The March for Democracy, from Philadelphia to Washington DC, April 2016
A well-functioning democracy needs an informed society with citizens acquiring and evaluating information to make electoral choices. But if society is polarized, are we able to do this?
On Wednesday night, at the University of Birmingham’s Future of Society Festival, Professor Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay hosts a discussion of the question. The panellists are Dr Zhihua Li (Economics), Dr Colin Rowat (Mathematical Finance), and Dr Kamilya Suleymenova (Economics).
The discussions runs from 6 to 8:30 pm in the Alan Walters Building on the Birmingham campus.
Democracy in Africa: Success Stories Defying the Odds
Professor Nic Cheeseman
When I first said that I was going to write a book about the history of democracy in Africa, quite a few people responded with a joke. That will be one of the world’s shortest books, up there with the compendium of great English cooking, they would say.
But, it turned out that there was a lot to talk about: Africa’s past reveals more fragments of democracy than you would think. And its present has a number of important things to teach the world about the conditions under which democracy can be built.
The poor quality of elections in many sub-Saharan African countries, combined with a tendency for the media to focus on controversy, means that Africa is often depicted as a bastion of authoritarianism. But, it actually has some of the most remarkable and important stories of democratic struggle.
“Can Democracy Survive in a Polarized Society?”
Hope not.
The Four-Stroke Regime
“…Generally, the [authoritarian] regime relies more on hard repression; the [democratic] regime relies more on soft illusion. But both, as we’ll see, can and do use both stabilization tools.The [authoritarian] regime is a one-story state. Everyone has to believe one narrative—one official history of the present. The one-story state is efficient, but unstable. Its chronic problem is that people hate being told what to believe. They often cause trouble even when the story is true!”
“The [democratic] regime is a two-story state.When people hear one story, they tend to ask: is this true? When they hear two stories, they tend to ask: which one of these is true? Isn’t this a neat trick? Maybe our whole world is built on it. Any point on which both poles concur is shared story: “uncontroversial, bipartisan consensus.” Shared story has root privilege. It has no natural enemies and is automatically true. Injecting ideas into it is nontrivial and hence lucrative; this profession is called “PR.” There is no reason to assume that either pole of the spectrum of conflict, or the middle, or the shared story, is any closer to reality than the single pole of the one-story state.
“Dividing the narrative has not answered the old question: is any of this true? Rather, it has… dodged it. Stagecraft! This is even better than supposing that, since we fought Hitler and Hitler was bad, we must be good. These very basic fallacies, or psychological exploits, are deeply embedded in our political operating systems. Like bugs in code, they are invisible until you look straight at them. Then they are obvious. The key feature of the two-story state is much less reliance on hard repression. As in the four-stroke engine, the cost of the feature is a pile of parts and a drop in performance. The fundamental engineering problem of the two-story state is to contain the active, but innocuous, political conflict which distracts its subjects out of any real democratic power.”
“Here is the genius of the [democratic] system. Each story is a whole philosophy, and the choice is not boolean. The two stories become poles of an ellipse, within which all may think freely: the Overton bubble. Every point in this ellipse is different. A mind at any level of talent and cultivation can search forever for truth inside the bubble, never thinking of the original question: is any of this true? This harmless marketplace of ideas, completely convincing yet completely contained, is just a beautiful regime-security device. Certainly the [authoritarian] state has nothing like it—punctual trains and all.”
…Why *wouldn’t* I wish for this system’s demise?