three main factors.

First, the relations between digital technologies and democracy have not developed as was imagined in part because much of what was imagined was imagined on the basis of maximalist visions of democracy with considerable theoretical appeal but little basis in reality. This reflects the unhappy coincidence that both contemporary democratic theorizing as practiced in the academy and much of the public speculation offered by the digital avant-garde has been more concerned with alternative, theoretical, maximalist visions of democracy than with actually existing minimalist visions of democracy (or indeed actually existing alternative democratic innovation: experiments like participatory budgeting, etc.). As a wide range of scholars—from radical democrats like Aletta Norval to liberal democrats like Ian Shapiro—have argued, political theory has, with its professionalization as an autonomous academic field and its move away from its roots in “reflexive practice” (think John Stuart Mill versus John Rawls, or Antonio Gramsci versus Slavoj Žižek), become more and more concerned with abstract self-referential argument and less and less interested in analyzing the intellectual and normative dimensions of actually existing democratic practices.¹⁷ A similar flight from reality can be observed among many of the public intellectuals of the digital revolution. Visions of how digital technologies might enable or be part of entirely different kinds of democratic politics are common. Detailed, evidence-based arguments about what digital technologies mean for actually existing democracy are rare. Everyone has a view on the tool of the moment, whether blogs, wikis, or social media. Fewer have bothered to find out what these tools look like and how they work from the point of view of elected representatives, trade unionists, or movement activists. (Some have speculated about what drives the political economy of this kind of tech commentary.)¹⁸ The problem with this development is not the insistence on imagining a better tomorrow. It is that the distance between reality and imagination too often seems to become an excuse for inactivity; that abstract technological potential is too strongly associated with hope, practical reality with disappointment; that the logics driving the production of the most influential ideas can seem parochial and self-interested; and that our visions of digital democracy are too rarely rooted in firsthand experience with actually existing democratic practices, warts and all.

Second, of course, the relations between digital technologies and democracy have not developed as was imagined in part because many other forces have shaped democracy more than has the spread of relatively affordable and accessible digital technologies during the same time period. (Some of these forces in turn themselves intertwined with the development of digital technologies involved in supply chain management, financial speculation, etc.) In many countries, actually existing liberal representative democracy today faces ever-more acute and multifaceted problems of legitimacy, efficiency, institutional integrity, and popular engagement. These problems by and large predate the rise of digital technologies by decades.¹⁹ More and more people in some countries seem disenchanted with democracy in an age of increased economic inequality, social segmentation, political polarization, and perhaps a loss of faith in the very idea of common solutions to common problems (and indeed the notion of a commonwealth)—but this has little to do with digital technologies. (Though we should note that there is no systematic evidence that digital technologies have enhanced democracy more in countries that, like parts of Northern Europe, have not seen these tendencies to the same extent as, for example, Spain and the United States.)²⁰

Third and importantly, the relations between digital technologies and democracy have not as was imagined in part because the vast majority of digital technologies were never developed to enhance democracy in the first place. This is a simple and, in a way, obvious point, but one that often seems lost in public debates and social science discussions of the role of digital technologies and their implications for democracy—the internet, for example, is not a “democratic technology” the way the ballot box is a democratic technology, developed specifically to enable popular government. The internet is an infrastructure for sharing digital information developed first and foremost to underpin and enable various government activities (including security-related ones), later personal and professional communication, and increasingly business interests. The democratic effects of the internet, whatever they are, are unintended externalities, not a primary purpose. When we look at what has been invested in the development of digital technologies, digital communication practices, and the infrastructures underpinning them, billions are being spent year in and year out on developing e-commerce, and hundreds of millions are spent on e-government, whereas e-democracy is an afterthought, subject to much talk and a few millions now and then. The Obama campaign may have spent millions in 2008 and 2012 building their own tailor-made digital infrastructure (a small investment compared to what it takes to develop patient record-processing systems for a midsize hospital system). But most political campaigns, electoral or otherwise, have to rely on their own repurposing of off-the-shelf at-hand technologies or standardized franchises offered by a handful of small tech companies and individual consultants specializing in politics.²¹ The real digital R&D and investment happens outside politics, outside democracy.

Together, these three factors help explain why digital technologies have not yet delivered on the high democratic hopes that surrounded them. (A fourth factor might of course be time—if the digital revolution is comparable to the print revolution, we are now in the early fifteenth century, the early stages of a sociotechnical transformation that played out over centuries, not simply years or even decades. No matter how imperfect the historical analogy, we certainly have larger and more substantial changes ahead of us than the ones we have already experienced.) They also highlight the importance of looking at the relationship between digital technology and democracy not only through the lens of our imagination and potential, but also through the lens of political practice, of actually existing democracy.

The advantage of understanding the relationship between digital information and communication technologies through the lens of the practical role of digital technologies in actually existing democracies and democratizing practices is that it, in a way, puts digital in its place, as a set of stage props and as part of the setting of the great drama of popular government, not as a main character. Media and politics are mutually constitutive and deeply intertwined, and changes in one (in this case media) invariably influence the other (politics), but not necessarily for the reasons or in the ways often and most prominently suggested, and always in combination with other forces. It also reminds us that democracy is simultaneously enormously disappointing and absolutely amazing—a peculiar outlier in human history—and that the main democratic struggles of our day are not primarily digital. They are primarily democratic. They involve tools of all sorts, analogue and digital, but are driven more than anything else by what Stanley Cavell gestures toward in the quotation used as an epigraph to this essay—the tension between people’s visions of perfect democracy (liberal and representative or otherwise), their perception of the present scene of imperfection, and their belief that they can change it for the better.

See in this volume: activism, culture, forum, geek, hacker, internet, personalization, sharing

See in Williams: behavior, bureaucracy, capitalism, collective, consensus, conventional, democracy, determine, elite, expert, ideology, liberal, masses, popular, standards, western

Notes

1Keane (2009).

2Sen (1999). As Keane (2009) shows in his history of democracy, it is, contrary to what is sometimes said, not a “western phenomenon.”

3Mishra (2012).

4See Freedom House’s annual “Freedom in the World” report.

5Bimber (2003).

6Bennett and Segerberg (2013).

7Howard and Hussain (2013); Yang (2009).

8A parallel track of technological pessimism has predicted almost exactly the opposite—that digital media would fragment public debate, encourage people to opt out of political processes, leave us isolated and at home, etc.

9Schlozman, Verba, and Brady (2010); Boulianne (2009).

10Karpf (2012); Kreiss (2012); Lievrouw (2011); Nielsen (2012).

11Coleman (2013); Milan (2013).

12Pleyers (2014).

13Melucci (1996).

14This point was made twenty years ago by Manuel Castells (1995).

15Sassen (2006).

16Compare, for example, Chadwick (2013) and Hindman (2009).

17Norval (2007); Shapiro (2003).

18Farrell (2013).

19Pharr and Putnam (2000); Norris (2011).

20Vaccari (2013).

21Nielsen (2011).

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