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March 28, 2023 at 8:52 a.m. EDT

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We all know that democracy is about words and law, oratory and policy. But democracy is also about math. This is one of its most interesting features.

First, thats because you have to count the people. While many ancient societies counted people for taxation, we get the word census from the ancient Romans. Part of their government was based on a popular sovereignty principle. In addition to using the numbers for purposes of taxation, they also used the census to organize voters. The modern census appeared with the American invention of constitutional democracy and the constitutional requirement for a decennial census. It is now a fixture of modern political and policy administration. Over time, the census became the basis for much of the work in social statistics that provides the foundation for modern policymaking.

Democracy is also about math because you use math for decision-making. Which decisions will be decided by a simple majority vote by 50 percent plus one? Which will require a supermajority? And should that supermajority be a two-thirds or a three-quarters threshold?

The general idea is that you use a simple majority for matters of ordinary, passing and contingent concern. Supermajorities should be reserved for matters that rise to a constitutional level. (Here this, O ye Senate: Your filibuster does not accord with centuries of best practice in democratic design.)

And democracy is about math because of the principle of one person, one vote.

But even here matters can get complicated. For instance, humans arent spread out over geographical space in mathematically neat ways. The original design of the House of Representative aimed for a ratio of 30,000 constituents per representative. But state populations dont come in neat multiples of 30,000, or any other number. There is always a remainder, and what do you do with that? Round up and allocate an extra seat, or round down and increase the number of constituents per representative in that state?

Originally, using a rounding-down method, congressional districts had a ratio of constituents to representative ranging from 33,159 (New York) to 55,540 (Delaware), according to independent scholar Michael Rosin. This was the plan developed by Thomas Jefferson. Alexander Hamilton, rounding up, proposed a more representative plan with ratios ranging from 27,770 (Delaware) to 35,418 (Georgia). But the Jefferson approach won out. These plans were as close as the designers could get to 30,000 constituents per representative given population distribution.

Now, however, with the growing population and the House frozen at 435 seats, the spread runs from about 500,000 constituents for each of Rhode Island and Montanas members and 580,000 constituents for Wyomings single member, to 755,000 for each of Californias 52 representatives and 778,000 for each of Floridas 28.

As I explained in my previous column, the Founders never envisioned districts so large, and their gradual expansion over a century is a major reason our politics have become so dysfunctional.

To get our politics working again, we need a system that delivers energy (the ability for the government to get things done), republican safety (protection of our basic rights), popular sovereignty (adaptive responsiveness to the will of the people) and inclusion (all voices should be synthesized in the national voice of our House of Representatives). Real proximity of representatives to their constituents is necessary for delivering on all those design principles. For that, we need a bigger, and continuously growing, House of Representatives. We need smaller districts and fairer representation between more- and less-populous places.

But how big should the House be? That is also to ask how small should a district be. And based on what math? And on what principle of growth?

Scholars and advocates have been working on this question for decades. There are seven basic options, all compiled in a report on enlarging the House by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences commission on the state of our democracy, which I co-chaired. Those options would increase the size of Congress from 435 to between 572 to 9,400. They are as follows:

The Wyoming Rule. Peg the size of a district to the population of the least-populous state, which is currently Wyoming (with about 580,000 people). Thats 180,000 fewer constituents than todays average of 762,000 and would yield a House of 572 members. The difficulty with this rule, though, is that it could cause the number of members to fluctuate dramatically depending on the growth patterns of the smallest states. One way to address that would be to pick the current number (580,000) as a stable ratio going forward. But that would lead to speedy growth in the size of the House over time.

The Deferred Maintenance Rule. When the size of the House was capped in 1929, new seats could shift to growing areas only by taking them away from other areas. The number of seats lost by particular states since 1929 through this method is 149. If we restored those seats and added one more to keep the total an odd number, then reallocated to achieve even districts, we would have a new base of 585 seats. This method is clean and yields districts slightly smaller than the current population of Wyoming. However, we would still need to figure out a principle of growth under this method. Would we take district sizes after such a reform as the standard ratio, and simply let the House grow in relation to it? This, too, would result in relatively fast growth.

The Cube Root Law. This method was developed to ensure that growth is slow and steady. Instead of picking a fixed number of House seats and establishing it as the target ratio for constituents to representatives, we would use the cube root of the national population to establish the number of legislators, then apportion across the states in proportion to state populations. Whenever the national population grows, so too would the number of representatives, but slowly compared with the other options. At our current population, this rule would give us 692 seats.

Here is a chart laying out the number of representatives you would have over time on three different growth principles, given population increases:

The U.S. population is projected to cross the 400 million mark in 2058. This means the pressure to add seats to the House will only increase and slow, steady upward movement is probably better than fast. It would also be better than making a one-time move, only inevitably to face the same problem very soon thereafter.

When one recognizes the implications of projected population growth, the cube-root method comes to seem the simplest, soundest method for managing growth over time.

Its biggest problem is that its initially hard to understand, because most of us dont have intuitions about cube roots. It sounds like a bad dental experience. So advocates worry that it would be hard to sell to the American public. But, hey, America! Can we handle the math, or what?

The Least Variation in District Size Rule. From 2010 to 2020, Rhode Island had two representatives and Montana had one, even though Rhode Islands population was only slightly larger. This method would address that by prioritizing districts that are roughly the same size across the country. At our current population, this rule would produce a House of between 909 and 1,014 seats, as per the American Academy of Arts and Sciences report.

Restore the 1913 Ratio. Another option would be to use the fixed ratio that characterized the House when the 435-seat number was established in 1913. At that time, there were 211,000 constituents per member. If we returned to that today, we would have a House of 1,572.

The James Madison Rule. Or we could be even more ambitious and use an even older aspirational ratio. In an amendment to the Bill of Rights as originally proposed, Madison sought a ratio of no more than 50,000 constituents per representative. His amendment is still out there, available for ratification. This would give us a House of roughly 6,500 members.

Restore the Original Ratio. Or we could be even more ambitious than that and restore the first actual ratio used: 35,000 constituents per representative. That would give us about 9,400 members. (If we wanted to add an eighth option, we could opt for George Washingtons rule of no more than 30,000 constituents per representative. That would yield 11,000 members.)

As I wrote in my last column, two current representatives have introduced bills to increase the size of the House. Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) has introduced a bill using the Wyoming Rule. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) has offered one employing the deferred maintenance rule.

Of those, Id go with Blumenauers bill out of concern for the instability of the denominator used to create the ratio for the Wyoming bill. But the Blumenauer bill provides only a one-off solution. It doesnt give us a smooth way to resize the House over time. For that reason, and given the anticipated scaling up of our population, I do think the cube-root rule is best.

Perhaps it would be good for our collective math skills, too.

Which of the options do you think makes the most sense and why? Can you come up with something better? Id love to know your thoughts in the comments below.

Danielle Allen on renovating democracy

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Opinion | How big should the House of Representatives be? Here's the right size. - The Washington Post

The 2023 Summit for Democracy, beginning on March 28, is a genuine personal commitment from President Biden. And rightly sofor democracy is under assault around the world. Only 20% of the worlds population live in countries that non-profit group Freedom House judge to be fully free. But the great danger is not just that democracy is under attack, but that the rule of law and systems of accountability are being eroded in all areas of life.

Impunity, in other words, is the rising global instinct of choice. The notion that rules are for suckers is on the march, and everyone is paying the pricefrom civilians in conflict zones to future generations staring down the long-term effects of the climate crisis. As I wrote during the first Summit for Democracy in 2021, framing the defense of democracy within the wider battle for accountability would sharpen the Summits agenda, and build greater buy-in from many of the Global South countries for whom the framing of democracy versus autocracy has not been convincing.

The recently released Atlas of Impunity, published by the Eurasia Group and the Chicago Council for Global Affairs, highlights how widespread impunity has become. The Atlas, which is based on more than 65 independent, credible global data sources, scores 197 countries and territories across five areas of impunity: abuse of human rights, unaccountable governance, conflict and violence, economic exploitation, and environmental degradation. Each of these sites of impunity reflect the concentration and abuse of power.

By using impunity rather than democracy as the prism through which to understand global challenges, the Atlas captures the multidimensional nature of global challenges. This approach also highlights the work required from all countries, whether they are democracies or not. The great powers, especially the United States, are a case in point: the U.S. ranks 118th out of 163 countries in the Atlas, putting the U.S. closer to countries in the Global South like Argentina or South Africa than to countries like Germany or Japan. Although most residents in the U.S. enjoy full civil liberties and low levels of mass conflict or violence, the U.S. has a higher level of impunity than many of its high-income peers due to middling scores on discrimination, inequality, and democratic access. The countrys arms exports are an even bigger negative factor.

Read More: Guns in America

An impunity framing also acknowledges that while accountability is essential to democracy, a democratic system of government alone is insufficient to guarantee an accountable society. It should be a strong point of emphasis in the Summit for Democracy that democratic countries like the U.S., India, Israel, and Malaysia all perform more poorly on human rights indicators than on governance measures. Similarly, while many liberal democracies like Canada perform well on most indicators of impunity, its poor performance on environmental degradation highlights the spaces impunity continues to thrive even within otherwise accountable societies.

As the Atlas of Impunity highlights, impunity is the driving force behind many of the worlds greatest shared challenges. But the Biden administration will miss an important opportunity to achieve its goal of uniting countries around a common global agenda if it fails to link its defense of democracy with promotion of the rule of law. As the international reaction to the war in Ukraine has shown, critical swing voters in the international system have not been swayed by arguments from the West about the vital need to defend Ukraine.

Two-thirds of the worlds population live in countries that are officially neutral or supportive of Russia, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, and these countries do not fit into a convenient axis of autocracy. They include South Africa, India, Indonesia, and Brazil to name four democratic countries, as well as plenty of the undemocratic world, and many in between. Instead, the Biden administration should use the Summit for Democracy to situate the defense of democracy within the wider global battle for accountability, which would widen the coalition and speak more directly to the concerns of these swing voters.

With this impunity framework in hand, here are three things the Summit for Democracy could do to launch a global accountability agenda and fight back against rising impunity around the world:

First, attendees at the summit should commit to holding their own governments and militaries accountable for abuses. The U.S. Department of Defense has taken an important step in this direction through the recently released Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan, which puts protection of civilians at the core of military missions, creates conditionality for U.S. security partners and establishes better pathways for accountability when civilians are killed.

Second, participants should pledge to support accountability mechanisms in the international system. The measures here range from the technocraticlike support for the now defunct Group of Eminent Experts investigating the war in Yemento the more political, including support for the International Criminal Court. Then there are even more ambitious proposals, like the idea of France and Mexico to suspend the U.N. Security Council veto in cases of mass atrocities.

Finally, acts of impunity will not be deterred through acts of accountability alone. That will require systems and cultures of accountability to counter systems and cultures of impunity. Summit participants build countervailing power against impunity by partnering with private sector and civil society groups to develop a global counterculture of accountability, starting with transparency over state and non-state actors violating the global rule of law.

The Summit for Democracy is an important and rare moment to bring a large swath of the world together to unite for a common global agenda. It is critical not to misuse this moment or leave behind potential coalition partners. By using the fight against impunity as its rallying cry, the Biden administration can build a truly global coalition, establish a clear agenda not only on democratic governance but on a range of shared challenges, and start the fight back against impunity in a world overrun by it.

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How Biden Can Fight Abuses of Power to Save Democracy - TIME

We, the undersigned citizens of the world, from movements representing tens of millions around the globe and in Israel, condemn the aggressive, anti-democratic legislation proposed by the Israeli government. We stand in solidarity with the citizens of Israel who have been fighting for democracy and taking to the streets in hundreds of thousands for the past 12 weeks.

The legislation promoted by the Israeli government, now in its final and crucial stage, will de facto abolish the independence of the judicial system and provide unlimited power to the executive branch. Destroying the checks and balances of Israeli democracy will endanger the rights of so many first, the political and individual rights of the Palestinian minority in Israel, including disenfranchisement, but also the rights of women, LGBTQI+ people, secular communities, civil society, asylum seekers and immigrant workers.

Destroying the checks and balances of Israeli democracy will endanger the rights of so many.

Moreover, the anti-democratic legislation will perpetuate the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and enable formal annexation of the occupied territories. This goes against international law and denies the rights and freedom of millions of Palestinians.

Some of us live in countries where governments took similar steps to form an illiberal democracy. We are deeply worried to witness that the same playbook is being used by prime minister Netanyahu and his far-right government.

Israel and democracies around the world enjoy an enduring and unique friendship. It is built on shared values such as democracy, liberty and the protection of human rights. The occupation of the Palestinian territories against international law has already severely weakened this relationship. Now, the Israeli government is completely turning its back on these values and is undermining the precious relationship that citizens of democracies value so much.

We call on the worlds leaders to take urgent action to defend democracy in Israel for the sake of all people living in the region.

DeClic, Romania | Kreni-Promeni, Serbia | Skiftet, Sweden | ~ le mouvement, France | Akcja Demokracja, Poland | 38 Degrees, Great Britain | #aufstehn, Austria | Campax, Switzerland | Campact, Germany | Zazim Community Action, Israel | Uplift, Ireland | Leadnow, Canada | MoveOn, USA | ActionStation, New Zealand | aHang, Hungary

Originally posted here:
Solidarity with the fight for democracy in Israel - POLITICO Europe

Its billed as a summit for democracy. Under U.S. leadership, countries from six continents will gather from March 29 to March 30 to highlight how democracies deliver for their citizens and are best equipped to address the worlds most pressing challenges, according to the U.S. State Department.

Although advancing technology for democracy is a key pillar of the summits agenda, the United States has been missing in action when it comes to laying out and leading on a vision for democratic tech leadership. And by staying on the sidelines and letting othersmost notably the European Unionlead on tech regulation, the United States has the most to lose economically and politically.

One in five private-sector jobs in the United States is linked to the tech sector, making tech a cornerstone of the U.S. economy. When U.S. tech companies are negatively impacted by global economic headwinds, overzealous regulators, or other factors, the consequences are felt across the economy, as the recent tech layoffs impacting tens of thousands of workers have shown.

And tech isnt just about so-called Big Tech companies such as Alphabet (Googles parent company) or social media platforms such as Metas Facebook and Instagram. Almost every company is now a tech companyautomakers, for example, can track users movements from GPS data, require large numbers of computer chips, and use the cloud for data storage. Rapid developments in artificial intelligence, especially in the field of natural language processing (the ability behind OpenAIs ChatGPT), have widespread applications across an even larger swath of sectors including media and communications.

This means that tech policy is not just about content moderation or antitrust legislationtwo of the main areas of focus for U.S. policymakers. Rather, tech policy is economic policy, trade policy, andwhen it comes to U.S. tech spreading across the globeforeign policy.

As the global leader in technology innovation, the United States has a real competitive edge as well as a political opportunity to advance a vision for technology in the service of democracy. But the window to act is rapidly narrowing as others, including like-minded democracies in Europe but also authoritarian China, are stepping in to fill the leadership void.

The European Union has embarked on an ambitious regulatory agenda, laying out a growing number of laws to govern areas including digital services taxes, data sharing, online advertising, and cloud services. Although the regulatory efforts may be based in democratic values, in practice, they have an economic agenda: France, for example, expects to make 670 million euros in 2023 from digital services taxes, with much of that coming from large U.S. tech companies.

Whats worse is that while other key EU regulations, such as the Digital Markets Act (DMA), target the largest U.S. firms, they leave Chinese-controlled companies such as Alibaba and Tencent less regulated. Thats because the DMA sets out very narrow criteria to define gatekeepers, such as company size and market position, to only cover large U.S. firms, thus benefiting both European companies and subsidized Chinese competitors and creating potential security vulnerabilities when it comes to data collection and access.

While Europe rushes to regulate, China has developed an effective model of digital authoritarianism: strangling the internet with censorship, deploying AI technologies such as facial recognition for surveillance, and advocating for cyber sovereignty, which is doublespeak for state control of data and information. Beijing has been actively exporting these tools to other countries, primarily in the global south, where the United States is fighting an uphill battle to convince countries to join its global democracy agenda.

And the battle for hearts and minds has implications far beyond techit goes to the heart of U.S. global leadership. In last months vote at the United Nations to condemn Russias brutal invasion of Ukraine, endorsed by the United States, the majority of the countries that voted against or abstained were from Africa, South America, and Asia.

Without a U.S.-led concerted effort to push back against authoritarian states desire to define the rules around technology, large democracies such as Turkey and India are also wavering, imposing increasingly authoritarian limits on free speech online. The result is growing digital fragmentationfragmentation that benefits authoritarian adversaries.

The Biden administration says it wants to see technology harnessed to support democratic freedoms, strengthen our democratic alliances, and beat back the authoritarian vision of a government-run internet.

Heres how it could help achieve these goals.

First, the administration should map out an affirmative technology strategy, making sure that U.S. workers and consumers benefit from U.S. tech leadership. This means investing in competitiveness and a smarter public-private approach to research and development, an area the United States has underfunded for over a decade.

Tech touches on almost every sector of the U.S. economy as well as international trade, defense, and security, and involves almost every government agency from the State Departments Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy to the Federal Trade Commission and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. And while most European countries now have full ministries for digital affairs, the U.S. doesnt have similarly politically empowered counterparts tasked with coordinating a whole-of-government effort across all government agencies to produce a national strategy for technology. This needs to change.

Second, the administration should take advantage of the bipartisan consensus in the U.S. Congress on the need to push back against Chinas growing domination in tech by putting forward a balanced regulatory agenda that establishes clear rules for responsible innovation. In an op-ed earlier this year, U.S. President Joe Biden called for Republicans and Democrats to hold social media platforms accountable for how they use and collect data, moderate online content, and treat their competition. To be sure, a national privacy law is long overdue, as several states have already passed their own laws, creating a confusing regulatory environment.

But this agenda is too backward-looking: Policymakers today are debating how to regulate technology from 20 years ago, when social media companies first emerged. As ChatGPT has shown, tech advancements far outpace regulatory efforts. A balanced agenda would set out key principles and ethical guardrails, rather than seek to regulate specific companies or apps. Banning TikTok, for example, wont prevent another Chinese company from taking its place.

Third, the U.S. should reenergize its engagement in multilateral institutions. The United States is taking the right steps in endorsing Japans initiative at the next G-7 meeting to establish international standards for trust in data flows, known as the Data Free Flow with Trust. The administration has also appointed an ambassador at large for cyberspace and digital policy to work more closely with allies on tech cooperation.

The U.N.s International Telecommunication Union, which helps develop standards in telecoms, is now directed by American Doreen Bogdan-Martin, which also presents an opportunity to beat back Russian and Chinese attempts to impose government control over the internet and instead reinforce the present private sector- and civil society-led internet governance model.

Washington has led important defensive efforts to challenge Beijings system of sovereignty and surveillance and has brought key allies along in these efforts. But it has not done enough to drive an affirmative agenda on technology innovation and tech-driven economic opportunity. The Biden administration has an opportunity now to prioritize tech. There is no time to waste.

Original post:
Summit for Democracy 2023: How the U.S. Can Lead on Tech ... - Foreign Policy

Georgetown political philosopher Jason Brennan is one of the world's leading theorists of democracy, and his new book Democracy: A Guided Tour is a valuable overview of the strengths and weaknesses of democracy, and various arguments on that topic developed by leading political thinkers from ancient Greece to the present day. Brennan has an impressive command of the relevant literature, and he's a very clear writer. The book is a great resource for anyone interested in debates about democratic theory.

Democracy: A Guide Tour is divided into five sections, each of which considers a leading traditional rationale for democracy: stability, virtue, wisdom in decision-making, liberty, and equality. Each section includes a chapter outlining arguments holding that the democracy effectively promotes the value in question, followed by one outlining reasons for skepticism.

One of the strengths of Brennan's book is that he carefully avoids the widespread tendency to conflate that which is "democratic" with that which is good. This leaves room for the possibility that increasing democracy might actually cause harm, as opposed to defining it away in advance.

Brennan himself is something of a democracy-skeptic, as evidenced by his previous work. But in Guided Tour, he strives hard to be balanced, and mostly succeeds. Still, it's hard to come away from the book without getting a sense that democracy falls well short of at least the more expansive claims on its behalf. For example, far from promoting careful deliberation over policy and making effective use of the "wisdom of crowds," democracy is often plagued by systematic voter ignorance and bias. Far from making citizens more virtuous, democratic political participation often brings out and exacerbates some of the worst tendencies in human nature. And so on.

I myself am also skeptical of many of the benefits claimed for democracy, especially when it comes to issues related to voter ignorance. It's possible that a reader who comes to the book with the opposite predisposition will view it differently. Either way, the book provides an excellent analysis of a wide range of perspectives on these issues. And it manages to cover a lot of ground in a relatively modest amount of space.

Despite its many strengths, Guided Tour does have a few notable limitations. First, while Brennan carefully considers strengths and weaknesses of democracy in an absolute sense, there is little in the way of comparison between democratic and non-democratic regimes. Brennan discusses a number of thinkers who reject democracy in favor of authoritarianism, but says little about the actual performance of the sorts of regimes they advocate.

Incorporating the latter would make democracy look better on many dimensions. For example, as Brennan explains in Chapter 9, democracy is often a threat to liberty. But authoritarian governments are far worse. For all their many injustices, no democratic government has even come close to the level of oppression perpetrated by communist and fascist regimes. Similarly, a dictator who listens mainly to boot-licking cronies who tell him what he wants to hear will often make even worse cognitive errors than ignorant democratic electorates. Vladimir Putin's recent disastrous miscalculations may be a case in point.

Brennan is aware of the relative superiority of democratic regimes over authoritarian ones. But it gets little mention in this book, perhaps because the author had to cover so much other ground. Still, I think this issue deserved more attention. The relative failure to consider it may lead readers to (wrongly) dismiss Brennan's more democracy-skeptical chapters by citing Winston Churchill's famous statement that "democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried."

This ties into Brennan's second notable omission: there is very little discussion of various institutional structures that can potentially mitigate the flaws of democracy, such as federalism, separation of powers, and judicial review. In a previous book, Brennan himself advocates "epistocracy," giving more power to relatively more knowledgeable voters (see my assessment of the idea here). It's only briefly mentioned here, as part of a discussion of John Stuart Mill.

Many of these institutional fixesmost obviously, judicial revieware actually constraints on democracy (defined as majoritarian government). Thus, to the extent they are effective, they don't necessarily vindicate democracy, as such. But there is still a crucial difference between structures that limit democracy and those that dispense with it entirely. If nothing else, the potential benefits of the former undercut Churchill-quoting complacency about the democracy, which is often implicitly premised on the assumption that authoritarianism is the only alternative to giving democratic majorities a virtual blank check to rule as they please.

In sum, Democracy: A Guided Tour is a great overview of various longstanding debates about democracy. But it leaves room for a broader tour that more fully considers non-democratic alternatives to democracy and institutional fixes for various democratic pathologies.

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Jason Brennan's "Democracy: A Guided Tour" - Reason