Written 2015/16
From longtermnews.com
“21st Century Democracy
Wikipedia’s format of mass collaboration with contributions from millions of individuals adds up to possibly the worlds biggest and best database. Activist and tech geeks such as reddit creator and political writer Aaron Schwartz wanted the whole of the internet to be like this, editable at the point of use. Schwartz who at 12 was such a inspired programmer that he actually created a wiki with equal capacity to early wikipedia but perhaps a less catchy name, infonetwork.org. He argued that instead of others belief that wikipedia was built by just a few hundred super-contributors it was built by millions of everyday people anonymously and altruistically giving their specialised expertise so that others could be a little better informed.(1) Why is this relevant? Well, this analogy of a diverse community contributing to produce something of great social benefit with no personal commercial intent doesn’t just apply to knowledge and education. An open source platform, possibly with greater revelations than wikipedia is emerging in Europe.
Decide Madrid is a real step towards putting people back in power. Previously, this perhaps would only be imaginable in very small societies with much common ground and social cohesion. Decide Madrid allows citizens to propose their own motion for public vote either at one of the citizens bureau’s or online at decide.madrid.es. Motions that have support of over 2% of the population, or approximately 53,000 of Madrid’s 3.5 million population will instigate a referendum in the city. To many it sounds very radical, even to citizens who consider themselves progressive and that they live under a fairly democratic government. Perhaps understandably, many initially believed a referendum would come about either on a meaningless topic or people would propose a profoundly negative policy.
Of course the first proposals on the website were posted by trolls. A motion was put forward to produce a monument to the flying spaghetti, part of a rastafarian religion. At the time of writing, May 2016, since launch of https://decide.madrid.es, the most backed motions include making Madrid completely sustainable by 2050, having a universal, more affordable public transport, stopping bullfighting and subsidies for it, ensuring that the church pays a fair share of tax on their estates and making it free to call the City Council information service and the Police line. At the time of writing (May 21st 2016), the most backed proposal has around 26,500 votes, half of the 53,000 required for a referendum. Importantly the Mayor of Madrid, Manuela Carmena, a former judge, is fully behind the project. She was inspired by her time in Switzerland whilst working for the UN at the regular public votes on policy. Interestingly Decide Madrid also allows citizens to propose as to how to manage the council budget.
Spain’s backdrop of the second highest unemployment in the EU (after Greece) peaking at over a quarter of the general and over 55% in youth labour force 2013 created an atmosphere of need for change. (2) As Pablo Soto, a councillor for the new politcal party backed by Podemos, Ahora Madrid (which formed in 2014) says, a lot of the people protesting in 2011 at a peak of social unrest in Spain, were in their 30’s facing poor job prospects.
The code that makes up https://direct.madrid.es website is open source. Other cities in Spain including Barcelona and A Coruna are looking at using the platform to use with their own citizens.
Madrid isn’t the first place in the world to adopt direct democracy. Switzerland have national, regional and cantonal referendums and popular initiatives with referendums having a slightly different meaning in Switzerland and Popular initiatives meaning motions for new policy/law or ammendments to existing law proposed by the general public. Public engagement with this system is fairly high with voter turnout typically around half but for more debated issues over three quarters.
Continual participation in democracy at all levels is a landmark of Swiss society. The extra time invested into making decisions from the wider community is extra effort but is absolutely requires if people want to see their views matter. Foretunatley the technology we have made widely available today in many countries means much less time is required as we don’t have to always physically have to be in the same place. The direct democracy seen in Madrid is a natural extension of an online petition and once this is realised it is seen as far less radical and far fetched, making a more progressive, transparent society possible.
The direct democracy seen in Madrid is a natural extension of an online petition and once this is realised it is seen as far less radical and far fetched, making a more progressive, transparent society possible.
Why would one argue for direct democracy? Take the UK as an example, in the run up to the 2014 general elections the Green Party came up on top as the party with the most popular policies. Despite this they received just under 4% of the vote. If politics followed the capitalist theory of supply and demand then if the majority of the population demanded a policy, such as not bailing out the casino banks in 2008 in the UK, then the government would supply and enact the general consensus. If this was true, direct democracy wouldn’t be necessary and there wouldn’t be the current state of a huge gap between public opinion and politicians actions.
In London in the run up to the Iraq war over one million people marched against the UK joining the USA and invading Iraq. Had a national vote for or against invading Iraq happened, even with the lies about them having nuclear weapons circulating the media at the time, which were subsequently found to be lies by George Bush (a failed military salesman) and Tony Blair (who now is famously involved in charging huge fees to facilitate arms deals in the Middle East) in order to promote invading, the public, judging on polls at the time would have said no.
Clearly for societies with sharp anti-humanitarian values or a lacking education system will not be ready for direct democracy but in many countries in Europe there is no overwhelming reason to rule it out.
References
Book: The Boy Who Could Change The World: Aaron Schwartz
The Metro Friday 23rd Jan 11:54 am Jimmy Nsubuga
Documentary Rebel Geeks – Hacking Madrid”
Leave a Reply