In our January newsletter, we highlighted the significance of this year as possibly the biggest election year in history, with 76 nations heading to the polls. At the same time there's enormous concern about the rise of authoritarianism in its various guises and the future of liberal democracy.

This month we’d like to share with you some sources of inspiration for us, that point beyond the evident need to to protect democracy, to the larger work involved in transforming it. At CII, we seek to contribute to the work of redesigning democracy; it's very heartening to see others’ efforts in similar directions:

A recent article in The Atlantic by Jedediah Britton-Purdy, We’ve Been Thinking About America’s Trust Collapse All Wrong offers an in-depth look at crucial systemic needs beyond the upcoming election cycle. In addition to structural and systemic changes for rebuilding social trust, Britton-Purdy calls for the civic practice of "non-defensively meeting serious disagreement", something that is essential for the work of “Using DIvergence and Disturbance Creatively”, one of the patterns in our pattern language.

“Non-defensively meeting serious disagreement” is also key for being able to build the broad coalitions of people in the US, supermajorities from all ideological camps, that we need in order to revitalize democracy; this call comes from Harvard’s  Danielle Allen. In Democracy Teetering On the Brink, she explores how the work of “revitalizing democracy”  includes BOTH "protecting" AND "renovating" democracy. She also describes these two complementary areas of work in this Washington Post Opinion article: 

“Protection requires achieving election integrity. It requires leaders who set norms of respect for elections, the law and opponents. And it requires projects to bridge social and ideological divides, deliver civic education and encourage public service, along with a healthy information ecosystem. 

Renovation, in turn, requires redesign of institutions to support good incentives for elected officials and responsive representation, as well as reanimation of civic experience for the disconnected and alienated, which is most people. The two tasks go hand in hand and reinforce each other.”

With regard to renovating democracy, Allen emphasizes the importance of restructuring political institutions to ensure participation and power-sharing across all communities. We could see this as a call for “holistic leadership and governance dynamics”, another pattern from the Wise Democracy Pattern Language.

This brings us to the brilliant strategic thinking and action of the UK based ISWE foundation. January’s RWCI community learning call featured CEO Rich Wilson elaborating a vision of what “doing democracy for ourselves” might look like. ISWE designs and advocates for deliberative systems that bring together citizens’ assemblies and networks of influential stakeholders to create new forms of governance that don’t necessarily rely on government to enact change.

In the call we heard about the Convention of the Future Armenian, a people-powered forum that took place last year in Armenia. It focused on influencing institutions and mobilizing citizen action, while building a power block of stakeholders and supporters dedicated to implementing its recommendations. By providing a legitimate governance chamber, the Convention aims to complement or even surpass the legitimacy of formal government structures

Read more and watch the video here