welcome on another episode of Democracy Innovator podcast.
And our guest of today is Chago Pesotto.
I'm very sorry for the pronunciation.
And thank you for your time.
As a first question, I would like to ask you maybe a short presentation of about...
yourself, so your experience and maybe the projects you were involved in.
Oh yes, so...
Thiago Pesciotto.
I'm a visiting professor for the University of Southampton for the Center for Civic Futures, um which has Matt Ryan, Paulo Spada, and many people working with Democratic
Innovations.
And I also work at the World Bank.
In the past, I did lots of projects related to citizen engagement, but um now most of my work...
um related to democracy comes from collaboration with scholars.
So, and for disclosure, anything that I say here, it's like my personal opinion, of course, and doesn't regard by any means the work of the bank, of the World Bank or the, or
any of its member countries or its board of directors.
So my very, very personal opinion.
Sure.
And how would you define a democratic system?
Well, democratic system, I'll define it a bit in a sense of...
It is always measured against an ideal benchmark, right?
And then you have the real existing democracies of what Philippe Schmitter, political scientist, speaks of.
But well, a democratic system, is one in which...
people can shape the decisions that affect their lives and that they have like enough information about it to shape those decisions.
Right?
But I think also if we go at the very, very etymology of democracy, it's not really what people would like to say like power of the people.
uh Kratos is more about the capacity to do things or capacity to achieve things.
So it is
Of course, it's a process that is inclusive in which people can shape the decisions that affect their lives, but they're also capable of achieving things that otherwise they would
not be able to achieve.
That would be my short definition of it.
Okay, I was thinking because many times I thought in Italian the word like potere is like, it's like I can, uh I can do that.
And it's very interesting how it is also related to what is uh one person is able to actually do.
Yeah, yeah, it is less, yeah, is power in the capacity of changing course of things, right, or doing things that otherwise would not happen, right?
So if you go like to some other classical definitions of power, it's the capacity of A, it has to change the course of B, which without A's action,
would not have changed its course, right?
power in this way is the capacity of doing things that would not be happening if democracy didn't exist.
And thinking about technology and politics and also about the power that we have about, I don't know, shaping the future.
uh Of course, it's a small power.
um I wonder which kind of society we could have like using technology for political use.
So, in one way we could have annex.
a very democratic society and on the other way um a lot of surveillance, know, all the dystopic movies.
um So I wonder what is your idea about uh how can we use technology, that power that we have?
Look, mean, the essence of the state is the legitimacy of the use of the force, right?
And to be able to use the force, the state is always tempted to enter into surveillance mode on one or another, right?
The police have their intelligence services, and that's common, and even in democracies, right?
The question is that I think we will always be in an equilibrium between a state that is more libertarian or more uh not in equilibrium, but you're going to be along that
continuum, right?
State might need to do surveillance for like a.
security questions and so on and so forth, but the problems when the state starts to intervene on people's agency or people's freedom, which are inherent to them, right?
Because democracy as well, one of the definitions of democracy is the notion of agency, right?
It is your freedom to do things that will lead to your greatest fulfillment as a human being, to be able to flourish and grow.
And the problems when surveillance starts to enter into that.
But I mean, the negative effects of technology and democracy, think it's not that I don't think it's important, but I think uh it's a field that it's already uh saturated with
concerns both in the public and academic sphere.
Not that it's not important again, but I think when I talk about the risks, we need to talk about the possibilities.
And then when we talk about the possibilities of technology in democracy, I that's an area that I've been dedicated, I think, perhaps my last over 25 years.
Look, I think we need to think of technology's role in two areas, from two angles, one which would be...
dedicated to democracy, right?
One would be what you could call invited spaces, which are the spaces that exist by the government.
So for example, uh elections, referendum, initiatives, or consultations that are done by the government.
And you'd have what we would call like invented spaces, which are what you could call grass roots or bottom up.
uh
activities that are started by citizens.
uh And the role of technology on these two, sometimes it overlap, but sometimes it's completely different.
So I think an invented space is a classic use of technology is, uh for example, internet voting.
It's very, uh very well known and we did some work as well with an invented.
of effects of the internet voting, including participatory budgeting.
We were some of the first to assess the impacts of that.
um But I think we don't discuss enough this, and particularly when it comes to elections.
um The impact of technology, and probably the largest documented impact.
ah impacts of technology on democracy came from the introduction of electronic voting in Brazil.
Not e-voting, but electronic voting.
Why?
Because in Brazil we had an election that was very complicated.
So if you wanted to vote for somebody in the past, you'd have to choose candidates for like president and this and that.
You need to memorize the number of the candidate.
You needed to know the number of the candidate.
So it was a paper-based process and was very complex to do.
And what happened in Brazil is that those who had least education
and uh of course the poorest who are also the poorest, most of their votes would be uh nullified, right, because they wouldn't be able to vote correctly, so to speak.
And that created a huge bias on who got elected in Brazil.
And this until two decades, three decades ago.
Now I don't remember when it was introduced precisely.
I think about 89, yeah, so probably three decades ago.
Or a bit after, it doesn't matter.
But what happened is that they created electronic ballots.
in which citizens just would have to go and sometimes they would just put one number and the picture of the candidate would appear and people would say, yes, that's the person I
want to vote, right?
What happened is that all of a all those votes from poor people that were not being counted before, right, started to be counted just because you improved the user interface
of voting.
And because the ballots, the electronic ballots, they rolled out in Brazil, I would say not ah all at once, you had the natural experimental design.
So you could see what were the effects of with the ballot and the effects of without the electronic ballot.
So what...
uh
uh What one researcher Thomas Fujiwara, one of the most beautiful papers in civic tech for me finds is that in the places where you wrote out the electronic ballot, you had less
people making mistakes, then you had more candidates of poor people getting elected.
And that led
to bigger priorities in legislation and on budget for proper spending.
And years later, you even had an impact on health and infant mortality indicators.
So there you go.
You just moved the ballot from a paper to an electronic ballot where the picture appears and it's easier to vote.
And it changed.
I mean, uh I don't know of any other civic tech that had any other.
quantifiable impact and at a scale as a country as in Brazil on oh infant mortality.
I mean, when people talk to me about civic tech, I always think about that case and I say like, well, if you could get at least one good indicator uh because the bar is too high,
but that's what I'm thinking.
uh Of course you have the other.
applications and so on and so forth.
But then you have the invented spaces, right?
Well, let's still stay in the invited spaces.
Then you have what we call invited spaces, but there are still participatory democracy.
which are um
which are like participatory budgeting and so on and so forth.
And you do see an increase in participation of people who otherwise would not have participated, right?
Because particularly voting via internet and things like this, the idea is that you let people to participate who otherwise would not have participated because they have
constraints in terms of time, distance, and there they can vote whenever it's convenient for them, pretty much from anywhere.
So this is the CYD.
invented spaces, right?
Then you have the invited spaces, which would be uh where I think we don't look a lot neither.
uh We look a lot on the participatory spaces and now on AI for citizens assemblies and so on.
But what I find interesting on the part of the
invented spaces, which are those that I'm calling those that starts by citizens and everything, and I'm thinking mostly about social movements.
Their technology plays another role.
It's not about expressing preference, just like voting, right?
But it's about connecting people, connecting people who otherwise would not connect, right?
And there I think it's a huge power that ah
It is one, it enables people to meet people who think like you, who are like-minded.
Some people think this is a bad thing, right?
But in some cases, you don't have collective action if people were not, they don't share like some vision of world, for example, at least around a certain issue.
But also, it allows...
coordination failures, right?
It allows to overcome coordination failures.
So if you look at the literature on social movements and collective action, you have like lots of coordination failures.
So for instance, not knowing if another person is willing to take action or not, right?
Or pluralistic ignorance.
I kind of think that no, I think that maybe you should overthrow in a certain government, but
Nobody.
ah But I think that nobody else thinks like me, right?
And technology as well there, in particular, if you have privacy and you can use it anonymously and things like that, it enables you to overcome that pluralistic ignorance
and maybe realize that there are lots of people that are unhappy with a certain.
poor government and they decide to take the streets.
So I think the mechanisms, and these are of course different, only kind of like stylized examples, but this is to highlight that the way in which a technology plays a role will
depend a lot
on the type of participation mechanism that your crime should do, right?
And I think this is one of the problems a lot on the civic tech space is that we start with the solution and then we go looking for a problem.
But never before understanding really what is.
One, what is the participation mechanism?
What is keeping that participation mechanism to reach its full potential?
And how technology can help overcome some of those barriers.
So I would have a lot of questions to the things you just mentioned.
I really like the distinction between invented and invited.
Which is not mine.
Okay.
And I was thinking also about the coordination between people that also that is um a sort of collaborative power.
I'm about Hannah Arendt when she described power as people with the same intention.
um So if someone is able to meet another person on the other side of the world and talk about something, then...
um And then, yeah, a question like if you think that it will be possible in the future to have like a society where everyone is basically able to participate, because I'm thinking
that...
um You mentioned how changing the design...
allowed a lot of people to actually vote because before it was not...
um they were doing mistakes, so the vote was not registered.
And I'm thinking that sometimes it is also like...
Could it be that the previous way was designed in that way um for a reason?
Because I'm thinking that a lot of times uh it happened that...
uh
m political parties, the power changed, um I don't know, gave voting rights to a certain category of people, because for political reasons.
Also now in Italy you can vote only if you're older than 18.
Thank
they were discussing about also giving the vote to people uh that are older than 16.
And so you can see that it is cool if they can vote, but at the same time, who is proposing this is also thinking about what that category of people could actually vote.
So I'm thinking about this, I don't know, maybe it was a bit confused.
Yeah, now look, I mean, I think they think of like everybody wanting to participate.
So first of all, when we think about technology.
And the rationale to introduction of technology, the whole rationale in the past about e-democracy was precisely that one that I told you, It's to make it easier for people to
participate anywhere, right?
So the hypothesis is that if you lower the transaction costs of participation, uh more people will participate.
which is a very utilitarian view, right?
When you look at the effects of internet voting on turnout, for example, right?
It's the best measure that we have.
If you look for the examples uh in like effects of that on voting in Estonia, on effects on voting uh in Switzerland.
The effect on turnout is very low, very, very low.
And sometimes even some authors will find like it's an elusive effect.
It's like sometimes 1%, 1.5, sometimes nothing.
I mean, you need to be looking a lot.
So what does this say?
First of all, it's that first people decide whether they will participate or not.
the big majority of people.
Afterwards, they decide by which means, right?
Of course, you know, there's like some effect, for example, as well, in days that snow, it depresses a little bit to turn out, but very little, it's not huge normally, or depends on
depending on the weather or so.
The other thing that you could say, it is, and that's.
something that even I sometimes advocate, people don't participate because they don't have an impact, right?
But again, if you look at elections, in most elections in the world, the odd of your vote counting on your...
it is much lower than the odds of you getting run by a car on your way to the ballot station, right?
So in some states, in some very disputed districts in the United States, the chance that a meteor flies from the sky and hits you in your head is higher than you casting the
decisive vote.
So what am I saying?
It is that assuming this
perfectly rational behavior of the voter that if it's easier for everybody to participate, they will participate.
Or if they have an impact, they will participate.
You don't see difference a lot in those things.
So the whole thing of like the utilitarian view or the kind of like, how do say, like utilitarian view or
fully rational behavior doesn't exist.
But of course we see, particularly in some things like when you go into participatory budgeting, you see a higher effect of internet floating.
So it seems that in events that are low saliency, in which means like very few people participate or is less known stuff, it has a stronger effect.
So just to say that...
Technology and everybody participating, it's not supported by the evidence.
Now more people participating probably you could do, right?
But that still would be far from being...
uh
And it is a bit somehow as well paternalistic.
Some people don't want to participate.
I mean, you have like James Fishkin that talks about deliberation.
I mean, I think there is a bit of that on the deliberationist view that a citizen's point of view is only as good as far as he comes to a place, listens to the
to different points of views, have enough time to deliberate.
And then if they have enough time to deliberate, then the citizen is ready to express their opinion.
It's a bit authoritarian, right?
I mean, if you take this deliberative view to the extreme,
you will stop people from voting on elections because they are uninformed, they didn't get the chance to deliberate, they didn't listen to the pros and cons and so on and so forth.
And I mean, I'm saying as somebody who's a proponent of deliberative democracy, but you to be very careful about the claims that we're doing and how far they can go.
Now on the thing of lowering the voting age, it's a super interesting quest.
ah One of the things that you see in the history of democracy is that every time the democracy uh or the democracy was a stake or the state was a stake, you'd have a type of
enfranchisement.
Right?
So you'd have, uh you'd expand the base of a good participate.
Right?
So you have social unrest in the United States.
You let women vote.
Right?
Then afterwards you have like a civil unrest in the United States and you expand the pool of people who are, who could vote.
Right?
The thing that happened with representative democracy is that it's traditional way
uh of dealing with new challenges as we face now as humankind, global warming, or how do you say, right, like a poly-crisis state.
Now the state has very little room to increase who can participate from an electoral democracy perspective because we already expanded to universal voting.
So the only little thing that we can do, it is decrease the voting age, number one.
There's this proposal of like 16 years old.
There are some people as David Ransom that goes as far as saying that you should let five years old vote.
It's super interesting, right?
But let's look at the evidence, right?
There's one European country, I'm not gonna nominate, where lowering the voting age was extremely uh supported by a coalition or left-wing uh parties.
They lowered the voting age and the result was that that new pool of voters was captured by the extremists.
So thinking that youth, because now they like, I don't know, like smoking pot and wearing their Che Guevara shirts at the university, you know, and these kinds of things that are
gonna reduce the vote for youth.
Number one, it might backfire.
You don't know where it's gonna go.
So expanding the enfranchisement.
based on, as you said, on political preferences or anticipating political preferences is one of the stupidest political moves that somebody can do.
The other thing, and this is, there's uh a good work from a political scientist, other people did that, it's called, his name is Mark Franklin.
The other thing is that people who defend voting for increased participation, they don't calculate one thing.
Vote is a habit-forming act.
uh
So if I vote to the strongest predictor that if I will vote on next election four years from now is if I voted on this one.
That's the strongest predictor.
Now what happens?
All else equal younger people, depends on the cases, but in many cases
they are less likely to vote in that moment of life.
Okay?
So what happens is that even though you can increase the number of people voting, let's suppose you had a thousand sick people between 16 and 17 years old, right?
If you enable voting, maybe you're to have like a thousand voting, right?
But what happens is that that one thousand that did not vote, they'll continue not voting for the rest of their lives.
On the other hand, if you didn't change the voting age, when they reached 18, you'd have 1500 people voting and voting forever for the rest of their lives.
Do you understand the difference?
yeah you're it's quite interesting the habit that is formed um
lowering the voting age has long-term depressing effects on turnout, i.e.
democratic participation.
But the people who defend that, they don't read literature, right?
Okay, yeah, because it was done in the past many times, I think.
Thank
And yeah, actually, I had another question.
Now, you want to do that on the basis of normative game in which...
ah That's something totally different, right?
I mean, maybe you wanna even do something, right?
Maybe for example, for Brexit, maybe you should have given different weight of votes.
You should let like 12 year olds people voting and given that there was like something to have a lasting effect, maybe their votes could have from a normative standpoint, even have
different weights, right?
Maybe when it's about global warming.
Maybe you should give them heavier weights for citizens, uh for younger citizens, because they are the ones who bear the highest costs, for instance, of global warming.
But doing that, you need to do again based on a normative ground.
But thinking on the ground that, doing that will be beneficial for this or that agenda,
that's a big bet and normally one that people lose very often.
And yeah, I was saying I'm very interested by the, I don't know, some hybrid experimentations that um were done in the past, but also now they are doing.
About, I mentioned like the, via email, the five star movement that in Italy tried to use this platform called Russo.
to mediate so some people were elected, so they were politicians, and they had to do basically what was said on the platform.
Then it didn't really happen.
But by the way, I'm interested by these kind of things because I wonder if there is a new, let's say, platform or a new, let's call it, protocol of governance.
then it has to be tested in some way.
yeah, what do you think?
Yeah, who saw a casalejo and all that right?
uh Yeah look super interesting I mean
Introvert democracy is a very interesting thing, right?
em
And I do, uh...
I do favor it, right?
I mean, if parties, they have like intra, if parties were truly democratic, we wouldn't need all these democratic innovations maybe, right?
Maybe parties could run their very own citizens' assemblies or delegates' assemblies, right?
ah But we know the parties, intra-party democracies is a...
is a difficult thing.
Now, before Rousseau, you had a zillion of other
experiments of intra-party democracy, a like direct or semi-direct democracy, or just like this.
You have, for instance, I think the first one documented in history was DemoX in Sweden, if I'm not wrong, right?
And after that you have, repetitively, I'm not even sure, does Rousseau still exist?
And do the party still use it to...
uh
to really shape decisions.
If it does, great for them, because then would be a case.
Because normally what we see in many of these experiments is that they start doing.
But democracy is about power sharing.
And people who have the power, don't want to share it.
uh
and how to fix this problem because um I wonder if there is a way or not because I think that from a couple of years they stopped using the platform because also Casalejo um died.
um And so...
And yeah, it was some years ago.
um but by the way, also back then, I remember that sometimes the decision that were proposed were not really, I would say important.
um So in some way, it is as, as you say, like, people that have power do not want to share their power.
And uh
I wonder if this is something that...
I don't know if it is part of the human nature in a biological way, in a social way.
Do we have to just accept this?
That it's going to be forever like this?
Or...
I don't know.
Okay, so let me...
let me start to say for what I think we should not be doing.
First, do not fall for the fairy tale, Habermasian fairy tale, that deliberative Democrats, many of them, truly believe, which is that the force of the best argument shall
prevail.
OK?
So that's one of the things that I think some deliberative Democrats get wrong.
It is that thinking, like, if you have enough good argument, that argument will win.
I mean, I want to know, I was talking to you about expanding enfranchisement movements, women, racial segregation, and so on and so on.
Which movement got power given to people based on good arguments?
know?
I mean, Rosa Parks, worst use of her time, would be sitting in a citizens assembly.
What Rosa Parks did is that she refused to do that and to spark a movement.
And one thing that people don't know often, Rosa Parks was an activist, a very well-trained activist.
What I'm saying is that you don't get power sharing by making good arguments why you should be sharing power.
You do it by defining it.
You do it by making the costs of trying to keep power become much higher than the costs of sharing.
Or at least that it's a credible threat.
Votes got extended on that basis.
It wasn't because people came there and said like, oh, it's unfair or appealing to some kind of like universal logic.
So the way that go about it, it is social movements.
The way that you go about it, it is about exert impression.
The way that you go about it is that if you want to have power, nobody's going to come and say like, well, you know, I slept, I put my hand in my consciousness.
And I thought, actually, you have very good arguments and I'm going to give you power.
em Or that there's a clear game, participatory budgeting.
Why did participatory budgeting took off in places like the United States?
Because they saw that it was electrically interesting, right?
I think was the name I don't remember of the mayor of a district in Chicago.
I mean, he did participatory budgeting.
The next year he won by a landslide.
even though before he didn't perform great.
Then he went all hands on deck for participatory budgeting.
But again, justifying that democracy provides benefits.
I was a person that believed that, right?
When I started, when I got interested in participatory budgeting, participatory budgeting, I was still very young, was not mainly in Brazil.
I looked at that and I thought, that's amazing.
Actually, citizens participate and wow, they don't burn their money.
They make good choices.
I thought, wow, it's a matter of time for it to catch like fire.
And it's going to spread like wildfire across democracies.
It didn't work.
Then I think in the meantime, ah Paulo Espada from the University of Southampton
did something, actually showing what I'm telling you, that participatory budgeting increased the odds of re-election.
So participatory budgeting not only is not crazy, number two, it increases the odds of people getting re-elected.
Then there was another research, two researches, one by Brian Wumpler and Michael Touchstone and another one from Sony, I think Sony Goncalves, two different researches,
which they found municipalities with and municipalities without participatory budgeting.
In the municipalities with participatory budgeting, after you participatory budgeting, you had much more investments in like sewage, treated water and health, right?
And after some time, you could see that those cities with participatory births, you had less infant mortality.
So, okay, so now participatory budgeting.
People don't burn the money, they make good choices, it helps you get it re-elected, and it saves lives.
Maybe that was missing something.
Then I got together myself, Michael touched on a red one plan went to see to the fiscal effects of participatory budgeting in Brazil.
And what we saw participatory budgeting but participatory council.
We saw that
By implementing participatory budgeting, governments collected relatively much, much more taxes.
A municipality with participatory budgeting and a municipality without participatory budgeting, the one with participatory budgeting, their investment capacity is 40 % higher.
It's 40 % more money to be spending on things.
So now people don't burn the money, they go, they make good choices, they live happy, you increase taxes, you save lives, and you're more likely to be reelected.
What argument more do you want?
If by humbremous perspective, the force of the best argument would prevail, you'd have participatory budgeting in every city in the world.
And it's nowhere there.
And all the other democratic innovations that we now talk about, be Citizens' Assembly, Citizens' Initiatives, uh Participatory Councils, Neighborhood Associations, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like every, every innovation that they are.
None of them come one inch closer in terms of having evidence that they work beyond the fact that citizens don't make stupid choices.
But none of them have like solid evidence that, one, improves quality of living, two, is politically beneficial, and three, ah even increases how much taxes government can...
No other than participatory question.
So when I look at this and I think that people think that they will, on the force of the best argument, convince people, that is naive.
That is totally naive.
Maybe you're gonna start doing, which I doubt, to collect evidence of that.
Maybe 20 years from now, you're gonna collect all the evidence which would make it like totally 100 %
acceptable type of policy.
A policy that you should do and you're not gonna do.
The fact that a policy is reasonable doesn't mean it gets adopted.
I can give you a list of policies that are factually reasonable and they're not adopted.
Now for other types
policies which are democratic innovation policies or democratic innovation policies.
You don't even have that evidence base and you're expecting to make it pass on a normative basis?
That's not gonna happen.
So yes, it can happen.
It should happen.
I would like to see it happening.
But the only way that it will happen it is if you have collective action.
so that you make it for existing people who are able to make democratic reforms, the costs of not making democratic reforms much higher than the status quo.
But to do that, the democratic field needs to start fighting, right?
And particularly the deliberative democracy field needs to lose its antipathy of social movements.
Right?
Or thinking that people are only reasonable if they deliberate to get their booklet, to get the mediator there and stuff.
Right?
It needs to lose its antipathy.
needs to build alliances with those.
And it needs to agree on a democratic agenda.
But the field of democracy, activism,
They are united by two things.
One, they believe that every citizen should be hard.
But the other thing that they have in common is that they think that whatever other democracy field should not be heard.
If it's your album, right?
So every citizen is intelligent as long as it is only my case.
No, those guys are stupid.
They're doing...
So it's very inclusive, but only from its point of view.
And it's a field, that's why it's stalled.
That's another reason why it's stalled.
I mean, then you can say, but the number of X or Y and Z is increasing.
I mean, there was a moment that there were 10,000 participatory budget in the world, probably producing all of these results.
Nothing changed.
And these were producing dividends, including political dividends.
So unless you have social movements similar to the ones that led to previous waves of enfranchisement, we're going to be on this democracy, Poliana, cramy uh model.
right, or this very idealized model which I sympathize.
I would like to see it happen, but it doesn't.
But I was wondering, if, um I know it's open question, maybe um you said that, mean, participatory budgeting is very helpful from various point of view.
So there should be a lot of interest, but there isn't, not as much as we could like.
And so this is more like a culture related to the people that they are not aware.
But you also said that is a...
uh Also from a political point of view, if you are the mayor of a town you get more chance to be reelected, so it is convenient if you're a politician to adopt that system.
But I wonder, from a politician point of view, why they do not adopt...
There should be some cons.
Because sharing power.
Sharing power.
point.
I mean, to have a house of your own and,
Have a house of your own or a business of your own and try to do it.
So.
mean, I'm yet to see a grassroots democracy ah NGO without a oh CEO that
cause the shots, right?
I'm yet to see uh a democracy activism organizations where all the decisions are taken collectively.
So I wonder like uh from a sort of realistic point of view like to see a sort of social movement that let's say use a platform so it should be let's say from the beginning that
the power is equally distributed because otherwise there is no way because also I understand that uh
Horizontality is very hard to...
Like if you want to share power with other people, then everything becomes slower.
uh And so I see why, I don't know, inside an organization there is someone that in some way leads the organization.
But that is not allowing, let's say, a social movement to then use a platform.
and then doesn't have a CEO or a leader that then keep the power and doesn't let people to actually participate in the platform.
So I wonder if...
Like it should be from the beginning, like a social movement that grassroots that use a platform.
And with that platform, with that system, they tries to run for election.
I mean...
One thing is you wanting to deny the presence of the...
D.
the leader, leaders you need.
But I mean, what I saying is that you have lots of literature about workplace democracy.
And I'm very interested in seeing how many organizations are advocating for that eh openly show how much of a workplace democracy they are or they are not.
em
There might be one or two, but their majority I haven't seen.
Many organizations are not even transparent about their budget, their donors, and so on.
em
And this is not to bash democracy uh activists, and they do a very good work.
But I think there is a bit of a missing the spot in terms of not understanding the importance of collective action.
That's the biggest point that I want to make.
And collective action sometimes is not a
Organic or collective action is sometimes not very organized, right?
And they.
They, they, I mean.
um I'm just telling, and I mean I spent one year looking at that, look at every critical moment in history in which rights of participation were expanded, in which one of them,
they happened by force of persuasion.
They happened because they threatened either political or economical interests.
So, and this is the field that I changed now, but for me, any uh organization that works on that, for me, any credible...
any credible long-term...
it's not to say, look, it's great if there's a government doing citizens assemblies or participatory budgeting.
Great for them.
And I think they should be doing, and they're doing the right thing.
But for this to grow, I believe that it only grows with collective action and pressure.
Just that.
There is no other strategy.
So social movement.
Yes.
And also related to this, because now there are also.
the person to say that, but you have in Italy Donatella della Porta, who you could talk to and probably would give us both a good class uh on that.
I was thinking because social movement uh
Like internet, as we say, allows people to meet based on their interests.
so social movements are not just related to, I don't know, being Italian or being...
It could be a social movement that is global.
There are social movements that are global.
you have.
mean, we did some analysis of change.org on this.
We have a paper with Holly, Russ, and Gilman and others in which we show a little bit of this transnational dynamic, right?
In which is you have what I don't think we call that, but at some point in the past, I was working with Philip Schmitter and he liked to call it ideational constituencies, right?
Which are constituencies that are not defined
by the territory in which they are, but much more by the uh sharing of common views.
I don't know if you want to protect.
the green whatever animal that has purple eyes uh in your little territory you're not gonna find, but maybe if you're gonna search around the world, you're gonna find 10,000
people who one of that and that becomes a strength, right?
And here's one of the problems with representative democracy.
that with technology becomes, and I think will become even more increasingly problematic, is that the definition of the state, the modern state, and electoral democracy is still
essentially territorial.
Yeah.
And, um, yeah, there was also my question related to states.
If also national states can, uh, be known tied to the territory.
Um, there is this theory about the centralized states and, uh, that, that is also in different ways.
Also in, uh, I remember was, I was really a padurai, an anthropologist and it was anthropology of globalization.
And it was, of course, very different.
he was also thinking about these kind of things, like the word is very globalized.
And so I see it's
the problem is that the world is very globalized, politicians feel pressured by their constituents, by people who vote for them, right?
But then you have the whole thing of like global movements and stuff.
I mean, we did some study in the past looking at e-petitions on change.org that we saw this, right?
uh Maybe some people in their country, they were not strong enough, but they would launch petitions internationally.
And when that government would see that the global public opinion or mobilizing, there would be more responsive.
ah which is a bit, there's some.
some political scientists from from Johns Hopkins, I forgot her name now, um but which speaks even of kind of like this boomerang dynamic, right?
You throw it out and it comes back flying, right?
But what we saw this is that this this phenomenon of being more responsive to global social movements was much more present
in non-democratic states.
In democratic states, they were much more reactive to their local, to their national constituencies only.
Essentially, non-democracies care about what other people think and democracies care a bit more about what other people think.
And if we think about the possible political system in 10 or 20 years, I mean more from a technical point of view than...
I don't know, do you have any idea or thoughts about how it could evolve?
Also considering that you said that when you were younger, you had a lot of trust in the participatory budgeting, but then it didn't really...
No, look, I mean, if you ask me the idea, I would prefer that like, I don't know, every country would have like a bicameral system in which a part of that bicameral system is
composed by elected people and another part is composed by randomly selected people.
I totally subscribe to that.
What I disagree is how we get to that.
And how can we get there?
Like if we...
then you gotta work with social movements.
And then you have the old artificial intelligence, like uh Dario Modai likes to say, I don't know, like a thousand Heinstens in a data center, right?
I mean, what we need is a thousand Mandelas in a data center.
What we need is a thousand Rosa Parks in a data center, right?
But yes, but we need these people who are willing to risk and trouble makers.
Even Gandhi was a troublemaker.
So I'm not saying necessarily by any means that violence is required.
But what I'm saying is the only way to do is to make the political costs of not reforming democracy so unbearable that people have no other option than to reform.
They share either some of their power and they need to feel a credible threat that if they are not sharing some of the power, they're going to lose all the power.
And that's the only way.
And how you get there, it is through social movements, organizing, and so on and so forth.
And the field of democratic innovations uniting uh all together and understanding that there's not one good solution, but it's a repertoire of solutions.
the only one good solution that I think that we really need is kind of like social movements, but still combined by everything else, combined with everything else.
But what I'm saying is social movements might not be a sufficient solution, but is a, is an essential solution.
Because I was thinking like social movement, then you mentioned also some leaders.
So social movement and leaders.
ah
moment to history?
Yeah.
And so I also had a question because we, if you have a message about, I mean, for the people that, I don't know, they're working on participatory budgeting or like, uh they
are, I don't know, coding a new tool or, but you already mentioned like a um social movement.
So.
No, look, I mean, there are other things that we could be doing.
I mean, let's suppose, right, if there is, if this moment comes, or let's suppose there's an illuminated person that comes and decides to give power in certain country.
You still want to have some things that work or not, But I mean, for people who are coding something, get people to participate is relatively easy.
For people that are coding something, I would always start from here.
least I'll start the question is, how do I get the government to respond?
How about I?
Afterwards you're gonna work on how to get the people, right?
But why is the government failing?
Because if you want to create participations, because the government's failing to respond to something, right?
Otherwise, if it works perfectly, people won't feel the need to participate probably, right?
And if people feel the need to participate and they cannot participate, it it's not working perfectly.
So, but then there you need to say like, isn't the government responsive to that?
And I would start coding my tool by the result and not by the means.
Please, please, please not one more deliberation platform.
Please, please, please not more one.
participation platform, there's plenty of them and uh don't waste your time on that.
I know I come across as negative, uh and by the way, now even like uh people are deep mind with their hubbers machine, they're good people with lots of money doing good stuff.
So at least for people to be participating, uh deep mind is taking care of it for now.
I mean, try so.
The technology of participation is easy.
The technology are relatively easy.
The technology of making a difference out of participation is the difficult one.
And if I were coding, I would be thinking of that.
If I were working on participatory budgeting,
or anything else obviously like how do I connect this with the energy, with the potency of the people, right?
If I'm in a social movement, how I can connect with people who are creating structured spaces of participation with their citizens, assemblies and participatory budgeting so
that together we're stronger, right?
I mean, I don't remember when, but I think it was long time ago, I had a small involvement.
the beginning of the Obama Foundation.
uh Long, long time before the foundation started.
And I think it was afterwards, I got some of their newsletters or something, right?
But one thing that Obama said, it's kind of like, look, first thing that it does try to get people on your side, right?
And then he's true on that.
And I mean, that's what he will say, but that's what Marshall games will say.
That's what probably Mandela would say.
So getting people and not only the ones that think about you, particularly about democracy.
It's difficult enough to find somebody who cares about democracy.
Don't get too picky about what type of democracy.
Thank you a lot.
It very, very interesting.
I still have a lot of questions in my mind.
uh
do those other questions another time.
Thank you, it was fun.