Associative democracy

In addition to deliberative democracy, I also want to raise the notion of associative demcoracy. I've written an article about this before, though in a different context, but I think it will be sufficient to just copy some of that writing over here:

There are a few different interpretations or styles of associative democracy, and I don't think it will necessarily be fruitful to survey them all, nor to commit in detail to one particular type. Instead, I think we can draw a few basic principles from the concept of associative democracy to see how they might apply. These principles I'll call self-determined jurisdictions, non-exclusive jurisdictions, decentralised primacy, and democratic commitment. The appeal of them for our purposes is that they can offer a decentralised way of conducting democracy, while still bringing along the usefulness of democracy as a signalling mechanism.

The first one is self-determined jurisdictions. By this I just mean that people get together to form associations, and their associations decide what they have power over. Usually this will be power over something relevant. So, for example, pople from a certain area might come together to make decisions about the area they live in. Or doctors might come together to make decisions about the standards that doctors will follow. This is still pretty consistent with one of the fundamental ideas of democracy, that people have the right to rule over themselves and democratic institutions are the most appropriate way to do it, except that they get to choose what the boundaries are, whereas typically those boundaries are chosen for them by the way the world has been carved up into states. In a traditional state democracy the boundaries are both geographic and conceptual, and are often imposed from the top down (for example, the central government will define what area a local government has power over and what powers they have). In associative democracy, these boundaries come from the bottom up - straight from the people - and can be considerably varied rather than uniform.

The second one is non-exclusive jurisdictions. By this I mean that two or more associations can have power over the same thing. So there can be two doctor's associations, or two local community associations, and so on. This might sound rather confusing - what if they make contradictory decisions about the same thing? This is something that I'll discuss in my context later.

The third is decentralised primacy, by which I mean that the associations hold the legitimacy for rightful rule and the more centralised institutions are just there to facilitate them. So in an associative democracy the associations are the real decision-makers, the movers and the shakers, and the central government plays a role of helping them get what they need. This is a reversal to most modern democracies, where the central government has primacy (it will always win out when two different levels of democracy clash), and often get to give and take away powers from the smaller players.

The last one is democratic commitment. And all I mean to say here is that these associations are run democratically. The associations will have members, and the internal structure will give the members democratic power to run the association. What sort of democratic procedures should these associations have? Generally, this decision is left up to the members themselves, so different associations might have different procedures. The overall model then looks something like this: associative democracy describes the way that associations relate to legitimacy and to each other, and inside those associations can be tucked different varieties of democracy.

Associative democracy is about self-forming, diverse and overlapping democratic associations, which have a legitimate right to exercise power over their jurisdictions, as opposed to an all-encompassing centralised government that has power over everywhere and everything.