When Freedom Is Not an Endless Meeting: A New Look at Efficiency in Consensus-Based Decision Making

Abstract

It is axiomatic among scholars of participatory democracy that consensus-based decision making is inefficient, yet no study has systematically assessed that claim. This article examines the efficiency of consensus decision making in 12 social movement groups from the German autonomous and nonviolence movements. Data were analyzed from 62 semistructured interviews regarding how long it took each group to make a typical decision and what types of decisions were the easiest and most difficult to make. A measure of inclusiveness was included to determine whether efficiency was attained by silencing dissent. Most decisions were made in less than two hours. Factors were identified that distinguished more and less efficient groups.

Keywords::

• collective behavior and social movements
• sociology of culture
• organizations, occupations, and work
• political sociology

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Joyce Rothschild, the external reviewers, the editors of TSQ, and to Tasleem Padamsee, P. Zitlali Morales, and Marisha Humphries for their extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Thanks also to the Social Science Research Council, the German Marshall Fund, the Horace Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan, and the Office of Sponsored Programs at Bradley University for their generous financial support.

NOTES

Notes

¹ At least one modern-day organization, the Religious Society of Friends, with a worldwide membership of over 300,000, has been using a form of consensus decision making since its founding in 1647.

² The term “collectivist democracy” is taken from the path-breaking work of Rothschild (1979), who introduced it as an ideal type alternative to rational bureaucratic organization. The two forms differ along eight dimensions, the most important of which for our purposes are that collectivist democracies: (1) do not have a hierarchical delegation of decision-making authority (important decisions must be endorsed by the consensus of the collective as a whole), (2) have a minimal and flexible division of labor, and (3) exhibit a value-rational logic of action.

³ There is a fairly heated debate over the relative merits of professionalization. For an argument favoring professionalization, see Staggenborg (1988). In contrast, others have argued that highly structured decision-making procedures hasten oligarchization (Leach 2013) and may undermine the ability of disenfranchised groups to effectively pursue their interests (Piven and Cloward 1977).

⁴ One of the “crystallization points” for this movement was the town of Mutlangen in Baden-Württemburg, where the delivery of the missiles and other military equipment were met with continuous nonviolent sit-down blockades from 1983 to 1987. People who were active in this campaign went on to found many other important groups and campaigns in the peace and antinuclear movements of the 1980s and 1990s, bringing their experience with collectivist-democratic forms and tactics with them (Nick, Scheub, and Then 1993; Painke and Quartier 2002).

⁵ The group names are pseudonyms meant to reflect the character and issue focus of each group.

⁶ There are alternatives to conceptualizing efficiency solely in terms of how quickly decisions can be made. For example, one could argue that the quality of the decisions being made is an important aspect of efficiency, because a poor decision will have to be revisited and thus will cost more time in the long run than a decision made well in the first place. While I would agree with that point in theory, I chose to use the more traditional measure in part because nothing in the interviews for this study could be used to measure the quality of the decisions made, and because I wanted to directly evaluate the common perception that consensus is inefficient because it is slow.

⁷ There was no consistent pattern in the way I used the prompts—I used whichever prompt would give me a range of estimates from shortest to longest. However, when I asked only what the longest decision had been or followed up with that instead of asking for a range, I sometimes did not get an estimate for the shortest decisions. Estimates for time to shortest decision were missing (indicated as number missing relative to the total number interviewed) in the following groups: Subvert (1/5), AAN (2/5), Grassroots Action (1/5), Unmovable Mass (2/5), Disarm Now (1/4), Black Space (2/8), Open Door (1/4), Vigil of Conscience (3/5), Complex (5/5), Peace Shield (1/5), and NVTC (1/6). This is one reason I decided to rank the groups based on their estimates for the longest decision.

⁸ I chose the longest estimates in both instances (i.e., for both the shortest and the longest time to decision), because if I was only going to use one person's estimate for each group, it seemed more appropriate to take the most conservative one, rather than the most optimistic, since in both estimates people are more likely to underestimate than to overestimate, to make their groups look good.

⁹ As a matter of interest, the shortest estimates given for the shortest time to decision in each group were as follows: ANA: 2 minutes, Subvert: “a few minutes,” AAN: 5 minutes, Grassroots Action: “a few minutes,” Unmovable Mass: 10 minutes, Disarm Now: 1 minute, Black Space: 5 minutes, Open Door: 1 minute, Vigil of Conscience: 5 minutes, The Complex: no estimates given, Peace Shield: 5 minutes, and NVTC: “a few minutes.”

¹⁰ Ideally, a team could conduct simultaneous participant observation in all of the groups over a long enough period to capture the longest decisions, but this would be highly impractical, due to limitations on funding and person-power. Alternatively, one could rely on the groups themselves to keep meticulous minutes and make them available for analysis, complete with time markers at the beginning and ending of each decision taken. That, too, is highly unlikely to work, given the high turnover, low degree of professionalization, and legal vulnerability that characterizes most collectivist social movement groups.

¹¹ Averaging the midpoints of the age ranges for all six groups in each counterculture gives us an average age of 33.92 for the Autonomen and 36.42 for nonviolence activists.

¹² Blockade refers to the week-long direct action events that attempt to blockade nuclear waste transports being delivered to the temporary storage facility in Gorleben (in Lower Saxony).

¹³ Indymedia refers to the network of 141 Independent Media Centers that have sprung up around the world since their emergence in the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization meetings in 1999. Pirate radio refers to illegally operated radio broadcasts, many of which are radical leftist projects. Other social media such as Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest were not in use yet.

¹⁴ See, for example, Hedges (2012) and Graeber's (2012) response. This was also the topic of a public debate between Hedges and B. Traven, from the CrimethInc Ex-workers' Collective held at the City University of New York on September 12, 2012 (Jourdan 2012).

¹⁵ A few issues appear in both columns, because the same type of decision was a quick decision for some groups and a more difficult one for at least one other. The second column is longer and more specific because I only asked for examples of the more drawn out decisions in the interviews, not because there were more decisions in that category.