Abstract
In this paper, I introduce and discuss a new model of governance, in which epistemic qualities of intrinsically elitist open deliberation are combined with normative qualities of aggregative democracy based on universal suffrage. In our model, these two approaches, typically considered as opposite to each other, are combined in a quite natural way. Namely, the process of deliberative policy-making in a community is open to every its member who is willing to participate (the “active” ones); while all others (the “lazy” ones) are provided with the possibility of either to cast their informed vote, or, at the end, to delegate their voting right to the whole community, through an IT system enforcing appropriate procedures and performing appropriate algorithms. Practical implementation of our model will be made possible through a combined use of (1) a procedural framework for Mass common Online Deliberation (MOD), which had been described in detail in our past papers; (2) an appropriately designed Computer-Assisted Argumentation (CAA) system; and (3) a system for collecting and taking into account individual preferences of every “lazy” citizen, in a way similar to the so-called Voting Advice Application (VAA) systems.
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Notes
- 1.
Alternatively, if at the beginning of the process a list of requirements has been set up, which shall be satisfied, to a greater or lesser degree, by every alternative solution accepted to enter the final vote, then the profile of an alternative would take the form of a requirements compliance vector. In the subsequent sections of the paper, I will further expand on this idea.
- 2.
Or, if such an implicit vote is made compulsory by law, for every person that hasn’t cast their vote explicitly.
- 3.
At the very end, we should also consider the case of those “laziest” people who have neither voted explicitly, nor filled their preference profile at all. This does not mean, however, that these people will not be affected by any direct or indirect effect of the solution chosen by all others. Should we, nevertheless, drop those people from any consideration in a given policy-making instance? Or, instead, we should try to approximate the preference profile of each of them, e.g. by considering known parameters of their socio-economic status (SES) and then define their “implicit preference profile” by averaging and extrapolating the profiles of people with similar SES who have explicitly specified their profiles? This is not a purely technical question, but a question of political theory as well. For, one thing is aggregating needs and preferences of those who feel (or believe) themselves concerned with an issue, and a quite different thing is taking into account assumed needs and preferences of all those who are supposed to be affected by the issue, though remain mute and inactive (cf. Sunstein [7]).
- 4.
In my earlier papers, I have introduced a neologism deliberandum, which designates a specific instance of public deliberation on a given issue, within a given community, on a given online platform, and with a given time schedule. A deliberandum on an issue is a process quite naturally leading to a referendum, for selecting one solution among proposed alternatives. In my proposed design, such a referendum can be considered as the 5-th stage of the process.
- 5.
At some stages of this process, involvement of external experts (domain specific ones, legal ones, etc.) may often appear necessary. Their selection/accreditation is a very difficult issue, as they need a double recognition: recognition of their knowledge and skills by their professional community (epistemic), and recognition of their integrity by the deliberating community (normative). This issue needs separate consideration.
- 6.
I assume that every instance of policy-making relates to a given community, which can be a territorial (country-state, region, city, municipality), or professional, or religious, etc. A citizen of a state who is not legally deprived of his/her civic rights is an eligible citizen; the same term can be applied to a member of a community. In this paper, I use the terms ‘citizen’ and ‘community member’ interchangeably, always assuming their eligibility.
- 7.
ὁ βουλόμενος in Ancient Athenian terms (literally, ‘anyone who wishes’, a shortened form of a longer expression signifying ‘anyone who wishes among those who can’, that is, among eligible Athenian citizens).
- 8.
The situation is somehow similar to what happens in a typical Deliberation Poll, when the same questionnaire filled by every participant after the deliberation is to be compared with the pre-deliberative one.
- 9.
“…so far, both in the AI literature and in argumentation studies generally, the direction of research has been almost exclusively on argument evaluation rather than on argument invention.” (Walton and Gordon [12]). In the paper cited, the authors discuss two existing tools (Carneades and IBM Watson Debater); both, however, in their actual state seem to address experts rather than “average” deliberators.
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Velikanov, C. (2018). Direct Deliberative Democracy: A Mixed Model. In: Alexandrov, D., Boukhanovsky, A., Chugunov, A., Kabanov, Y., Koltsova, O. (eds) Digital Transformation and Global Society. DTGS 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 858. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02843-5_6
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