Brazil’s parliamentary democratic innovations in the last decade are landmark in our global pursuit of more open, inclusive, and participatory parliaments. A series of excellent posts on this blog by Beth Noveck, Dane Gambrell, Allison Bruno Dias de Queiroz, and Luis Kimaid have reviewed and assessed four of those initiatives and have proposed strategies for improvement, most of which based on the potential of AI for empowering citizens and make our institutions more open, inclusive and collaborative.
In the first part of this post, I mentioned four additional considerations that might complement these authors’ analysis and presented the first two: the importance of the ends of citizen participation and the need for an economy of participation.
In this second part I will present the other two: the case for worshipping citizen participation and for giving deliberation the central role it deserves in our democracies today.
1. Worshipping or honoring citizen participation
The current democratic crisis is fundamentally based on a lack of public trust in democratic institutions and politicians, a growing emotional and rational gap between citizens and their representatives, and an increasing political apathy or disinterest among citizens.
It's difficult to overstate the importance of these phenomena for the health—that is, the legitimacy—of our democratic systems. No democracy can survive if its citizens don't minimally trust their governments and parliaments. A parliament cannot be democratic, and therefore legitimate, if it is not representative. And it is not representative if citizens don't perceive it as such.
We expect citizen participation to play a decisive role in approaching the four ends mentioned in the first part of this post: rebuilding trust between citizens and parliaments, reinforcing democratic legitimacy, improving lawmaking quality, and fostering civic education, trust, and collective intelligence.
The crucial role of citizen participation in strengthening these four pillars of our democracy, combined with the relative scarcity of participation as a resource (which necessitates a political economy of participation), are the two main reasons why public institutions have the duty to treat citizen participation as sacred and adopt this fundamental mandate: never, under any circumstances, frustrate or disappoint citizens' expectations when you ask them to participate in government.
The best way to honor citizen engagement is to make it truly instrumental to the four goals enumerated above and to manage it efficiently. Wasting it, on the contrary, represents a failure in this duty. Given the current crisis of democracy, when public institutions like parliaments create more frustration or mistrust among citizens through their engagement initiatives, they commit a serious error that our precarious democratic systems cannot afford.
While not every expectation a citizen may have should be satisfied—which would be both impossible and undemocratic, since individuals in a democratic community must accept limitations on what they might expect from government—a legitimate expectation is that when citizens are invited to participate, their participation can be meaningful and impactful, and everyone's view should be fairly considered.
This duty to honor citizen participation implies that public institutions should not raise expectations among citizens if they cannot guarantee they will meet such expectations. Authorities should clearly explain to citizens what they can legitimately expect from these engagement processes. Citizens should receive sufficient relevant information and training about the processes, but also a proper account of what the system did with their contributions and what their real impact has been once processes are completed. They should end up trusting their representatives more than they did before participating.
Do Brazil's four parliamentary democratic innovation initiatives sufficiently honor citizen participation? Do they raise citizens' expectations to a level they can meet? Are they avoiding the creation of more frustration, disappointment, or mistrust? Are we certain they are not counterproductive? Do all questions addressed to Senate hearings receive proper answers? Do citizens receive enough information about what happens with the proposals they submit or the real impact of their votes in e-consultations? Is the Brazilian parliament tracking and measuring the impact of these initiatives on citizens' trust in the institution?
It might be argued that honoring citizen participation properly is too costly for our parliaments and other institutions. But if public institutions cannot guarantee that opening new opportunities for citizen engagement won't create even more frustration and mistrust—if they cannot design and run these processes responsibly and efficiently—they would do better not to change anything.
As Noveck, Gambrell, de Queiroz, and Kimaid show in their posts, AI might prove very helpful in tracking the effects of individual participation and allow institutions to properly account for their actions. This is one area where AI use is becoming fundamental for the health of our democracies.
2. Deliberation as a key
Finally, if we want to strengthen both the legitimacy and effectiveness of our legislation, we need to expand existing opportunities for citizen engagement with a two-fold focus.
First, we should focus on maximizing the quantity of participation—getting more citizens involved, increasing and diversifying their forms of engagement, gathering more contributions, suggestions, questions, and votes. Increasing participation numbers will generally not only lead to greater inclusion and procedural legitimacy but, under certain conditions, through the "miracle of aggregation," to forms of collective intelligence that will also reinforce substantive legitimacy. This justifies promoting the ideal of crowdsourcing public decision-making, as crowdlaw proponents claim.
But even more important than the quantity of participation is its quality—the second focus. Large amounts of low-quality participation might ultimately be counterproductive for democratic legitimacy. Such participation might not effectively serve the four goals of participation specified in the first post. It might even confirm the worst stereotypes regarding citizen engagement—that people are ignorant or irrational, or that they lack adequate information, skills, or virtues for good governance.
What we need is quality citizen participation that can achieve the highest levels of collective intelligence and improve lawmaking and public decision-making. When public institutions create new opportunities for civic engagement, they have traditionally focused on quantitative aspects while ignoring or downplaying qualitative ones—a serious mistake. In designing and implementing these initiatives, they should embrace both focuses. And when public institutions face a trade-off between quantity and quality of citizen participation, they should prioritize quality.
Public deliberation is key to the quality of citizen participation. Our best normative models of democracy, collective intelligence, and public innovation place democratic deliberation at the center. To the miracle of aggregation, we should add a miracle of deliberation that emerges when participants can discuss among themselves, argue for preferred solutions, and exchange reasons with the aim of convincing others through the force of argument.
We should further add a third level of collective intelligence: the miracle of collaboration—citizens' capacity to learn collectively and cooperate with each other, building upon their participation in deliberative processes. Thus, public deliberation is crucial for maximizing collective intelligence, bridging the quantity of participation and aggregation with the highest state of public collaboration.
The same holds true for our best normative understanding of democracy, provided by deliberative democratic theory, as defended by philosophers such as John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Philip Pettit, and Jane Mansbridge. The ideal democratic system is a deliberative one in which public institutions are internally more deliberative and open to citizens' deliberative input, while simultaneously maintaining a vibrant non-institutional public sphere with flourishing informal public deliberation among citizens.
Are Brazil's initiatives sufficiently deliberative? Are they transforming parliament from within to make it not only more open but also more democratically deliberative? Do they incentivize quality, deliberative, and collaborative citizen participation? Do they foster informal public deliberation in the non-institutional public sphere? These are crucial questions that should be addressed regarding Brazil's parliamentary democratic innovations, both generally and for each specific initiative.
Consider the example of proposals submitted through the e-citizenship platform. Limiting such proposals to 140 characters restricts their deliberative quality. Citizens can barely express a refined idea in 140 characters, let alone argue for it based on reasons. Voting yes or no in e-consultations has little deliberative component either, since it merely aggregates preferences or opinions, many of which might not be sufficiently informed or considered, unless voters connect with a wider public debate on each bill being discussed.
Addressing questions to Senate hearings might effectively open committee deliberations to wider audiences, but their deliberative character would be strengthened if the process ensures not only that questions receive meaningful responses, but also that genuine dialogue develops between committee members and the public asking those questions.
Conclusion: Transforming Brazil’s parliament from within
In this post and the previous one (part I), I have offered four additional considerations that complement Beth Noveck, Dane Gambrell, Allison Bruno Dias de Queiroz, and Luis Kimaid's reviews of Brazil's parliamentary democratic innovation initiatives.
I have presented thoughts that hopefully contribute to a proper assessment of these initiatives. In some cases, I may have questioned certain elements or pointed out weaknesses.
This is not to suggest that Brazil's parliamentary democratic innovations are inadequate or should be abandoned. On the contrary, they should be welcomed and celebrated. Transforming our democratic institutions from within is both necessary and urgent, but not an easy task. We need to innovate and experiment, and we need to learn collectively about how to do it effectively.
It is precisely because Brazil is leading the world in promoting citizen participation and the open parliament concept that it's worth learning more about all their initiatives and discussing them thoroughly—not only to help them take ambitious next steps but also to contribute to global collaborative learning about the best ways to preserve and enhance our democracies.
José Luis Martí is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Law at Pompeu Fabra University.
