Giving people power beyond the ballot box

“For the youth, democracy is not merely about elections―It’s about dismantling systemic barriers, amplifying marginalised voices and ensuring fairness.”

―General students interviewed by The Daily Star.

“To institutionalise democracy, elections are the only path.”

―Mirza Fakhrul, General Secretary of BNP:

“The people of England deceive themselves when they fancy they are free; they are so, in fact, only during the election of Members of Parliament: for, as soon as a new one is elected, they are again in chains, and are nothing.”

―Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762)

Reimagining Democracy

The quotes above show the stark differences in the ways young educated citizens and mainstream political elites of Bangladesh perceive democracy. For the students, it is not only about representation but also about confronting social barriers and overcoming structural injustice and to achieve an egalitarian and fair society. One of the world’s greatest egalitarian philosophers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, would have readily agreed with the students’ view of democracy.

Such a capacious view of democracy has indeed been endorsed and adopted by theorists of democracy and democratic activists globally, given the glaring deficiencies of representative democracy to robustly uphold the collective interests of the people. The central argument is that democracy is not just about elections. Democracy is also a method whereby citizens can exercise their power alongside and beyond the ballot box through direct and collective engagement with the state to provide inputs to decision-making. More critically, citizens can directly participate in the checks and balances process, which are not possible through representative democracy. This idea of citizen-led collective form of democracy also needs to be differentiated from the notion of direct democracy (referendums and recall, for example) since this method still leaves the elected representatives only in charge.

On a conceptual level, this collective and direct/participatory form of democracy privileges equality of outcomes over the equality of opportunities. Equality of outcomes ensures that disadvantaged citizens are making disproportionately positive gains, which was reflected in the student’s demand as quoted above. Conversely, equality of inputs aims to provide same opportunities to everyone to make those gains. When we think in the line of equality of opportunity, we assume democracy as an instrument to make collective decisions on equal basis, which compels us to articulate it only in liberal procedural terms, such as equal opportunities for opposition MPs, possibilities of floor crossing, neutrality of the speakers, bi-cameral system and so on. Such assumptions tend to ignore the prevailing balance of social and economic power in the larger polity and society that ultimately shapes whatever procedures we use in the deliberation processes. Consequently, democracy must also be about resisting and neutralising state capture by the political, social and bureaucratic elites, in the domains of political, economic, social, and ideological processes to ensure disproportional positive gains of the marginalised.

We are currently witnessing massive initiatives, led by the interim government, to reform the state and political institutions to develop robust and resilient checks and balances mechanisms to prevent any reversal towards autocracy by keeping political elites rule-bound and making them operate within a narrow corridor. Different commissions have been tasked with the aggregation of citizens’ preferences to reform and come up with agendas for the relevant stakeholders to deliberate.

The major thrusts of the commission’s recommendations were largely based on the assumptions of representative democracy being the only game in town. The checks and balances mechanisms they aimed to develop predominantly involved elected political actors with the implicit assumptions that they would have necessary and sufficient incentives to balance each other. It is a largely false assumption, as our political history amply demonstrates. Commissions did recommend citizens’ direct participation, both individually and collectively, but in a very weak and marginal manner. For the commissions, the state has remained the predominant site for institutionalising the checks and balances mechanisms.

Such intra-political elite-centred check and balances proposition is predominantly a self-defeating one. It tends to end up in elite collusions to share privileges instead of generating mutual constraints and self-restraints. Elected political elites, also, being a small group, have better coordination and collective action capacity, which enable them to form political oligarchy. Think of the specific case of duty-free import of cars by the parliament members. MPs across the political divide had no incentive to end this legal but systemic corruption. Furthermore, perpetuation of the policy of whitening of black money indicates that political oligarchy could easily and successfully collude with the economic oligarchy. As our political history shows, there were many such perverse consensuses among the political elites (ruling and opposition) that they were happy to live with. Proposals of the commissions have largely failed to address these political realities and associated incentives of the politicians.

Commissions’ recommendations to place individual non-partisan citizens, to be nominated by the elected politicians (and president) in the upper chamber (in the proposed bicameral system) with diverse socio-economic and gender backgrounds, will, perhaps, add little value in terms of citizen-initiated checks and balances. The reasons are: i) individuals with de facto partisan background will enter the upper house. They will be least interested in being disloyal to the political party as patron, and voting against the party policies/decisions; ii) even if they are truly non-partisan they can be intimidated and co-opted (with material offer); iii) in general, individualised representation is no match for collective representation of the citizens in terms of collective self-rule and the prevention of the state capture.

The Electoral Reform Commission’s recommendations in terms of direct democracy, including recall, referendum and no vote will surely add value to checks and balances. But it is still political elite-centric, sporadic, and it deploys individualised mode of citizen representation (secret ballot). Unlike deliberative democracy, such secret voting does not allow for collective reasoning and reflection. Moreover, large-scale voting can only offer very coarse-grained checks and balances. It is heavily susceptible to ideological and other forms of meta level factors contributing to behind the scene manipulation by the political and economic elites.

The central focus of the reform commissions seems to be deterring monopolisation of power in the political domain rather than dispersion of power across state and society. We are not proposing that this political centric mode of checks and balances is abandoned. Rather this should be complemented by the constitutionalised and collectively organised societal constraints to deter systemic corruption (legal or illegal). To achieve the latter, we need to introduce checks and balances both within and outside the state in the following ways:

i) Within the interfaces of state and society, constitutionally mandated permanent national commissions (like the existing Human Rights and Public Service Commissions) with more independence must be created. Such commissions should also be set up for women, ethnic groups, labour and other marginalised groups to empower them. The more commissions, the merrier.

ii) Checks and balances institutions located entirely outside the state must be created by establishing constitutionally mandated citizen assemblies. Existing citizen-centric political infrastructures at the level of union parishad such as ward shabha and open budget meetings and their counterparts in the urban areas, can be easily converted to robust forms of citizen assemblies being endowed with sufficient legal mandates. Such forums can also be created at the upazila parishad level.

iii) Within the state, collectively organised citizens’ associations, based on professional, gender, ethnic categories etc, should be allowed to nominate their representatives in the upper chamber of the parliament with the power to recall.

Our critical concern is to guard the guardians—to prevent political party elites from capturing accountability institutions. Fundamental institutions and policies should be protected from such capture by creating societal countervailing powers so that ordinary citizens can benefit from robust checks and balance mechanisms.

Dr Mirza Hassan is based at Brac Institute of Governance and Development at Brac University. He can be reached at [email protected].

Views expressed in this article are the author’s own.