From a county show ox to the possibility of direct democracy

In 1906, visitors to the West England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition were asked to estimate the weight of a live ox after it had been slaughtered and dressed. Upon analysing the results of this competition, the Victorian polymath Francis Galton noticed a curious thing: the average of everyone's guess wasn’t just closer to the correct answer than the winning guess; it was also more accurate than any of the expert judges.

Quoting this and subsequent scientifically more rigorous evidence, the program Ultimate Swarms (BBC 1) argued that animals which exhibit collective behaviour are at their strongest when there is no single leader. This is because individuals, however capable, are nonetheless fallible. A collective, on the other hand, is able to counteract and mitigate the consequences any singular errors.

Intelligence in numbers

This holds true, for example, when looking at the evasive actions of a shoal of tuna, twisting and turning in an effort to outmanoeuvre animals of prey. Even if a few unlucky fish end up as lunch, the aggregate of each individual action produces a highly responsive defensive unit – indeed, one that is far more formidable than if the shoal were directed by a single lead fish.

Honey bees also take advantage of this collective intelligence. For example, when the time comes, it is not the queen bee who decides the location of the colony’s next home. Instead, this decision – vital for the survival of the group – is a communal choice. Upon discovering a potential nesting site for the colony, the worker bee will report back to the beehive and promote their find with a "waggle dance". This form of communication imparts information to the rest of the hive about the location and features of the newly found property. The winning dance – the one that excites the colony the most – will determine the location of the collective’s next home. A kind of bugs life X-Factor indeed.

But back to the ox and the county show in Plymouth. After realising that the median of all the guesses came to within 0.8% of the correct weight, while the average came even closer and was also more accurate than the experts, Galton reasoned that, "according to the democratic principle of ‘one vote one value’, the middlemost estimate expresses the vox populi, every other estimate being condemned as too low or too high by a majority of the voters”. 

Now, if this vox populi identified by Galton arrives at better answers than our so-called experts, and studies in swarm intelligence point to group decision-making being favourable to actions directed by a single leader; then what does this say about our reliance on individuals to ultimately decide the direction of our communities?

Thankfully, we in the West at least are able to vote in our leaders, but human collectives tend to still be guided by a singular brain, whether it be a PM, President or dictator. Our current system for collaborative action endows our rulers with the authority to weigh and consider the available information in order to arrive at decisions that will then affect us all. However, it's still just one individual making the final call.

Online to the rescue

In the wired parts of our world, however, there rests a gadget in virtually every gentleman's pocket and each lady's handbag that could be utilised to capitalise on our collective intelligence. 

Moreover, the daily routines of most of us already include posting statuses, checking tweets, and dealing with all manner of online chatter.  It shouldn’t, therefore, be too burdensome for each of us to have a civic obligation that would regularly poke us into thinking about a subject to do with our communities, hence, our own lives. 

It could be as unobtrusive as receiving an email, text or Facebook notification requiring us to vote for a collective course of action by clicking on “like” or “dislike”. Such e-plebiscites could take the form of questions, such as "should speed bumps be installed on street Y?", or "should land X of this council be used to build a shopping centre, business centre or park?", or "should this council buy energy from wind farms or shale gas producers?"

The user interface could be a simple page showing the question, and a button or two with which to assert one's position. The resulting votes would then be calculated by a Google-type number-cruncher.

  Each adult could own a civic profile ("Civicbook"?) connected to their council, allowing them to only vote on matters directly relevant to their lives and to their communities (and perhaps a national equivalent for larger and broader questions).

Every adult member of the body politic would also retain the power to bring up issues for debate, as already happens with the online petitions in the UK that can trigger talks in Parliament. And every time a citizen were to create such an e-plebiscite, it would be permanently displayed on their profile – resulting over time in a history that would flag up any conflicts of interest, thus bringing transparency and long-term accountability to our political interactions.

Such a Civicbook should also allow everybody to browse questions posed by others and to pick causes to "like" or "dislike".  Collectively agreed-upon rules would then dictate the frequency of these e-plebiscites and the threshold for "likes" that would trigger a referendum. 

There should also be a statutory duty forcing people to take part regularly, at risk of losing some commensurate privilege, right or benefit; not necessarily compelling us to vote on every question, but at least on an agreed-upon number. 

The thing is, this is far from some idealised techno-fantasy – indeed, a form of direct democracy similar to this is already practiced in Switzerland. Elections and referenda, increasingly often electronic, on all types of issues take place four times a year in each Swiss canton (about equivalent to our councils). 

Swiss citizens are able to, for example, demand popular votes, amend the constitution and even veto laws and spending bills through these referenda. The relatively small size of the cantons (in effect, peer pressure) and, in some places, fines for not taking part in elections ensure that everybody has an incentive to fulfil their duty.  

Likewise, the citizens of Iceland were allowed to draft their new constitution via crowd-sourcing – as is now also being advocated for the UK in a new project at the LSE.  So the technology already exists – what is missing is the political will. Our leaders and decision makers need not worry about their livelihoods, however, as we'd still need experts to analyse, inform and galvanise the population on the relevant questions of tomorrow.

Even so, as Galton opined about the county show competition, “the average competitor was probably as well fitted for making a just estimate of the dressed weight of an ox, as an average voter is of judging the merits of most political issues on which he votes.” 

How to define "Politics"

The question is, how prudent is it for us to outsource our stakes in society to career-politicians – with their party political responsibilities, ideological agendas, vested interests and core voters – when these days we could so easily each wield the power ourselves? 

Moreover, the zigzagging, even schizoid dynamic of oppositional politics – the governing party moulding the country according to their proclivities, the opposition trying to undermine them, only for the roles to be reversed after a Parliament or two; and repeat ad nauseam – seems far from an efficient or productive system for guiding our societies toward sustainable and long-term prosperity. 

If we each had the exact same amount of say, in no way mediated or determined by whichever party made it into government, it would seem to follow that there would be a lot less, if any, need for the kind of arrogant partisanship and ignorant tribalism that so often goes for "debate" amongst the political classes, the MSM and, in particular, online comments sections. Merriam Webster offers several definitions for Politics. 

Here are two:  “Activities that relate to influencing the actions and policies of a government”; and “Getting and keeping power in a government”. The former, in my mind at least, would better describe this type of direct, power-in-the-palm-of-your-hands politics. 
The latter, meanwhile, reflects rather aptly our current, depressing-for-most-but-lucrative-for-a-few party political system.

We are incredibly lucky and privileged to be alive at a time when the power to influence our societies could reside equally in each and every individual. Indeed, modern technological advances are bringing us the opportunity to consign to the dustbin of history – where it belongs with such other iniquitous systems as feudalism and imperium – our paternalistic form of representative democracy. 

These days, a large scale state run by an electronic form of direct democracy is a real and distinct possibility, one that even Plato might have approved of. 

A single official – democratically elected or otherwise – is always prone to such quintessentially human traits as vanity, greed or being fallible, as are we all. So, when it comes to questions that affect communities, societies and countries, wouldn't it be more prudent to trust the votes, so easily collectible these days, of everyone affected in order to arrive closer to the optimal solution? Swarm intelligence, Galton’s vox populi and Equity – one vote, one value – all seem to suggest it would.