The TV show Parks and Recreation begins with a citizen of Pawnee, Indiana showing up to a city council meeting with a specific complaint. She soon becomes the best friend of Leslie Knope, the series’s government-bureaucrat main character. The series, a celebration of engagement in civic life, in fact shows an example of a problematic power system I like to call schleptocracy. (Pun-based political theory: the best kind of political theory.)
Schleptocracy is when the decisions of a nominally representative body actually reflect only the priorities of the people who show up – who schlep to meetings, votes, and debates.
The archetypal schleptocracy is the Soviet Politburo before WWII. Stalin took control of the entirety of Russia by selectively not inviting people to things; he told Trotsky he could skip Lenin’s funeral and then badmouthed him there. In that case, schleptocracy took hold because of weak institutions and absolutist governance. Schleptocracy also frequently takes hold in small organizations with few powers, like student councils (in the USA) or clubs. And of course, there are intentional schleptocracies, like American party primary caucuses, where winning-by-showing-up is the point of the exercise.
Small-scale schleptocracy like that in clubs is probably a good thing, because in small communities the decision-makers are likely to also be the people who implement the decisions, so they have more at stake. On a larger scale like in politics, there are some arguments for schleptocracy. Passionate citizens might be more motivated because their problems might be legitimately more pressing. Non-passionate citizens might not have well-formed opinions at all.
But ultimately, there are several clear reasons why schleptocratic governance on a large scale is bad. The first, of course, is that it’s ableist and classist. In order to actually show up to the places you want to show up, you have to have the time, money, and energy to go there, and those places must be accessible to you. If you are an Iowa Democrat and you have to work to support your family during the time the Iowa caucuses are going on, or you are in bed with a chronic illness at that time, or your mobility comes from a wheelchair and the venue isn’t wheelchair-accessible, no democracy for you.
The second is that “engagement” can also be negative. I reported an obstructive construction site which had dug up the whole sidewalk to the Bureau of Street Services the other day, and I felt mostly good about that, but an engaged citizen with other priorities than walkability might report “suspicious persons” who are only suspicious in that they conform to the reporter’s biases. Privilege often determines whether people can speak out. If “engagement” is an opt-in rather than an opt-out, it amplifies the worst kinds of purse-clutching busybody and self-righteous vigilante by letting them set the terms of civic engagement.
The third is that democracy is supposed to be inclusive. Whether you agree that this is a moral imperative or you simply recognize that a population that feels included is less likely to revolt, making people feel like their government represents them is at the heart of a stable society.
Schleptocracy is the consequence of a system that makes participation difficult and arcane with little reward, and US civic life at the present moment can fairly be described as such a system. We have very low voter turnout ratings relative to many other democracies, and voters are dissatisfied with their options even at a time when the US economy is doing relatively well. I don’t want to overstate the case – the effects of oligarchy and unrepresentative districting are more of a problem in today’s USA – but we should nevertheless do more to make democracy accessible to everyone.
Part of that is physical accessibility – not just wheelchair-accessible polling places (which, I mean, we should already have? gee, I hope all polling places are wheelchair-accessible in this day and age) but also absentee voting, maybe even voting-by-text in the plausible future. Caucuses are a doomed model and should be entirely done away with. But we should also make voting conceptually easy, with early voting, automatic registration, some kind of automatic reminder system you could sign up for, voter information pamphlets (they have this in San Francisco, but nowhere else I’ve voted?), PSAs to remind people that the election is coming up and what’s on the ballot, and so on. The idea is to bring the election to you. I know that sounds Orwellian but it needn’t be, not if there are strong statutory limits on the data the government can keep and on the ability of various agencies to communicate with law enforcement. Online voting is very difficult to secure and very easy to abuse, but there are plenty of other ways we could make voting easier.
Even beyond making sure a majority of people vote in elections, there are other steps the government should take to get citizens invested. I think governments should hold regular text polls testing the approval ratings of various figures, how you plan to vote in upcoming referenda, etc. Of course, this kind of thing is still subject to some of the problems of our current system – it’s still classist, because not everyone has a cell phone; it’s still an opt-in model (because otherwise yikes, you’re getting unsolicited texts from the government?); and it still has civil-liberties risks – you’d probably need to limit responses to multiple-choice so people couldn’t make threats and so law enforcement couldn’t really use this data to incriminate people; you probably shouldn’t ask open-ended questions like “what is the biggest problem facing your community” or anything like that. But I think this closes some of the gap between the engaged and the disengaged, or at least brings some more people on board.
Then there’s accessible content in politics itself. Debates, floor votes, certain hearings, and some meetings should be televised. With local journalism in financial trouble, local government should both start publicizing itself and take pains to be worth publicizing. A good model for this is Prime Minister’s Questions in the British House of Commons. It can often be maddeningly stupid, but the part that makes it ostensibly shameful is also the part that makes it good television: everyone is yelling. Democracy should be raucous, and politicians in a democracy should not be considered national heroes. It would only be a good thing to introduce this format to US politics, which suffers from far too much idolatry of the executive, and from a plague of politicians who are garbage public speakers. (I dearly love Nancy Pelosi and have in fact voted for her, but…) Question Time may come at the expense of a certain amount of nuance, but it acquaints a wider audience with the contrasts and similarities between parties.
We should of course keep a healthy skepticism for government involvement in your life. But the principle of democracy is that you have a right to be involved in the government’s life, and there’s a vested interest in making sure people don’t waive that right.
Notes From Punderground 