Who gets to legitimise a decision?
Archon Fung's democracy cube maps any mechanism of public decision-making against three axes — Participation, Deliberation and Authority — to surface the core problems of democratic governance: legitimacy, justice, and effectiveness. Sitting at full-Participation, full-Deliberation and full-Authority all at once is rare, and it comes with real costs — most real mechanisms trade one axis off against the other two.
The three axes
Select an axis above to see its description.
Explore the cube
Drag the sliders to move a point through the cube's interior, and see which real-world mechanism sits nearest your combination.
Slider categories are a simplified, same-direction (closed → open) adaptation of Fung's five-to-eight-step vocabulary, for accessibility. The seven seed examples are drawn directly from Fung (2006); positions between them show the nearest seeded example, not a precise mapping.
Our plainsight untruth
Representative democracy was never designed for people power. British parliamentary democracy has always been about empowering a limited set of representatives to speak on behalf of a limited set of the population — originally restricted to male landowners and a specific aristocracy. The franchise has since been extended, gradually, to non-landowners, to women, to people of different ethnic origins, and in some places even to foreign nationals resident in the country. New Zealand inherited this system, but we're taught to treat "this" as democracy itself.
Hélène Landemore's book Open Democracy reimagines what democracy — people power — might look like if designed from the ground up. Like Fung, she finds a large space of democratic possibility that goes mostly unused or unconsidered, and argues for genuine experimentation and a progressive transformation of culture and institutions.
Evolution of western democracy
Democracy has never stopped evolving — it's just evolved slowly, unevenly, and usually because people pushed for it. Five foundational milestones lead down into a detailed, true-to-scale timeline of what's happened since — click any box for its year, place and event.
Ancient
Emerging
Early modern
Modern western democracy
Select a box above to see its year, place and event.
Swimlanes by country, true relative scale from 1830 to 1970 — equal distance means equal elapsed time (gridlines every 20 years). Athens and the five foundational milestones above are shown separately, not to scale.
Fung, Archon. "Varieties of Participation in Complex Governance." Public Administration Review 66, no. s1 (2006): 66–75.PDF ↗Landemore, Hélène. Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century. Princeton University Press, 2020.