Cultural democracy and ‘the long march to alternative institutions’

In 2022 Dr Owen Logan started a pilot study partially funded by RWF along these lines……..

“Raymond Williams was open to the potential of new technologies to facilitate cultural democracy but warned that communication technologies driven by business, electoral marketing, or the general competition for power would flatten out and streamline opinions. The transformation of the world-wide-web into echo-chambers and information cocoons proves that Williams was right. So perhaps it is time to recover the ancient egalitarian principle of random assembly of public representatives for deliberative purposes. Sortition (random selection) is intended as a counterbalance the negative effects of the competition for power and influence in any kind of democracy worthy of the name. The claims made for sortition have motivated our inter-university study The Spirit of Fascism in the Arts and the Prospects for Cultural Democracy: Testing a Randomised Jury Model.i Drawing on Williams’ materialist sense of culture our research acts on the premise that if widening participation in the arts matters it matters first and foremost at the level of public-funding decisions.ii To this end we have begun using sortition to assemble citizen juries from members of the general public, comparing their hypothetical funding preferences with that of more homogenous focus groups including expert groups. Our initial findings suggest that groups with some kind of direct or expert interest veer between promotion and censorship, whereas independent citizen juries may strongly prefer critical contextualisation of the arts.iii

FULL REPORT