Why Millions Can Deliberate: It Just Requires an Economy That Supports Mass Participation

Essay by Nick Vlahos: “…The consistent challenge of scale often misidentifies the main constraint in modern democracy. The binding limit on mass deliberation is not simply that there are “too many people” spread across a large territory. It is also not that masses are inherently poor deliberators and completely prone to be swayed by demagogues. Surely, it is not hard to appreciate why large amounts of people might not be able to govern large territories. However, as I see it, the problem is that modern societies have organised time as if democracy were an after-hours activity, and organised political economy as if participation were a luxury rather than a public obligation. Put differently, the claim that “a million people cannot deliberate” often means something more prosaic: a million people cannot all stop working, travel, prepare, deliberate, and return to work without destabilising the economy. It is not that people cannot be organised in masses for conversation, because we have enough theoretical and practical resources to design such processes, both in-person and online…(More)”.