Marcus, my apologies for the belated comment, but I'm also a democracy enthusiast and I agree that we undersell it but, for me, the reason we do that is that we don't understand it.

It seems to me that democratic processes are the way we make best use of the intellectual resources available to a community. Those resources (knowledge, empathy, perceptiveness, rationality, etc) are spread over individual human brains and to make full use of the whole resource, we have to 'put our heads together' in a way that best utilises the available brain power. This, to me, is the essence of the democratic process, but the actual mechanics will vary from case to case. Nevertheless, like any process, there will be inputs, processing and outputs. In democratic processes, the immediate input is information and data relating to the matter at hand (so free, open and ubiquitous access to information is important and matters such as censorship, freedom of information, libel laws and a free, independent, media – amongst many other things - are democratic issues). But, looked at from a medium and long term perspective, whole of life experience is also important (so education, health and social policy generally are also democratic issues).

The actual processing of a democratic process consists of some form of discussion/discourse/debate and for that to work properly we need well understood rules and conventions (so, we should start practising democracy early in life so that by the time we are adults we do it without having to work out the rules each time). We also need well understood mechanisms for involving people in these processes (so,the suite of democratic skills should include how to run meetings, how to use online forums and the internet in general and how to communicate your ideas to other people).

The outputs can range from action by individuals (as in voting), the forming of some sort of consensus (as in science, where the consensus is usually tentative and implicit, but can be firmer and more explicit as, for instance, in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) or joint action (as in various forms of coordinated cooperation).

Both formal and informal examples of processes like this are common in everyday life and have probably been common throughout human history. In fact, it could probably be argued that most human activity requires intellectual, human and physical resources and that, as you scale up the activity, the techniques to maximise each category of resources lead to democracy, corporations/governments and commerce respectively. But that is a much bigger can of worms that I don't necessarily want to open. Nevertheless, I think it does help to think of democratic process as a fundamental human activity.

At the informal level, most of us would have had experience of family meetings to decide what to do about some situation and who hasn't suffered through interminable meetings at work. The startling thing about most of these more informal processes for me is that how few of us actually know how to get the most out of them. It doesn't have to be like that and there are many examples of this sort of thing being done well, but much of the time we do it badly because we have no expectation of anything better. That comes back to not taking democratic processes seriously enough.

More formal democratic processes, such as jury trials, markets and science, have worked out ways to operate that optimise the outcomes, but the trouble with them is that they are generally not recognised as democratic processes at all.

Many of the activities around politics are, of course, democratic processes under my definition as well, but I don't think that we should define democracy only in relation to politics. To the extent that you can untangle a very tangled web, politics is about power and power is about managing human resources and that is a very different beast altogether.

So, based on this understanding of democracy, you would expect that there would be a thriving intellectual and activist community striving to promote democratic process; we should be making sure the information and data flow is unobstructed, that the discourse is well managed and the outputs work effectively.

But, there just isn't! Where is the Australian Democracy Movement? Where is the Institute for the Study of Democratic Process? Why don't we have an offence of 'Perverting the Course of Democracy'?

There are, of course, many organisations and individuals who address parts of the process, but it is all very ad hoc and fragmented. To me it seems as if we are not taking a fundamental human activity seriously enough. We call our society a democracy and there are undoubtedly a number of well oiled democratic processes operating within it along with innumerable informal processes (many of which we share with other societies). But we also don't seem understand what we have or how it could be improved.

I started down this track because it seemed to me that democracy was lacking something in this country (indeed, even losing something) and that one way I could contribute would be to join an organisation promoting democracy and volunteer my time. To my chagrin, I couldn't find such an organisation; there are plenty of political ginger groups, groups for policy wonks and independent journalism, but nary a sniff of any body promoting the democratic process as a whole.

Australian Democracy Movement anyone?

It's a curious thing that citizens in tyrannical regimes dance for joy when democracy is introduced into their homelands, only to find, ten years later, that their enthusiasm is quelled, sometimes squashed for good.

What happens to the institutions of democracy that they become so quickly captured by a professional class of politicians and their machine men, so that the core idea of citizens having a voice becomes hard to find? Or even to remember?

Marcus is right about the need for a comprehensive re-invention of our institutions. But how to do it?

Almost every thoughtful citizen will say, in conversation, that the institutions of democracy need fundamental reform. But in the privacy of the ballot box, most will revert to their traditional voting patterns which uphold, rather than reform, those institutions. What does this mean?

The two machines from which governments are drawn in Australia, with their highly unrepresentative teams of MPs and candidates, are deeply enmeshed with the composition and operations of our democratic institutions. Disentangling these machines from our institutions is the critical task.

The size and comprehensive nature of this task, however, seems daunting to most of us. We need a public effort to organise citizens to recapture their institutions, and take them back from the machines.

What kind of organisation do we need for the task? That's the key question, because it can't be done without it.

Vern Hughes
vern@civilsociety.org.au