中国民主：科学化，民主化，合法化

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最近，大牌机构英国学会（British Academy，以下简称BA – 译者注）在“公共政策新范式”工程旗下展开了一个新项目，“今日英国政策制定者面临的挑战”。今年2月，2010 BA讲座由以研究希腊民主久富盛名的历史学家M. H. Hansen教授主持。在讲座中，Hansen教授总结，一直以来被误认为是****的起源的孟德斯鸠的分权理论已经“由于太多与之不符的例外显得漏洞百出，应该被摒弃”。
法国国王路易十四（1638-1715）臭名昭著的论断 —“朕即国家”（L’état, c’est moi）对于现代的总统首相们来说言犹在耳，所以我们还得追溯到由英国国王查理一世（1600-1649）于1642年签署的带有共和色彩的宪法草稿。你别认为这是疯人疯语，查理一世的引文可是出自著名历史学家 J. G. A Pocock。Hansen教授的BA讲座也马上要在备受推崇的学术期刊《政治思想史》发表了。
上周，James Fishkin教授主持了一场同样颠覆传统的BA讲座。James Fishkin教授是斯坦福大学协商民主中心（the Center for Deliberative Democracy）的主任。他所独创并倡议的民主实验在中国反响不错。
Fishkin教授指出，自1957年，Anthony Downs（美国公共政策专家 – 译者注）的“理性的无知（Rational ignorance）”理论问世以来，我们就知道****（liberal democracy）已经不管用了。简单来说，Downs证明，考虑到投下明智的一票所需要的认知深度，与个人投票对于选举结果微不足道的影响，选民就不会费功夫研究选举了。或者，正如Russell Hardin（美国纽约大学政治学教授 – 译者注）一针见血地指出，“拥有投票选举的自由，差不多就和自由投票确定明天会不会出太阳一样‘有价值’”。Fishkin教授和同事Bruce Ackerman（美国耶鲁大学法学院教授 – 译者注）都毫不避讳他们对当下选举的不屑态度：选民倾向投票给“笑容最好，传单最妙的政客”，电脑抽样模型则让政客得以“准确了解怎样浇灌欲望的迷魂汤能争取重点投票群体的支持”。
Fishkin教授对于“理性的无知”问题的解决方案是，通过抽签随机选取样本，建立临时的协商群体，讨论当下议题并投票确定结果。和多数在这个领域工作的人一样，包括Anthony Barnett（英国《卫报》评论员，openDemocracy.net的创始人 – 译者注）和本文作者，Fishkin教授以为他发明了一个新的民意测量系统，并称之为“抽签”（sortition）(国内也有学者称之为“抽样”—译者注)。其实，雅典人在2400年前就超越他了。不过对于“抽签”系统的当代研究主要集中在规范性（normative）政治理论家之间。这些理论家更关心罗尔斯式的公平正义计算，而不是设计可操纵的实验去让一群随机选取的门外汉做聪明但可能无知的决定。
斯坦福大学的“抽签”实验已经进行二三十年了 – 在美国，英国，加拿大，澳大利亚，丹麦，意大利，保加利亚，匈牙利，北爱尔兰和欧盟多国 – 并已经显示，在公正倡导和精心主持下，普通人愿意花时间认真研究并思考议题，再通过无记名投票做出决定。Fishkin教授同时反对困扰哈贝马斯式的协商民主的来自共识的压力，并且他断言他的系统化设计克服了Cass Sunstein（美国哈佛大学法学院教授，奥巴马政府顾问 – 译者注）提出的协商民主的群体极化倾向。
这就又把我们带回了中国 – 这也许是世界上最不可能进行前卫民主实验的地方了。2004年，温岭市泽国镇（在上海南部300公里）党的领导正面临基础设施建设取舍问题 – 他们有30个项目待建，但只有10个项目的资金。Fishkin教授就是在那时受到了当地邀请。尽管当地党的领导有自己的喜好，他们还是委托Fishkin教授引入一套随机选取协商群体（235人）的系统。被抽出的235人就不同项目讨论了一天并投票决定。尽管结果和当地领导的设想大相径庭，协商结果还是如期施行了（相比之下，大部分Fishkin教授的其他协商民主民调都是纯粹建议型的）。Fishkin教授关于泽国的论文全文发表在这一期的《英国政治学期刊》上。
若在西方成熟民主体制里大规模施行“抽签”方式，那么一个大问题就是，正如Tariq Modood（英国布里斯托大学公共政策机构教授 – 译者注）在BA会议上指出，我们为什么要放弃奋斗了两百年才争取来的普选权？选举含有一种天赋人权的意味，即使它现在不管用了，也很难想象人们会主动放弃它。这又使我想到了Hansen教授在讲座中的一段话，1828年前，没有人相信选举和民主有半点关系 – 选举是为了选出“完人”（aristoi），那都是贵族的事，唯一能施行民主的办法就是“抽签”。关于这点Bernard Manin（美国纽约大学政治学教授 – 译者注）也补充道，不管普选权到什么程度，这条原则还是颠扑不破的。
然而，1828年见证了Andrew Jackson（美国第七任总统 – 译者注）的神奇戏法，他接手麦迪逊和杰佛逊创建的民主共和党，又重新施洗礼创造了民主党。从那以后我们就碌碌于偏好投票（preference voting）很“民主”的幻象中。即使熊彼特力陈选举只不过是一种精英轮换的方式，我们仍坚持这个幻象 - ****很民主。同时存在的问题还有，英国辉格党对于历史的解读颇为流行。他们把历史呈现为一种朝向更多自由更大启蒙的既定过程，这种解读在现代****形式下达到顶峰。
中国，对比之下，却没有什么幻象需要克服。与我们的陈见相违背的是，中国有一个出奇的去中心化（decentralised）的政治体制。在一些地方行政单位，那里有浓厚的“恳谈”传统（官民谈心式的会议）。中国的目标是政策制定过程要“科学化，民主化，合法化”。
Fishkin的方法论既符合“科学化，民主化”的要求（计算抽样出有人口学代表性的样本），也很“合法化”，因为随机选取群体的决定被当地人大如期采纳了。尤为关键的是，即使代表群体的决定和当地领导的设想完全相左，这些决定也如期施行了。原泽国镇委书记蒋招华（现为温州市副市长，温州市委常委）就被这种由恳谈结果带来的合法性吸引了（“我放弃了一些权力，但发现我得到了更多。”）。同时吸引他的还有在没有举行民主恳谈的泽国附近的一个小镇发生了骚*事件，而泽国却没有。
在近期劳工事件频发的状况下，中国领导人很渴望找到一个让决策制定合法化的方法。学者如Suzanne Ogden（美国东北大学政治学教授 – 译者注）、林尚立（复旦大学国际关系学院教授 – 译者注），Ethan Leib（美国加州大学法学院教授 – 译者注）和何包钢（澳大利亚亚迪大学国际关系学院主任– 译者注）都提示，协商民主也许能给中国民主化奠定重要基础（当然我们还要克服民主需要多党制的熊彼特式偏见）。
泽国实验的结果在北京的一次会议上的亮相引来了各方极大的兴趣。从那时起已经有三例类似的实验了。虽然对于共产党来说，吸引他们的正是这样的真民主（“抽签”）并不损害一党坐庄的地位，但要看出熊彼特式的多党制在哪些方面会更“民主”也不容易。若是中国成了第一个再度施行真民主（雅典制）的现代国家也许会有点讽刺，因为这样的民主中国不存在不同党派间的党同伐异，这点也正是希腊人所不齿的。

英文原文：


Chinese Democracy: ‘scientific, democratic and legal’
Keith Sutherland, 5 July 2010
That august institution the British Academy has recently embarked on a radical enquiry into ‘the challenges which face policymakers in Britain today’ under the aegis of its New Paradigms in Public Policy project. In February the 2010 BA lecture was given by M.H. Hansen, the foremost historian of ancient Greek democracy. In his lecture Professor Hansen concluded that Montesquieu’s doctrine of the separation of powers (the creation myth of liberal democracy) has become ‘so riddled with exceptions that it must be scrapped’.
Louis XIV’s infamous claim ‘L’état, c’est moi’ is just as applicable to modern presidents and prime ministers, so we should revert to the 1642 blueprint for a republican mixed constitution authored by Charles I (sic). In case you think this is just a deranged rant, the Charles I citation was from the distinguished historian J.G.A. Pocock and Hansen’s BA lecture is soon to be published in the well-respected scholarly journal History of Political Thought.
Last week an equally iconoclastic BA lecture was delivered by James Fishkin, director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University, which advocated a democratic experiment of his own that is apparently going down well in the People’s Republic of China.
Professor Fishkin claimed that we’ve known that liberal democracy doesn’t work since 1957, when Anthony Downs published his ‘rational ignorance’ theorem. Put simply, Downs proved that there’s no point in voters taking the considerable trouble to study the issues in sufficient depth to vote intelligently as their individual vote has a negligible effect on the outcome of the election. Or, as Russell Hardin memorably put it: ‘Having the liberty to cast my vote is roughly as valuable as having the liberty to cast a vote on whether the sun will shine tomorrow.’ Fishkin and his colleague Bruce Ackerman are delightfully rude about our tendency to ‘vote for the politicians with the biggest smile or the biggest handout’, and are equally scornful of computer sampling models which enable politicians to ‘learn precisely which combinations of myth and greed might work to generate the support from key voting groups.’

Fishkin’s solution to the problem of rational ignorance is random selection by lot to create temporary deliberative assemblies to debate the issue(s) on hand and vote on the outcome. Like most people working in the field (including Anthony Barnett and the present author) Fishkin thought he had invented this system (known technically as ‘sortition’) only to discover that the Athenians beat him to it 2,400 years ago. But the modern study of sortition is largely in the hands of normative political theorists who are more concerned with Rawlsian speculations on equality and social justice than with designing practical experiments to investigate the institutional framework necessary to enable intelligent and informed decisions from a randomly-selected group of lay people.
The Stanford sortition experiments have taken place over the last quarter century – in the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, Denmark, Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary, Northern Ireland and transnationally in a Europe-wide project for the entire European Union – and have demonstrated that, given balanced advocacy and careful moderation, ordinary people will take the time to study and deliberate the issues before making an informed decision (via a secret ballot). Fishkin is opposed to the pressure to consensus that afflicts the Habermasian model of deliberative democracy and also claims that his institutional design overcomes the polarising tendencies of group deliberation recently outlined by Cass Sunstein.
Which brings us back to China – perhaps the most unlikely place on earth for an experiment in radical democracy. Fishkin was contacted in 2004 by the party leadership in Zegou township, Wenling City (about 300 km south of Shanghai) who had a problem prioritising infrastructure projects – they had identified thirty potential projects but only had funding for ten. Although party leaders had their own preferences they commissioned Fishkin to introduce a randomly-selected deliberative assembly (235 members), who deliberated for a day over the various projects and voted on the outcome. Although the winning priorities on the deliberative poll were very different from those of the local leadership, the results were duly implemented (most of Fishkin’s other deliberative polls are purely advisory). Fishkin’s full paper is published in the current issue of the British Journal of Political Science
One of the problems with implementing sortition in a wholesale manner in mature Western democracy is, as Tariq Modood pointed out at the BA meeting, having struggled for two centuries gaining the franchise, why would we now want to abandon it? Voting has the status of a natural right and it’s hard to imagine giving it up, even if it doesn’t work. Which brings me back to Professor Hansen, who pointed out in his lecture that, prior to 1828, nobody believed that voting had anything to do with democracy – elections were aristocratic as they were intended to select ‘the best’ (aristoi); if you want democracy then the only means is sortition (as Bernard Manin has pointed out, this is true in principle, irrespective of the extent of the franchise).
However 1828 witnessed an extraordinary sleight-of-hand when Andrew Jackson took hold of Madison and Jefferson’s Republican Party and rechristened it the Democractic Party. Since then we’ve been labouring under the illusion that preference voting is in some sense ‘democratic’. Even after Schumpeter’s demonstration that voting is just a way of alternating elites, we still hang on to the illusion that liberal democracy is democratic (the other problem being the prevailing ‘Whig’ interpretation of history, which presents the past as an inevitable progression towards ever greater liberty and enlightenment, culminating in modern forms of liberal democracy.)
China, by contrast, has no such illusions to overcome. Contrary to our prejudices, China has a surprisingly decentralised political system and in some localities there is a strong tradition of kentan (convening heart-to-heart discussion meetings). Chinese requirements are that decision-making should be ‘scientific, democratic and legal’.
Fishkin’s methodology passed the first two criteria (selection algorithms to provide a democratically representative sample) and the decision of the randomly-sampled group was legal because it was duly rubber-stamped by the local People’s Congress. And the key point is that even though the decisions arrived at were entirely different from those of the local party leaders, they were duly implemented. The local party chairman, Zhaohua Jiang, was attracted by the increase in legitimacy as a result of the deliberative poll (‘I gave up power and found that I got more’) and the fact that a nearby township to Zegou where there was no consultation underwent riots.
Given the recent outbreaks of labour unrest, the Chinese leadership are eager for any way of legitimising their decision-making process. Scholars such as Suzanne Ogden, Lin Shangli, Ethan Leib and Baogang He have suggested that deliberative polling might provide an important building block for democratization in China (although we will have to overcome our Schumpeterian prejudice that democracy requires a multi-party state).
The results of the Zegou experiment were presented to considerable interest at a Beijing conference (there have been three other experiments since). Although the attraction to the communist party leadership is that real democracy (sortition) doesn’t undermine the one-party state it is hard to see how Schumpeterian competition is in any sense more ‘democratic’. It would be ironic if China were to be the first modern country to re-introduce real (Athenian) democracy, which never had anything to do with partisan battles between competing factions (abhorred by the Greeks).
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