Raphaël Doan is an aggregator of classical letters, former student of the ENS Ulm and the ENA. He published When Rome invented populism (éd. Du Cerf, 2019).
The Citizen Convention on Climate, which has just made its proposals, has updated the draw. Created by the President of the Republic after the yellow vests crisis, this body brought together for six months 150 citizens, randomly selected from telephone lists, to decide on measures to take in the fight against climate change. Defended by a number of environmentalists and supporters of participatory democracy, who call for going beyond our old vertical institutions, the draw for the members of this convention was chosen by Emmanuel Macron to " fully represent society in all its diversity and vitality . "
When we speak of a draw in democracy, we often invoke the example of ancient Greece, and particularly of Athenian democracy. But was the Athenian draw really similar to the one we are talking about today? Can we see in Athenian democracy the ancestor of our participative democracy? This is not so sure.
In Athens, judges, ordinary magistrates and members of the council of five hundred were drawn by lot, who presided over the sessions of the Assembly.For Plato, "it is democratic the fact that the magistracies are allotted by lot, oligarchic the fact that they are filled by the election." For Aristotle also, it is democratic on the condition "that the magistracies be drawn by lot." And in fact, in Athens, judges, ordinary magistrates and members of the council of five hundred were drawn by lot, who presided over the sessions of the Assembly. In total, several thousand positions were filled at random, from a pool of more than 30,000 citizens. The participation of the latter was therefore much more massive than in modern democracies.
What we are offered today, however, has little to do with the spirit of the Athenian institutions. Why did the Greeks consider chance to be democratic? Not because he would be “representative” of society, but because he undermined the monopoly of a few large families over the administration of the city, much like, under the Old Regime, the burdens of the kingdom were concentrated in the hands of the privileged. To put an end to it, the French Revolution made the choice of meritocracy: the public service was open to any deserving citizen by the means of the contest. Athens had found a different solution through the draw, but the objective was the same: to reduce the place of the aristocracy in the administration.
In Athens important decisions were left to universal suffrage or the sagacity of the elected officials.Let’s take a closer look at the posts assigned by lot to Athens: they were either archaic and honorary functions, like the archons, or functions of current administration, temple overseers, guarantors of weights and measures, in charge of roads, public secretaries. For the magistrates responsible for vital decisions for the city, we were careful not to draw lots: the financial and military functions, but also those concerning water management, were elective. Moreover, the laws and the major political orientations - such as peace or war - were voted directly by the people, gathered in the assembly. To simplify, we can say that Athens drew lots of its civil servants-citizens, but left the important decisions to the universal suffrage or to the sagacity of the elected officials.
Read also: The Citizen Climate Convention wants a referendum on the crime of "ecocide"
The citizens' climate convention is based on opposite principles. The draws are not supposed to administer the city, but formulate great political proposals. Far from tearing away the monopoly of expertise from those who exercise it traditionally, as in Athens, the chance of recruitment strengthens the role of experts. Beyond the 150 citizens who are by definition novices in climate matters, the convention is supervised by a “governance committee”, composed of members of think-tanks, activists, agents of the Ministry for the Ecological Transition, researchers and '' other qualified personalities. They are the ones who frame the problems to be solved by the lottery, point out solutions to them, and are responsible for transcribing their ideas into law. Suffice to say that they take care of the essential, upstream and downstream.
Putting ecology at random gives the feeling of paying little attention to it.The functions of secretariat, organization of debates and legal transcription of the decisions of the assembly are precisely those that the Athenians attributed to the drawing of lots, to avoid that the deliberation of the citizens is diverted by a small number of experts. As we have seen, they did not entrust the questions they considered fundamental, such as the conduct of war, to lot. Putting ecology at random gives the feeling, on the contrary, to make little of it. It is true that in the case of the Citizen Climate Convention, the President of the Republic has undertaken that the final proposals will be examined by the Parliament or decided by referendum. But if the proposals are prepared by experts and voted on by the national representation, what was the need for intermediaries drawn by lot?
This is the fundamental problem of participatory democracy, when it is embodied in small non-specialized assemblies who are asked to decide things: it is at the mercy of either indifference or special interests. As Condorcet worried: "What to expect from an assembly of men almost all foreign to public affairs, indocile to the voice of truth, quick to let themselves be seduced by that of the first charlatan who would try to seduce him?"