It seems unlikely that green growth alone (or absolute decoupling, measures of efficiency) will be sufficient to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in time [1]. In order to not spend the world’s carbon budget in the coming decade(s), it seems we will also need to change our behavior (measures of sufficiency). However, it is very difficult for political parties to advocate such measures - and to properly inform the general public - out of a fear of electoral loss. Yet the longer we wait with effective GHG emission reductions, the more impactful such measures will need to be. The solution this text proposes is an (online-first) preferendum, in which a government or parliament polls the broad population about which of a set of additional measures, compiled ideally through a deliberative process, they would prefer to see taken up (first). The platform would provide background information for each of the measures, estimates of their GHG-reduction capacity, financial cost, and social and broader ecological impact. Citizens select several measures with varying ‘ambition levels’, ideally until the targets are met - or, agree to pay the price for not doing so; translated into e.g. GHG emission rights.
This sample application demonstrates such a platform: https://ecorendum.be/
Some notes:
It is widely known that, and understood why, it is so difficult for the party-political democratic system to effectively deal with climate change and similar problems: problems that manifest themselves on a long timescale, yet their mitigation would pose a (deemed) short-term sacrifice. No political party dares to take such action, fearing electoral loss, instead postponing the solution to future generations or at least legislatures; being tempted to bet on technological innovation (decoupling; measures of ‘efficiency’ rather than ‘sufficiency’); or free-riding. At best, green parties will attempt to describe, ‘package’ the solutions as desirable; focus on the upsides; e.g. cleaner air.
Politicians are not correctly informing the electorate on the severity of the problem and the impact of the necessary measures to deal with them; hushing citizens with promises of future innovation, downplaying the problem, or focusing on other political topics. Neither are commercial media, social media or mainstream entertainment (exceptions aside, it’s not what generates most revenue). Citizens, especially older generations who no longer receive an education and are fixed in their worldview, are thus in no way forced to acknowledge the severity of the problem. As long as there are political parties or factions which bring a message that everything will be alright, people vote for this perceived legitimate option. Again, the only way out of this seems to be either to try to ‘tempt’ voters by focusing on upsides - which becomes a less realistic story every day and typically only works for certain (‘nature-minded’) groups - or by appealing to reason and morality. It doesn’t help that ecological issues are ‘politicized’, seen as a left-wing issue (some might say this is rather arbitrary; one can certainly imagine reasons why it could have been a right-wing issue).
It becomes increasingly clear that the party-political system and their traditional solutions (betting largely on future innovation and/or trying to ease voters into accepting measures by portraying them as desirable) have not resulted in the necessary rate of change [1:1] and seem unlikely to in the near future [2].
The ironic and poignant result of this inability to act decisively now, is that the measures which will need to be taken will likely only get ever more drastic and thus less ‘politically realistic’. It seems likely that this will result in increasing polarization, with on the one hand scientists and climate and ecological activists demanding ever more extreme measures to try and stay within identified boundaries; on the other hand people who refuse to accept these ever more extreme measures, provoked by (typically conservative) politicians and social media bubbles. It seems almost unavoidable that this will result in increasing social unrest, even in the coming decade, as we lose ever more hope of still being able to avoid the worst.
The only way out of such a game theoretical suboptimal equilibrium is to change the rules of the game. It is typically precisely the role of a government to change the rules. But what if the executive and legislative powers in themselves are trapped in a stalemate position? Then the judicial power can still come in. This is precisely what’s happening. After decades of cases against individual polluters, recently, in several countries, more and more cases [3] are started and won against governments (started by the ‘Urgenda’ case in The Netherlands) and large companies - giving politicians an ‘alibi’: they had no choice but to impose stringent measures, they were forced by court. Unfortunately, this is an extremely slow process, and not guaranteed of success: in Belgium, the ‘Klimaatzaak’ case lasted 6 years and even though the Belgian governments were convicted, they were not given any binding targets, and a year later, they seem to largely ignore the ruling.
It is being thoroughly debated that deliberative forms of democracy, ideally with randomly selected citizens, either on an ad-hoc basis (such as la Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat (CCC) in France) or on a permanent, institutional basis (such as the futures assemblies proposed by e.g. William McAskill [4] and others), might be the democratic alternative which would depolarize, depoliticize these topics. Indeed, the results of the CCC, along with many other examples [5] have shown that such assemblies can come up with a coherent, sufficient, realistic set of proposals supported by all slices of the population.
However, it is becoming clear that the bottleneck resides not in identifying effective solutions, but in implementing them. Academics largely agree that the role of deliberative panels should be only to _propose _solutions, ideally raise public awareness and broaden the public discourse. The deliberative body does not have sufficient legitimacy for the proposed measures to be binding, even when organized by a country or region’s executive or legislative powers. The constitutions of some countries like Belgium even explicitly forbid non-elected citizens to create legislation. It is typically agreed upon therefore that the output of the deliberative process (the proposed measures) should be passed back to the legislative and/or executive powers - elected politicians, who do have the necessary legitimacy to decide on their implementation. However, it turns out that it is far from certain that measures will get implemented. For example, after the CCC, even though president Macron proposed beforehand he would implement the measures ‘without filter’, only 15 out of 149 proposals were taken up without modification, 55 after being modified or weakened, while the remaining 79 or 55% were not applied (situation 2/04/2021) [6].
The problem remains the same: when the proposed measures are transferred back into the party-political system, the well-known flaws described above result in them being largely ignored. It turns out that party politicians still assume that, even though an informed representation of the country’s inhabitants were in favor of the measures, the uninformed general public will not necessarily agree to blindly defer their democratic power to them (a problem well described by, among others, Christina Lafont in ‘Democracy without shortcuts’). Although there is some theoretical evidence that measures proposed by a well-organized citizens’ assembly are more easily accepted than the same measures getting proposed top-down, and there is some initial empirical evidence which backs this up [7], there is reason to believe that indeed, party politicians’ fear for electoral loss is not entirely ungrounded. After all, no matter how small the loss, in the party-political zero-sum game, the best strategy for all parties is to avoid the risk.
So how to get the broad public informed, supportive of the necessary measures; not just the randomly selected citizens who participated in the assembly?
Whether a set of possible measures was compiled through deliberative, party-political or technocratic means, this text proposes to put the measures to a vote to the entire population - as a form of direct, participatory democracy. Not as a typical referendum (e.g. “Do you accept this set of 149 measures produced by the climate assembly, yes or no?”), but as a preferendum or multiple-choice referendum. In a preferendum, the enquirer polls the preference of the enquiree for a set of options; in this case, all or a subset of the proposed ecological measures. This concept was recently proposed as part of the solution to solve the climate measure problem by Belgian historian and one of the world’s leading experts on deliberative democracy, David Van Reybrouck [8].
A preferendum combines the advantages of representative, deliberative and direct/participatory democracy. With representative democracy, it shares the ‘one person, one vote’ principle. With deliberative democracy it shares the fact that citizens must inform themselves; both regarding the severity of the problem (the sort of measures needed to meet targets), as well as regarding possible (and impossible) solutions. It also avoids (party-political) polarization and encourages nuance. Finally, it has the advantage of direct democracy that citizens feel directly involved and heard in politics, and that it is difficult to question the legitimacy of the outcome.
For politicians, preferenda also offer large advantages. Inherently, the preferendum informs them of the relative support for different proposed measures. As described above, it takes two difficult tasks out of their hands – informing the populace of the severity of the challenge, and imposing the required set of strict measures – all without risking electoral loss.
In his original text [8:1], Van Reybrouck proposes to offer a subset (e.g. 20) of the entire set of measures to each participating citizen, so as to not overload people with dozens of measures (e.g. the 149 proposed by the CCC). In his proposal, citizens would rate and rank these measures: for each measure they would indicate the degree to which they ‘agree’ with them, e.g. ‘strongly disagree’, ‘somewhat disagree’, ‘neutral’, ‘somewhat agree’, ‘strongly agree’ (rating) and they would be able to select their top 4 priorities (ranking).
I fear that this way, citizens would simply select those measures which would have the least impact on their personal life - and that these are not necessarily the ones which would most effectively reduce GHG emissions. This seems to be confirmed through a recent poll performed by Kantar Public among 9000 adults in 9 Western countries [9] - for instance, citizens think it is very important to ‘reduce waste and increase recycling’, ‘stop deforestation’ or ‘protect endangered animal species’, which are all rather abstract, while almost nobody thinks it is important to ‘reduce meat consumption’, ‘ban fossil fuels vehicles’, ‘increase the price of products that do not respect environmental criteria’, ‘reduce travel by planes’ or ‘favor the use of public transport over cars’ - which, in general, are precisely the sorts of behavioral changes which would most effectively, surely, reduce GHG emissions, for the lowest public cost.
Additionally, there is no guarantee that the selected measures would add up to the required GHG reduction target; cheaper measures are not necessarily preferred; and there would be no penalty to choosing solutions which would have a high environmental or social cost, or a high degree of uncertainty.
I believe all of these concerns can and should thus be tackled, by a) estimating the GHG emission reductions of each measure; b) estimating the financial cost, social impact and broader ecological impact such as nitrogen pollution; and c) stimulating respondents to select sufficient measures in order to meet internationally agreed upon targets (possibly not only GHG reduction targets, but also other social and environmental targets), or clearly lay out the consequences for not doing so.
Like the organization of citizens’ assemblies [10], the initiative should be taken by the government or the parliament, while it should be executed by an independent group of experts, lead by a varied coordination group and scrutinized by a supervisory panel including prominent citizens, a wide range of experts (legal/political, communication, security and privacy, IT/UX, experts in deliberative democracy,...) and ideally participants of the preceding citizens’ assembly.
The extent to which the constitution or legislation with regards to referenda can be applied would differ by country and must be further researched. As a starting point, every citizen who is otherwise allowed, or obliged, to vote, should also do so in the preferendum. Obligating the participation in the preferendum (especially when voting is not obligatory) has both advantages and disadvantages which should be weighed per country, based on its history, previous experiences with referenda, etc.
(Steps 5 and 6 can continue throughout the rest of the procedure)
All users’ results are anonymously (yet if possible and legal, along with some metadata such as age, education level, region,...) stored in a database: the measures and ambition level users selected, or, if they did not meet the primary target, the penalty they instead agreed to pay. This allows ranking measures relatively in terms of approval rating or acceptance. It sketches the willingness of citizens to take the necessary measures for the common interest; even when many citizens ultimately claim they are not willing to take sufficient or even any measures and, after being explained the implications, instead pay the consequences.
In order for citizens to accept both the exercise and the set of proposed measures, several precautions must be taken:
A legitimate question is whether the public will accept the top-down choice of the subject of the preferendum - as proposed here, the selection of measures to mitigate climate change, while limiting broader ecological impact and ensuring social justice. E.g.: why not a selection of measures to prevent migrants from entering the country?
As argued by MacAskill [4:1] and others, a possible solution is to focus on the rights of future generations, who do not yet have a voice/vote. Second, the form of preferendum as described here is particularly useful when certain targets must be met by combining different measures; maintaining a broad overview of the impact on a broader ‘system’, in this case the ecosystem. This is particularly difficult to achieve through any other traditional, non-digital, democratic tool.
Finally, another reason why this subject lends itself well for this kind of preferendum is that, in European member states and possibly other states, the targets have been imposed by the European or another higher level of government: the target itself is not so much a political option, it is a given, and clearly, the typical party political tools on the national level have proven to be insufficient to meet them.
Of course, if this exercise proves to be a successful precedent, it could be used to achieve other kinds of (ecological) targets.
If, as is most often the case, the preferendum gets initiated by the government (or the president or prime minister), on a subject of their choosing, it can be seen as effectively bypassing the scrutiny of, and possibility of opposition in, the parliament.
A possible answer relates to the above remark concerning the choice of subject. If the subject is imposed, an a-priori given not subject to political debate, at least this decreases the weight of the counter-argument. Additionally, nothing obstructs the parliament from questioning the government’s decision to organize the preferendum or its high-level form. The rest of the implementation should be left to independent instances.
The typical argument against e-democratic innovation is that it risks leaving out a large portion of the populace who are either unable or less able to participate online. This will certainly remain a valid argument for several decades to come, and systematically responding to it would be the subject of many studies in itself and is outside the scope of this text.
However, in the West and particularly in Europe where this proposal is most relevant, the argument is decreasing in validity every passing year as the percentage of people with access to (cheap) mobile devices and the internet increase, along with the number of people getting accustomed to working online. The question then becomes whether the (organizational) challenge posed by reaching and involving those still left out still outweighs the enormous potential of this sort of extremely effective new form of democracy. Is the cost of not leveraging these e-democratic tools not getting much higher than that of taking the necessary organizational measures to involve them? For example, The Netherlands have statistics of access to the internet at home and daily usage rates. Even in the age group of 65-75, 96,3% have access to the internet at home and 79,3% use the internet daily. At the age group of 75+, this drops to 79,6% and 52,4%, respectively. In total, 3% of the population does not have internet access at home. That amounts to about 400.000 adults in The Netherlands.
Since every citizen who is allowed or obligated to vote would get a written call to participate in the vote by postal mail, just like it would happen during regular elections, the argument that certain groups of the populace are difficult to reach also does not apply. Citizens are assumed to by default vote online, authenticating ideally through their id card or some other national way to securely and uniquely identify (possibly combined with more convenient ways to authenticate afterwards; such as email/password, facebook, etc). The off-line alternative is opt-in, and only for these citizens, an information brochure must be published and accommodation must be foreseen - presumably using the same infrastructure and organizational channels as used during the regular parliamentary elections.
Let us not forget that one reason why people have difficulties finding their way online, is because often, web applications are extremely badly designed - not in the least government websites, which citizens typically have to interact with. Nowadays however, developers have sufficient experience with UX (user experience) design to make the experience as easy and frictionless as possible. Much of the preparation (educating people how to use the tool) must also only be done only once and can then be re-used or at least best practices and expertise can be shared. With such numbers of users, it should be possible to provide the absolute best possible user experience.
Let us also keep in mind that the proposed solution should not be perfect, it need only be better than the current party-democratic system - which is rapidly steering our society towards the brink.
Regardless, this remains a large challenge and potential achilles’ heel, which must be thoroughly researched and possible risks mitigated.
The representative democracy is typically skeptical of handing over her power. Although the ‘deliberative wave’ probably cannot be stopped anymore, direct democracy is yet a step further. Getting executive or parliamentary power to resort to this kind of new democratic tool would require two things.
First, the current representative-democratic powers must be convinced that it is in their benefit to resort to this new tool. It becomes ever clearer that the alternatives are rather bleak. As explained above, not taking the required measures today risks causing more and more societal polarization, and the measures to take tomorrow will get ever more extreme. The sooner measures can be taken, the easier. And in order not to suffer electoral loss by taking the required measures of sufficiency, this tool allows to ‘outsource’ them.
Even so, for various reasons beyond the scope of this text, it is unlikely that politicians will choose to resort to this experimental tool when they are not sure of broad support - when citizens are not demanding for it. The time for these tools is now. The reason why people aren’t asking for them is first of all because people generally still associate democracy with elections - not with deliberative or direct alternatives. It is the task of various actors in society to popularize these alternative democratic concepts, e.g.:
Activists, civil society groups and public intellectuals should, backed by all the above, lobby at elected politicians and the government, and pave the way as much as possible.
Ideally, this concept would need a lot more research on various domains, as described below. However, unfortunately, the time we need new democratic tools to solve the question of how to implement measures of ‘sufficiency’ is now. The West is spending the world’s remaining carbon budget - and deteriorating the environment - quickly, and with every passing year, remaining hope decreases and chances for extreme polarization increase. That is why I believe we must advance on both fronts at the same time; trying to maximize effect while minimizing the risk of creating negative precedents.
Several fields related to this proposal could use extensive theoretic and especially empirical research. The academic field of deliberative democracy has been booming over the past decade and the past years particularly, experiments and adoption are increasing exponentially (although set back by the Covid pandemic). But in recent years the field seems to have especially come to understand its limitations, thanks to the work of e.g. Lafont, and hence, thought leaders like Van Reybrouck started to shift their attention to possible ways to resolve the issues through direct democracy. A few possible research topics that come to mind - although far from exhaustive:
Of course, any real-life experiments would count as invaluable empirical research projects - like the CCC has been in France for deliberative democracy. Identically, while practically applying these concepts, using the best knowledge at that time and only if high quality is guaranteed, any of these real-life preferenda should be carefully followed (and guided) by academics. As such, experiments do not necessarily have to be executed by governments. Possible real-life experiments initiated by non-elected bodies could include:
As described in the ‘Adoption’ section, these sorts of democratic renewal can only get adopted if they - aside from being well backed up by research - are demanded by the broad population. They will have no legitimacy except when organized by legislative or executive powers, who will not do so without clear support from their voters. As described above, all societal actors believing in this concept can play their role in raising public awareness around this new form of democracy - one worthy of the 21st century.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab842a ↩︎ ↩︎
https://reporterre.net/Convention-pour-le-climat-seules-10-des-propositions-ont-ete-reprises-par-le-gouvernement ↩︎
http://www.odoxa.fr/sondage/mesures-de-convention-citoyenne-seduisent-francais-a-lexception-notable-110-km-h/ ↩︎
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2021/10/08/geef-burgers-echte-invloed-op-het-klimaatbeleid-met-het-preferendum-a4061204 ↩︎ ↩︎
https://kantar.turtl.co/story/public-journal-04/page/1 ↩︎ ↩︎
https://researchportal.vub.be/en/publications/deliberative-minipublics-has-made-it-to-mainstream-politics-a-dis ↩︎
https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html ↩︎
Thanks for writing this!
From your source 1 (italics mine):
"We conclude that large rapid absolute reductions of resource use and GHG emissions cannot be achieved through observed decoupling rates, hence decoupling needs to be complemented by sufficiency-oriented strategies and strict enforcement of absolute reduction targets. More research is needed on interdependencies between wellbeing, resources and emissions."
This seems like an obvious mistake in reasoning, where the lack of evidence of observed decoupling rates is taken as evidence that decoupling rates could not be higher.
It seems to me that much more could be gained by actually being serious about decoupling (i.e. driving technological change at scale) than by voluntary or politically feasible sufficiency measures.
At this point, almost no country has made serious efforts to decouple and the very few that have (Sweden, UK) have been quite successful.
That's correct, but wouldn't you say that looking at this empirical data can give a sense of how realistic it is that in the next decade(s) we will make a sharp turn for the better? I think this report of the EEB certainly makes a fair case that we won't. Even if you don't agree with the conclusion of the paper, it's a bit easy to dismiss all the data (and the neutral, transparent way it was selected) along with it.
I really wish I could (still) believe that absolute decoupling alone will suffice. May I ask where you get your optimism from? Of course there can never be proof either way, but all I read and hear stems me ever more pessimistic... I've read McAfee, Gates and in Belgium Maarten Boudry on the subject, but I don't find their case reassuring, rather the contrary (read my reviews here and here).
In short; sure, absolute decoupling exists and must be (continued to be) pursued as quickly as possible. But the only question that's relevant is: will it be enough, in time, with low enough risk, so as to not deplete the remaining carbon budget? Every year that passes where we deplete 35 Gt of the 300-800 Gt remaining budget to stay below 1,5°-2° with some degree of certainty, leaves less room for a positive answer...
How much more data, how many more of the linked meta-studies, how many more alarming IPCC reports do we need before we admit that we also need to urgently take measures of sufficiency - especially heeding the precautionary principle?
Either way, also 'technological' solutions will have negative impact on citizens or the environment. Take for instance installing wind turbines, utility-scale pipelines,... A preferendum could help citizens choose between such alternatives too. It is entirely agnostic about which kinds of solutions get chosen - the only thing that matters is that, finally, non-action is no longer a valid option.
Finally, maybe not every country will need this soort of tool. Indeed there are a couple of countries where the regular party-political system seems to be doing fairly well. In Germany and The Netherlands, the newly elected coalitions/governments certainly make impressive promises (it still remains to be seen whether there will be enough citizen buy-in as to also execute them). But the majority of countries is not doing so well, as quite clearly tracked by https://climateactiontracker.org/. The country where I live, Belgium, is especially suffering from party-political polarization which is completely blocking effective climate policy, and I honestly don't see any other democratic way out, aside from this sort of tool.
Decoupling as a large-scale technological transformations requires (i) time and (ii) dedicated effort (public investment, private investment, induced technological change, etc..). Such effort has, for the most part, not existed for a long time so looking at historical data is not evidence of likely future rates. (I also think that when a scientific paper makes a logical mistake in the abstract that one should be pretty concerned about the quality of the paper, overall).
I think a better proxy for future rates of decoupling would, for example, be looking at how the changes in the cost of renewables have changed decarbonization trajectories (and rather massively reduced expected future emissions, we discuss this a bit here). Overall, it seems quite conceivable that the recent uptick in policy attention on climate will lead to much faster rates of decoupling than previously observed.
Irrespective of how optimistic or pessimistic one is on decoupling, the fact that the US and the EU are at most 15% of future emissions limits the potential of sufficiency unless one thinks sufficiency will be an attractive idea to the rest of the world, for the most part much energy-poorer than the US and EU. On the positive flipside this also means that failing at sufficiency / stricter domestic targets is not necessarily that relevant given that high-income countries have leverage on emissions far beyond their domestic emissions (more on this here).
It seems that you (and I suppose many with you) have accepted global warming of considerably more than 2°C, where I am still (in your view, I assume, naïvely) looking for ways to avoid that.
I think it's striking how most people seem to treat our current behavior and desires and habits as a given, an unchangeable fact (this for instance also struck me reading Gates' book); whereas I try to see the laws of physics, and its current 'best effort' implications regarding a maximum number of PPM of GHG in the atmosphere, as a given - and look for ways to stay below those thresholds using societal parameters - in this case, democracy.
Clearly in order to reach net zero emissions at some point, we need technological innovation and market forces. But if we want to stay well below 2°, preferably at 1,5°, waiting for those won't cut it: during the coming decade(s), we would spend all of our remaining carbon budget to stay within those boundaries with some degree of certainty. Also, for 2050, all scenarios I've seen for my country Belgium include quite substantial behavioral changes on top of all (hoped for) technological changes. E.g.: https://klimaat.be/doc/climate-neutral-belgium-by-2050-report.pdf
In order to sufficiently reduce our emissions the coming decade(s), while working as quickly as possible on the technological advancements, we need behavioral changes. Sure enough, through current party-political means, this is unthinkable, as outlined above. Hence I propose here an alternative democratic tool which could help achieve doing what's necessary. In principle, I currently don't yet see a reason why this couldn't work, on the time scale required: within a couple of years. It's nothing more than an idea, a concept, for which I believe the time is ripe, which can spread extremely quickly. Technologically, it's really not complex to implement, and practically it is also feasible. But of course, this is why I'm posting it here: it needs a lot more research and thinking, there are undoubtedly pitfalls which I haven't yet thought of.
Indeed, every country will have to go through such a phase (presumably several iterations, e.g. every two or three years). By spreading the word of positive precedents, citizens and activists in all countries can demand them to be copied. It's all a matter of spreading an idea. Even in autocratic regimes, the power of citizens is growing.
Although I understand that in the long run, the emissions still to be emitted by China, India and presumably large parts of Africa, through vast amounts of coal plants existing and still under construction, emissions this decade of 'the West' are on the same scale as those emitted by China and India - of the remaining carbon budget we're depleting at 35 GT per year, we take an equal share. And given the Western living standard, it's far easier (not to mention, given our historical weight in the problem, fairer, cfr. Hickel, 2020 [1]) for us to limit, through behavioral and consumption changes, e.g. the 15 tons/year CO2-footprint of the average American, than it would be to reduce the 7 tons/year CO2-footprint of a Chinese person through the same means.
It seems to me, in the long run, extremely, unthinkably unwise, for only just one human generation, to jeopardize the near-term future of humanity, the wellbeing of countless other conscious beings, and the stability of ecosystems in the coming decades, centuries, millennia, or longer. Just one generation has to make a 'sacrifice' (at least, something initially perceived as such, and promoted as such by certain political parties, lobbyists and other stakeholders) to stand a chance at staying well below 2° warming.
Of course, we need to let go of the gigantic misconceptions related to the effect of global warming on the economy, spread by Nordhaus et al (refuted by e.g. Keen, 2020 [2]), if we want to take seriously the importance of staying well below 2° warming...
Aside from the well described risks of more than 1,5° warming on the ecosystem, a factor which I believe is largely neglected is the potential social unrest caused by increasing polarization, precisely between those who want to make the behavioral changes to reduce our emissions the coming decade(s) and those who don't... I believe new democratic tools, focussed on deliberation and participation, are the perfect antidode to such social unrest (and many other maladies of our time: reduced trust in politicians and democracy, general increasing polarization, the rise of fake news, etc) - read e.g. 'Against Elections' by Van Reybrouck, mentioned in OP.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(20)30196-0/fulltext
[2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2020.1807856