Democracy In Practice co-founder Adam Cronkright talks to journalist Patrick Chalmers about his organisation's work - an experiment in democratic decision-making that knocks the spots off most systems that would claim to be democracies.

Democracy in Practice trials in Bolivian schools

Adam Cronkright, co-founder of the Cochabamba, Bolivia group Democracy In Practice, talks to Patrick Chalmers about life beyond conventional elections. DIP has been exploring better ways to do democracy, tackling the frustration many people in many different countries feel about the current state of representative democracy.  His group's experimentation with random selection in student governments is road testing a technique that first came to light in Ancient Athens and other Greek city states. What lessons for today's democracy lovers - take a listen to find out.

Bolivia experiments with democracy beyond elections

Democracy Talk meets Iain Walker, Executive Director of the Australian charity newDEMOCRACY, which aims to innovate in how we do democracy. Iain goes beyond conventional ideas about why Western representative democracies are suffering a collapse of public trust. He sees the problem as much deeper than one of money's outsize influence on elections - it's the voting itself that's at fault. Elected officials are in permanent election mode, making thoughtful, long-term decision-making impossible. The solution newDEMOCRACY favours is sortition - randomly selected samples of the public who then ponder a policy question with help from all the evidence they can gather.

Australians doing democracy differently - part 1

Part 2 of Democracy Talk's interview with Iain Walker, Executive Director of the Australian charity newDEMOCRACY, which aims to innovate in how we do democracy. Iain goes beyond conventional ideas about why Western representative democracies are suffering a collapse of public trust. He sees the problem as much deeper than one of money's outsize influence on elections - it's the voting itself that's at fault. Elected officials are in permanent election mode, making thoughtful, long-term decision-making impossible. The solution newDEMOCRACY favours is sortition - randomly selected samples of the public who then ponder a policy question with help from all the evidence they can gather. First part here (https://soundcloud.com/patrickchalmers/australians-doing-democracy-differently)

Australians doing democracy differently - part 2

Adam Cronkright, co-founder of the Bolivian organisation Democracy in Practice, talks about the group's findings so far with experiments in student government.

Democracy in Practice has been helping run student councils in a few different Cochabamba secondary schools since 2013, using lottery selection rather than elections to choose candidates.

Doing away with elections allows for a more representative body of students on council, making room for less charismatic or popular pupils to have a chance at government.

Changing selection methods is one thing, governing differently is another - with all the usual challenges of having representatives turn up on time, or at all, learning how to take collective decisions,  not dominating proceedings and following through with promised actions.

An encouraging finding, Adam says, is that students can, and do, learn the necessary skills to govern. It raises hopeful prospects for better government in societies who manage to improve their citizens' governance skills more generally.

An intriguing curiosity, albeit an anecdotal one according to Adam, is how students who appear to stand out as natural leaders, those who might usually get chosen in elections, are often not the best suited to actual government.

Teaching students government skills

Frome ex-mayor Peter Macfadyen (not the current mayor, as incorrectly stated in the interview) talks of how a group of ordinary people in southwest England took control of their local government by standing as non-party, independent candidates.

His story involves a group of local residents - meeting in a pub, of course - who took control of their town council at their first attempt then swept all the seats on their second.

Peter's book - Flatpack Democracy - describes what happened, and why, while also offering an instruction manual for taking local political power.

His story suggests people who despair of their dysfunctional democracies may have more potential for power than they realise.

Patrick Chalmers

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