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Helene, good morning, and thank you for being with us today, in this set of interviews we
are conducting with different persons and organizations all over the world about what
the future of democracy is and what democracy really means beyond representativeness. And
how many discoveries of many organizations and research are taking place right now about
this issue. Helene, to begin with, we want to know firts; please Helene tell us who are
you and why is it that you have been intrested and researching in this in this topic of democracy
beyond representativeness and beyond many other constructions of what democracy means
today.
Well thank you for having me I am a political science professor at the Yale University and
I research democratic theory. I wrote a book in English called democratic reason, politics,
collective intelligence and the rule of the many, where I was using former results in
the social sciences to argue that democracy is a good regime in part because it taps the
collective intelligence of the citizens. And building on that, I am now interested in looking
at more empirical evidence for collective intelligence or what I call democratic reason.
In so, I have look into so called democratic innovations which are experiments in institutions
to include the citizens in direct decision making, policy making, law making. An so that
how I came to be interested in certain experiments that I have been conducting for example in
Scandinavia, on look at the inclusive constitutional process in Iceland. One that took place in
Iceland from 2010 to 2013 and had this famous crowdsourcing moment where the Constitutional
Council actually consulted the people online and posted on drafts, to get a feedback from
the people. And I have been also been involved more directly in an actual experiment in Finland.
Where we, my coauthor and I, Tanja Aitamurto from Finland and I, where trying to include
the people of Finland in the revision... in the reform of the law on off-road traffic,
so that is also one of the things that I´ve been doing lately. And I want to sort of start
from this empirical observation of what is going on, on the ground and elaborate a new
concept that I call post-representative democracy, by which I mean a new understanding of what
democracy means for the 21 century. One which include much more direct elements of participation
by the people, which retain some of the valuable features of representative democracy and jointly
delegation , because I think is hard to return to a freely direct model of democracy. I think
it is actually neither totally feasible nor actually desirable, and also a model of democracy
that will embrace the technology that are now available to make that model work, right?
so... the internet to begin with.
Helen, can you please tell us a bit more about your first relevant work "democratic reason,
politics, collective intelligence and the rule of the many". What was your research
question and what did you find, in this endeavor.
So, my research question was, more or less the following; I always wondered why is it
that we value democracy so much. And the end of that was well because we believe in political
equality. But when you ask people why they value political equality they never give you
an answer. It seems to be based in a sort of fate, right. And in fact looking at social
scientific results, of the recent past, I find that a good reason to care about political
equality and therefore to care about democracy and democratic decision procedures is that
actually, giving each one of us a vote and more importantly a say in the deliberative
process, actually ensures under the right conditions that we are going to get to better
answers to the problem we face us as a group. And I think that a really part of the reason
to value democracy and to care about spreading it, is a reason that should appeal to very
exceptical people who don't really believe that we are all sort of equal, and could embrace
political equality at least or certain amount of right for all of us on a political level,
for purely sort of pragmatic reasons. And, part of the research questions I had, the
answer is again, is that of inclusiveness as the answer for the fulfillment of good
solutions, good politics really, through the peak concept of cognitive diversity, something
I drew up from the work of Luham and (...), they have shown that in order to make a group solve
problems better, you better off maximizing the difference in the ways people think and
address problems to interpret the world than maximizing the ability, the individual ability
of people. Of the members of the group. And I thinks this sounds as a logical implication
for the way we think about politics. In particular for the way we think of how we should select
our leaders, our representatives specifically, I think thinking about that has been guided
by the very platonian idea that we have to select the best and brightest, and so elections
is supposed to be a good device for that is actually an aristocratic principle. But what
happens if you look at the job approval of congress, it has been most ... between the
law of 9 persons last November, and a high of 33 persons sometimes, you know since the
1970, in this kind of postwar poll started to be made, so it means that never more that
in 1/3 of the population approved the job made by congress. That seems extremely worrying
if those people are supposed to represent us. And yet when you ask people, when you
poll citizens about how they value the contribution of their individual representative, the numbers
are much higher, so there is a complete discrepancy there. And in my view this can be explained
by the fact that, is not in fact a good idea to add a people that seem individually competence,
because it doesn't guaranty, this individual properties don't guaranty that you are going
to have a collective group that is performing the way you want it to perform. Is more important
to take people that are not actually as smart or able individually but make sure that the
group itself has properties that are such that they think could cognitively think in
diverse ways. To address the problems that they have to face from very unusual perspectives,
and so they are more likely to solve the problem that way. And when you look at politics that
way, when you look at the selection of representatives that way, if you tend to suggest that we should
move away from elections to what is sortation, in particular, or other forms of selection
for elites, so that is sort of a if you want to summarize, the core contribution of my
I would say is there, and then there is other aspects of it, I looked at the history of
the arguments for democracy, also, pointed out that sort of strong anti-democratic prejudice
that exist I think in the political science literature and in the history of political
though more generally, so I am thinking to fight back that elitist bias in our thinking
That politics
Helen, there is a concept which we find quite interesting and I think here in Ecodemocracy,
we have mention it before, by other researchers. It is the concept of collective intelligence.
HOw would you define this concept and how have you elaborated this concept within your
research.
That is a very good question, so collective intelligence i think is a concept that is
understood more and more I would say in the last 50 years, there has been a science of
collective intelligence developing in the social science and in artificial intelligence,
in lots of the fields of cognitive science. For me is an imagined property that you observe
at the level of groups, and that is a function of pose the individual intelligence of the
members of a group and certain features of the group as a whole. So it´s the, you know,
the ability of a group to solve problems, to make accurate predictions about the future,
basically answer smartly to unknown challenges, that is the intelligence part, and the collective
part is just about the fact that is a quality that pertains to the group as a of course
to individuals. Now how it relates to democracy... it doesn´t relate directly to democracy,
I mean you could have oligarchies that are smart, you could have dictatorships that are
smart... the collective doesn´t mean that the group is necessarily inclusive. It just
means that whatever the size of the group, you know the group is smart. Now, what I think,
connect collective intelligence to democracy, at least in my argument is the fact that is
much easier maybe to maximize numbers, to include everyone, than to identify in the
group in any given group who the smartest people are. It is not true in every field
for example I suppose that for a brain surgery or, that physical problems you cannot identify
who the smartest people are you make them take a test or you make them to study medicine,
but for politics is different, because politics is a realm of questions that you can´t know
it ahead of time... what the challenges and the problems are going to be... they are going
to go from you know... environmental crisis, to violence, to a drug issue to a health issue,
to... you know it is a range of problems that is so vast that yo cannot identify the extent
to whom competent people are going to be and I think the sum of knowledge required to address
that sum of questions is to vast for any single mind and for any single subset of experts.
So that is why in a political context I think that you are better off in order to achieve
collective intelligence maximizing the inclusiveness of the process that trying to identify exactly
who the best and brightest are.