Opinion – Ronaldo Lemos: Brazil can point out paths to democracy

It is a shame that in difficult times it is easy to forget Brazil’s leading role in the development of state-of-the-art democratic practices.

The country is the birthplace, for example, of the idea of ​​participatory budgeting. The simple and powerful idea that it is possible to consult the population of a given territory so that they can decide directly on how to prioritize the application of scarce resources on it. After all, no one better than the population that inhabits a place to decide what their priorities are.

The idea, which emerged in Porto Alegre about 32 years ago, has become a global hit. It is used today by numerous countries and regions, including the USA, Africa, most European countries, India, China and Australia. New York City, for example, has a standing committee on participatory budgeting. This is perhaps the most successful Brazilian institutional model, which has become an export product. It’s only in Brazil that he’s been forgotten.

However, democratic experiments in Brazil have not stopped. On Friday (17), The Economist magazine published a report on the idea of ​​quadratic voting, calling the method “a fairer way to vote”. And which country is among those listed as experimenting with the quadratic vote? Precisely Brazil. Cities like Gramado and João Pessoa have carried out projects using the method.

The quadratic vote was proposed by Eric Posner, professor at the University of Chicago, and economist Glen Weyl. It is a voting system that better expresses a population’s preference among multiple alternatives.

Voters receive a set of votes (for example, 100) and can allocate those votes among several available options. If the voter has a strong preference for a single option, they can put all their votes into it. However, by doing this, your votes receive a quadratic “discount”.

If the 100 votes are applied to a single option, they are worth 10 instead of 100. However, if the voter spreads the votes among several options, ordering their preferences, this discount is much smaller, and their decision-making power increases.

This corrects relevant distortions in voting systems and allows for balancing voter preferences and collective decision-making seeking consensus. For example, the City Council of Gramado tried the model to decide the agenda of what should be voted on. In the words of Professor Daniel, president of the Chamber: “At first, we thought it was strange. But then everyone understood the idea, which is to seek consensus and a democracy for the future.”

The experimentation in Brazil, it is worth informing, was carried out in partnership with the ITS, an institution of which I am a part, with the institution created by Weyl, called RadicalxChange.

The crisis of democracies is one of the most important issues of the present. In this context, it is important to think about how the democratic system itself can evolve to account for the construction of broader consensuses, avoiding the repeated dynamic of alienating close to 50% of voters in the elections. The quadratic vote brings, at the very least, a constructive provocation in this regard.

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