Incentivizing Democracy
Two global crises are troubling policy-makers, academics, and large swaths of the general public. The first one is political, currently unfolding, and could be best labelled as a crisis of democracy. As the latest V-DEM Report on Democracy shows, the gains of the so-called “third wave of democracy” have been almost completely wiped out, with democracy worldwide going back to 1978 levels. Only 7% of the world population are now considered to live in a liberal democracy. Moreover, global dissatisfaction with democracy among ordinary citizens has reached unprecedented levels in the last few years. The other crisis is economic, currently looming, and is traceable to the impact that loosely regulated AI development is likely to have for the job market. While it is too early to offer more than potential scenarios for this evolution, even in the near to medium-term future, there is a fairly widespread sentiment that the consequences of AI for employment, at least in some sectors, will be rather pernicious. For example, most business executives believe that AI is likely to displace a large number of existing jobs, while about two thirds of both EU and US citizens believe that AI will lead to more jobs dissappearing than being created. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has strikingly predicted as recently as January 2026 that AI could displace half of all entry-level white collar jobs within the next five years. In this piece I briefly outline an institutional proposal, which is not novel but instead has excellent historical pedigree, that could contribute to attenuate these crises if coupled with other kinds of substantive democratic reforms.
Athenian Tetradrachm
Source: https://www.navic.org.au/numismatic-items/the-athenian-tetradrachm/
I begin this essay, as I sometimes do on this blog (see here and here), with a story from Classical Athens. This story is placed sometime around the middle of the 5th century BCE, closely following the reforms of Ephialtes, which open up what is ordinarily understood to be the phase of radical democracy in Athens [1]. It is in this period, according to the Aristotelian source of the Constitution of the Athenians, that a power struggle ensues between Pericles and Cimon, the two leading politicians of the time, together with their supporting factions – the people on the one hand and the wealthy on the other (with Cimon representing the latter). Cimon was, apparently, very wealthy (“as rich as a tyrant”, according to Arist. [Ath. Pol.] 27.3) and was able to garner the loyalty of many Athenians through his generous financial support. Pericles, on the other hand, was not, even as a descendent of aristocratic families on both parental sides, and could therefore not compete with Cimon when it came to bestowing economic benefits on his fellow citizens for political gain. The solution to his conundrum is further described by the Aristotelian source: “He was therefore advised […] that since he was less well supplied with private property he should give the people their own property; and so he devised payment for the jurors” (Arist. [Ath. Pol.] 27.4). If the story is accurate, this political struggle represents the origin of dikastic pay, namely remuneration for occupying the role of juror in the People’s Courts (dikasteria). Importantly, we should not think of Athenian Courts as merely institutions for legal recourse, as they would be nowadays. Instead, courts played a fundamental political role, especially as after 462 BCE (so, shortly before the introduction of dikastic pay), since they were responsible for hearing and deciding on political trials [2]. Financially compensating jury participation should therefore, first and foremost, be interpreted as a form of payment for democratic service.
This kind of payment was subsequently to be extended, first to the (predominantly lottery-selected) magistrates [3] and then, crucially, to those attending the Assembly, after the restoration of democracy in 403/402 BCE. In this latter case, too, there were likely pragmatic reasons for the move, related to political absenteeism, which especially in the context of the shrinking of the citizen body in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War made reaching the quorum for decision ratification very difficult (Hansen: 1991, 131). For broadly the second half of Classical Athenian democracy, then, all fundamental democratic roles (legislator, Council member, juror) belonged to the ordinary people, who were payed for their time and effort, a feature of a political system which Aristotle was later to name as one of the core characteristics of democracy (Arist. Pol. 1317). Moreover, even if this was merely a side effect, and not the reason for the introduction of payment for democratic service, the system effectively incentivized political participation especially among poorer citizens, who could get about the same amount of money as they would for ordinary employment if they attended the Assembly, and a little less for attending the Courts (Hansen: 1991, 150). And, because it was the poor who largely manned the democracy, it was their preferences and interests – and not those of the elites – that ultimately shaped policy-making.
The core thought that I put forward, then, is quite straightforward: payment for democratic services is an idea whose time should come again. Of course, to some extent, it has not dissapeared from the political stage altogether. Elected officials are, indeed, payed for representing the people, and from time to time, ordinary citizens are also payed for their democratic services – for example, polling station workers on the day of the election. But this latter situation only happens rarely, with payment being provided for handling administrative tasks, rather than engaging in democratic decision-making. Meanwhile, the former constitute a very narrow category of individuals, who are often times career professionals, and who, it might be said, are usually part of a structural elite to whose interests they may be more inclined to cater, particularly under some institutional constraints (e.g. campaign finance laws that allow for institutional capture of policy-makers by corporations and economically powerful individuals). So representative democracy provides for relatively few opportunities to introduce payment for democratic service, even though we could – hypothetically – pay citizens for voting in elections [4].
Moving towards more direct democratic mechanisms, however, could open up a broader range of such opportunities. One possible avenue would be to introduce local-level bodies, like the cantonal or communal assemblies in Switzerland, where citizens could meet in-person on a recurring bases and discuss problems and policies relevant to their local communities. Another would be to implement digital democratic platforms, like – for instance – LiquidFeedback. When currently deployed, these kinds of platforms are more often used at the local level, but they could, in principle, be scaled to the regional, national, or even supranational level [5], and can function both as direct democratic instruments or liquid democratic instruments, where individuals can not only debate and vote directly, but also delegate their support and votes to others for specific initiatives or policy areas.
Increasing citizen engagement in democratic processes is often touted as a key political objective in many polities, and for good reasons. The two avenues suggested above are not designed to replace representative democracy with a modern Athenian-style direct democracy, but rather with an eye to complement existing democratic processes with ones that are suited to large-scale civic participation that do is not exhausted once the elections are over. Even if these additional democratic forms would not go beyond functions like agenda-setting and public consultation, at least in their initial phase, they still have the potential to be democratically valuable. This is the case both in terms of policy-making outcomes (as they might align more with citizen preferences, which would be publicly available) and in respect to their effects on participating citizens, since (1) they are likely to gain better knowledge of the democratic systems and the complexities of political decision-making (e.g. Paulis and Pospieszna: 2025), (2) by constantly interacting with each other in a deliberative space, they might be less susceptible to democratically inimical phenomena, such as affective polarization (e.g. Fishkin et al.: 2021), and (3) the democratic attachment of citizens who are disenchanted with the workings of standard contemporary democracies might be reinforced (e.g. Pilet et al.: 2023). But one of the fundamental problem with these tools, particularly when their results are not mandatory for policy-making, is that participation is likely to be low, and therefore inevitably skewed towards some particular socio-economic groups. This, on the one hand, would render them of little use in revealing the genuine preferences of the demos, raising significant doubts on the legitimacy of decision-making when it is informed by them. And on the other one, the tools would have few positive effects on the citizens themselves – since they would not actually engage politically through them. The point of introducing payment for democratic service, would, therefore, be to incentivize people into using them on a sufficiently widespread scale, so as to correct the disparity of engagement that would otherwise be likely to exist, and to ensure that the experience of participating in direct democratic processes, together with its positive effects, is one that is shared by a considerable – and perhaps the wide majority – of citizens.
A second line of support for the proposal comes from the very different concern raised in the introductory paragraph, namely the likelihood that AI will lead to significant levels of technological unemployment. It has become a bit of a cliché, especially among AI-developing executives, to invoke Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a panacea for the adverse effects of AI on the labour market. But this is problematic due to several reasons. The first one refers to its lack of fiscal feasibility. For example, Zwolinski and Fleischer (2023, 39) calculate that introducing a $1.000 dollars per-month UBI in the United States for the entire adult population would cost more than 3 trillion dollars annually, a figure which represents more than 40% of the entire annual federal budget of the US (e.g. for 2025). Surely, the usual thought accompanying the UBI proposal is that the productivity increases in the economic sector will lead the possibility of increased budgetary revenues. But it is difficult to imagine (at least given the current power structures in contemporary capitalist systems) a scenario in which whatever productivity increases AI brings will not principally go into the pockets of corporations, investors, and AI executives, rather than being taxed and redistributed to citizens. Second, a scenario where a vast number of people are sitting idly by and living off of UBI, while AI and robots are performing all meaningful work, does not appear particularly attractive not least because of the psychological, social, and ultimately political instability that such a context is likely to give rise to. But at least according to most current predictions on the future of work, it is rather unlikely that at least in the medium-term AI will wipe out jobs on this magnitude. Rather, it is more likely that the effects will be significant, even major, but that most people will still be able to be employed. If this is right, UBI would not really be necessary and given its crippling budgetary impact, may be a disproportionate policy measure. Instead, payment for democratic service, of the kind illustrated above, could prove to be a more fruitful solution. Its budgetary impact would be much less severe, and could be adjusted more readily to specific local circumstances; it would help alleviate the plight of those unemployed, as long as they would be willing to participate in democratic political processes; and it could do so in a way which preserves their dignity and provides a socially important occupation that they can engage in.
To this extent, then, the proposal can be seen as outlining the contours of a new form of democratic job, which stretches back historically all the way to the early days of democracy, and which would be properly remunerated, individually meaningful, and politically beneficial, responding to important economic and societal challenges that we currently face or are likely to face in the upcoming decade.
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Notes
[1] Raaflaub (2007) goes further than this and argues – albeit in a minority position – that these reforms represent, in fact, the origins of Athenian democracy, and not the Cleisthenic reforms of the late 6th century.
[2] Further down the road, in the 4th century BCE, Mogens Hansen has suggested that the courts may have even replaced the Assembly as the “supreme body of government” and the place where the demos was “exercising its supreme power” (Hansen: 1991, 303)
[3] Though payment for magistrates ceased after the oligarchy of the Four Hundred, even following its removal, in all cases except for Council members (Hansen: 1991, 240)
[4] See Saunders (2009) for such a proposal and Brennan (2014) for a modified version, where only a small subset of people are randomly selected to vote and are payed for doing so (I criticize the latter proposal in Volacu: 2024).
[5] Exploring the challenges of scaling up such platforms is the objective of the on-going Horizon Europe-funded PERYCLES project, in which I am currently involved.
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References
Aristotle, [Athenaion Politeia], trans. by P.J. Rhodes, Penguin Books, London, 2002.
Aristotle, Politics, in J. Barnes (ed.), Aristotle’s Politics. Writings from the Complete Works, Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2016.
Brennan, J. (2014), “Medicine worse than the Disease? Against compulsory Voting”, in J. Brennan, and L. Hill (eds.), Compulsory Voting: for and against, 3–110. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Fishkin, J., Bolotnyy, V., Lerner, J., Siu, A., Bradburn, N. (2024), “Can Deliberation Have Lasting Effects?”, American Political Science Review, 18 (4): 2000-2020.
Hansen, M. H. (1991), The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes, trans. by J.A. Crook, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Paulis, E., Pospieszna, P. (2025), “Deliberative mini-publics as learning schools for democracy? Examining deliberation impact on dissatisfied and radical participants of a citizens’ assembly in Poland”, Democratization, 32 (4): 888-911.
Pilet, J.-B., Bol, D., Vittori, D., Paulis, E. (2023), “Public Support for Deliberative Citizens’ Assemblies Selected Through Sortition: Evidence from 15 Countries”, European Journal of Political Research,62 (3): 873-902.
Raaflaub, K. (2007), The Breakthrough of Demokratia in Mid-Fifth-Century Athens, in K. Raaflaub, J. Ober, and R. Wallace (eds.), Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece, Berkeley: University of California Press, 105-154.
Saunders, B. (2009), “Making Voting Pay”, Politics, 29 (2): 130-136.
Volacu, A. (2024), “Voting Lotteries, Compulsory Voting and Negative Freedom”, Journal of Ethics, 28: 331-349.
Zwolinski, M., Fleischer, M. P. (2023), Universal Basic Income. What Everyone Needs to Know, Oxford University Press: Oxford.
