7 June 2022. Democracy | Sport

Rebuilding democracy. // Sport as social cohesion

Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story. Recent editions are archived and searchable on Wordpress. And a reminder that if you don’t see Just Two Things in your inbox, it might have been routed to your spam filter.

1: Rebuilding democracy

David Runciman once said that the political crisis that follows a financial crisis lasts for a decade.¹ But Britain’s slow-moving car crash of a constitutional and political crisis seems to have been running for longer than that now. Even the most recent act, from the Brexit referendum vote to Johnson’s implosion as Conservative party leader has taken almost exactly six years.

So it’s always good to be reminded that there are other possibilities when it comes to democracy. And I was pointed towards a piece by Claudia Chwalisz in Noema that explored some of these when she guest-edited Sunday’s edition of Exponential View. Chwalisz leads the OECD’s work on citizen participation and the future of democracy.

Imagine you receive an invitation one day from your mayor, inviting you to serve as a member of your city’s newly established permanent Citizens’ Assembly. You will be one of 100 others like you — people who are not politicians or even necessarily party members. All of you were drawn by lot through a fair and random process called a civic lottery... Essentially, this group of 100 people is a microcosm of the wider public. Your mandate lasts for one year, after which a new group of people will be drawn by lot.

—

(‘European Citizens’ Initiative: Participatory democracy for citizen-powered Europe’. Photo by Arvamusfestival/flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0)

This isn’t a hypothetical exercise. As she notes, there have now been hundreds of such participatory exercises over the past few years, often designed to address public policy issues. The evidence on them so far is good. They refresh democratic processes by involving more people, improving social cohesion, and the deliberative processes tend to create reflective judgments even on complex decisions, by drawing on the group’s collective intelligence. They do a bit more than that, though:

Research also shows that being a member of a deliberative body strengthens people’s agency. It creates a collective consciousness and allows us to harness our collective capacity. Moreover, deliberative institutions strengthen democracy by extending the privilege of representation to a much larger and more diverse group of people, allowing them to play an important role in shaping decisions affecting people’s lives.

Paris provides a case study. It created a permanent Citizen’s Assembly in 2021–it was delayed by the pandemic—after a citizen’s deliberative process recommended it as a way to improve participation. It now has its own secretariat and a dedicated oversight body. The Assembly can shape the city’s participatory budget; decide on which issues should be reviewed by citizen’s juries; and it can decide to evaluate existing city policy. The Council is required to respond to every recommendation made by the Assembly or by a Citizen’s Jury. These are the ground rules:

Your role as an Assembly Member is not to give your personal opinion, or to represent a political party, interest group, company or any other group or organisation. You and the other Assembly Members are asked to put yourselves in the shoes of the broader community and think about the public good, to weigh the evidence you receive, to listen to others in the room, to come to an informed public judgement and to find common ground.

There are a lot of different models here. Chwalisz distinguishes between eight versions in an OECD policy paper. Here’s the headline list from that paper:

1. Combining a permanent citizens’ assembly with one-off citizens’ panels

2. Connecting representative public deliberation to parliamentary committees

3. Combining deliberative and direct democracy

4. Standing citizens’ advisory panels

5. Sequenced representative deliberative processes throughout the policy cycle

6. Giving people the right to demand a representative deliberative process

7. Requiring representative public deliberation before certain types of public decisions

8. Embedding representative deliberative processes in local strategic planning.

Belgium, for example, does the second of these. Toronto does the fourth. And so on.

But there are some necessary conditions for success, both in the way the citizen’s assemblies are connected to existing democratic processes and the way that they are selected:

(T)here needs to be a commitment from decision-makers to respond to and implement the citizens’ recommendations. The civic lottery needs to ensure that everybody has an equal chance of being selected. Sufficient time — usually at least four to five days — is required for people to be able to understand the complexity of an issue and collaborate on developing solutions. It also matters for ensuring legitimacy — people not part of the process need to be able to trust in the citizens’ recommendations. Access to a wide breadth and depth of information is therefore crucial as well.

She notes that many of the criticisms of these forms of citizen’s democracy are exactly the same criticisms that met most previous proposals to extend democracy:

Many common objections to sortition and deliberation stem from fears that ordinary citizens are not competent enough to handle complex political decisions.

Her response to this is that may of our existing politicians might not be competent either—ministers, for example, jump from portfolio. And elections create perverse incentives that can produce poor decisions:

The current democratic system for taking public decisions — anchored in the short-termism of elections and the inward-looking logic of political parties — has perverse incentives that are preventing action, exacerbating polarization and fueling distrust.

Well, that sounds familiar to anyone reading this in the UK—or the US, come to that. Chwalisz anticipates a world where forms of citizen’s democracy move beyond their current roles, as advisory bodies that complement existing political institutions, they could go further:

As Yale Professor Hélène Landemore argues, the idea of “representing and being represented in turn” supports a new, non-electoral understanding of democratic representation... As public awareness of deliberative democracy grows and evidence that it is working proliferates, arguments for genuine shifts in power could be more compelling.

2: Sport as social cohesion

Football, said one of the more famous football managers, is “the most important of the unimportant things in life”, and I was reminded of this quote at the weekend.² The football details are unimportant, but unfashionable Grimsby Town won a play-off match to get promoted back into the English Football League.

We’re in the lower depths, in other words, between the fifth tier and the fourth tier, a world away from the millions that the teams that compete in the European Champions’ League spray around. But be reassured; this piece isn’t mostly about football.

As it happens, a technology entrepreneur, Jason Stockwood, had become co-owner of Grimsby last year with his business partner Andrew Pettit, after the club was relegated, and he has written a number of pieces in The Guardian that articulate—outstandingly well—the value of sport, even in the lower depth of the leagues, to communities such as Grimsby. His interest: he was born in one of the poorer parts of the town, but has managed to do well for himself. He has a healthy perspective on this. I’m going to pull out some extracts from these articles here. The first is from a year ago, just after the decision to become the owner:

Grimsby deserves better than becoming the goldfish bowl of post-Brexit Britain, gawped at by the prosperous and socially conscious, a tourist attraction on the map of social and economic deprivation. Instead we should be looking to the town as a place where the voices we hear are not lamenting their lost past, but shaping their future. While many civic institutions and local businesses have faded away and shuttered over the years, professional football teams are one of the few institutions that have endured.

Football teams have often become untethered from their communities, certainly at the rich end of the spectrum. The interests of owners and fans diverge. But in many communities, a football team can still create a sense of collective belonging around a sense of place, as he discussed at the start of the season:

Robert Putnam, in his book The Upswing, writes that capitalism’s original success was partly down to the localised nature of enterprise and the civic institutions that existed as a counterweight to its worst excesses... When I read Putnam’s book, it was clear to me that one of the few institutions that have endured and still have such potency are professional football teams. Grimsby Town FC has a 143-year history and a committed, if somewhat diminished, following today... Exactly how those bonds can be further encouraged and amplified is a question we can try to answer together.

Stockwood is clearly reflective and well-read, and despite his own business success is sceptical about the working of the “free market” and of the many mechanisms that accelerate inequality, in football as elsewhere. In fact, football becomes a microcosm for wider social inequalities. The £40,000 that Grimsby will receive from television appearances this year would barely—or not even—pay for a Premier league reserve player for a week. In football, as elsewhere in society, the rules need to work a bit differently, as Tracy Crouch argued in her review of English football after the debacle of the European Super League:

Even the former Conservative sports minister Tracey Crouch seemed to understand the need to rethink the value of a football club. “Football clubs are not ordinary businesses,” she said in her interim findings. “They play a critical social, civic and cultural role in their local communities. They need to be protected – sometimes from their owners, who are, after all, simply the current custodians of a community asset.”

In his final piece of the year—written after Grimsby had qualified for the play-off final but before they’d played the game, Stockwood reflects that the business of football ought to be like other organisations, but the pressure of results tends to distract from this. (Earlier in the season he’d borrowed Jonathan Haidt’s idea of our rational selves desperately trying to ride the elephant of our emotional selves: “When you lose 1-0 at home, that runaway elephant insists we sack the manager”):

We experienced the best start to a season since 1982, followed by an 11‑game streak with one win in all tournaments. While a small number of fans took to social media to call for our manager’s job, we looked at the data and recommitted to our long-term values and the culture we wanted at the club.

Because most of what we know about business success seems to hinge on culture:

(T)he clues that seem to improve your odds are all about culture – focus on building a culture of high trust and clear values, foster an attitude of continuous learning and most importantly be prepared to put the required effort in. Or in other words, trust, talent and graft.

But of course, football, like other sport, isn’t just a business. It’s more important than that, the most important of the unimportant things:

Football is the business of memory making. It has the ability to create those rare moments of joy that transcend our day-to-day lives – that, per TS Eliot, “shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy”.

---

Other writing

I have a review of a recent concert in London by the Northumberland group The Unthanks on the folk music site Salut Live!, edited by Colin Randall. They have a new record out soon, and this is is the official video of the single:

j2t#325

If you are enjoying Just Two Things, please do send it on to a friend or colleague.

1. But he doesn’t seem to have written this down anywhere.

2. Arrigo Sacchi, if you care.