[2/4] Structure of politics — (direct-democracy, indirect-democracy, referendum, deliberation)

The previous chapter “[1/4] Structure of politics — (direct-democracy, indirect-democracy, referendum, deliberation)“

2. Decentralization

2.1. Technology and direct democracy

3. US presidential election in 2016 and French one in 2017

2. Decentralization

The transition of the world from “Before the Internet (BI)” to “After the Internet (AI)”[1] brought benefits, but with regard to the flow of information, human beings are affected negatively as well. However, I do believe that we can have better political structure inclusively works to make society for everyone. As a way to establish the political system, I focus on the notion decentralization to distribute powers from center to edge so that we can prevent abuse of power or corruption among those who in power. As decentralization (in political sense) enables citizens to have further accessibility to join in — in this respect I wonder if I might be able to say the universal suffrage is one of the cases since before that happened people didn’t have right (or power) to choose which means that was enclosed in those in power,  decentralization prevents excessive concentration of power in a few authorities — after the emergence of the Internet the power balance between center and edge became relatively smaller to some extent. People speak up by gathering together on the Internet and move on to making movement, and there are many cases that it had impact on our world. Because of this sort of phenomenon, society would be more inclusive, less people left behind. Decentralization is related to direct democracy in a meaning that people have a way to express their collective voice to authority.

2.1. Technology and direct democracy

An idea to implement system of direct democracy is worth discussing, as in technologically developed society we can almost simultaneously catch up with what is going on, for example in where decision is being made or in our life basis we can be updated everyday. People can take various actions such as raising question, giving critical comment, launching movement.  Given the concerns I mentioned, direct democracy is too early at this moment — suppose in the future people might be able to deal with vast amount of information in daily life which may be idealistic, another possibility is that as the current world has the tendency that people are divided into the different fields depending on interest of each, our future world might be divided more, less people are interested in politics — , but expecting the (near) future in which we would be able to install by our capacity or even now and more for the future because of technological advancement there’s need to at least think about whether direct-democracy works or not, I take a look at it this time.

3. US presidential election in 2016 and French one in 2017

Concern on democracy derived from politics of the latter half of 2010s. Democracy has been always on the table of discussion as it’s been discussed especially using terms like crisis, defect, problem, and other negative aspects of democracy, so improving democracy (or political system) is a shared sense among us — it depends on persons how much they feel the current system is not working well though. We are more and more moving into crucial phase, so do democracies, as we have seen the current political trend around the 2016 US presidential election in which Donald Trump was elected, and the 2017 French presidential election in which Emmanuel Macron won, Marine Le Pen showed her strong influence. As for the French case, based on the report of Le Monde[1.5], the result of first round was: Emmanuel Macron (24.01%), Marine Le Pen (21.30%), François Fillon (20.01%), Jean-Luc Melenchon (19.58%), Benoît Hamon (6.36%), Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (4.70%), Jean Lassalle (1.21%), Philippe Poutou (1.09%), François Asselineau (0.92%), Nathalie Arthaud (0.64%), and Jacques Cheminade (0.18%). Since Marine Le Pen who is regarded as far-right showed popularity, on 23 April 2017, François Fillon from The Republicans clearly said that he supports Macron[1.6] and, as Levitsky, S. & Ziblatt, D. (2019). How Democracies Die explains, “called his partisans to vote for center-left candidate Emmanuel Macron to keep far-right candidate Marin Le Pen out of power”[2], although François Fillon is “right-wing”[3], he asked support for Macron to prevent an extremist from taking office. In the second round, citing the analysis of Financial Times[4], Levitsky and Ziblatt explained that about “half of François Fillon’s conservative Republican party voters followed his surprising endorsement of Macron; about another third abstained, leaving around a sixth of Fillon’s supporters who went for Le Pen, arguably making a key difference in that country’s election”[5]. For US case, it analyzed about the presidency of Donald Trump, using “the Four Key Indicators of Authoritarian Behavior” — “1. Rejection of (or weak commitment to) democratic rules of the game”, “2. Denial of the legitimacy of political opponents”, “3. Toleration or encouragement of violence”, and “4. Readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including media”[6]. While referring examples to the criteria, Donald Trump is applied to all of these indicators[7]. These two cases indicate that in the current politics, politician with extreme political ideology can (almost in the case of Le Pen) reach to the very center of politics supported by citizens. If we continue to see this sort of influence that extremists can have, the concerns over more democratic political system would be piled up.

[1] The words “BI (Before the Internet)” and “AI (After the Internet)” come from Joi Ito. For example, he described this way in his TED talk titled Seeing the Future: Joi Ito at TEDxMidwest available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LN6Vn-aqgFs 1:08-Accessed 3 December 2019.

[1.5] Le Monde. Présidentielle 2017. Available at https://www.lemonde.fr/data/france/presidentielle-2017/ Accessed 3 February 2020.

[1.6] Fillon spoke of it on 23 April 2017, as for this a report from Reuter available at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-election-fillon-idUSKBN17P0T0 Accessed 28 November 2019, a video posted by Bloomberg Politics available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRWcwmJhXm8 Accessed 28 November 2019.

[2] Levitsky, S. & Ziblatt, D. (2019). How Democracies Die. Published in Penguin Books. Originally published by Crown in 2018. p.68. 

[3] Ibid.

[4] Financial Times. French election results: Macron’s victory in charts.  https://www.ft.com/content/62d782d6-31a7-11e7-9555-23ef563ecf9a Published 9 May 2020. Accessed 20 March 2020.

[5] Ibid. p.70. 

[6] Ibid. p.61-67.

[7] Ibid. His actual remarks are cited in the book in detail.