Welcome to How to Save Democracy, the podcast for people who love democracy but know it needs to change. I am Omezine.

So I spoke extensively about the Tunisian experience and revolution and democratization process in another episode where you interviewed me, John. So if you wanna listen to the details, you can you can go back to it. Today, I would like to focus on the first years, even the first months, if I to be more precise, of the transition from dictatorship to democracy. It is this historic moment in twenty ten, twenty eleven in Tunisia where there was a lot of street protests that ended up with Ben Ali fleeing fleeing the country on 01/14/2011. And the role that was given or the role of of of of people and how it was perceived by institutions. And I think now looking back after a decade of democracy and now back to authoritarian regime in Tunisia, we missed the point there. We only perceived Tunisian people as voters and protesters, but not as full and active participants in designing the new democracy. We had the influence, and I think it's normal in a transition to look at established democracies and representative democracy as the type of system to install. But the reality is that even representative democracies have lost the trust of the people and people are frustrated. And and I think people as participants could have added so much. We could have used the energy of the streets, people demanding jobs, freedom, and dignity to bring that vision into the institution we created, into the political vision of a and a new contract that Tunisia started to establish then via the first free and fair elections.

available to us if if Tunisia had drawn on those things at that point. Is that right? Yeah. It's right. And I've been in dialogue with Johnny Benson, our friendly academic as you call him, was a specialist really in political theory and and and democratic skepticism to see that, you know, how we can look at what happened during those days. And if really, like, my my idea of missing the point of treating people as citizens can can make sense in terms of democratic innovation and try to analyze what didn't work because we had things that work. Right? Strong elements that made us establish the this foundation as a new democracy, but we missed some points and and see if democratic innovation practices could have brought the solution that would made us stronger, that could have made the checks and balances resilient to the the the steps back to author authoritarianism.

Yeah. I I think a lot of people won't be happy to hear that it was a on a Western model. This is actually a polarizing issue that we try to avoid talking about democracy as Western, non Western in in that in that sense. But for sure, I remember that politicians were talking to many experiences, South Africans, Latin Americans, Spanish people, people from the former Eastern Bloc,

the good things from a representative democracy, but we immediately reproduced what was already happening in, representative democracies. And I think the main challenge for us Tunisians then was to move from the subject story to the citizen story and not stick to the consumer story of the current representative democracy, to use your language.

So when an an outsider like myself, unlike Thomasine, reads or hears about the Tunisian experience, In many ways, it feels exceptional because of the rate of change. Right? So you went from a revolution against autocracy to this kind of rapid process of democratization turning into a process of democratic retreat, and then finally, this return to to autocracy. And all of this within around a decade. Right? And that feels very exceptional. But if we take that arc, that general pattern, then that general pattern can be seen much more broadly on the global scale. Right? So particularly after the Cold War, you saw this rapid expansion of democracy around the globe. There was much kind of hope. Academics were always talking about democratization. That was the big kind of word. And today, the big kind of word in the academic debate around democracy is backsliding. Decline is erosion. Right? So today, the average level of democracy for the average global citizen is back to a level that it was in '19, '78. Right? For the first time in two decades, there are more autocracies in the world than there are, democracies. Right? So we've seen this very significant decline, and it's not been, located in only one part of the world. Right? So Eastern Europe saw autocracies set in or worsen in Belarus, in Hungary, in Russia. In South Asia, you saw India, which was the the world's most populous democracy. 1,500,000,000 people downgraded from an electoral democracy to an electoral autocracy. We've seen democratic declines in Latin America, Western Europe, North America, and The United States. So the speed at which things happened in Tunisia was exceptional. But that arc, that pattern, we're seeing replicated at a more kinda global level. And the way in which the decline is happening also is replicated. Right? There's always differences with context, but we're seeing this way in which democracy falls not by kind of revolutions, not by the military and the men with guns, Right? But by this slow incremental undermining of democratic processes, often by leaders who were elected. Right? It was an elected leader in Tunisia who suspended parliament. Mhmm. And that is the case we see in many places which are experiencing democratic decline rates. The slow erosion of both what we call formal norms. Right? So this is kind of your elections, your corruption bodies, your constitutional norms and courts, but also the erosion of those informal norms that support democracy. So politicians' commitment to democratic process, to respecting elections, to playing not only by the rules, but the spirit of the rules. Right? So not using every gap in the constitution for your own partisan political gain. All those kinds of things have been kind of slowly eroded predominantly by people who came to power, through elections. Right? So there is a lot of patterns and a lot we can learn from looking at the kind of rapid microcosm of Tunisia for the broader experience of global backslide. Just before we go into the contribution that democratic innovation might have made,

I mean, there were definitely demand. And then the the hope, the expectation of people was that politicians would deliver and immediately. And, you know, a revolution doesn't happen overnight. So these problems have been slowly building over generations, and the lack of political freedoms and space for people and parties and organization to come and criticize and propose alternatives ended up with a revolution, that nobody expected. But still, you you can you can read, you can see that there are grievances that were not taken into account by politicians. And so I think people had had high expectations of democracy delivering immediately, which is not really the case. In democracy, you have elections and the best case I mean, minimum minimum, you have elections and you have to wait until political parties agree. But then in our case, we also needed to build the institutions for this new democracy. So it took longer for, for government to really be able to tackle all the issues. And I think people saw that democracy was not delivering as fast the as they thought, and they lost hope. Because if revolution doesn't give you the answers, then democracy won't. They saw immediately and and I think the perception of politicians also played a big role, in in in a in a country where politicians were only seen as corrupt, serving their own needs, getting richer by stealing money, I mean, they didn't have any faith in the new politicians either. Even if they saw new faces, newcomers, brave people who were fighting, the dictatorship who finally came to power, they they didn't believe that, this new new old class will will will deliver for them. So that that's that's, I think, for me, a main issue Yeah. That that what what works then? Yeah. And that's also and this is my opinion. Lots of people were looking at violence

Yeah. I'm thinking of democratic innovations because they have this fundamental belief in the agency, the power, the intelligence, and everything that the citizen could bring to a conversation. And this is really the framework where all these citizens who went to the street and liberated all Tunisians would have a formal, official, recognized, and respected place, not as protesters in the street, not as voters coming in elections only, but as active contributors to the policy conversations at all levels of government. And I think that's a huge shift in paradigm for all politicians in Tunisia. All over the world, for sure, we're not exceptional in that. Politicians still perceive citizens this way in most places as protesters or voters. But active participants is that what I think that's what we missed because we had so much energy, so much beautiful, ideas that needed to be channeled. And I I personally understood very quickly that I needed to join a political party if I wanted my ideas to be taken seriously. If I wanted to influence the new social contract, I needed to run for parliament. If I wanted to change the laws, maybe I needed to have a position in government. There was no other space inside. Let's change. And and lots of people also decided to stay away from that. And being the inside the game, they they decided, and that was also beautiful to witness, to start organizations, to monitor elections, to care about issues that were very important, but to stay outside. And and I felt that the the the this new energy was not strong enough to push politicians. But if we had that framework, that idea of seeing people as citizens, if we had created spaces for deliberative processes, for participation, then we would have used that, like, I was going to say a gray area. It's not inside. It's not outside. Created that space for people to safely involve in the process harnessed to feed into the reflections and the debates and the extraordinary work that was being done at the national level at the constituent assembly.

Yeah. I was directly involved in that process in 2013 and 2014, and I was senior adviser to the minister of finance then. And there was truly a will to involve as many people as possible, but I don't I don't think people in the sense of citizens was meant, but more the institutions. And because we didn't know how how long we would be in government, the transition was changing all the time. And because we still wanted to have our contribution to a fairer system, simpler system, and also to kind of make sure that we have a truly progressive system, we looked at what was existing and maybe never formally used, but or truly used in a participatory way. And, there was the National Council for, Fiscality or Tax that had representatives from trade union, business associations, consumers, organization, ministries. And we try to have meetings there and working groups, that were as participatory as possible in a system that was still representative and not including lots of citizens. And so I think that worked at some point like, to some point because we really had a lot of experts coming in, but people were still outside. That was still perceived as a technical issue and not a societal cause to to kind of bring together. And, people are still upset about the fiscal system, about paying taxes, and they know that there is a lot of tax avoidance and tax evasion. And so we didn't include, we we missed that point there either. But I think we did our best in that short amount of time.

what might what might you have done, do you think? I think I would have done a national citizens assembly on tax fairness. The question that we had, like, we we we really established beautiful and aspirational goals, a simple, fair, and modern tax system. We would have asked the question to randomly selected citizens representing all, you know, aspects of Tunisian society from rural to city to gender to a level of education, demographic. And we would have asked them the question. And they would have been the ones to call on experts, on organizations, international and national contributions, see what worked and doesn't work in other countries, and they would have made a a decision and the government would have had to execute. That would have been my dream.

I think that would have made first of all, people, citizens look at government in a different way. They would have understood the complexity of dealing with such incredible, complicated system. They would have understood the challenges. They would have understood where dictatorship had left us, but concretely not in what they heard or what they know without, being involved in administration. They would have understood the the the the challenges of civil servants, and they would have followed thoroughly the politicians and what has been implemented. And they would they would have been able to ask and question the politicians and also elect politicians accordingly. I think what would have also fundamentally changed is that they would have trusted the process. They would have trusted that we were trying to do our best, and they would have, created that link between people who were not involved in the in the process, and heard only about it and the politicians who just are perceived to steal their own propaganda.

So I don't think, though, myself or Omi Zim would tell you that a democratic innovation would have saved Tunisian democracy on its own. Right? These are not silver bullets. Right? These are not substitutes for good constitutional safeguards, right, for the independence of institutions, for public support, for democracy. But I do think there is an opportunity for these kind of institutions to play a role in this context in helping to build forms of democratic resilience. Right? So many of the problems that Tunisia faced during, its process of democratization, these are problems that linger and fester. Right? They don't produce return to a democracy overnight. So you need to be able to intervene earlier on in order to stop them turning into an issue, which then brings an end to, brings an end to democracy. Right? And research that looks at process of autocratization shows that the earlier you can intervene, the earlier you can stop it, the the better. Right? The more you allow autocratization to lock itself in, the harder it is to push back. Right? So I think democratic innovations might be able to play a role at that earlier stage. And what's really interesting in talking to Amazeen is when she raises the kinds of problems that were faced in the transition, many of them map onto what we normally think about as an advantage of democratic innovations. Right? So take the limited economic reform, which included tax situation but much more poorly. Right? This was a big part of the revolution. Right? People were demanding this. But there was a failure of the institutions to take those public demands and actually put it into legislation and actually make those necessary reforms. There was a disconnect between what the elites thought were important and what the public thought were important. Well, democratic relations have a real virtue here because they bring ordinary people into into government. Right? Government people tend to be from certain backgrounds. Right? This is true of Tunisia. This is true of The UK. It's true of almost every democracies. Right? These tend to be educated people from better backgrounds, and they have a certain set of perspectives where certain problems feel more urgent to them. Democratic innovations bring perspectives into into government that are not normally there, and therefore, problems that might otherwise get marginalized can come in. Omersey has talked a lot about the complexity that was faced in the transition. Right? You're going from decades of authoritarianism to a completely new political system, having to deal with decades of clientelism, right, of a tax system that has just been tweaked in every possible way to favor the the supporters of the regime. Right? Dealing with these things is highly complex. Well, democratic innovations are often seen as helping to deal with complexity. Right? Both because they can bring away in new ways of thinking, because they bring ordinary people who think about problems in different ways. And because they create different visions of labor. It's a new source of problem solving that's not already there. Building trust. Trust was lacking in Tunisia. Democratic innovations could help to build trust. There was dominance of a religious cleavage in Tunisia. Democratic innovations could help to moderate polarization and bring other issues into the debate. So the problems often point towards these virtues. We can talk about the limitations as well, but this is a really interesting link between, what were the problems in those cases and what we think of as beneficial about democratic innovations. And then that's quite surprising. Right? You would think the democratic innovations, their virtues would have something to play in this kind of this kind of context. I really like the the way you talked about that, this sort of early intervention.

Okay. Right? And WEIRD here is an acronym for wealthy, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic countries. Even though we know that lots of, democratic innovation also happening in global majority countries and participatory budgeting was invented in Brazil. But they are mainly based on transparency, on visibility of these processes, of, openness to dialogue that and and these, like, three elements or or or or, prerequisites, if you if you will, are not necessarily true or present in post dictatorship environment. People, even though they are freed from oppressive regime, you don't change your Mhmm. Upbringing, your education of not speaking up, of not, being open to others, trust a group. We we you really have to understand that in Tunisia, we were raised with, like, a policeman in our head. That's a little metaphor we use to explain how censorship works. You're not you don't even allow yourself to think of the idea that emerges. So you repress it even in your own head before even you speak it. So there is even a step, that comes before speaking. Your idea is you don't accept the ideas in your own mind. So that is something that we need like, the the destroying our own destroying our own sensor, censorship is a first step that needs to be added to be to to allow people to speak openly, and and to express their ideas.

So what I think Omidyin is pointing to is the real significant challenge here, which is how do you get democratic innovations to work effectively in a backsliding context, which is in many ways, unhospitable to them. So I talked before about how many of the problems during the democratization process pointed towards virtues of democratic innovations. Well, many of the problems that happened when you start to see that retreat of democracy also point to the risks and the vices of democratic innovations. So if we think about something like a normal challenge to democratic innovations even in the the weird world, which is something like instrumentalization. Right? What if politicians instrumentalize citizens' assemblies to only commission them when it's useful to them, to only follow their recommendations when they like the answers, right, to use it to To frame the questions to be what they want to To use it to to produce their own legitimacy, right, when it's helpful to them, but not actually to follow, what people want in some way. So that is a problem for democratic innovations, you know, the world over in a backsliding context. Right? When you have actors who are explicitly anti democratic. Right? This is not a context where there is a background assumption that we all play by the democratic game. Right? Here we have actors who actually are trying to erode those democratic brawns, who have no commitment to democracy. How might they instrumentalize the use of democratic innovations? Right? May they try to use them in ways that can enhance their legitimacy, perhaps to go against the more general popular will of elections by saying, well, we formed this assembly. Right? And this was real people even though we tweaked it to make sure that it was people who supported us. Right? These are real dangers. Think about another challenge that affects democratic innovations more generally, the trade off between transparency and privacy. Right? So on one hand, we want democratic innovations to generally be transparent. We want their decisions to be known to the public. We want their deliberations and reasoning to be known. We don't want this to be a black box, a secret, assembly within government. But on the other hand, we wanna protect the citizen members of these sins assemblies or participatory budgeting, institutions because they're not public individuals. They're not politicians who signed up to be in the public eye, right, to have people scroll through their social media looking for dirt. Right? They're not people who have taken up that role. This is normal people, right, who've been asked to do a public service. So there's this this way of trying to trade off the transparency versus that privacy. Draw that to a situation of democratic backsliding where the members of this assembly not only have this concern of being, you know, perhaps ending up in a newspaper or having a a being on the the the wrong end of a Twitter storm, but also have legitimate concerns about the extent to which the government is really committed to protecting them, protecting their freedom of speech or freedom of association. It might actually, make reprisals if they say the wrong thing. Right? Would be a genuine fear of people in Tunisia at that moment, and it would be a justified fear. So how do we deal with these kinds of cases? Right? And that comes back to your question before, which I I failed to answer, which is how do we, transform democratic innovations to suit this in this bottle inhospitable, context. Right? And I think that's the real challenge. Right? So we should think about different ways in which we can do this. So on transparency versus privacy, we might have really good reasons to put lots more weight on the privacy, which we would not normally think is acceptable, right, in a kind of established democracy context. But here, it might actually be necessary. Right? Maybe we need to treat citizens' assemblies in a bit how we treat juries. Right? Juries in criminal trials get anonymity. They get a significant level of privacy in a serious trial with public attention. You know, real steps are taken to protect the safety of that jury. Perhaps we need to start thinking about them like that in this context. When it comes to instrumentalization, well, you know, that's also a problem, of course, which confronts elections. Right? Dictators like many, the autocracies are electoral autocracies. They like legitimacy that, elections give them even if they're, you know, corrupt elections. And ways we try and deal with that are things like having independent electoral commissions. Right? From either, independent institutions within the country or external to the country to try to guide them, to run them, to make sure they, they run by the correct standards, perhaps we still need to start thinking about that in terms of democratic innovations. Right? So not relying on the traditional state institutions that you might, in a weird context, rely on thinking about these different ways of doing it. Right? But that's the real challenge. How can we get those virtues to work in a context which is quite inhospitable to those virtues?

and how they can become leaders and what's this transformation that happened during those first days, first months, post Tunisian revolution. Lot of people had ideas and wanted to implement them, and and they immediately positioned themselves in the public sphere. But a lot stayed out of the decision making process because the system was not adapted to welcome different walks of lives, but also the I mean, by that, politicians and others by choice because they didn't wanna have their hands dirty of being in charge somehow. And so I'm thinking what needs to happen to reassure people that it's safe enough to contribute and to be somehow leading the process without that risk of being associated or, as we see now happening in Tunisia, retroactively be punished for an opinion that you published, you expressed publicly, or a decision you made as a civil servant or as a politician. All are now in the same bucket. The witch hunt that didn't happen post revolution is happening today in Tunisia. And so I'm thinking, what is what can we plan for the future, both in terms of, you know, as I said, future security, but what also are the skills that need to happen. I definitely think that democratic innovation knowledge and expertise and experience need to be there from the beginning when the next wave of change will happen in Tunisia because I believe it's gonna happen. It's just a question of time, a matter of time. And so how can we create, like, a group or community or a collective or different sorts of collectives of people who know about these practices, but at the same time reflect about our own context of post dictatorship and all the issues that, Ajani talked about. And so we have a non weird democratic innovation that provides really the space for everyone really to feel safe, to contribute. And I think that will be an incredible addition to to really bay build more resilience. It won't be the silver bullet that we all need. It's still experimentation. We really we are really building the first democracy in the Arab and Muslim world, so context matter, matters. And so the question remains also for politicians. I mean, not only the groups and the collective of citizens, but also politicians or people who aspire to lead the next transition phase of Tunisia need to know about democratic innovation. So how can we make these processes known? How can they debate them, criticize them, but learn about them and consider them as a tool in their hand in their hands? Because I don't believe that can happen only from citizens, from organizing from grassroots, but it also needs to happen from institutions who open up to the citizens the citizen power.

And when it comes to the the global level, the thing that's I've really taken away by learning more about the the Tunisian experience is the importance of the relationship between democratic decline and backsliding and democratization. So when we first started speaking to each other and thinking about, democratic innovations in a time of backsliding, The assumption was we'll be thinking about the end of this Tunisian arc that we've talked about. Right? It'll be about the part where it starts to slip away into into autocracy. But, actually, many of the problems that Omezine, identifies are in the earlier stages. Are in that democratization stage. And we look at the global level, although I spoke earlier about this kind of general democratic decline at the global level, it's not universal. Right? Most countries have not seen significant declines. Sorry. Most democracies have not seen significant declines. And actually we find surprising evidence even about some of the worst cases or most serious cases, of autocratization about the ability of democracy to come back. So if we think about democratic breakdowns, so countries that have really lost the democratic institutions over the last thirty years, 54% of those cases in the last thirty years have returned to democracy. Right? And that's quite an amazing figure because we're not talking about every country that's just had some problems of decline, some problems of norm aversion. We're talking about the most serious cases where there's been a proper breakdown in democratic institutions. Over half return. So when we look to the future, I think we're looking not just at a kind of future erosion, we're looking at a future of kind of instability, of moving back and forth between times of decline, times of democratization. So in addressing that problem, yes, we need to think about how you fight back in times of decline, how you do kinds of democratic self defense, but also how do we do the democratization bits better so that when you have increases in democratic quality, those are not lost in the future.

Okay. About the paper, we're gonna publish it on Manchester University website.

That's the hope.

Then if they wanna follow me, I have a personal website, omezhinkrifa.com, and my LinkedIn, same. And we I'm gonna probably publish also the paper there. And you have your own website too. Yeah. My website is,

doctor Jonathan Benson, @.co.uk. You can also find me on the the University of Manchester's website. And, yeah, everything I'm working on can be found in those places.

This was How to Save Democracy, the podcast for people who love democracy but know we've got serious work to do to save it. This episode was hosted by John Alexander and me, Omi Zin Khalifa, and produced by Joe Barrett.