Ideas - BBC Reith Lectures: Artificial Democracy

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

IDEAS presents the first of the BBC Reith Lectures delivered by Ben Ansell. The Oxford professor and author of Why Politics Fails examines the threats facing modern democracy, how artificial intelligence can distort its integrity, and how politicians can invest in a democratic future.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Imagine you're trying to make your mind up how to vote in an important election. You want to make a fully informed decision, but you also want to avoid the grind of finding out information by yourself. So you ask the algorithm. Ben Ansell is a professor of comparative democratic institutions at Oxford University.

He is author of the book, Why Politics Fails, and the Reith Lecturer for 2023. One focus of his talk, democracy and technology. And as democratic citizens, if we try and outsource our own decision-making to these tools, we may find ourselves signing up to fantasy political agendas. Elections will become illusions. Democracy is already under threat around the globe. According to the American NGO Freedom House, civil rights and political freedoms declined around the world for the 18th

straight year in 2023. There are now more countries on their way to autocracy than on the way to democracy. Ansel argues one of those threats to democracy is artificial intelligence. Our democratic future then is not assured. To secure it, we need to put in the hours, abjure the temptations of polarisation, and avoid innovating ourselves into a dictatorship. The Wreaths are the BBC's flagship lecture series. The theme of this year's talks is the precarious nature of politics around the world and the future of democracy. Introducing the first lecture from London is the BBC's Anita Anand. Very warm welcome to you, Ben. So you're going to try and fix democracy.

That's right. right 25 maybe 26 minutes fabulous I mean do you ever think you might have bitten off more than you can chew only when I was asked to do these lectures yes well uh you're here now do you remember can you cast your mind back when you first got bitten by the politics bug so my first political experience was in 1987 when I was nine and our school school, our primary school had a mock election. So I put my candidacy up. I won't name the party. I think what's important for you to know is that I didn't win.

And the reason I didn't win, despite my impassioned speech about how many people in this country had outdoor toilets, because I thought that's going to work really well in a primary school environment, that kind of toilet humour. It didn't work because I gave out fewer stickers than the winning party, which, in retrospect... You fool! Yeah, so I learned a lot about what some people might call corruption and other people might just call smart politics at that point.

There was a party that fared less well than my party did, because you could come up with your own parties. And so there were two kids called William, and I won't embarrass them, not that they're probably listening to the Reflectors thinking we're talking about an election from years ago. But they were both called William, so their party was called the Two Williams.

Now, like any good election, the candidates could go and vote for themselves, right? So you could have that photo moment where you cast your vote. But when the final numbers were called, two williams had only got one vote because one of the williams had defected i imagine to the party that gave out more stickers when we think of democracy these days i mean i think you all agree that you sort of you wake up in the morning you pick up your phone you doom scroll, you turn on the news, you feel oppressed by the weight of it all.

It all just seems so bleak. And yet you strike me as somebody, I'm not tiggerish exactly, but optimistic about democracy in its future. I'm optimistic. We need to be careful not to assume that our present is worse than many of the pasts that our parents, and I'll talk about this in my talk, recently experienced.

And to give you an example of that, I moved to America in 2000, and I'm like the bad penny because I moved, and then there was the Bush-Gore election, and then there was 9-11, and the Patriot Act. And so the political fervour in the early 2000s had a lot of people talking about, is democracy under threat? But the United States is still standing. We're still standing. And so I don't think we want to foretell

the death of democracy. I think it's a resilient system and that's what I want people to get out of these lectures. Well, it is time we hear your first lecture. It is entitled, The Future of Democracy. Ben Ansell, the stage is yours. Thank you. Our democratic history, even here in Britain, is just a blink in human time. So many of us sitting right here in this room today,

you knew a friend or family member who was deprived of the voting rights that you hold today. And my own family's democratic history tells this tale. My great-grandfather was called William, and he was born in 1890, and he grew up on the Isle of Wight, where he worked as a plater's labourer's mate in a shipbuilder's yard in cows. Now, earning a pittance, he was forced to live with his father, also called William. And William Senior was a fierce man with a luxurious lord kitchen and moustache and according to my grandfather's memoirs this is a quote a rather sadistic demeanor so this it seems was a fairly terrifying experience but it was also a disenfranchising one because it meant that like

40 percent of men at the time my great-grandfather didn't meet the property qualifications to vote in British elections. So throughout the 1910s, he toiled in the shipyards, hot, tiring, dangerous work, plating the sides of Britain's new battleships. But he was only finally granted the right to vote in 1918, at the end of the great war that the very ships he'd built had fought in. My great-aunt Mo, born in 1907, she was among the very first women to be able, like men, to vote at the age of 21. So in 1918, women had received the right to vote, but they had to be over 30. Younger women had to wait until the so-called flapper election of 1929, and that was appropriate for my Aunt Mo, because she was a thoroughly modern woman

who liked to dance the Charleston in the grand hotels of Scarborough. My family's democratic history, it's not only about finally getting the right to vote, because it turns out that some of my ancestors actually counted double. Until 1948, my grandfather, a graduate of Edinburgh University, he had two votes, one for his constituency and one for the university. And business owners could also vote twice, once for their own home and once for that of their business. Now, your own democratic history here in this room, it probably looks a lot like mine it's a story of missing rights and sometimes of extra ones perhaps your parents or grandparents came from india or pakistan or nigeria where they lacked a vote until independence or perhaps from america

where black americans were denied equal rights until the 1960s, or from Switzerland, where women couldn't vote until 1971. Our democratic history, it's an oral history of relatives who lived at a time of unequal rights that has only just ended. And we sometimes think of Britain as this home of democracy, but that home, when it comes to one person, one vote, it's really quite modern. It's kind of like a shabby 1950s semi. So we're maybe not so shabby. We are only recently free and equal citizens when it comes to voting, together now in our democratic present. But what about our democratic future?

You see, democracy is supposed to be about ruling ourselves, and so that raises the question, why are we so unhappy with our own choices? So trust in politicians, it's collapsing throughout the West. Fewer than half of people in Britain now think the state is run for the benefit of all the people. A quarter of Brits now claim they would prefer to be ruled by a strong leader who could ignore parliament Tyson Fury perhaps and our politics is angrier Donald Trump encouraged an insurrection Emmanuel Macron has been beset by Gillet Jean Justin Trudeau by truckers convoys and here in Britain in a great outpouring of democracy, we voted to leave the European Union. But seven years later, we're still fighting each other over Brexit, well, and

low-traffic neighbourhoods. So we make our own choices, we rule ourselves, but we're polarised and discontent. And this is new. So had I given these lectures 25 years ago, I would have been surfing on the crest of a democratic wave which rolled on unstoppable until it stopped. Because the democratic flood in the 1990s with the fall of the Berlin Wall became a drought in the early 21st century. According to the Wiedem Institute, the average level of global democracy today has receded all the way back to its level in 1986. So you see, it's not just Kate Bush making a comeback. For the first time in two decades, there are now more closed autocracies in the world than there are liberal democracies. And increasingly, the liberal part of liberal democracy

is under attack. The Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, has proudly proclaimed his country as an illiberal democracy. And in the world's largest democracy, India, even though the formal rules of democracy remain stable, and they do, civil liberties have been undermined. In 2022, the Indian government shut down the internet 84 separate times, often before or during protests, and broadcasters are regularly raided, including the BBC. The process of free and fair elections, democracy's very core, is also at risk. In Turkey and Venezuela, opposition leaders have been jailed. In Brazil and in the United States, defeated leaders have tried to delegitimize elections by falsely claiming fraud. And outside the democratic club, authoritarian countries from

Russia to China have portrayed themselves as strong-willed, strong-handed models to follow. have portrayed themselves as strong-willed, strong-handed models to follow. So our democratic future is under threat from within and without. But it's not enough for me to stand here and bemoan this. We need to defend our democratic values, and to do that, we're going to have to confront democracy's critics and make the case for democracy again and again. So you might ask, what is that case? Well, bluntly, we do better in democracies. So decades of research in the social sciences,

even by me, have confirmed that in democracies, human life tends to be better. So democracies have lower infant mortality. Democracies have higher literacy. Democracies even have cleaner water, although anyone who's recently tried swimming in the Thames might disagree with that. And despite what you might think about the rise of China or a few oil-rich Gulf states, overall, democracies tend to grow faster and get richer, and they do so because national wealth ultimately comes from human ingenuity and creativity. And dictatorships fear those gifts. Democracies inspire them. And democracy also has intrinsic benefits as a political system.

And the paradoxical reason why we should all agree democracy is a good thing is because, well, we disagree on almost everything else. Now, if we did all agree, then why would we bother going out to the polling booths at all, because surely we already know what we want, so anyone could speak for all of us, including a dictator. So that's not ideal. No, all of the machinery of our democracies, our voting booths, our elaborate electoral systems, our free speech rights, these only matter because we disagree. And successful democracy at its core then is about how we create agreeable disagreement. So to be agreeable, our democracies can't cower under the threat of violence. And that violence is very, very real. As you know, in the past decade, two British members of parliament have been

assassinated. And every drip of violence poisons the bloodstream of our democracies. So for democracy to succeed, it must permit us to resolve our disagreements peacefully. But that doesn't mean we're happy about it, because agreeable disagreement means winners and it means losers. It means competing priorities, clashing ideals and vocal dissent. So our democratic systems have a dual function. Yes, they need to be agreeable to prevent a spilling over into violence, but they also need to encourage disagreement to avoid a blunt tyranny of the majority. Because a simple electoral majoritarianism,

it can make decisions for us in a world of disagreement, sure. But that kind of mere democracy is not enough because it's unstable and volatile. A populist democracy that hangs on the latest will of the majority will trample on our liberties in a ceaseless chase for today's approval rating. We can't govern by daily opinion poll. Constant referendums will become never-endoms. It'll be like having a Brexit vote every week. For democracy to truly give us agreeable disagreement, we've got to acknowledge that there are limits

to what governments, even those elected by a majority of us, can do to us. And we secure those limits not by simply trusting our government to respect them because we're not idiots. Instead, we rely on other counterbalancing institutions that make up the menagerie of a liberal democracy. So the courts, the independent agencies,

devolved governments, and yes, yes, really, the media. Because our government is accountable to us as voters, we who send our opinions up from the grassroots, but it also needs to be accountable to these other institutions that sit to its side and elbow it sharply in the ribs like a malicious younger brother if it steps over legal or moral lines. And those restrictions on what our government can do are what best distinguish our liberal democracies from dictatorships, where the only limits on leaders are their degree of capriciousness or malice. In fact, democracy's chief proponents are often the well-to-do, not the huddled masses,

because those with money to lose are precisely those most at threat of dictators arbitrarily stealing their fortunes. It was, after all, colonial America's wealthy merchants who called for no taxation without representation. And it's wealthy oligarchs whose riches have been commandeered by Vladimir Putin, who are some of his most vocal critics. So liberal democracies, they don't only empower the majority, they also can protect embattled, or indeed wealthy, minorities. But we need to be careful not to push too far in the other direction. Because if a few people can block popular reforms indefinitely,

well, then we get a tyranny of the minority instead. And we cannot each have a veto on every government policy or nothing, nothing would ever get done. And you can trust me here. I know this because I'm an academic. So for example, protections for minorities can clash with treating voters equally. Some democracies give far more weight

to some voters than others. A classic example is the US Senate. Here, California with almost 40 million residents has the same voting power as Wyoming with just half a million and so you might ask yourself why can't America pass gun control laws that command majority support and that's part of your answer so the institutions of our liberal democracy are like a spider's web each agreement each institution each norm of behavior, a single strand, painstakingly formed over the

centuries, binding our body politic. And these strands tie our democratic history to our democratic future. But there's nothing inevitable about liberal democracy's triumph. The past few years have exposed the essential fragility of that democratic web. And many of us here today feel caught in a democratic malaise, that the system is not responsive, that it doesn't look out for us. And there's an irony here, because we look for alternatives. We look for quick fixes. But in so doing, we may end up fueling rather than fighting three enemies of our democratic future. So democracy's first enemy is entropy. If we don't actively sustain democracy, then things fall apart. To maintain the ties that bind us, to secure the deals that we make, this is all really hard work. What the German sociologist Max Weber called the slow boring of hard boards. And that does

sound kind of boring. But the reality is there are no quick fixes because democracy, it's about resolving disagreement and we will always disagree on new things from how to manage artificial intelligence to the merits or lack thereof of 20 mile an hour speed limits. There's always more debate, more dissent, and yes, more voting. And many of us feel like Brenda from Bristol, a voter interviewed as Theresa May called the 2017 general election who just despaired. You're joking, not another one. There's too much politics going on at the moment. And you know, even as a professional political scientist, I feel Brenda's pain. But if we stop caring, if we stop voting,

then entropy sets in. Old norms of behavior are lost. We forget how we resolved our previous quarrels. And we see our disagreements on the street or online as irresolvable, as an inevitable, unstoppable, and tragic polarization. And polarization is democracy's second enemy. It happens because we feel that our institutions are unresponsive, stifling, dare I say, elitist. And so we call for more participation. For example, we might think

about primaries and leadership elections for political parties, but now we might discover that there is such a thing as too much democracy. Because leadership elections, they get dominated by active members of political parties. Now, I'm a card carrying political scientist. I have to say these citizens are important to a healthy democracy, but they can also be oddballs, and they're often attracted to the extremes. And in the United States, leadership primaries have produced ever more extreme candidates, and so the consensual middle ground between Democrats and Republicans has withered to inexistence. And the UK is not immune to this kind of voter-led polarisation. You all remember the 2019 general election, I'm sure. It saw Jeremy Corbyn, the favourite of the Labour membership,

face off against Boris Johnson, the favourite of Conservative members. And I think we can all agree that was a very clear choice. But it was one that left centrist voters and politicians in the back seat. And that polarisation has seeped into our everyday lives. In 2019, over a third of Labour supporters said they'd be unhappy if their child were to marry a Conservative. So apparently Labour supporters

aren't willing to swipe right. That's a joke for the young people in the audience. It could be worse. In America, only 4% of marriages, like on one hand, are between registered Democrats and Republicans. So just imagine those wedding receptions. Voters in America now live in physically separate walls and bedrooms. And that kind of polarisation in America means now many voters vote against the other party rather than for their own. So when Donald Trump had his mugshot taken in Georgia, this actually helped his electoral prospects

because Republican primary voters blamed Democrats for his legal difficulties. So a vote for Trump, even if he's a criminal suspect, is a thumb in the eye for the Democratic Party. Now, I don't want us to obsess about political parties getting along, because American polarization was lowest in the 1950s, the Jim Crow era, where black Americans were politically oppressed and deprived of the vote. But the 21st century seems to be one where our party identities are defining all of our identity. And this polarisation of everything is turbocharged by our addiction to social media. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, X, pardon, Elon. They're intensifiers.

Their algorithms drive us to more of what we already like. And perhaps that's harmless with some things like heavy metal or Italian food or, I don't know, Crystal Palace football club, as my family can confirm. I spend far too much of my time online getting angry about Crystal Palace losses, so maybe it's not so harmless. But in politics, these algorithms mean reinforcing our own views, pushing them bit by bit to the extreme, bypassing the things we agree on to better amplify our disagreement, creating disagreeable disagreement. So the third and final enemy of democracy is our use or rather misuse of technology, and in particular the way that we employ artificial intelligence. Now because so much political speech is predictable and vague, it's simple for artificial intelligence to mimic

politicians, some politicians. Could any of you honestly tell apart the responses of a politician on the Today programme from the output that chat GPT might give you if you asked it for a series of defensive platitudes and a few misleading statistics? But a bigger risk is malign imitation through videos that fake well-known figures. So a deep fake of the prime minister declaring war could spread instantaneously across the internet to friends and foes alike. It's the contemporary amped up version of shouting fire in a crowded theatre. So AI's chief current strength and its threat to us is this kind of masterful mimicry, but it also has weaknesses. And those weaknesses may also harm our democracies, because AI is great at form,

but it's weaker at content. Let me give you an example. I recently asked Google Bard to write my biography, because I'm very solipsistic, but it was also revealing. So three times in a row, Google Bard correctly identified I had written three books. Well done. Each time, two of them were books I'd never written. And to be fair, those books did sound more interesting. But they were wrong. And getting the facts wrong, it's deeply corrosive in democracies.

So imagine you're trying to make your mind up how to vote in an important election, and you want to make a fully informed decision, but you also want to avoid the grind of finding out information by yourself. So, you ask the algorithm, and the algorithm provides you with a series of entirely plausible-sounding but fundamentally non-existent facts. Well, since the algorithm cannot reason, it can't spot any obvious logical flaw in its claims. And as democratic citizens, if we try and outsource our own decision-making to these tools, we may find ourselves signing up to fantasy political agendas. Elections will become illusions. And with crucial elections in 2024 in Britain, America and beyond,

we still lack rules about the use of artificial intelligence in politics. And I see no desire, I'm afraid, on behalf of those who run artificial intelligence companies to take these concerns seriously. Our democratic future then is not assured. To secure it, we need to put in the hours, abjure the temptations of polarization, and avoid innovating ourselves into a dictatorship. You're listening to the first of the Wreath Lectures, the annual flagship lecture series from the BBC.

Ben Ansell is Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Oxford University and the author of the book Why Politics Fails. ABC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on US Public Radio and Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it.

Short-sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted from CBC's Personally, available now. This year's Reith Lectures focus on the state of democracy and the threats to it. From London, here is the second part of the talk, followed by a Q&A with the BBC's Anita Anand. We don't have to solve everything at once. There are reforms that we can make to politics here in Britain that will buttress it against its enemies and inject some life into our democratic veins. So let's begin with that threat from AI.

The horrors in Israel have shown how susceptible people are to fake online information. And sadly, many of our politicians have proven themselves similarly gullible. Our media regulators already struggle to enforce due impartiality and accuracy on our broadcasters. And so doing so for social media, it seems to me, might be a challenge too far. After all, we can't regulate malign information away when it's transported at light speed from anonymous servers. But what we can do, what we can do is back trusted sources. And despite what you might hear, despite what you might think, our national broadcasters are still more trusted than not by

the public. And you know what? That's even true for some of our newspapers. But the mainstream media has been in a defensive crouch, attacked by opportunistic and populist politicians. So those of us who worry about public trust need a robust, self-confident, yes, and accurate media, and we need politicians unafraid to support it. Now another thing that we could do is we could come together. Citizens' assemblies have been used in countries from Denmark to Canada. Rather than fighting online in social media silos, assemblies require us to meet up in the real world, imagine, with people that we might not agree with, even worse,

and find consensus. And few political issues are more contentious than abortion, which in Ireland was illegal until 2019. Several tragic deaths of miscarrying mothers put legalisation on the agenda. But then how was it possible to develop consensus on an issue where citizens fundamentally disagreed on definitions of life and death? How was it possible to disagree agreeably? Well, in 2016, Irish politicians asked citizens to debate the abortion issue in the citizens assembly. Now an assembly can't make everybody agree but what it

can do is help citizens see that others are not extremists, that there are conversations across the divide that can happen that help you find painful but mutually acceptable compromises and these compromises were ones reflected in the final legislation. And you know what? Perhaps people were better at this than the politicians, because the debates in the Citizens' Assembly were more complex and less negative in tone than those among the lawmakers in the Irish Parliament.

So when we make the decisions ourselves, we're sometimes more thoughtful and kinder than the politicians that we elect. Shocking, I know. Now, it won't be easy to convince MPs to hand over their cherished powers to us hoi polloi in citizens' assemblies, I get that. So are there ways for us to reform our system of representative government to ensure that we're governed, well, more representatively. So there's a common lament about British democracy. It's that our electoral system, first past the post, systematically leaves people out. So the eighth of the electorate who voted the UKIP in 2015 received

just one seat out of 650. And the Greens and the Lib Dems with a similar combined vote share got nine. It's hard to talk about our democratic future when the hour consistently leaves out a quarter to a third of the population. And a more proportional electoral system would remedy this to some degree, matching parliamentary seats to the public's votes. But it is no surprise the big parties aren't going to like this, right? They like the current system and I won't expect turkeys to vote for Christmas. But it is no surprise the big parties aren't going to like this. They like the current system, and I won't expect turkeys to vote for Christmas. But our current electoral system, it's not sacrosanct. In 1918, the British government almost passed proportional representation. There's a kind of nerds sliding doors moment. And in recent years, we've used proportional systems ourselves in elections in London, in Scotland, and in European elections.

Now, proportional systems are no panacea, but they do ward off some of the enemies of democracy. They force parties to speak to the whole country, not just swing voters. And more parties, and hence more opinions, even ones you don't like, get represented in the heart of Parliament, and perhaps also in government. And finally, proportional elections can produce more consensual politics because no party can rule on its own. And coalitions are frustrating and they're imperfect and they rarely satisfy every party. I get it,

I get it, but that's the point. No one gets what they want. Coalitions, they're a tableau vivant of the core of effective democracy agreeable disagreement we don't always get along but we do have to agree how to disagree so let's end then where we began will our great-grandchildren look back at us with the same astonishment as when i look back at my great-grandfather's story will they look at our electoral institutions and see them as biased or unrepresentative? Will they still be complaining about what might be hereditary cyborg peers in the House of Lords? Our democratic history, it's an unfinished story. We govern ourselves, but not always as equally as our ancestors might have hoped.

Democracy is our legacy from past generations, and it's an obligation of ours to secure for future generations. It's up to us. It's hard, unending, but worthwhile work for our descendants, for their democratic future, and for our democratic future. APPLAUSE and for our democratic future. Just before we get questions from the audience, Ben, how worried should we be about the future of democracy?

Democracy will outlast us. So that's the good news. The formal institutions of democracy are pretty hard to undermine and to destroy without a strong reaction. But what's easier for all of us to do, perhaps unthinkingly, is to corrode and demean some of the norms of democracy, the norms about letting others speak, norms about not casting aspersions on people as enemies of democracy, norms about the role of some of the more undemocratic elements of our democracy, like courts. And I think that's where we've struggled

in this country in recent years. I don't think anyone thinks that tomorrow we won't have free and fair votes. But a lot of the menagerie, as I call it, of liberal democracy, I think is under more threat. Thank you. Let's turn to you. Peter Bottomley. I first stood for election in 1974 when Spain, Greece and Portugal were dictatorships and not democracies. If I looked in the index of a book on the future of democracy, would I find anything on the purposes of politics? It isn't a good idea

to try to work out how we create a good society nationally and internationally. And in a future of democracy, if we would look back not quite a hundred years, how would we have decided which year to confront

Mr. Hitler by force? Or in my time, how could we account for getting Iraq wrong and also getting syria wrong which allowed putin to then go into crimea and all things that followed from that gosh that's a whopper to start with thank you very much uh you know the first part of that sounded so easy um it does raise an important issue which is whether democracies work when we get so many things wrong

and I think they do because we're all frail imperfect beings who make poor choices including the people we elect to rule us but you will all recall at the time before the invasion of Iraq for example how popular that was in opinion polls in early 2003 but it's hard for democratic publics to make life or death decisions and it's certainly very hard for democratic publics to make life or death decisions. And it's certainly very hard for democratic publics to be able to trace down the complexity of history, such that decisions that are made in one year have ramifications decades hence. But what I think we can say is that democracies are better able to adjust for the mistakes that they make. So we might all be wrong about things, but at least we can throw out the people who made the wrong decision last time. Can I throw a question back to you? When you hear Ben say that

actually MPs sound a lot like chat GPT doing a defensive ninja action, what do you think of that? I pay attention to the person on my right. Well, the person on your right, I should say, is Virginia Bottomley, who is your wife. I think democracy is very difficult. I was brought up with a leader, Margaret Thatcher, not everybody's cup of tea, but she wanted to set out the difficult decisions. And she sort of said, if it isn't hurting, it isn't working, take the difficult decisions. We moved on then to Tony Blair, who was all for the focus group, which is ask people what they want

and then try and give them what they want so I think modern democracy is always trying to give people what they want present democracy almost forces political parties to over promise and under deliver and I'm really worried that that will lead to more and more cynicism and disenchantment. But the question was about politicians addressing questions head-on so I mean do politicians do that enough and the fact that Ben is saying that they may not that chat GPT could give a very similar performance on not answering a question. Is that hurting democracy? It may be, but I know that when I was health secretary, I was probably much too direct about saying people needed to face the difficult decisions. There is a tendency,

particularly for an elected politician, to want to please. When you start parliament, there's a wonderful prayer. It says we should govern wisely and avoid love of power and desire to please. Okay, thank you very much. There is a question there. Great. Hi, my name is Melissa. I'm a recent graduate. So I wonder what's the incentive for young people to engage in the democratic process? We've been excluded from things which older generations have benefited from, like affordable housing, free higher education and triple locked pensions.

But for my generation, it's been the financial crash, austerity and the cost of living crisis. So what's the point? What does democracy offer the young? So I think the first thing to say is you're right. Unfortunately, our politics has been very much split around age in recent elections, and that's something I'll talk about in a later lecture. Ultimately, democracy is about us, right? So if enough young people do turn out and vote, that can shift what politicians think. If young people vote, and it's tricky with our electoral system, right?

Because young people tend to be packed in a way that political scientists would call inefficiently into, but for young people, it's like, that's where fun places are. But packed into urban districts, right? That makes it harder for them to express that vote. So I get that it's harder

for young people to express that. But ultimately, that's the only way of affecting change in a liberal democracy you can go and protest you can write op-eds you can do all of those things but but these are the tools that we have and the worst thing that could happen but an understandable thing is for young people to say well look this isn't for me it's not working out so i won't vote because that precisely makes things worse i'm gillian tett i I'm provost of King's College Cambridge and also Financial Times columnist, so part of the mainstream media that's in a defensive crouch.

I'm curious, you point out correctly that last year autocracies overtook democracies for the first time since 2004. I think the Bertelsmann figure is 67 versus 70. And you've given us lots of examples of countries to not copy, like America. Can you give us some examples of countries where we can actually find inspiration in a positive way right now, as we try and think to create British democracy going forward? I mean, would you like us all to be German and go into coalitions are there other examples where you think we could actually learn positive lessons as we have this debate so I think there's a reason that we're having a democratic malaise and we're not the only people which is that there are a series of challenges in international economic markets with the pandemic, with the Great

Recession not that long ago, that means there's just a general sense of discontent throughout the world. And that's made things very hard for politicians everywhere. But it is hard to pick somewhere right now where things are going brilliantly. So let me then go back and say, well, 2008 was an exciting year because we saw a president who, yes, he didn't satisfy everybody's dreams for him, but we saw a president elected that most people never could have imagined be elected, particularly at that time.

Not only an African-American president, but one with the middle name that was the last name of the guy America had just fought a war with. And so our democracies do have upside surprises as well as downside shocks. You know, and we've had that ourselves in this country. I don't think we would want to underplay

how huge a change it has been to have had a number of female prime ministers and now an ethnic minority prime minister and throughout the cabinet in the last few years. This is a lot of exciting change. We just all feel really glum right now. Hello, I'm Hannah White. I'm director of the non-partisan think tank,

the Institute for Government. One of the characteristics of the last few years, as you rightly say, has been people not just disagreeing with each other, but disagreeing with what you describe as the spider's web of institutions that we have to protect our democracy. So how do we buttress those institutions if it seems that the politicians

have concluded that it's actually in their interests to undermine those institutions? It's a real challenge and politicians accept most of the time that in fact they can't do everything that they want and that these institutions play an important role. But the temptation right now is just so huge to blame our courts or to blame European courts. And so I think it does require those at the very top of government to basically back off doing that. Okay, let's take the question. Who's got the microphone over here? Hi, my name is Mimi and I'm a recent graduate and a policy researcher. And you spoke a lot about the threat of AI to the future of democracy. I'm interested in whether you think personalised algorithmic recommender systems that do prioritise interactivity and user engagement

are actually contributing to this polarisation. Yeah, the problem with AI algorithms is we end up being the donkey chasing the carrot all of the time with them, right? We follow exactly the way that the algorithm is structured, what kinds of news it recommends. And that's not an ideal news environment for any democracy to be in. I like getting news that I'm interested in. I do want some kind of personalization.

news that I'm interested in. I do want some kind of personalisation, but I think all of us need to develop a bit of a taste for diverse arguments, but that's just not what happens on Facebook. In a way, funnily, it happened more on past Twitter, and I don't even know how to describe what's going on right now with that algorithm, because it's chaotic more than anything else. I'm Desmond King, Professor of American Politics at Oxford. You may deal with this in future lectures, but I'd like to see a bit more about institutional reforms. I would personally abolish the House of Lords immediately. In the US, we could end lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices.

The Congress has the power to do that. We could abolish the Senate maybe and take the Supreme Court here. There are more things that could be proposed and pushed for to make democracy vibrant and more in touch with the sorts of local values you are proposing. I think what I would say about the House of Lords is that getting rid of it forces us to ask a really important set of questions about what we would want from a second house. And I don't think we as a country have thought that through what I would say though is lots of parts of our liberal democracy aren't elected right so we need to be careful about that our judges aren't elected and thank god they're not elected right because the American situation of elected judges causes all

kinds of problems so I don't think we should value parts of our democratic system just about whether we get to vote for them but i do think that the house of lords is like a vestigial limb okay sort of didn't go away as the body evolved okay like it's it's essentially our coccyx okay but i don't hate my coccyx and i haven't asked no no that's fine that's fine well i'm pleased to hear that i'm lord stewart wood we've heard from conservative peers i know you don't have a coccyx and I haven't asked it to be removed. No, no, that's fine. Well, I'm pleased to hear that. Lord Stuart Wood, we've heard from Conservative peers. I know you don't have a microphone. Can we have the yellow microphone here? I agree with Ben, actually. Not everything in a democracy is valued because it's elected. And I personally would reform the Lords.

I agree with Des King. But you can't reform it unless you know what you want to replace it with. Are we also in a situation, and this is for both of you, where actually it's more about not ideologies, not what you really want to do, but how do you manage the purse that you've got? And that's what our democracy is these days. It's not big ideas. It's small change. No doubt we're in tough times. And in tough times, the purse strings issue becomes dominant. But I wonder whether this is an enemy of democracy. You mentioned three, Ben, which you didn't mention, which is the enemy of democracy is economies that stop working properly.

And we've known that through the history of democracies. We've got a particular twist in the last 40 years, which is we've got an international economy that's globalising, and politicians that are, in general, happy to say, I'm sorry, we can't control some of these great shifts in people, in companies, in finance. There's no wonder, really, that people lose faith in democracy when you live in an international economy where you can't control the things anymore that affect your life. Ben? I don't think we should downplay how serious difficult economic times are for liberal democracy.

They were in the past and they will continue to be in the future. I think the first thing to say is that's why it's important for those of us who believe strongly in the institutions of liberal democracy to speak up for it because they're under challenge and there are going to be many, many people saying, look, this system doesn't work at all and convincing large audiences. So if not just the mainstream media

but all of us go into that defensive crouch and say, gosh, you know, liberal democracy does have problems and there's nothing we can do, then we open up the playing field to that. Okay, thank you. Peter Tatchell, you've identified and we've discussed lots of different issues and problems. But is it not true that until we fix the fundamental

of an unfair, basically corrupt voting system, none of those will be fixed? We have not had in this country a political party that's won a majority of the public vote since 1931. That's almost 100 years. Every government by 2010 has been based on minority public support. Without that public support, we can't reform the system, we can't renew our democracy. So I put it to you that reforming the vote is the key to unlocking all the other necessary changes. Thank you. You can't give a Reith lecture where you talk about proportional

representation positively without feeling some agreement with that statement. There is an unfairness that's never going to go away while we have the current system. And so we've got a couple of options, one of which is just to try and have a referendum created by parties who benefit from the current system and will almost certainly lose out. We've done that once before. It didn't work out very well. I'd be surprised if it worked brilliantly again. One never knows. Another, though, would be to think cleverly about where we could introduce more proportional elections in other parts of our polity. We did, until very recently,

have proportional representation in the London elections, but to the degree that lower levels of governance are good, and I strongly, as someone who's spent a lot of time in America, I think that giving people more power locally is a good thing. Gentleman over there with the yellow microphone. My name is Sasha Ward. I represent the Guardian Reading Wokorati. I'd like to ask if you think that the future of democracy is inextricably linked to the future of capitalism in that greater inequality seems to be a huge threat to democracy and causes massive polarization. Democracies tend to emerge in more unequal countries. So that's the opposite of that

claim. I'll come to your claim in a second. But the reason that happens is because unequal countries are often those where there's a new group of rich people who find themselves unrepresented. But then it does seem that democracies function less well when they're highly unequal and i think the political science evidence is basically the democracies don't produce representative public goods let's say welfare spending health systems when they get really unequal and so that's kind of a challenge right because the very thing that often causes democracies emerge that makes them work badly it means that it's not easy to draw a simple line and one thing i will say about capitalism is that a system of economic production

that emphasizes liberty doesn't completely clash with a liberal democracy that emphasizes freedom but where it clashes is where one person one vote vote, and one dollar, one vote, push against one another. And I think the American situation where campaign contributions are so important, that's one where inequality corrodes democracy. Thank you. And the final question, squeezing you in, short question and short answer, if that's possible. Hello, I'm Aidan. I'm a software engineer. What do you make of the Cambridge academics, David Ronsman's view that we ought to lower the voting age to six? What's wrong with five-year-olds? The political scientist Philippe Schmittaire,

he argued that European elections should grant votes for all sort of living people. But I guess the parents would have to do it for a while because his point was, look, actually, those are the future generations who are being most affected by policies. Now, that brings us right back, isn't this convenient, to the start of today's lecture where I talked about

when sometimes people get more than one vote, right? Like my grandfather and his vote for Scottish universities as well as himself. Well, as a parent, then, you'd be getting votes for your children. I think that's something we could argue might be democratically legitimate, but you can also see how some people might say, well, why should people with large families tell me what to do? Is there something about large families that leads to a particular type of politics and so on?

And so I don't think it ends the debate, but I actually think it ends the debate but i actually think it's an interesting thing that we should debate and i look forward to being in a debate with a four-year-old about why they should have the right to vote if you're in a debate with a four-year-old you're going to lose uh anyway look that happened before we are going to have to leave it there i'm afraid next time ben is going to be talking about security we will discuss threats from both home and abroad but that's for next time for now though from London a huge thanks to our audience here and especially to annual Reith Lectures from the BBC,

featuring Ben Ansell, Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Oxford University and author of the book, Why Politics Fails. His next talk focuses on the future of democracy in a world that's becoming less and less secure. How we can maintain freedom when threats of conflict grow each year. That places us on the horns of a terrible dilemma. Our temptation as we face these new insecurities will be to tighten every screw, plug every hole in the ship of state, to protect us and prevent the horrors of anarchy from seeping in. But inadvertently, we may end up summoning tyranny instead.

We might find ourselves tempted by the demand for order above all by a demagogue who exploits our fears to bolster their hold on power. Or we might constrain ourselves inadvertently layering rule upon rule like layers of bandages until we accidentally mummify ourselves. So our task then is to find a balance, to secure security without abandoning the core principles of liberal democracy. And to do that, we will need to trust one another. So what then is trust? The political philosopher Jan Elster

defines trust as lowering one's guard. When I interact with someone else, I do so without taking precautions. And if we completely trusted one another, well, then we could unlock our doors without fear of theft. But we don't, in fact, trust everyone at every time. Our trust is conditional and it's contextual. And we distrust others for two reasons. First, they might indeed mean us harm by lying, stealing or cheating. But second, they might actually mean us well, but simply be incompetent, unable to fulfill their promises to us. And that, I think, explains why we often don't trust politicians. It's not that

they're liars, it's just that they're incompetent. Complete trust comes about when we choose not to monitor other people. And Elster provides the example of not reading your spouse's diary. So trustful marriage is one where you don't have to lock your secret journal away. But when it comes to our security outside of the household, well, then we have different levels of trust. We move away from a pure trust to a more sceptical trust. We may need to be just as sceptical about trusting our so-called protectors. Ben Ansell, the 2023 BBC Wreath Lecturer.

Listen for another talk in the days ahead on ideas. If you'd like to comment on anything you've heard in this episode or in any other, you can do that on our website, cbc.ca slash ideas, where, of course, you can also get our podcast. The series was adapted for ideas by Matthew Lazenrider. Special thanks to Laura Lawrence and the BBC World Service. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for Ideas. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval.

Our acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.