I was asked the following question:
Is sociocracy a compliment to or a replacement for democracy?
My response was I see it as a replacement - mostly.
The followup questions were these:
How does sociocracy address or manage a tyranny of the minority?
And individual obstructionism?
And now I’m turning to you - what do you all think?
I guess that depends on how people define democracy…
Unless someone has a relatively narrow and conventional US definition of democracy, then I would consider it a type of democracy.
Encyclopedia Britannica says “Democracy is a system of government in which power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or through freely elected representatives.”
By this sociocracy is neither a replacement or not a compliment, jt is just a type of democracy alongside majority vote or conventional whole body consensus, or other representative based models.
The earlier sociocratic work We the People: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy calls in this deeper definition, as does David Garber’s The Democracy Project.
It seems to me the answer to both questions revolves a lot around definitions, scale and context.
If by democracy we mean majority voting, then it is a replacement. At the same time, a board that makes decisions by majority voting, but whose membership is determined by the number of shares owned by the constituencies, is hardly democratic. Would you call it sociocratic if it adopted a consent based decision-making, without changing the representation mechanism?
If we are speaking of the general democratic process of running a country, I am afraid we are still far to have an evidence that sociocracy is a viable possibility.
I went back to “We the people” and the only reflections I found on a broader political approach applicable to a country are the appendices of Boecke and Edenbourg. And even Boecke presents it as, initially at least, just a complement to a classical government. The conditions he lists for making sociocracy a viable governance method for a country ( considering the interest of all, accepting the decisions of all, making representation a question of trust not power ,…), if satisfied ,would make even a classical democracy a paradise on earth.
I think the interest of Sociocracy is that practising it , changes people, and makes those conditions a bit more achievable. That is why I believe adopting sociocracy at schools would be so important.
For the moment, Churchill’s quote is still relevant :“democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”