I expected that Vergara would find open democracy insufficiently radical. I did not, however, expect her to misunderstand the role of open mini-publics in it. She writes that I conceive “nonbinding mechanisms as people’s power” and that, generally, “the book does not embrace giving binding power to the people.”
I am confused by this interpretation. The book builds a case for a new form of democratic representation in which elected officials are replaced with randomly selected ones and paves the way for putting ordinary citizens in the position of legislators. If making the law is not a form of power, I do not know what is.
I blame this misunderstanding from a sophisticated scholar on two points that I should probably have been clearer on: (1) the meaning of power and (2) the role of real-life examples in my normative theory.
By “power” I mean the capacity to decisively cause, bring about, or shape an outcome or state of affair (here law or policy). But power thus broadly defined has many “faces” (according to the famous distinction by Stephen Lukes), including two that are central to my argument. Decision making is the most visible face of power and the one that Vergara is the most concerned with, in part because it is associated with the concept of sovereignty as final say. I recognize the importance of final say by listing, as the first principle of open democracy, participation rights that ensure that citizens can trigger referenda on issues they care about (so- called citizens’ initiatives) or on laws or policies they want to repeal (rights of referral). The final say of citizens on at least some decisions is necessary for the legitimation of open democracy.
Another less visible but crucial face of power, however, is agenda setting, or the power to shape the terms of a decision. Recognizing the centrality of agenda setting, I am concerned with placing ordinary citizens, rather than elected officials, in the role of democratic representatives. Because not everyone at once can be involved in that task, I propose involving citizens via random selection and rotation to approximate the idea of “representing and being represented in turn.”
Perhaps Vergara considers agenda setting insufficiently binding if it is not also backed up by the power of final say, and that is why she sees my open mini-publics as merely advisory. I disagree. Agenda setting is structurally constraining on downstream decisions and thus is real power. But at any rate, as I just said, the final say in open democracy would go either to the larger public (in a referendum) or to the mini-publics themselves (the ones who set the agenda or new ones). So “the people,” or their lottocratic representatives, have binding power in my paradigm.
Generally speaking, Open Democracy argues that elected parliaments could be replaced by randomly selected ones not only without loss of competence (and indeed a likely gain in competence, as per the epistemic argument of my earlier work Democratic Reason), but also without loss of democraticity, legitimacy, and accountability (see chapters 4, 5, and 8). On p. 121 for example, I write, “It is possible to envisage the democratic legitimacy of a system in which there exists no stable elected representative assemblies whatsoever.” None of these arguments and claims would have any point if all I envisaged mini-publics to have merely an advisory function. And even when I consider the possibility of a partly electoral, partly lottocratic system (e.g., on p. 120), I suggest that we give open mini-publics their own autonomous sphere of legislative power, including at the expense of elected assemblies.
How could Vergara misunderstand me so much? It is possibly due to the place of examples in my theory. Vergara seems to infer from my method, which she correctly describes as inductively building on case studies, that I am bound by the scope of the powers entrusted to existing mini-publics. But my point is not sheer descriptive generalization but also normative extrapolation. Just because the examples I rely on were ultimately not binding on existing institutions does not mean that open mini-publics in my new democratic paradigm are not.
I am grateful for the opportunity to clarify these points and look forward to continuing the conversation.
