Towards a longtermist framework for evaluating democracy-related interventions

Abstract

Many people have suggested that improving, safeguarding, or promoting liberal democracy should perhaps be a priority for longtermists. For example, 80,000 Hours lists improving institutional decision making, safeguarding liberal democracy and voting reform as potentially high-impact cause areas (Koehler, 2020). However, it remains unclear how high-priority these areas and specific interventions within them are, and why. This post attempts to (1) tease apart different features of liberal democracy and (2) analyse how increasing or decreasing a society’s level of each feature would affect various potential intermediate goals for longtermists. By potential intermediate goals, we mean goals we could pursue to potentially increase the expected value of the far future, via four broad categories: existential risk reduction, trajectory changes, speeding up development, or “meta-longtermism” ( Greaves and MacAskill, 2021). This is intended as a step towards a general framework for evaluating: * how high longtermists should want societies to be on each feature of liberal democracy * the positive or negative long-term effects of specific democracy-related interventions * the extent to which longtermists should in general prioritise causes or interventions related to liberal democracy We also provide some initial thoughts on these points, and outline some directions for further research. We hope this post, and possible future work building on this framework, could inform longtermism-inclined people who are interested in potentially researching or funding democracy-related interventions, are making career decisions, or are designing and implementing democracy-related interventions. KEY TAKEAWAYS 1. The features of liberal democracy we identify in Section 1 are: 1. Competitive democracy: There are free, fair, and competitive elections ( representative and/or direct) and their results are peacefully implemented. 2. Accuracy