Introduction: Democracy’s Response to Disaster. Assessing the Icelandic experience Jón Ólafsson, Bifröst University Iceland: October 2008. For Icelanders, it was as if the ultimate nightmare had suddenly replaced everyday reality. It was surely an unexpected scenario, and for many people who in the weeks and months preceding the crash had been worried about their savings, a scenario that until then had sometimes been taken as an example of something that obviously could not possibly happen. Three financial institutions had collapsed, and the consequences were enormous. To begin with no one could even guess what would happen next. For the first few days in early October only the total worthlessness of the country’s currency, the Icelandic króna, was clear. Icelanders abroad felt stranded, their debit and credit cards useless, many were suddenly out of cash and had to rely on friends and acquaintances for basic supplies. In Iceland, where most homeowners had mortgages to pay that were either inflation indexed or linked to some foreign currency, the future was uncertain. Personal bankruptcy seemed inevitable to many of those who had used the lucrative loan opportunities available in the years preceding the crash, when banks and other financial institutions were able to lend money to home and car buyers indexed against a foreign currency with much lower interest than other Icelandic loans. Due to the artificial strength of the króna, currency loans meant lighter payments, which allowed people to also to borrow bigger sums than they would perhaps have done otherwise. The prospects for the Icelandic state were analogous: Given all the debts incurred by Icelandic banks, and the inevitable 1 decrease of state income due to their collapse, national bankruptcy seemed very likely, to many foreign media even inevitable.1 1. From a banking crisis to democratic renewal This piece is not about the financial and economic situation in Iceland. One must add of course that things did improve rather more quickly than anyone would have guessed at first. Quite some literature is available on Iceland’s econmomic and social collapse and resurrection.2 But the crisis evoked not only horror and despair and some of the public reaction had deeper consequences than the financial difficulties as such. The moral outrage felt by many Icelanders in the fall of 2008 was manifested in street demonstrations, grassroots activism and, especially, in an avalanche of blogs and communication on social media. The moral outrage was of course partly a result of personal situations that seemed hopelessly unfair. It was hard for individuals to accept as a part of the risk they thought they had taken with mortgages and other loans, the doubling or tripling of their personal debt. Over the next few years it would become one of the most difficult and poisonous tasks for the government to deal with these debt issues. But moral outrage was not limited to what had happened to people personally. It was directed at the political elites who had dominated the scene the previous years and decades. It led to two kinds of demands, frequently heard in the public meetings organized by grassroots movements and seen on blogs and in newspaper articles: The first was the concrete demand that many key officials Michael Mandel, Iceland goes bankrupt. Bloomberg Businessweek, posted 10 October 2008. Available at http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/economicsunbound/archives/2008/10/iceland_goe s_ba.html. 2 See also Stuckler and Basu 2013, p. 57-76 (“God Bless Iceland”). 1 2 should resign or be thrown out of office. There was nothing particularly new or unusual about such demands, they are standard for what might be expected in times of unrest or situations of crisis. On the other hand, there were demands pointed at the political system itself and linked to the creation of social movements. One might think of them as addressing political accountability in general—they included the demand for “more democracy” which may not reveal articulated thinking of any sort, yet was followed by much discussion on the merits of direct democracy, more involvement and public participation in decision-making and the use of deliberative rather than purely aggregative methods to reach conclusions about important issues.3 Concurrent with demands for more democracy a frequent accusation pointed at the political leadership (to the extent of becoming a cliché) was that political leaders had “broken the social contract”. What the social contract was, or had been, was not very well articulated either, but overall this idea presented an early analysis of the causes of the crisis: Since leading politicians had entered into toxic relationships with business and financial elites, their service had shifted away from the public interest and toward private interest. This was no conspiracy theory but in fact a critical look at a development that had been for anyone to see. It had become common wisdom that the big companies, especially Iceland’s international banks, were vital for the country’s well-being. Therefore, it was simply a given that government policies should favor big business. But a side effect was a clearly felt drainage of power from government to business. Where government ministers may at one time have had unnatural leverage over business enterprises in Iceland, the situation had been reversed. Now certain 3 Björn Þorsteinsson, Lýðræði í verki á öllum sviðum. Fréttablaðið, 19 November 2010. 3 powerful business and finance leaders were in a position to have decisive influence on government policy.4 Before the crisis critical voices could certainly be heard. Some people, mostly from academic circles, had voiced concerns. But the impact of such criticisms was small, if any.5 After the crisis, however, things had changed completely. Now boastful reports of international victories of the “Viking-financiers” were ridiculed. Reports and assessments made before the crisis were made fun of and academic research that purported to show and even theorize the management methods used by the Icelandic enterprises was quickly abandoned. 6 Demanding “more democracy” was a natural consequence of the late recognition of overly strong influences of big business. The final months of 2008 were thus characterized by calls for political renewal, where the demand for more democracy was a natural consequence of the notion that a social contract had somehow been broken, and that the political system needed an overhaul. As the króna gradually reemerged from the abyss of worthlessness (seriously weakened though, and locked in capital restrictions), national debt was recalculated and the government struggled to look as if it was coping with the situation—arguing that “changing horses midstream” was a bad idea—the new post-crisis politics started to take shape.7 4 Report of the Special Investigation Commission (SIC), vol. 8, p. 153. Report of the Special Investigation Commission (SIC), vol. 8, p. 225-226. 6 Two documents were often ridiculed in this context for expressing exactly the banal and empty self-promoting ideas of the the former ruling class were a report published by the Prime Minister’s office earlier in 2008 on branding the Icelandic Image (Ímynd Íslands: Styrkur staða stefna. Reykjavík: Forsætisráðuneytið, 2008) and a 2006 report created by the Icelandic Chamber of Commerce with a future vision for Iceland (Ísland 2015, Reykjavík: Viðskiptaráð Íslands, 2006). In both reports it was taken for granted that Iceland had trough its success shown the superiority of management methods practised by leading Icelandic entrepreneurs. 7 The metaphor was used continuously by those who argued that the Geir Haarde’s government of the Independence party and the Social Democratic Alliance should not resign even though largely blamed for the crisis. 5 4 In early 2009 it became ever clearer that the grassroots movement that had emerged in the fall was creating a wave of protests that even seemed likely at some point to be getting violent. As the parliament prepared to continue its session in late January the protests grew ever louder. When the first meetings were held, huge crowds gathered in front of the parliament making great noise with pots and pans, loud enough to make it difficult to conduct debates inside the parliament building. At the same time dissent grew within one of the two coalition parties, which eventually led to the collapse of the government on January 26th 2009.8 The events in January, ending with the collapse of the government have since been referred to as the “pots and pans revolution”. It was of course no revolution in the ordinary sense since it brought no revolutionaries to power, but it certainly had some key characteristics of a revolution. Most importantly since the movement that had been most influential in the removal of the government was a broad grassroots movement with demands and slogans that went not less towards the philosophical as towards the practical it fully makes sense to talk of these events as revolutionary and refer to them as a revolution. The movement demanded that the terms of the political debate itself be changed, not only leaders.9 In spite of its success the grassroots movement, having brought down a government and a few key officials as well, did not emerge as a unified force. Although the general thrust of its demands was clear—More accountability, more direct democracy, more representativeness, more participation and a 8 9 See Micahel Lewis 2010, p. 223-225. Eva Heiða Önnudóttir and Ólafur Þ. Harðarson 2011, p. 427-432. 5 serious effort to renew the “social contract”—it didn’t quite manage to articulate the underlying thinking so as to bring about any permanent or even tangible changes in the political arena. The revolution brought about parliamentary elections, which had historic results in that the parties of the left won a majority for the first time in the country’s history, but this change failed to result in producing a different working environment or different conceptions of democratic policy- and decision-making. It did, however, make certain developments possible. First of all, the demand for a renewed social contract directly influenced ideas about constitutional renewal, which had been discussed for a long time. Second, politicians felt it necessary to work more with local authorities and NGO’s on involving the electorate in policy-making, especially as regards identifying basic or core values to guide further prioritizing and decision-making.10 In what follows I will discuss briefly the various initiatives and attempts to involve individual citizens in political planning and decision-making in the immediate post-crisis era. I will argue that although these efforts are on the whole interesting and praiseworthy they have failed to bring about any significant or serious change in the conduct of politics in Iceland. But hurdles are instructive and one can only learn from failures. I conclude in this paper that there are two main reasons for these failures. The first is methodological. Projects, such as the revision of the constitution by the Constitutional Council, were begun without proper foresight and preparation. Crucial decisions about goals as well as the task itself (e.g. whether to write a new constitution or revise See e.g. Lýðræðis- og umbótastefna. Policy statements for Reykjavík municipal elections by Dagur B. Eggertsson who lead the Social Democratic Alliance. Available from http://www.dagur.is/2010/05/14/231/. 10 6 the current one) were left to the council to decide. The second is political. The parties of the left, the Social Democratic Alliance and the Left-Green movement seemed at first to have a solid majority, and therefore to be in a position strong enough to achieve the goal of changing political deliberation and consultation practices which, although not a part of the formal agreement of the two parties, was a much discussed issue when the new government established itself as a majority government after the elections in April 2009. It soon became apparent that the conditions for such a change were not as favorable as it seemed at first, and therefore many of the bigger reform issues that the government proposed, as well as the more complicated tasks of dealing with the serious consequences for families and homeowners caused by the country’s economic collapse, were not solved by creating alliances outside government ranks. Most governmental initiatives to achieve reform through wide-ranging public consultation were fiercely criticized by the opposition, especially by the conservative Independence party. What began in February 2009 as promising efforts to renew the political culture in Iceland ended in at least a partial failure as the term of the government ended, in the spring of 2013. 2. Experimenting with democracy 2009–2013 Even though the policies introduced by the leftist government may not have resulted in the reforms expected by many of those who participated in protest action, blogged or wrote opinion pieces in the newspapers in early 2009, a variety of new approaches to democratic consultation and participation were introduced on state and municipal level. The government actively supported these approaches both directly and indirectly, and they represented sincere 7 attempts to increase the importance of participation in public decision-making. I will now give a brief overview of the main democratic projects. The constitution Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, Prime minister from February 2009 until May 2013 had, previously proposed creating a Constitutional Assembly to rewrite the Icelandic constitution.11 It was a generally accepted view that considerable rewriting was necessary, since the text of the constitution was still too much a 19th Century relic. The constitution contains formulations, articles and provisions whose meaning is obscure without historical commentary. In light of the calls for a renewal of the “social contract” one of the tasks immediately agreed upon by the new coalition was to create a Constitutional Assembly to revise the constitution.12 The Constitutional Assembly was elected in 2010 but due to technical flaws in how the elections were conducted, the Supreme Court invalidated the elections.13 The Parliament then reappointed the candidates who had been elected to the Constitutional Assembly to form the Constitutional Council. The Council was given the official task of preparing a bill with a revised constitution and asked to consider a number of issues in particular, including the organization of the legislative- and executive powers, the role and position of the President, the independence of the courts and provisions about elections and the constituency system.14 The council submitted a constitutional bill to the Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, 13 September 1996 Breytt kjördæmaskipan – forsenda framfara. Personal blog. Available at http://www.althingi.is/johanna/greinar/safn/000010.shtml. 12 Samstarfsyfirlýsing ríkisstjórnar Samfylkingarinnar og Vinstrihreyfingarinnar – græns framboðs, p. 14. Available from http://www.stjornarrad.is/media/Skjol/rikisstjorn_8mai09.pdf. 13 Ákvörðun Hæstaréttar 25 January 2011. Available from http://www.haestirettur.is/control/index?pid=1109. 14 The Role of the Constitutional Council. Available from http://stjornlagarad.is/english/. 11 8 parliament in 2011 but parliament failed to pass the new constitution before its term ended in April 2013.15 The National Forums In early 2009 a group of people mainly from business and industry formed a movement—the so-called Anthill movement—to promote alternative means for policy-making based on the general idea, adapted from the bestselling book The Wisdom of Crowds, that harnessing the “wisdom of the many” could help articulate the common good beyond what traditional politicians were capable of.16 The Anthill movement convened the first National Forum in November of 2009. Its task was to express and rank the core values of Icelandic society. The methodology came mainly from goal- and value-setting strategies used in the private sector, when employees of a company, or employees and stakeholders, are invited to participate in the choice of values, main goals and priorities of a company or corporation. The government emulated the Anthill method in a second National Forum in 2010 whose task was to articulate basic values that should guide the revision of the constitution.17 Town meetings / Regional National Forums Soon after the new government took power it launched the so-called “2020 Moving Iceland Forward Initiative”. Its goal was to engage the public in longterm strategic planning to increase employment and quality of life in all regions See Thorvaldur Gylfason, Democracy on Ice: A Post-mortem of the Icelandic Constitution. openDemocracy 19 June 2013. Available from opendemocracy.net. 16 See the website of the first National Forum were these ideas are clearly stated: http://www.thjodfundur2009.is/thjodfundur/maurathufan/. 17 All basic information about the 2010 National Forum can be had from its website. Icelandic: http://www.thjodfundur2010.is; English: http://www.thjodfundur2010.is/english/. 15 9 of the country. Public consultation was again based on the methodology of the National Forum. Forums were held in the regions during 2010 using the structure and methods of the National Forum of 2009. The initiative upheld the core values selected by the participants of the National Forum as basic “national” values (honor, justice, respect), and its aim was to elicit policy statements and priority rankings, that could then be used in deciding on projects for the economic development in each area.18 The Icesave referenda According to the current Icelandic constitution the president has a partial veto power over legislation passed by the parliament. If the president refuses to sign the legislation it takes effect only temporarily but is to be put to a national referendum. In 2010 and 2011 the Icelandic parliament passed controversial bills ratifying agreements with the United Kingdom and Holland in which Iceland admitted responsibility for partially covering losses of individual owners of savings accounts in the British and Dutch branches of the collapsed bank Landsbankinn. The president, having received petitions from a considerable part of Icelandic voters, decided in both cases to refuse signing the bill.19 The latter refusal surprised many observers since in the meantime a greatly improved agreement had been reached and most specialists thought that Icelanders could hardly get a better deal. Both referenda resulted in a rejection of the proposed Conclusions of the 2020 – Moving Iceland Forward initiative. A report compiled by the Steering Committee, November 2010. Available from http://www.forsaetisraduneyti.is/media/2020/2020Moving-Iceland-Forward-Initiative.pdf 19 See declarations made by the president at the occasion of the first refusal 5 January 2010 (available at http://english.forseti.is/media/PDF/10_01_05_declaration_w_sign.pdf) and at the occasion of the second refusal 20 February 2011 (available from http://english.forseti.is/media/PDF/2011_02_20_icesave3_eng.pdf). 18 10 legislation. Many of those who opposed the presidential veto argued that the case was unsuitable for a referendum, since the content of the agreement as well as the economic consequences were too complicated for most people to understand fully. But when, after having twice had an agreement rejected by the public, the Icelandic government won its case against the British and the Dutch governments in the EFTA court and turned out not to be liable to pay the deposit guarantee to individual account holders, for some at least, it became less obvious that the public should not be consulted about complicated financial issues. The modern media initiative In the wake of the sensational publications of secret governmental documents by Wikileaks, a group of Icelanders who had been involved in various ways with the organization started lobbying in the Icelandic parliament that Iceland should take a step towards revolutionary legislation that would secure an unprecedented level of free speech protection for media and individuals.20 The initiative led to some interesting developments in the Parliament, which at first passed a resolution on special steps toward a new legislation on media freedom and freedom of expression stating that Iceland would aim at leading the way for other countries in this respect. The resolution was passed with a broad support in the parliament. Subsequent discussion about the consequences of the Wikileaks revelations created doubts among parliamentarians who eventually were unwilling to face the risk involved in taking the lead internationally in promoting freedom of speech.21 Smári McCarthy. Private interview, 14 May 2013. 138. löggjafarþing 2009–2010. Þskj. 688 – 383. mál.Tillaga til þingsályktunar um að Ísland skapi sér afgerandi lagalega sérstöðu varðandi vernd tjáningar- og upplýsinga- frelsis. 20 21 11 Participatory budgeting: Better Reykjavík In 2010, the City of Reykjavík began to collaborate with a group of web designers on creating web-based tools to enable individuals to have a direct say in policy matters within the city council. A special web was opened called Better Reykjavík where people could comment on planned projects, start initiatives and offer project ideas and solutions which city officials were obligated to consider.22 Citizens were also asked to vote on proposed projects and rank them within certain budgetary restraints. Thus Better Reykjavík has led to a miniature version of participatory budgeting.23 Political transformation: The Best party In the municipal elections of 2010 Jón Gnarr, until then first and foremost a well known actor and stand-up comedian, led a new party, called the Best Party, which aimed at proposing well sounding goals, be popular, say what people liked to hear, have fun and secure Jón and his friends stable well paying jobs. To begin with the Best party seemed like the ordinary political parody of Icelandic politics, but there was something more in it: In addition to all the fun there was a core element of sharp political criticism, which caught on. The Party got a plurality of votes, formed the biggest faction in the city council and Jón Gnarr became mayor. One could say that of all attempts at political reform in post crisis Iceland, the Best party is the most obvious short-term success. The party has to some extent become normalized as just one of the political parties competing at 22 23 Gunnar Grímsson, private interview, 17 May 2013. The website is http://betrireykjavik.is. see also http://citizens.is. 12 the municipal level.24 Together with the Social democrats it managed to create a stable and effective city government and according to opinion polls in the fall of 2013 would still be the largest party in the municipal council.25 Jón Gnarr announced at the end of October that he would not be running for reelection. The Best Party would not prolong its existence beyond its initial four year term. Members of the perty who had been active in the city government and wished to continue would do so on the platform of another party Bright future, founded in 2012. Bright future got six seats in Althingi in the 2013 parliament elections.26 3. Results The scholarly discussion in Iceland about these initiatives and actions has been critical and sometimes outright dismissive. It has been argued e.g. that the National Forums simply adopted a corporate methodology for a public forum instead of creating real deliberative opportunities.27 It has even been claimed that participants in the National Forums were deceived since they participated in the belief that their input would actually be used for further policy-making.28 Many critics of the Constitutional Council complained that its legitimacy was questionable, since instead of the elected Constitutional Assembly the Constitutional Council had simply been appointed by the parliament.29 When it submitted its draft constitution to the parliament as a legislative bill, the reaction among experts and scholars of law and politics was rather negative and during For a closer analysis see Boyer 2013, especially p. 284-285. See http://www.bestiflokkurinn.is. 26 Anna Andersen, Jón Gnarr will not seek reelection, Grapevine 30 October. Available from http://grapevine.is/Home/ReadArticle/Jon-Gnarr-Will-Not-Seek-Reelection. 27 See Jón Ólafsson 2011, p. 1. 28 Vilhjálmur Árnason 2013, p. 30-31. 29 See Vilhjálmur Árnason 2011, p. 350. 24 25 13 the most intensive discussion of the draft in the fall of 2012 became outright hostile.30 It was complained that the proposed constitution lacked the terminological precision necessary for such an important document and that some of its articles could even create constitutional uncertainty since they were unclear and internally contradictory.31 In general one might say that these projects were evaluated much more harshly within Iceland than abroad where most of them, especially the writing of the new constitution, evoked considerable political and scholarly interest. The appearance of the Best party before the municipal election in 2010 was also highly controversial. While the party appealed to voters very broadly, and seemed to take voters from all other parties, commentators had mixed and to a great extent dismissive reactions to it since the party was considered nonserious and its supporters therefore irresponsible.32 It is important to re-evaluate actions, initiatives and reactions meant to either address an unsatisfactory political situation or create a venue for democratic renewal. One way of doing so is simply to ask whether the quality of discussion and decision-making tends to increase with such participatory approaches or not. The criticism sustained by proponents of democratic initiatives has in most cases been focused on the quality of decision-making and on the quality of Thus e.g. Gunnar Helgi Kristinsson, professor of Political Science at the University of Iceland judged the efforts of the Constitutional Council and subsequently the Parliament as worthless in December of 2012. In an interview with the daily Morgublaðið he said: “Unfortunately I think that the whole process is such that it can only be given a failing grade” (Því miður held ég að þetta ferli allt saman sé þannig að það sé ekki hægt að gefa því annað en falleinkunn). Morgunblaðið, 13 December 2012, Prófessor gefur falleinkunn. 31 Two legal scholars, Ágúst Þór Árnason and Skúli Magnússon, criticized the draft severely in a series of newspaper articles and eventually put forward a rival proposal. They argued that unclarity in the text of the draft constitution could lead to a constitutional crisis if passed unchanged. See Vísir 24 january 2012, Markmið endurskoðunar stjórnarskrár „óljós og umdeild“. Available at http://www.visir.is/markmid-endurskodunar-stjornarskrar--oljos-og-umdeild/article/2012120129474. 32 See Domonique Boyer 2013, p. 285. 30 14 deliberation. Some critics, such as Vilhjálmur Árnason have argued that deliberation was seriously flawed at the National Forums, in the Constitutional Council and in connection with the Icesave referenda. Others, such as Gunnar Helgi Kristinsson and Ágúst Þór Árnason, have argued that in the case of the constitution (at least) the process was badly designed and therefore both the quality and the legitimacy of the product were compromised. It might very well be the case however that such assessment is based on a too narrow view of how decisions and policy making should proceed such that the involvement of the public will always be seen as a threat to the analytic quality ensured through the involvement of experts. As one Icelandic legal scholar suggested: We might have to revise our approach to legal texts before we can really appreciate and fairly evaluate input from the public or—as one might perhaps rather say—from the crowd.33 The referenda on the Icesave agreement, which twice served to invalidate agreements that the government had reached with British and Dutch authorities is quite important in such an assessment, since it is a case of a very controversial exploitation of the tool of national referendum. During the campaigning one of the main arguments of those opposed to the referendum was based on the claim that the issue was too complicated for the average voter to understand. A deeper analysis of the first and second referenda might challenge that assumption on several grounds. Although the referendum was certainly flawed in many respects, nothing suggests that the public’s lack of understanding of the issues was the decisive factor in determining the outcome of the vote. A group of informed people who truly understood what was at stake could have been split 33 Aagot Óskarsdóttir 2013. 15 along the same lines. When the result of the subsequent court case is considered the fact remains that in this case the public, wittingly or unwittingly, was right. The Icesave debate is a good reminder that it is no simple matter to evaluate outcomes of democratic deliberation. Although criticisms of the various initiatives are clearly important and to a large extent justified, they may often rest on antiquated, narrow-minded or misleading conceptions of democratic processes. John Dewey describes democracy as “a way of life” arguing that in order to fully understand democracy one must see it as an active framework for, or a principle of, human interaction in general. He refused to narrow it down to being simply a procedure or a method of decision-making.34 While Dewey’s conception may be too lofty to have more than an inspirational effect, it mediates a deep insight, important to keep in mind when considering different kinds of democratic approaches: Common problems bring people together and sharing problems that need to be solved may often be more important than sharing values or conceptions of the good. Value pluralism is often understood as a (partly at least) regrettable fact, even to the point of seeing differences in values or goals as potentially harmful to democracy. The democratic initiatives in Iceland—the work of the Constitutional Council is an important example—were in most cases attempts to find a common way to approach problems given ideological, political and moral differences. The emphasis, one might say, was on “intelligence” in the Deweyan sense, i.e. on “intelligent” (or “smart”) ways to conceive of common problems and deal with them.35 34 35 John Dewey 1937/1987, p. 217; 1915/1966, p. 87 Hélène Landemore 2012, p. 269. 16 Dewey saw intelligence as an inherently social phenomenon. Pooling collective intelligence is therefore perhaps the most important aspect of democracy: “While what we call intelligence be distributed in unequal amounts, it is the democratic faith that it is sufficiently general so that each individual has something to contribute whose value can be assessed only as it enters into the final pooled intelligence constituted by contributions of all.”36 Another idea that for Dewey should be seen as natural for the democratic mind that experimentation must play a role in democratic thinking. Experimentation has both the function of imitating the conditions of diversity through “dramatic rehearsal” and the more general function of allowing for a “a mechanism of feedback and accountability.”37 Experimentation is however a bit difficult to accommodate in contemporary political settings where politicians are locked in fierce competition with each other and uncertainty is considered a weakness. One might simply think of experimentation as appropriate on the discursive level of policy-making that would allow for the development of ideas in the sense of a thought experiment. This mild version of experimentation however is not what Dewey has in mind, but rather the much more radical idea that solutions identified by a collective could actually be tried out and tested for adoption or rejection.38 The idea of crowdsourcing seems to be based on such a ground. In its simplest form to crowdsource a problem or a task is to design a procedure that will allow for a binding decision to be made by a collective without authoritarian “security valves” ready to close down the process if it seems to be going out of hand. While John Dewey 1937/1987, p. 220 Elizabeth Anderson 2006, p. 15. 38 See Charles Sabel 2012. 36 37 17 such responsibilities are regularly given to small groups, such as juries, in a partial acknowledgement of the idea that a group outperforms the individual, issues such as accountability seem to pose a real problem to the idea of giving an undefined “crowd” the power to make decisions. Crowdsourcing could also be seen in terms of the theory of dialogue. As Dmitri Nikulin has argued, dialogue is a very different kind of communication from deliberation or dialectic as usually understood.39 He argues that dialogue, instead of “grappling with opposites” continues “the activity of conversation through interruption” assuming a variety of forms and presenting a much more disorderly way of communication than deliberation/dialectic.40 While a deliberative forum, such as the deliberative poll, follows certain conventions about permissible moves, tactics and assertions, crowdsourcing may lack even these constraints. It could therefore be considered from the point of view of dialogue, which is less structured and spontaneous, lacking the means to exclude certain forms of speech and exchange that a deliberative forum can exclude. Crowdsourcing is clearly one of the most interesting and pressing problems in democratic theory today. It seems to offer exciting possibilities for public choice, but there is no consensus in the literature on its nature or use. The concept is a coinage describing what has been called “outsourcing” when done informally and to a not fully defined group of people – possibly to “everyone”. When the tasks have to do with policy- or decision-making crowdsourcing may appear in two forms: The “crowd” may be given the power to make binding decisions, or it 39 40 Dmitry Nikulin 2010, p. 29, also 149. see Dmitry Nikulin 2010, p. x-xii. 18 may be asked to give substantive advice. The former kind is more radical but also riskier than the second kind.41 The Icelandic democratic initiatives were discussed internationally as cases of crowdsourcing, the work on the constitution in particular. This is partly true but partly misleading. While there was considerable interest in crowdsourcing as a way to elicit values and views from the public, there was never much discussion on the merits of crowdsourcing actual decisions.42 The Icelandic experiments therefore did reach the stage where people had begun to ask the important questions about epistemic merits of actual crowdsourcing, but the process never got farther than that. This epitomizes both its methodological and its political weakness: Since there was never any clear proposal on the methodology of alternative ways for making decisions or policy, but initiative simply brought underway half-formed, there appeared neither the political support nor the clear political opposition to these new approaches that were necessary for bringing the initiatives to some meaningful end. For such reasons nothing is “settled”, if one may say so, as regards the democratic processes that were supposed to bring renewal to forms of making public policy and decisions in Iceland. It is therefore only to be hoped that initiatives will continue on the basis of the experimentation that has already taken place. Icelandic democratic initiatives will also profit from being discussed and explored from the point of view of evolving democratic theory. As interesting exercises in epistemic and deliberative democracy they can contribute to theoretical discussion in the field. 41 42 See also the relevant Wikipedia entry e.g. en-wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing. See Jón Ólafsson, 2011, p. 1-2 19 4. Other papers in this volume The political reforms in Iceland after the economic crisis have been observed closely internationally, especially the work of the Constitutional Council. Many prominent constitutional scholars have commented on the creation of the constitutional bill and on the politics surrounding it. In this collection eight authors who have previously written on democracy, constitutional law, participatory budgeting and public consultation, offer insights and analysis with respect to some of the initiatives of the recent years in Iceland. The present paper has attempted to summarize the different kinds of democratic experiments conducted in Iceland in recent years arguing that even if some or most of these attempts have not been as successful as was hoped, they have left the Icelandic community with valuable experiences which should be exploited in continuing with democratic innovation and experimentation. All the authors in this volume share the conviction that although the experiments of the last five years in Iceland have been flawed in many ways and certainly leave a lot to be desired as attempts to involve the public in real policy- and decision-making, it is important not to conclude that such attempts should be abandoned, but rather to use the experiences to improve methodologies and approaches to public consultation. James Fishkin discusses the use of the National Forum to prepare the ground for the Constitutional assembly/council arguing that its conclusions did not provide clear guidance for the work of the council because of their overly general nature. He further describes how more structured forms of public consultation, such as Deliberative polls could have articulated in greater detail public expectations 20 about the new constitution and created a more convincing relation between the public will and the democratic constitution. He concludes his paper by stressing the importance of the experience gained through the process. Hélène Landemore discusses the merits of crowdsourcing for creating the new Icelandic constitution by the Constitutional council. She observes that the attempts by the council to make the process inclusive did increase the credibility of the product. She also explains in some detail how experimental evidence gives reason to believe that cognitive diversity is in many cases more effective in creating “smart” solutions than relevant specialized knowledge. While the method (or the lack of method) used by the Constitutional council may have been deficient in many ways, it did attract direct and indirect participation by the public mainly through the use of social media and, according to her, probably did have a positive effect on the resulting constitutional draft. Like James Fishkin, Hélène Landemore argues that public consultation on projects such as writing a new constitution should be more structured for crowdsourcing really to have the effect of maximizing the profits of cognitive diversity. Tom Ginsburg and Zachary Elkins compare the draft prepared by the constitutional council to the current Icelandic constitution it was meant to replace as well as to constitutions from around the world. They conclude that the draft is largely in tune with recent constitutions and in some respects can even be said to contain important innovations. Although their paper can in no way be interpreted as an endorsement of the draft presented to the parliament by the Constitutional Council, their reading and comparative assessment of it emphasizes how its content conforms to general trends in constitutional development. 21 Paolo Spada and Giovanni Allegretti share a long and rich experience in designing and studying participatory budgeting exercises. In their paper they discuss the ways in which participatory budgeting and e-democracy can go together in different kinds of democratic innovations. They also warn, that the multiplicity of channels for democratic participation made available through the quick developments of ICT tools of ever new varieties, also presents dangers. They conclude that diversity of approaches and redundancies do not by themselves increase public participation but must be designed so as to construct multiple paths of capacity building and empowerment. The final paper in this collection is written by Kristinn Már Ársælsson, who as a member of the NGO Alda Association for Sustainability and Democracy has been a keen observer and analyst of democratic experiments in Iceland. 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Liberalism and Social Action. Republished in The Later Works, 1925-1953: Volume 11 1935-1937. Carbondale: SIU Press, 1987. Anderson, Elizabeth. 2006. “The Epistemology of Democracy.” Episteme. Landemore, Helene. 2013. Democratic Reason. Politics, Collective Intelligence and the Rule of the Many. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Óskarsdóttir, Aagot 2013. Endurskoðun stjórnarskrárinnar og lögfræðin. A keynote address delivered at the annual Conference on Social Sciences in Iceland. Bifröst University 4 May 2013.Unpublished. Samstarfsyfirlýsing ríkisstjórnar Samfylkingarinnar og Vinstrihreyfingarinnar – græns framboðs. Available from http://www.stjornarrad.is/media/Skjol/rikisstjorn_8mai09.pdf. Conclusions of the 2020 – Moving Iceland Forward initiative. A report compiled by the Steering Committee, November 2010. Availabe from: http://www.forsaetisraduneyti.is/media/2020/2020Moving-Iceland-ForwardInitiative.pdf. Stuckler, D., & Basu, S. (2013). 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