In his essay here (https://theloop.ecpr.eu/the-butterfly-effect-representation-as-fractal-politics/), Alex Prior demonstrates how the practice of democracy is fractal. For example, a child may vote with their family over what movie to watch, the same child may then vote in their school over which sports students will play that afternoon, and, if suffrage is ever granted to the child, then they can choose to vote in local, regional, federal/national, possibly even multinational (e.g. EU) elections. The pattern repeats as the scale increases.

And whilst I do agree with Prior about the utilities that come from understanding fractal democracy, such as it helping us understand how politicians connect with various audiences, I do find the pattern problematic.

This is because it demonstrates, yet again, the ideological tyranny of voting in the practice of democracy. As James Tully et al. demonstrate in their recent book Democratic Multiplicity, there are so very many other ways of practicing democracy which are not so easily detected in the fractal logic. And that's not because they are ill-suited to working at different scales. This is a fallacy. It is because they are not "in frame" ideologically for the people who make the decisions at this or that scale - be that the family or the parliament. Voting's tyrannical grasp, as Rongxin Li recently put it, does not permit other democratic practices from entering our minds.

I, do, therefore think that we can utilize Prior's insight more critically by demonstrating how many of democracy's other practices are presently excluded by fractal democracy's vote-centric iteration.

https://theloop.ecpr.eu/the-butterfly-effect-representation-as-fractal-politics/