Affectedness-Proportional Multi-Criteria Participatory Decision-Making

The All Affected Interests Principle (AAIP) states that all who are affected by a decision should have a right to participate into making it (Dahl 1970). Numerous “technical” critics of AAIP consider it unimplementable. A more “conceptual” criticism comes from liberal and proceduralist camp. “Democratic procedures are about the agency of the people; so only agents can be enfranchised, yet not all bearers of interests are also agents.” (Saunders 2011). Democracy aims therefore at common will formation rather than at increasing everybody’s happiness. In practice, however, both principles become requirements, though at different stages. When the demos elects representatives, only the will of its actors (those who voted) counts; but when the same demos appraises the efficiency of the government, the appraisal is mostly based on whether the “happiness” of the demos, considered this time as a community of patients rather than actors, has increased or not. Every cycle of (representative) democracy is therefore volitional at start, but consequential all the way after. When we turn from representative to direct participatory deliberative democracy (DPDD), we can see that the two aspects – volitional and consequential – become inseparable and intertwined; for, those who decide on an issue remain responsible for the consequences of their decision. Any procedural implementation of DPDD should therefore satisfy both requirements. We propose such a procedural implementation, in a form of a multistage multi-criteria decision-making process accessible for participation, deliberation, and explicit vote to all enfranchised (in a classical sense, i.e. to all citizens or community members), but resulting in decisions that take into account the interests of all affected (participants and non-participants, community members and non-members) proportionally to everyone’s affectedness by an issue. The process will therefore preserve everyone’s autonomy as agent, while increasing everyone’s happiness as patient. Our process will be supported by a dedicated information system, and will comprise the following main stages: (a) A panel comprising both experts and strati-randomly selected citizens builds up a registry or taxonomy of “affectable interests”. (b) In every specific decision-making instance, a strati-randomly selected panel of citizens deliberatively defines which interests are or may be affected by various aspects or characteristics of the decision to be taken (mapping). (c) On the other hand, everyone is requested to fill one’s “personal profile”, comprising a set of one’s objective characteristics (including e.g. age, health, family status, etc.), complemented by one’s subjectively expressed values and preferences. These profiles will be managed by the system in a strictly confidential manner. Both the mapping (b) and everyone’s interests and needs (c) will be expressed quantitatively; hence, the system will be able to compute the voting power (or weight) of every citizen in every given decision-making instance (Brighouse, Fleurbaey 2010). Warren (2017) points out that unequal entitlement would have very little chances to be accepted, “given that publics <…> view equal political entitlements as markers of equal moral worth”. For this reason, we propose to apply affectedness-proportional entitlement to executive decision-making only, while in the legislative process all citizens will retain equal decision power.