2.2 From direct to representative democracy with Dr Roslyn Fuller and Professor Nadia Urbinati

What do we want? Real democracy! When do we want it? Now! Welcome to Real Democracy Now. I'm Nevec Thompson and Real Democracy Now is a podcast for people who think we can and should improve how democracy works. This podcast looks at democracy from different angles to help you think about how democracy might be improved. Welcome to episode 2 in season 2. Season 2 is looking at representative democracy. In today's episode, I'm talking with Roslyn Fuller and Nadia Urbanardi. Dr Roslyn Fuller is a Canadian Irish academic and columnist, specialising in public international law and the impact of technological innovation on democracy. Her latest book Beasts and Gods, How Democracy Changed Its Meaning and Lost Its Purpose, explores the flaws of representative democracy and how they can be addressed through the application of ancient Athenian principles. She is currently a research associate at Waterford Institute of Technology, like Professor Cartley in episode 1. Roslyn is interested in what we can learn from the democracy of ancient Athens. And like him, she sees technology as providing a way to scale up direct democracy. Well, the research I did, I kind of originally started looking at how international institutions could be made more democratic. And I went from there to national democracy and I went from there to Athenian democracy. So how democracy was practiced in ancient Athens. And in Athens, what got on the agenda of the assembly, so the assembly was a place where people came together to decide on laws and decrees. And the agenda was set by a randomly selected group of people. It was called the Council of 500. So they would be randomly selected every year to sit on this council and take care of various administrative matters, including deciding the agenda for the assembly. And in that culture, 500 people was actually a quite large number of people. So because they only had about 30 to 45,000 male adult citizens at any given time. So it was kind of the decision itself was based in a fluid manner, and setting the agenda was based on a fluid in very random manner. And in addition, a citizen could go to the council and say, "I would like to put this motion on the agenda." So it kind of worked in this sort of more unpredictable way with motions originating at individual level in this citizen body. And being organized or sorted together by the randomly selected group of citizens that were changing all the time, and then going forward to the assembly, which again was composed of people who had basically decided to show up on that day, so also can be predicted through neither. How can that approach be scaled from the relatively small city state of Athens to the nation state of America, the United States of America, or Australia, or Canada, or even Ireland? Or to a global scale where there's a bit of attention these days to global democracy? Well, I didn't, it's funny because I never intended to study Athens or to learn anything about it when I first started, but I really thought to myself, we have an issue in trying to define what democracy means, and so I thought, "Well, I'll go back, and I'll just look at the first democracy in Athens," or the first people who called themselves a democracy, and see what they did. And I actually thought at the time it's going to be pretty much what we do, it'll be pretty similar, but it wasn't. It wasn't. It was, you know, the system I've described earlier where people would act in various fora, they would act in the assembly where they would pass laws and decrees together, they would go to courts, courts and Athens were jury courts where, you know, the people sitting in the jury, and these would be huge juries in comparison to the sides of the population, would decide, would interpret laws. There was a system of public officials that was determined on a random, lottery basis. So all of these things were very interesting to me, and they were, Athens was called a direct democracy, but in some sense it was representative in that not everyone always showed up to the assembly or the courts. People went because they felt like going that day. So maybe there would have been 10% or 20% of the population present at these institutions, there may have been, in a court, depending on what the legal case was about, there might be 2% of the population on the jury or up to 15 or 20% depending on the importance of the case. So in the sense everyone was represented by the people who happened to be there, it's just that that representation was done in a more random basis that took a much wider swat of the population to consideration. So how did we transfer that to modernity, of course? When I first got done, my PhD, which this book is based on in 2010, I thought to myself well, I mean, it's all been very interesting, but I'm convinced that representative democracy isn't good. But how would you apply this direct democracy to a really large area, right? I mean, the Athenians were a very, were a small state in a very limited locality. How could you apply this to a state as big as the United States or even, even Ireland? And I thought, well, I think technology will make this possible someday. I thought at the time this was only six, seven years ago now, but at the time I thought, well, maybe in, you know, 15 or 20 years, technology will make it possible for us to imitate those institutions in an online environment where people will not have to actually travel physically to a space to meet but where they can debate and decide online. And then I noticed a few years later that actually, this is already happening. We can think of things like Twitter, of course, that allow people to communicate a lot. They don't have, however, you know, a decision making component of that communication. But there are other pieces of software. There's a New Zealand called Lumio. There's actually a software being developed in Australia called Flux, which uses blockchain technology. There is a software in Canada called Athelo, which enables decision making, which I've used myself, Democracy OS, which was developed in Argentina. All of these are pieces of software that, you know, similar to Liquid Feedback, which we were discussing before, which allow people to go online and participate directly with each other in a manner that's directed to deliberating and then deciding on various matters. So this is the kind of thing that we can easily imagine being scaled up. Globally would obviously be a huge challenge, for example, because of, you know, language differences, I think is one of the biggest issues to probably overcome that. But we can see it probably being used on a national level without too many difficulties. There's a lot of talk in Australia and I'm aware in other places around the idea of using the Athenian approach of sortition, you know, selection by lottery. And there's people in Australia and people else we're talking about using sortition to actually select members of parliament. What do you think of that and how does it fit with your sort of fluid democracy concept? I think it depends. In Athens, people were selected randomly, usually to positions where they didn't exercise decision-making power, these were usually more executive positions, for example, being on the council of 500 or acting as a public official. When it came to decision-making, especially when it came to laws, there were two major historical periods in democratic Athens in the first period, all the laws were made directly in assembly. So people would take the initiative, speak for and against emotions, pass them together. There was then an intervening period, very, very short period, called the period of the 30-tarants, which, as you might guess, was a period where a very small group of people managed to seize power in Athens in a very tyrannical fashion. And they were eventually expelled and after that, we entered the second period of democracy where all laws are still passed through the assembly, but they're debated by a panel of 1,000 randomly selected citizens, which, again, is a really large number of the population. It would be like, translated to Ireland, which is a small country that would probably be like 100,000 people, translated to the United States, that would be like millions of people, maybe, I guess, 30 million people, maybe something as much as that. So we had this panel, but it was an enormous panel compared to their population, debating and deciding on laws, which still have to be generally approved in the assembly. So there's, like, a two-step process after this experience with the 30-tarants. Now, some people would say, based on that, okay, the Athenians used sortition and we should just choose people, via sortition, to decide on our laws. But I think this is, to some extent, a misunderstanding of Athens. We are talking, even on the panels of them with the toy, an enormous number of people, and still everything being passed through the assembly, i.e., the population at large. So we don't have a situation ever in ancient Athens, where laws and decrees and the important decisions, you know, the base decisions of the society are ever decided just by people selected by a sortition. Personally, I don't feel think it's a good idea to try to apply this situation that doesn't even exist historically to a modern society. For one thing, there's a huge motivation problem. For another thing, how do a lot of people would say that experts would advise these people but how do you choose these experts? If you open up decisions to a wider society, you have people with various levels of expertise who can participate, you're not cutting that short and limiting the decision to a certain subset of people, which I think always carries with it the danger of who selects the experts. It kind of creates a note of power gradually. We have a situation where how a legitimacy issue. If you don't have a chance to participate in a particular decision, why will you then later accept that decision? So when people talk about sortition today, they often using very, very, very small numbers of people in comparison to the general population. Firstly, that's not entirely accurate. Polls are, well, often fairly accurate, not entirely accurate. So when you get very, very small groups of people, you end up with the same issues you do with representation. They can be off by a little bit, be that 2%, or 3%. Well, in situations where a decision is very close, that's going to be a huge issue for legitimacy. Also, there's the issue of people not accepting a decision that they have not had a chance to participate in. And when you have very, very, very small groups making these decisions, what are your chances of being called up to make a decision? Well, maybe twice in your lifetime. So you would say, well, I'm going to live in a society where maybe twice in my lifetime I'm called to make a decision and maybe something I'm not even remotely interested in, I don't care about. You're actually suppressing people's incentive to be interested in politics, to be informed, to be informed about politics, on a rolling basis where they know that they can take that knowledge and that information and seek to impact your society at any point. So I really don't think, well, I do see like a huge place for a certification in a democracy, as I, you know, selecting officials, maybe courts, like eventually at some point, far in the future. I don't see a place for it as the only, the sole legislative body. So on the one hand, it's not like, it's not, I don't mean to say it's a terrible idea and that if you were selecting people randomly to parliament, it might be an improvement on the system. But then again, I don't know if that's necessarily the case because if someone randomly chose me to be in the parliament or, you know, someone even less will off than I am, you're incentive to sell out your vote and be really made for life would be enormous. I mean, all kinds of people who are in parliaments go on to be on in boards of major companies where they make an enormous amount of money. In this vantage, a political appointment is merely the first step in a career that can bring you immense wealth. And as a person who has, you know, as I was just saying, average person who has no other possible avenues to make that kind of wealth, the incentive to sell out your vote once there is even higher than it would be for, you know, a politician who has more control where their careers are for seas, a longer period of being in office for themselves and therefore has to worry slightly more about remaining popular. So I think it has a place, but not a place where you're putting this in the driver seat and using really small numbers of people. In Athens, these were huge numbers of people. We say 1,000 people today, but we just have to remember that was an enormous level of people back in Athens or 6,000 people would be an enormously, you know, 1/5 to 1/6 of the voting population. So if you translate it to that today, you'd have millions and millions and millions of people on sortition panels, and then you might as well just open it up to the general public. It really doesn't make a difference at that point. - And can I just go back to yours, the fluid democracy idea, and I found your argument about that as compared to sort of a parliament elected by a sortition quite convincing, but the one thing that I always sort of, I've wondered about in, when I've listened to things about liquid democracy and that sort of thing, is the issue of deliberation? You know, if you look at Brexit, we can see that a lot of people made a vote, probably without a lot of information. It was an advertising campaign that they were voting on, rather than sort of actually understanding the underlying issues, having any sense of what was actually going to happen afterwards. How do you build that understanding and deliberation into a fluid democracy system? - Well, there's a lot of things to unpack there for one thing we're talking about, one referendum on an issue where the last referendum happened 40 years ago. So people are being asked to make these decisions once in a lifetime, and it's natural that then a lot of issues are being conflated together on one issue. So in an Athenian style democracy, they didn't make one decision every 40 years on the general direction of their society. They would have a lot of decisions happening all of the time. When you do that, it becomes much easier to focus on the issue, the concrete issue at hand. Instead of again, I would say that a referendum in a sense are to direct democracy with representation is to us today. It's just, it's kind of a symbolic decision on the general direction of the society, as opposed to being focused on the actual issues at hand. You need to make decisions really very often then you will have a much clearer idea of what your decision matter is. As far as people being uninformed are concerned, I think it's really an interesting thing because people tend to, at least the discourse in the media is often that remain voters were informed and leave voters weren't. Well, I mean, as someone who's a specialist in international law, most people who voted remain also don't have the fungus clue how the European Union actually works. They think they do, but they don't, because they've never really looked at it or been educated in that matter. They have a very superficial idea of how these processes actually work. So from my point of view, you know, there's two groups of people who are both pretty uninformed about the actual processes. Now, of course, when you have a once in a lifetime decision to be made, it's very hard to inform people all at once about all of those intricacies that they have not been partly to for decades. And you're not going to be able to do that overnight. You have to have constant decision making so that people are involved on a constant basis in these decisions. That's really the way to do it. Also, when you do that, people interested parties, let's just say, cannot bring all of their resources to bear on just one point. You know, if you're having 50 decisions that impact, you know, let's just say large business or the financial industry, they will have to decide which of those are the most important to them or try to spread the resources over 50, 60, 100 decisions. That's going to become much, much, much harder to do than this situation where you basically serve up. It's like, I always think about like kind of serving up this opportunity on a silver platter that makes it a very, very easy to influence a small, small debate at a small, small point in time. When it's constantly happening, it's just much, much, you know, no one has that much money to be influencing all of the people, all of the time. So you're reducing the impact of, you know, advertising and media and things like that, which you have to do, which is, I mean, it is very, very important. I mean, we know that referendum in this day and age when they're practiced infrequently. There also, mainly decided on who spends the most money, again, not all of the time, but disproportionately. So yes, we need to get that into check, but I believe that constant participation is a good way of doing it. It's also a good way of incentivizing people to inform themselves on a rolling basis about the concrete issue before them. - Professor Nadia Urbanati is a professor of political, theory, and Hellenic studies at Columbia University. She's a political theorist who specialises in modern and contemporary political thought and the democratic and anti-democratic traditions. Nadia has written extensively on democracy, including the book's representative democracy, principles and genealogy, democracy disfigured and mill on democracy from the Athenian palace to representative government. Nadia takes us through a potted history of representative democracy and explains four key elements of representative democracy and why they are crucial. Interestingly, she doesn't see accountability as one of these. - Nadia, thank you for joining us. You've written a 300 plus page book on the history and principles of representative democracy. Can you provide a short overview or a short history of how representative democracy came to be? - Well, well, I'll try. So I would say that representation was born in the confrontational environment with Christianity and between secular and religious powers in the medieval age. So its origins are to be found in the context of the medieval church and the relationship of power between localities and emperor and then between the nobles and the king between the bishops and the pope. So, for instance, in Spain, during the kinship of Falfonso IX, the courtes were instituted as a place for making decisions by representatives of various social interests drawn from a wide geographical space in localities. So as you can see, there is a tension that opposes the beginning, the kings and nobles, the papacy and the bishops and then the bishops and the believers. So this is to be found both in the church and in the secular institutions in the medieval age. And then these traditions was expanded and exported to states institutions. So there are thus two aspects that we have to pay attention to in these characterization. One, representation is a way of unifying a group of people, a large or medium-large populations under some representatives. And the subjection of them or the acceptance by these multitudes of the decisions coming from the representatives. So there is a moment of both unification acceptance and then also participation in contestation because sometimes these decisions didn't go through and were not actually accepted. So it was since the French Revolution, which became an important moment of construction of the representative government along with the American Revolution, there was for a long period of time these different elements combined within representation. And I would say that since the beginning before we encountered it within the state, it has these characteristics of designating a relation of interdependence between those who are the commissary or their representative and their representative, interdependence, because one needs the other. And even their representative is never an isolated cell for being outside of any kind of relationship with their representatives. On the contrary, the two together are combined. I like to quote it five times because it's very interesting. From Gatamer, I found a very interesting quotation which can very well make us understand these surplus. They say so, surplus of action created by representation, I quote. The important thing about the legal idea of representation is that the persona represented is only the person represented. And yet, the representative who he's exercising these rights of representation is dependent on him. So there is this relationship of interdependence. They represented, they don't give up, their views, their claims, in order to make their representatives. They are in a kind of dialogue, sometimes critical, sometimes conflicting dialogue with him or her. Sort of leads into my next question, which are what are the key components of representative democracy and how do they operate? And obviously, you've touched there on representation. And I suppose I'd be interested to know a bit more about how you see that operating in modern democracies. How it relates, for instance, to that concept of mandate can see there can be some tension between mandate and representation. So perhaps you could say a few words on that. Certainly. So in the first question, we focus on the late origin. Now, let's see how representation goes together with government, thus in the moment of making laws and decisions that all people are supposed to obey. Let's immediately talk about representative democracy. Now, representation democracy are two strange words, also in the origin, because democracy is a Greek word with no Latin equivalent. It means self-rule, and instead representation is a Latin word with no Greek equivalent. So we have democracy and representation in a very strange awkward, we would say, combination. This is what we live in today. So it's a mixture of two components. And we may say in these standard pictures that representative democracy is one. The sovereignty of the people expressed in the electoral or electoral, I'm sorry, the appointment of the representatives that is expressed in, not delegated or so-called alienated in, expressed in the electoral appointment of the representatives. Second, representation needs a free mandate relationship in representative democracy. Then we will come back to this issue. Third, the electoral mechanism to ensure some measures of responsiveness to the people by representatives who speak and up in their names is paramount. So democracy without elections, and only by appointment or representatives is inconceivable. Fourth, the universal franchise is fundamental, which grounds representation on an important element of political equality. So these four important elements together make what we call representative democracy. Now, you asked me to clarify the issue of mandate. This is a crucial one, because direct mandate or imperative mandate has been for decades and more even identified with through democracy, whereas mandate without imperative mandate simply political election or free mandate has been identified with the sorts of aristocratic delegation. So we have here two great authors we can refer to in the first case, Rousseau and in the second case, Burr. The imperative mandate representation is not properly representation, it's pure delegation. Meaning, I delegate you, lawyer, to do a ABC and D, and if you decide toward GAF, you are totally delegitimized. And if you want to do it, you have to come to see me and to explain to me and to talk to me and to receive my consent. This is the idea of imperative mandate. There is no freedom on the side of the representatives, which is truly a mouthpiece, I'm sorry, of the actor, which is the citizen or the representative. And according to Rousseau, this is the best way for substituting for direct democracy. And it's right, because this is a kind of direct democracy by other means, also Marx in the commune of Paris, the same learning they propose it as a way of eliminating all forms of representation that implies a kind of freedom of decision-making on the side, on the part of the representatives. Now, on the other hand, we have not free mandates. Not free mandate, it implies that legally speaking, when we go to vote, we elect Mr. X or a part, which is member of a party generally, he goes to the parliament, and from that moment on, he will be free to make the decisions that within the debate of the assembly of the parliament will be considered by him or her necessarily, without coming to talk to us every time. Of course, there are connections between the elected and the electors all the time. In a good representative democracy, thanks to parties, thanks to local assemblies, thanks to the media, thanks to the many intermediary bodies that connect the representative assembly and ask, there is always this ping pong of views and ideas, the fact that the representatives is never alone. But legally speaking, needs to be free to make decisions because if this is not the case, not only it may be that the parliament is dysfunctional, because it cannot make any kind of decision that are consistent, but also it may imply that in fact, we are not in a true condition of freedom as it may appear, it seems to be counterintuitive to say that we are not so free after all if the representative is not as no connections with us through imperative mandate. But this is the case because the imperative mandate, it implies that the representative, he's and thus, the interest of those who elected him, who are those who elected him are the master, but they are not all the people, they are simply constituency. So the outcome would be a fragmented parliament in which the many constituencies are like absolute small, republics that have their own delegates sitting in the parliament so we would see the break of the national unity or the national sovereignty or the popular sovereignty that the parliament should instead express. It is true that legally there is no direct or imperative mandate but it is necessary, however, that there is a political kind of mandate because there are presentations should be connected with electors and until, for instance, political parties are strong and they work well, we don't realize that and we don't realize because it goes on naturally. We realize our element is to have a connection with them and to have them connected to us politically, if not legally, when we realize that when parties work not so well, when they become simply self-referential and not connected to us. So the great John Stuart Miller used to talk about a permanent conferences between those who are elected and the citizens in order to make the sense of political delegation in actions if not from a legal point of view as in the imperative mandate but a political mandate is needed otherwise simply we have no connections with them. So we need somebody who has a member of a party and then after a widely changed or she changes party and goes elsewhere, this is an important and problematic question in fact because this means that our vote has only one meaning that is appointing somebody but doesn't have another meaning that is appointing representatives of us. So representation and appointment or voting for creating a majority and voting for expressing representation they are together and they need to stay together even if we cannot impose on the representatives through imperative mandate our will. And that goes to the idea of a narrow versus an expansive view of democracy where the narrow view being that the election is of elite who are better enabled to rule and the more expansive which I think you touched on and is where the politicians are in continual contact with the electors. And as one of my previous guests Professor Carson said they continually renewing their mandate and understanding what people are wanting from than the people that elected them. Right so it is important because democracy is not simply the right to vote I mean the word simply it is it is wrong because democracy and right to vote they must stay together in a noble sense voting is a noble power and makes us to express and to exercise our sovereign power. So we shouldn't diminish the value of elections because it's crucial and important. However political decision through elections he is a political decision not in a moment X in which we go to vote because we form our visions before making a decision before going to vote. Thus between election one and elections two in this intermediary time of four years five years it depends many things happens that we citizens do or ask our representatives to do. First of all we continue or we should continue to take information about what they do also to take information about the reality of our society as it goes on also to change our mind concerning the reasons why we made the decision in time one of elections and whether we want to re confirm or not in time two. So voting is does a very rich process of temporality in politics election introduced temporality in politics it means politics becomes a narrative so that to memory is important a memory is important to keep together movement to keep together the relationship with our representatives so it is an extended construction is never one X moment in which I put my ballot and stop this is peculiar to election not to voting simply if we were sitting in the ancient Athenian assembly our votes each of our votes would be like an absolute vote one after the other one without necessarily not any connections from one another there were no parties by any chance because all the citizens were there each time they didn't they didn't need to have the memory reconstructing them in time through time because their physical presence made all the narrative but we don't end up between one election another one our thickness of judgment formation opinion formation contestation is crucial why so not because we want to become very proficient elector or very proficient voters I don't think that we learn how to vote by voting we make many mistakes when we go to vote the question is not to have or not to have good or not truth or not truth electoral outcomes the issue is that for all the domains all the issues claims that pertain to us as citizens they are always present even after we go to vote and thus it is as if the election creates a kind of expanded citizen although a kind of citizenship that operates outside of the formal moments of election so that is crucial because without that we would simply have an elected oligarchy that is somebody going there like they're not abilites in the 19th century which was simply an expression of you know important men leaving in their own towns I don't know the doctors the physicians pharmacists you know the big representative names of the town which at least person they thought to be competent enough to make good decisions without considering the citizens enough competent no we are no longer in this situation the situation is no longer that we choose competent people we choose representatives they have something like us and something not like unlike us something like us in terms of ideas visions concerning then important things and something that is not like us because they have more time there's some proficiency we don't have or they simply are good speakers we are not we don't want even to be or become so we recognize a sense of identity and the sense of differences when we vote and this operates through the entire period of time that separates one election from another one and you mentioned you know voting in election one and voting in election two how important do you think that concept of accountability is in representative democracy the idea that you could throw people out yeah well you know throwing people out it would require a change in the way of understanding representative democracy there are countries or states in which there is the possibility for a recall that is the recall is when a public officer's appointed election is no longer light or appreciated by the people and sometimes those people collect the signatures to have a referendum against him and so on so forth it's possible in California and not only but remember that these are public officers in the moment of like the governor that is in the individual moment of high function in government there is not in the parliamentary collective body in this case perhaps the parties have to control their own representatives and they have to make the check over them more than a recall mechanically recall by by the citizen however if there is no such a male radical recall through the through the norm to the law it's possible to think whether accountability is operational and efficient so here there are many problems and objections there are some important scholars like John Dunn from Cambridge who wrote very important essays on this issue proving claiming that in fact what we call accountability most of the time is very you know wishful thinking ideological not clear why so because first of all it's when we vote in moment one and then we are going to Revolting. moment two in the middle, in those five or four years, many things happened. And some of them are even forgotten by has or by the electors. So what actually we do when we go to revolt for the candidate? Do we punish him or not? In relation to exactly what list of things he didn't do or she didn't do. So it's very hard to have this kind of register of all the bad deeds or good deeds at the end of the mandate. Second, it is very hard because there is no contractarian relationship between us and our electors. When I go to vote, I don't say, look at the vote for you if you do a BNC or vice versa. He doesn't ask us vote for me so that I will do a BNC because if these were the case, then we would be again back to imperative mandate kind. So the kind of relationship is so elastic and so open to be interpreted as politics is that is very hard to claim the possibility of a case by case issue by issue accountability. So the accountability is in fact in a form of relationship through ideas or parties or associations that can allow us, meaning we and our representatives to be on the same line of thinking or thought. When we are in the same line of thinking or thought, we can better criticize evaluate because we don't examine issue by issue case by case problem by problems, but they all togetherness of our relationship with the party or with representatives by our parties. So parties does are crucial in representative democracy. Even if they are themselves open to oligarchy contamination, we know that more elitist, we know that yet without them we would be even in the worst situation because there would be nothing between us and those who live inside of the palace, inside of the palace, that is inside of the institution that can make possible this current of opinion and interconnections and correlations. So it is a question of intermediation. Without these intermediary moments, we cannot even think in terms of a narrative of accountability. And a lot of people speak about other factors which are key elements of representative democracy, I suppose in the sense of being important to a functioning representative democracy such as freedom of speech. Some people go as far as economic equality. What for you are some of the other features that need to be in place for us to have an effective representative democracy? This is a very important question because contrary to other regimes, the red democracy is not only complex, but it is based on the assumption that there is a permanent correlation in, as I said before, intermediation between those we elect and us. So society and the institutions cannot be too empty boxes without communication. This is not the red democracy. This would be an oligarchic system, an authoritarian system. So does it means that in a live civil society, Haber must use to talk about even an article form of public sphere in the liberal and in the civil society is crucial. It means that freedom of speech, freedom of associations, organizations, collections of ideas, petitions, criticism are essential in the making of the representative democracy. They are not optional. They are part of the meaning of representative democracy and the functioning. So it's not something we can live without. So we may say that in representative democracy we live like in a hierarchy. Arche means authority. We live with two authorities that are distinct. They are different, but interconnected nonetheless. The authority of our vote, which creates the institutions inside and the authority of our voice that is of judgment, critical evolution of our ideas, that is crucial for making us always present and never silence. So these two authorities are different and must be different because only one needs to have a must have the institutionalization that we need to in order to have laws, in order to have control and check and division of power, all the constitutional aspects we know. But the other one, which I call the opinion, the largest field of opinion, the largest domain of opinion is equally crucial, although opinion doesn't rule and must not rule directly because this would be a terrible perhaps in my view, at least form of plebiscitarian populistic regime. However, opinion is crucial because it is the sign that our society is not governed by but is governed with. So representation is government with the representative and the people is not governed by the representatives in the absence of the people. I would say this is my answer to your question. I'm sorry if I was so scheming or not. No, that's great. Thanks so much for that. Thank you for joining me to learn about Athenian democracy and representative democracy. In next week's episode we'll be hearing about a couple of different approaches to evaluating representative democracy. The varieties of democracy project, the democracy barometer, the unified democracy scores and the work done by the research centre on democracies and democratisation in Rome. I hope you'll join me then. Thanks for listening to Real Democracy Now. You can find more about today's topic in the show notes at www.realdemocracynow.com.au. If you enjoyed this program, please subscribe to this podcast, write a review, share the podcast with your friends and join the conversation on the web page or on Facebook or Twitter. I'd love to know what you think is the essence of a real democracy.