For democracy’s defenders, 2024 was a brutal year.
To date, 2024 has seen 1.6 billion people vote in 71 of 74 scheduled polls. Voters in the US, Romania, France, and Germany gave anti-system populists record-high support. The tactics of elected leaders from South Korea to Slovakia have shaken the rule of law in places it seemed secure.
The answer lies not in mimicking the tactics and rhetoric of the demagogues. As academics and practitioners of collective intelligence, the science of complex collaboration, we believe that our institutions can only restore trust if they are redesigned with citizen intelligence at their center.
The rise of populist, anti-democratic candidates across the globe—from France to the US, Germany to Slovakia—has been attributed a range of causes: economic inequality and polarization, amplified by external disruptors and social media. These forces contribute to the erosion of trust in representative institutions and create fertile ground for demagogues to stoke fear, nostalgia, and simplistic solutions that enhance their own power.
Representative democracy has been built on a number of crucial principles: the rule of law, the separation of powers, stability in government, and respect for the people’s will. We contend that recent events make it clear that public institutions must draw on the science of collective intelligence (CI) to provide more rapid and durable solutions than technocrats can create alone.
What might a democratic upgrade look like in 2025? We propose a three-pronged approach.
Reimagine: Inspiring hope is key
Kamala Harris’s optimistic rhetoric energised parts of her base but failed to expand her coalition among those disillusioned by the failures of politics. Candidates wishing to win elections must become more effective at offering genuine hope based not only on good policy, but better processes of listening and collaborating directly with citizens.
Tried and tested CI processes teach us one simple truth: effective change requires listening hard and combining many perspectives on the problem. To move beyond the “red vs. blue” thinking of partisan politics, public leaders must try new ways of eliciting a common vision that cuts across these binary divisions. Approaches such as Transformative Scenario Planning, Theory U, or Appreciative Inquiry do exactly that. In CI parlance, we call this ‘visioning’ and ‘collaborative anticipatory governance.’ Those have been deployed with success on the scale of cities, countries and internationally. Such processes not only generate new, richer perspectives on complex problems like health or climate, but help rebuild relationships of trust between public servants and those they serve.
Reframe: Clawing our way out of the black hole of divise discourse
How can we recenter public debates away from scorched-earth partisanship? Researchers and practitioners at The GovLab propose that good solutions start with good questions. The 100 Questions Initiative is an example of how public leaders can use “smart crowdsourcing” – the practice of obtaining information by enlisting the services of a large number of people – by eliciting novel insights from citizens and experts in various fields. By resetting the agenda around what people actually care about, leaders within government and civil society can bypass the spin-doctoring and fear-mongering that certain parties promote.
The noteworthy success of the Irish Constitutional Assembly and Citizens’ Assembly in the 2010s also demonstrated how randomly selected bodies of citizens, supported by technical experts, can tackle divisive topics and renew the terms of the public conversation. Upgrading the quality of public deliberation helped Ireland reframe these conflict-ridden debates and find common ground on sensitive issues such as same-sex marriage and the role of women in politics.
Reinvent: Choosing crowd wisdom over received wisdom
Now is the moment to resist simplistic fixes and embrace institutional reforms that address the root causes of public frustration. We need systems that harness crowd wisdom to deliver smarter, faster, and fairer outcomes.
Once we have rejuvenated public agendas thanks to powerful, value-based visions and refreshed the public conversation, it will indeed be crucial that institutions deliver radically more effective policies. Policies that show better results faster, that cost less, that involve people in their design and implementation, and that are more appealing than the alluring yet simplistic pseudo-solutions of today’s merchants of frustration.
To make this aspiration real, we need the courage of leaders across public institutions open-minded enough to try new methods of collective intelligence: harnessing cognitive diversity, facilitating high-quality deliberation, and creating large-scale platforms to aggregate people’s ideas in an ethical, transparent manner. These changes are needed on a vast scale and at every stage in the policy cycle. Citizens assemblies and participatory budgets are a start, but these channels must be joined with others to form a true ecosystem of civic intelligence. Thankfully, our toolbox of democratic innovation is growing quickly, as documented in The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intelligence for Democracy & Governance. The best predictor of trust in institutions, according to a recent OECD survey, is when people feel heard.
Mainstream politicians cling to ‘status quo democracy,’ but the tide of rejection politics signals a deeper yearning: the demand for a stronger, more inclusive democracy. The moment for a full democratic renewal is now.
For a French version of this opinion piece, visit the site of Dreamocracy.
