Is it democracy?

I've pitched demotherapeia as a type of democracy, a type of post-structuralist process, and a type of therapy. One of the most common responses that I have had is a critique that is it not a model of democracy, and that to use the word "democracy" to describe it is misleading. I want to think about that here, but I can give an immediate overview of the conclusion: it probably doesn't matter, because the word shouldn't define the process.

There are really two categories of things to consider: those things intimately associated with modern democracy, and those things associated more with newer theories of democracy such as deliberative democracy.

Votes, elections, representatives, laws

Modern representative democracies have votes, elections, representatives and laws. These are, in some sense, not incidental or logical outcomes of the principles of modern democracies, but the defining features of these systems as democracies at all. That is, if there were a proposal to take away elections, most citizens would propose that the system would be no longer democratic.

Under this framework, demotherapeia would not be a democratic model. Instead, it would be a model of deliberation, or a therapeutic process, or something else - one of many different ways that people can speak to each other about issues, but not one that is particularly democratic. One of the more common responses is that "democracy" comes from demos, "people", and kratos, "rule", and that without some law implemented by the process there is no rule to satisfy the second part of the word. That does, of course, depend on how narrowly "rule" is defined, and whether kratos is better defined as "rule" or "power", and maybe whether the "people" is some collective rather than aggregation, and so on - but it is easy to take this argument in a good faith manner and see why people would object to the word "democracy" being applied.

Equality, inclusiveness, voice, proceduralism

On equality, inclusiveness and the ability to express their voice through procedure - all things intimately associated with democracy - demotherapeia fares a little better. The process should be inclusive, it is all about having voices expressed, and there is even a notion of equality - either that people can express themselves equally or that personal commitments are equally binding. And not all models of democracy meet this sort of criteria, such as those where some people are excluded from sitting in parliament, where speech is curtailed, or where votes are counted differently (it is often said, in Australia, that the Tasmanian vote counts for "more" than the New South Welsh vote because the representative/constituency ratio is smaller).

If this were the only or main set of criteria, then I think it might make sense to consider demotherapeia a type of democracy. This is the basis of calling some houses of review, where legislation is scrutinised but not where it is decided upon, as democratic, as well as various types of focus groups and citizens' juries who do not have the ability to make binding consequences. On the other hand, the lack of empowerment and decisiveness as some of the factors that make people describe them as un-democratic.

Collective deliberation, the common good, harmonious society

If democracy is about the collective identification and pursuit of the common good, then traditional models of democracy are mixed on how they perform. Some direct democracy models are justified as achieving this (such as Condorcet's "jury theorem" that the more people you ask the better answers you will get), or the idea of citizens' rights and the social contract, which can create harmonious and peaceful conditions. Other models simply don't focus on this area, looking primarily at the way that the power of the people can be used through institutions, and less about what outcomes are necessary to consider the model democratic.

Other models, such as deliberative democracy, focus heavily on how collective deliberation facilitates the common good, and is a bit more suspicious of procedure and structures to produce the right sort of outcomes.

Harmonious society is an expected outcome of demotherapeia, as is collective insight, but as with most theories in this area, the procedures don't directly engage with or ensure this. Whether the common good is an expected outcome or not might depend on how the people involved conceive of the "common good" as a discourse, because they might reject the idea of a universal metric for measuring it.

Distributed power

Maybe the most fundamental measure of democracy is distributed power: do the people have the power? I've sometimes heard the internet, or guns, as being "democratic" because they distributed power more equally to the people and begin to dissolve the elite vs everyday divide. I'm not personally a fan of this particular usage myself, but the emphasis of it is clear: the underlying requirement of democracy is distributed power.

On that front, some people champion direct democracy over representative democracy because it places the power more directly in the hands of the people, and away from elites, campaigns and intermediaries (or so they perceive). The opposing view is that direct democracy reduces deliberation and that representatives act as focal points, and that distributed power cannot be the be-all and end-all of democracy. However, there is always some appeal to the people having the power, without which no model can seemingly feasibly call itself democratic.

On the basis of personal commitments as the fundamental type of power, which is a power for each person over themselves placed into a context of collective reflection, I think that demotherapeia has distributed power - perhaps one of the most distributed models.

So is it democratic?

The short answer is that I don't know. The arguments against are that:

• it doesn't have votes, elections or representatives
• it doesn't have a process for directly making collective decisions
• it doesn't define or protect rights

On the other hand, the arguments for are that:

• it is necessarily a collective activity
• it follows an established procedure
• it is inclusive, equal and discursive
• it aims for collective outcomes, harmonious society and the common good
• it gives power to the people

On that basis, I am very happy to describe it as "democratic", and I am also fully understanding of those who don't. As I said earlier, there is no consensus on what democracy actually is, and I don't expect that by proposing a new model there will be consensus regarding whether it is a democracy or not. I think some people consider deliberative democracy to be something other than democracy, though the theorists in the field - some of the people who have studied the concept of democracy most intensely - very clearly call it a democracy.

But the name does not change what the thing is, though it can easily change whether some people are more or less accepting of it without a critical review. And this, I think, reinforces the utility of the process, which is to deconstruct such terms to see where and how they hold power and what they justify. If demotherapeia is "deserving" of the name "democracy", then it comes packaged with a set of justifications for its use that many will readily accept without much further scrutiny, whereas if it comes presented as distinctly different it might be justifiably dismissed without examination. This is the power of words, and why something like demotherapeia is necessary at all.