Democratic Participation and Global Catastrophic Risk

The issue of democratic backsliding has gotten extensive attention in recent years. That is the issue of countries becoming less democratic than they previously were. Often, it is discussed in terms of governments becoming more authoritarian. That is undoubtedly very important. However, in this article, I’d like to discuss a different dimension, one that has gotten less attention but is of particular relevance to GCRI and the broader community of people involved in global catastrophic risk. This is written in terms of democracy in the US, though much of it may also apply to other countries.

The character of American democracy went through a massive change starting around the 1960s. Prior to then, policy advocacy was largely centered on mass movements. An ambitious person who wanted to change government policy—a policy entrepreneur—would establish a mass membership organization, recruit citizens into chapters across the country, and mobilize these citizens to push for policy change. Or, the entrepreneur would work within an existing mass membership organization, working up the ranks to a position of leadership.

Today, this approach to policy entrepreneurship is less common. Policy entrepreneurs still form and join organizations to advance their causes, but the organizations tend to have a different character. Instead of recruiting large numbers of citizens, today’s policy entrepreneurs are more likely to engage directly with the government. Citizen participation is of a more limited character: subscribing to organizations’ newsletters, donating, maybe signing a petition, but usually not much more. For most citizens, policy advocacy has become less participatory and more of a spectator sport.

Here is a remarkable statistic that illustrates how things were. In 1955, the 20 largest membership organizations were, in aggregate, so large that around 3% to 5% of the total US adult population was active in those organizations in leadership positions. These were organizations that each had up to around 17,000 local chapters, each of which needed around 15 people serving in leadership. This evokes a line from 1892, in which it was said that—to paraphrase—in the United States, everyone wants to be President, and in the United States, with its numerous civic organizations, everyone gets to be President [1].

The US today is nothing like this. Instead, it looks—well, it looks more like GCRI. GCRI is a nonprofit organization that has a policy agenda but no mass citizen participation. We do run an Advising and Collaboration Program that welcomes participation from anyone interested, but it is geared toward students and professionals, not the general public. That is typical: policy advocacy has become highly professional, featuring educated specialists capable of mastering complex policy issues and navigating an equally complex government bureaucracy that is itself heavily staffed by educated specialists. It is largely an insider game.

There are important advantages to the current setup. Many policy issues, including global catastrophic risk, are highly complex and benefit from advanced expertise. Furthermore, developing expertise and building mass movements are both very time consuming activities; the more time a policy entrepreneur spends on mass movements, the less expertise they’ll bring to the policymaking process. Indeed, the sheer difficulty of building mass movements is a primary explanation for the historical shift in US policy advocacy: policy entrepreneurs found it easier to engage directly with governments [2].

However, there are also some major downsides. Without mass citizen participation, policy advocacy is less democratic. It can also result in weaker policy. Insider advocacy is well-suited to smaller policy issues that fly under the radar of public opinion, but the biggest, most impactful policy changes are difficult to advance without substantial public pressure. Insider advocacy can also result in more elitist policy. Freed from the need to appeal to the masses, policy entrepreneurs can advocate for whatever they can get funding for. It is often easier to raise funds from a few wealthy donors than a large number of small donors, especially given the current state of wealth inequality. That incentivizes policy entrepreneurs to align their stances with the preferences of wealthy donors, which may not correspond to the preferences and interests of less affluent citizens.

The funding dynamic in global catastrophic risk is quite extreme. A large portion of funds comes from just three individuals: Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook who funds the Open Philanthropy Project, Jaan Tallinn, a co-founder of Skype who funds the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and Vitalik Buterin, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur who donated $665 million to the Future of Life Institute [3]. This leaves the field of global catastrophic risk heavily sensitive to their particular preferences and not to the public at large.

It is not hard to imagine a mass movement for global catastrophic risk. Indeed, there is precedent in the large movements for environmental protection and nuclear weapons in the 1970s and 1980s. An estimated 20 million Americans—10% of the population—participated in the first Earth Day in 1970. A single 1982 anti-nuclear event in Central Park drew one million people. These examples show the potential for mass public interest in global catastrophic risk.

There does remain the challenge of crafting a global catastrophic risk policy agenda that can appeal widely across the public. This is not a trivial matter. As a case in point, despite its massive turnout, the 1970 Earth Day participants were predominantly young, college-educated White Americans, as was the broader environmental movement it was part of. This limited the movement’s political success, especially when opponents branded it as elitist and counter to economic progress [4]. A movement for global catastrophic risk should seek to have broader appeal, cutting across socioeconomic class, age, race, geography, etc. This could be possible: today’s US population may have deep cultural and political divisions, but if there’s one thing we all should be able to agree on, it’s that we must avoid global catastrophe. It is a big collective goal that perhaps could motivate broad political action.

Here are a few ideas for a policy agenda of a mass movement for global catastrophic risk. These ideas are only tentative; they are intended as a starting point for discussion, not a definitive conclusion on what to do. I’m confident that each of them would help reduce global catastrophic risk, but it’s harder to say how well they’d serve for a mass movement. Some of these policy ideas may only appeal to a segment of the population, but hopefully in aggregate there is something for everyone.

• Increased urban housing supply and improved options for car-free transportation to lower the cost of living, improve quality of life, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

• Pro-labor handling of automation technology to ensure workers maintain financial self-sufficiency and the dignity of employment even as AI technology becomes more advanced.

• Pursuit of peace between geopolitical rivals, including through grassroots diplomacy, to reduce the risk of war and improve international cooperation.

• Investment in local infrastructure to improve local economies and quality of life while hardening critical infrastructure to improve resilience to catastrophes.

• Support for local self-sufficiency to reduce dependence on global economic trends and improve local communities’ ability to withstand and recover from catastrophes.

• Increased dialog between the public and expert communities to jointly develop and advance policy ideas, improve mutual trust, and foster a sense of solidarity across the citizenry.

That last point is perhaps the most important. Indeed, I’ll admit that I find this exercise very humbling, trying to craft a policy agenda that could have broad appeal across the US public. This could be a substantial research project in its own right. Social science researchers could investigate public perspectives on policy for global catastrophic risk, which could be integrated into analysis of the risks themselves. That could be valuable research to support a broader project of building mass public participation and achieving larger policy advances to address global catastrophic risk.

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[1] Both of these anecdotes are from p.8 of a paper by political scientist Theda Skocpol, Voice and inequality: The transformation of American civic democracy.

[2] See Skocpol, Voice and inequality, and especially Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, Downsizing Democracy.

[3] For a brief period of time, the field had a fourth major donor, Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced former head of the cryptocurrency company FTX.

[4] See Mark Dowie, Losing Ground. The growing political split between the college-educated and the working class is a big part of the historical shift from mass movements to insider professional policy advocacy.

Image credit: Marcel Antonisse / Anefo / Nationaal Archief / Dutch National Archives