Do you remember Brenda from Bristol? If you’ve already forgotten the star of Britain’s most recent general election, this should remind you:

Brenda’s exasperation was over the thought of having to vote in two general elections and a national referendum within the space of two years.

If only BBC did a vox pop with a Brenda from Belfast. She might have displayed an additional layer of exasperation, having already voted in two general elections, a national referendum, and two Assembly elections in the same two years.

The title of David van Reybrouck’s book, Against Elections: The Case for Democracy, is deliberately provocative. Surely any democracy needs elections? Surely pointing out the pitfalls of elections would amount to arguing against democracy itself?

But yet the reason Brenda from Bristol became such a hit across the country in April was because she was speaking for so many of us. We have an implicit understanding that elections can sometimes be bad for democracy – as well as sometimes good for it.

Van Reybrouck starts with a simple observation: “It would appear that people like the idea of democracy but not the reality of it, or at any rate not the current reality.” People are increasingly interested in politics, but yet decreasingly trust the institutions of democracy – political parties, politicians, and the press:

Anyone who puts together low voter turnout, high voter turnover, declining party membership, governmental impotence, political paralysis, electoral fear of failure, lack of recruitment, compulsive self-promotion, chronic electoral fever, exhausting media stress, distrust, indifference and other persistent paroxysms sees the outlines of a syndrome emerging. Democratic Fatigue Syndrome is a disorder that has not yet been fully described but from which countless Western societies are nonetheless unmistakably suffering.

How can ‘Democratic Fatigue Syndrome’ be treated? Do people have excessively high expectations as to what democracy can actually deliver? Is there a better way of ‘doing’ democracy in the twenty-first century?

The crux of the argument is not that democracy per se is in crisis, but that electoral democracy is. Van Reybrouck bemoans the modern logic of elections. Citizens have become passive consumers, while 24-hour rolling news – exacerbated by social media –renders the electoral process a constant mud-slinging match. Politics has become about point-scoring, not problem-solving.

Does it have to be that way?

This focus on elections is actually rather odd. For almost three thousand years people have been experimenting with democracy and only in the last two hundred have they practised it exclusively by holding elections.

In Ancient Athens, the Boule or ‘council’ was the main agenda-setting body. Its 500 members were selected by lot, just like modern legal juries. Members of the Boule typically held office for one year and were paid for their service.

But hold on a minute. Could ‘ordinary’ citizens really make competent decisions about politics? The main thinkers behind American and French democracy certainly didn’t think so. Madison argued that rulers should be “men who possess most wisdom to discern.” He thought that elections could help to filter the unrefined will of the masses.

The context has undoubtedly changed since Madison’s time. Indeed, although Madison wanted the best and brightest to govern, the idea of elections being contested by factional political parties rather than noble individuals would have horrified him. Factions, Madison argued, were “adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

Factions, or political parties, can sometimes make effective government particularly difficult. After a messy election in 2010, Belgium found itself without an elected government for 589 days. The parties struggled and struggled to agree on a coalition deal.

Meanwhile, David van Reybrouck had an idea. In the absence of an official government, why not see what ordinary citizens would do if they were in charge? He instigated the ‘G1000’ initiative, whereby just under 1000 randomly selected Belgian citizens attended a crowd-funded ‘Citizens’ Summit’. They took evidence from experts and stakeholders on three issue themes: social security, dealing with the financial crisis, and immigration. They then deliberated on the evidence and produced a series of recommendations.

More than 75% of those who participated “felt that good decisions were made at the G1000.” The initiative received a lot of media attention and might even have focused the minds of Belgium’s elected representatives; a new government was finally formed the month after the Citizens’ Summit.

It was on the back of this novel experience that van Reybrouck decided to articulate the virtues of citizen-based decision-making by penning Against Elections. Pragmatically, he doesn’t conclude by calling for an end to elections, but he advocates a new ‘bi-representative’ approach to politics that involves drawing lots as well as voting.

Is van Reybrouck a prescient thinker on the next phase of democracy, or is he just a fantasist? Read his argument and you can make your own mind up.

More pressingly, here’s what we do know closer to home: Northern Ireland has been without a devolved government since January. With little progress between the DUP and Sinn Féin on the main sticking points and growing talk of yet another Assembly election in the autumn, we have some big questions to consider. Will another election solve anything? Will it make effective government more or less likely? Or should we send in the citizens instead?

Against Elections: The Case for Democracy (2016) is published by The Bodley Head Press.


Also published on Medium.