Lessons from Brexit and the fallacy of tyranny of numbers

The top tweet on #Brexit on the day of the vote was by Edward Snowden, the fugitive American information technology expert who tweeted that “No matter the outcome, #Brexit polls demonstrate how quickly half of any population can be convinced to vote against itself. Quite a lesson”.

I recently watched Snowden debate Fareed Zakaria arguing for the right to digital privacy, a debate that in my view he won easily. Often cast as just another techie, Snowden is in fact a profound libertarian thinker. But in this tweet, he too seems to have slipped into error, namely presuming that there was in the vote a single common interest for all UK citizens. This is a rather monolithic view of society.

While Snowden does not reveal which half he thought was wrong, the collective handwringing and recriminations of the British establishment that has followed the result, as well as the reactions from the markets points to the view that it is the victorious quitters that have erred in their judgement.

However, this article is not on Brexit, but on the tyranny of numbers. I have read in recent days assertions by two prominent newspaper columnists, Kamotho Waiganjo and Prof Iraki, that democracy is a game of numbers. It may come a surprise that this is a fallacy, albeit a very widely held one.

The problem of tyranny of numbers is as old as democracy itself. Lord Acton (of power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely fame) in the essay "History of Freedom in Antiquity" comes to the conclusion that “the one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections”.

But it is not a problem of democracy in itself but of abuse of power. The name democracy is derived from two Greek words: demos (people) and kratos (power). Democracy is people power—nothing more, nothing less.

Think of two villages. Both are democratic in that all adults are involved in making public decisions. However, in Village 1, decisions are made by simple majority. In Village 2, decisions can only be made by consensus. Tyranny of numbers is possible in Village 1 but not in Village 2. Village 1 can make decisions that are unpopular or oppressive to some of the members. Village 2 cannot make oppressive decisions.

However, decisions in Village 2 will take a long time to make as intense deliberations are required to persuade everyone. In all likelihood, Village 2 will make popular decisions while Village 1 is likely to make many more decisions of varying degrees of popularity.

Simple majority rule makes for more efficient decision-making. In fact, if Village 1 values efficiency so much, it can democratically reduce the decision making threshold from simple majority to a third, or even less.

JUST ELECT

At the limit, a very impatient village could decide to just elect a chief and delegate decision making to him or her, effectively, democratically abolish democracy. Village B in turn finding consensus too inefficient may decide to lower the threshold to something less than unanimity, say two-thirds majority.

It is readily apparent that tyranny of numbers is an artifact of the decision making rule that people adopt not of democracy of itself.

Our presidential elections have been characterised as an ethnic censuses. That we vote ethnically is not something that we have just discovered. This begs the question as to why knowing this, we would proceed to adopt a majoritarian voting rule.

To see this, let us suppose that Village 1 and 2 are neighbouring each other and that are considering uniting under a common government. Village A’s population would be 60 per cent of the combined population, and Village B would be 40 per cent. What decision-making rule would they adopt? It stands to reason that Village B would not consent to a simple majority rule. What would it take for Village B to sign up to the union? A consensus would of course be ideal but as observed, it is inefficient. One possibility would be to adopt a system where decisions would be made by bodies with equal number of representatives of both villages, which would subject their decisions to a supermajority. Another would be a rule requiring proposals to be voted in each village separately and adopted if they achieve simple majority in both villages.

It may also come as a surprise that elections are not intrinsic to democracy.

The Athenians, birthplace of democracy, the system where a people campaign for elective public offices was called oligarchy, not democracy. Aristotle: “It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election”.

Allocation by lot simply means a lottery. Think of a village which is governed by a 10-person council. The village has 100 adult members. To allocate the seats by lot, 100 tokens are put in an opaque jar, of which 10 would be black and 90 would be white. All the villagers would put their hand in the jar and pick one token. Those who pick black tokens become the members of the village council.

Allocating offices by lot is known as sortition. The Athenian one was quite sophisticated, they even had a machines for conducting the lotteries, called kleroteria, whose purpose was to prevent fraud. To Athenians, sortition was more than just a method of allocating offices. It was an expression of equality, which they considered the central tenet of democracy. As Aristotle observed, “democracy arose from the idea that those who are equal in any respect are equal absolutely.” Aristotle was echoing Herodotus, the “father of history”: “The rule of the people has the fairest name of all, equality, and does none of the things that a monarch does. The lot determines offices, power is held accountable, and deliberation is conducted in public”.

Our political system has three serious problems, tribalism, exclusion (especially gender) and fraud.

How would we fare with sortition? A parliament constituted by sortition would be ethnically and gender balanced. Although fraud is not inconceivable, it is certainly less prone to fraud than elections. It would cost the public much less, and of course there would be no campaign expenses. Being much cheaper means that parliament could be constituted more frequently, say every one year, which would give even more citizens the opportunity to be legislators.

NOT INTRINSIC

Another insight we gain from sortition is that the competition for public office, and political parties are not intrinsic to democracy.
The failure of ideological parties to take root, alongside the salience of ethnicity in our multiparty politics is often touted as evidence of failure of democracy in Africa. But it should be readily apparent that this is in fact not a failure of democracy but of the western political system, one that is closer to oligarchy than democracy.

The western system of government is inspired by the Roman Republic, which came into being after the overthrow of the Roman Kingdom by a group of noblemen in 509 B.C. lasting until the autocratic reign of Julius Caesar ended in his assassination by senators who then installed Octavius(Augustus) as Emperor in 27 B.C. Familiar features of the Roman Republic include class conflict between the aristocracy (patricians) and commoners (plebeians) referred to as the Conflict of Orders, the bicameral legislature comprising of a Senate (for aristocrats) and Plebeian Council (for commoners), and “presidential” elections—the Republic was governed by two Consuls concurrently elected directly for a term of one year, except during war or civil crisis when dictatorial powers were granted to one person for a maximum of six months.

The founding fathers and framers of the US constitution, the most ardent republicans of modern times took a dim view of democracy. Their primary preoccupation was to protect individual liberty and property (including slaves) from majoritarian tyranny. Echoing Lord Acton, James Madison famously described democracies as “spectacles of turbulence and contention, incompatible with personal security or the rights of property, short in their lives as they are violent in their deaths.” Accordingly, they set about limiting individual citizens power as possible.

Republicanism and the western political system in general, is at its core oligarchic—the Conflict of Orders is in its DNA. The most insightful statements for me about the Brexit is two quotes that I picked up in the British media. The first is the view of Cameron aide, speaking before the referendum who opined thus: “I can’t believe people are really going to vote themselves poorer because they don’t like the Poles living next door”.

The second is mouthful from a quitter who describes the remain campaign as “the crass stupidity of mega rich celebrities telling the poorest of British people that they must accept mass migration into their communities, whilst said celebrities will never have to be on a housing waiting list, will never have to worry about a school place for their child or about healthcare for their families.

She concludes: “What many British people object to is mass, uncontrolled, unchecked migration, and profound, rapid and irreversible social and cultural change for profit”.

But so it is that every territory emerging from colonialism promptly declared itself a democratic republic and proceeded to enthusiastically cut and paste its political paraphernalia—monkey see, monkey do.

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