Samuel Bagg in Boston Review: In late 2018 a massive protest movement shook French society. Named for the yellow vests, or gilets jaunes, worn by demonstrators, the movement was initially sparked by opposition to a fuel tax hike, but its demands soon expanded. Among them were reforms to enable more direct popular input into political decisions.
Within weeks, President Emmanuel Macron rescinded the fuel tax increase. He soon offered ambitious democracy initiatives of his own: first, a “Great Debate” involving more than 10,000 local meetings and 2 million online comments, and second, a Citizens’ Convention on Climate (CCC), which asked 150 randomly selected citizens to propose solutions to the climate crisis, with the promise that their proposals would be put directly to a referendum.
Each side in this drama claimed the mantle of democracy. Defenders of the fuel tax pointed out that it was implemented by representatives who had been duly elected by the people of France; the gilets jaunes, they complained, were attempting to circumvent this legitimate process. Meanwhile, protesters criticized modern representative government, charging that it favors wealthy elites and insisting that genuine popular rule requires direct input via tools such as initiatives and referendums. And Macron’s own proposals aimed at transforming adversarial confrontation into respectful deliberation—reflecting an ideal of democracy as a process of reason-giving, collaborative discussion, and mutual learning.
These three visions—representative democracy, direct democracy, and deliberative democracy—represent intuitive and popular ways of thinking about what democracy means. Each has clear virtues, highlighting certain decision-making tools—elections, referenda, and citizen’s assemblies—that can help to ensure public power serves genuine public interests. By placing so much emphasis on the search for the right procedures, however, all three visions ultimately sell democracy short.
Consider what actually happened with the CCC, whose participants produced a highly ambitious program of climate mitigation policies. Sadly, but predictably, Macron vetoed their most radical proposals—including a 4 percent corporate dividend tax—and watered down many others, before allowing the promised referendum to proceed. For defenders of representative democracy, this was a vindication of the system: the policies crafted by ordinary citizens would never have worked, they argued, so it was right for elected leaders to step in. For advocates of deliberative and participatory innovations, the outcome was a tragic missed opportunity to rethink the way we make decisions together. And for many of the gilets jaunes, Macron’s betrayal was further evidence of the need for a direct popular voice in government.
This reaction is quite natural. Whenever powerful interests thwart popular progressive goals, it is tempting to blame the specific institutions that enabled them to do so—and to valorize whatever alternative procedures might have yielded different results in that case. Indeed, an emphasis on finding the right decision-making procedures follows naturally from the ideal of collective self-rule that has long defined our democratic aspirations. And in various ways, generations of liberals, progressives, and radicals have all chased an ever-receding mirage of genuinely collective self-rule—giving rise to a cycle of democratic innovation, reform, and disappointment.
To escape this cycle, we must reconsider that ideal itself. No matter how responsive, deliberative, or inclusive our decision-making processes may be, those with systematic advantages in background power will always find ways to shape outcomes to their advantage. Such power imbalances compromise any procedure for collective decision-making—even the most participatory, like those envisioned by the gilets jaunes. We must focus instead on addressing these imbalances directly.
