Comment by friendzis
11 hours ago
When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes.
In this day and age, probably with a relatively tiny investment into public access points, we could very reasonably have a technically functional direct democracy. The legislative cycle is already authenticated so there's no need to solve "authenticated anonymous vote" problem, European countries already have functional eIDAS systems to back the authentication part and the legislative systems are already to some degree digitized.
On one hand, the problem "what if someone sells their vote" is already present and unsolved, in the shape of lobbying. What's interesting, though, that we have built entire systems to shape public opinion and entrenched them into our daily lives, which are used by corporations and politicians alike.
This begs a question: is there such a thing as unbiased public opinion without authenticated internet access?
inb4: direct democracy does not mean parliamentary systems could be abolished altogether, central spaces for debate would still help solve discussion exchange problems
You are confusing the ability to bring information to people, with the ability of people to consume it.
As has been mentioned elsewhere on the thread - the real issue is often there are complex 2nd and third order effects, often there are devils in the details.
I'm not saying people are not capable of consuming it, I'm saying people don't have the bandwidth.
Direct democracy is best when it's used for very specific proposals with lots of time for debate - not every decision.
If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers.
First, my comment is a knee jerk reaction to the idea of representative democracy falling to authoritarianism, don't take it as seriously in favor of direct democracy.
Second, your comment hinges on an interesting hidden assumption. There's implication, that representative democracy selects for a group with inherently higher average bandwidth allocated per proposal and inherently higher average expertise to evaluate the non-immediate, higher-order effects. I'm not going to contest the idea, however, this assumption has to hold quite strictly for the concerns listed to be material.
> If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers.
Otherwise this concern is just another side of the lobbying coin. The distinction between professional storytellers curating media in favor of certain party and convincing masses or elected representatives on merit of some law is paper thin anyway.
> There's implication, that representative democracy selects for a group with inherently higher average bandwidth allocated per proposal \
Eh? It's a representatives full time job to consider these things as oppose to the general public doing a full time job and then having to consider legislation.
The difference between lobbying for representatives versus people directly is that representatives have to answer to the people - whereas no-one loses their job as a citizen if they get persuaded by story tellers.
ie both come down to - "it's their job"
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Do you think the average person - ~98 IQ, at most one year of college but likely none, working some sort of retail, home health, or counter food service job - is truly capable of synthesizing third-order effects of a legal proposal and how it interacts with the current environment? If you do, what about someone 10% below average? 20%? Even at 20% below average intelligence we're still talking about one out of every three people, roughly.
I don't think it's just a bandwidth problem.
If I follow your comment, then a politician who is elected based on how they look while eating a bacon sandwich[1] is better at synthesizing third-order effects of a legal proposal because they are a politician?
(i.e. Politicians are selected from average people, often on things like appearance, charm, charisma, voice, snappiness, being less-bad than the other candidates, standing for the voter's preferred party, etc. not based on intelligence or systems thinking; so why would they be better reasoning about 3rd order effects than average people? And they are elected on short terms, so why would they be more interested in spending time trying than others?).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Miliband_bacon_sandwich_pho...
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A consequence of democracy means average people get a vote.
However average people are actually pretty good at making the right moral, common sense calls, if not the technical legal detail. I suspect that's in part because they are not living in the Westminister ( or whatever your seat of power is ) bubble.
So any system needs to blend that common sense, with specific expertise. In theory that's what a representative democracy does - however one of the failings currently is the party system ( note designed, in part, to overcome the bandwidth problem - people grouping together to give a single consistent message rather than 100's of independent ones ), where capture of the party by a few people has become too easy and some options that the majority of people want never being offered at the voting time.
This results in an increasingly angry and volatile electorate.
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It’s been tried in China, in the Zeguo Township, with interesting results.
An alternative would be to select representatives by lot. It would get rid of a political class, would automatically be representative (so no arguments about whether women, minorities, whoever are fairly represented) and not select for people who want power and it would mean people have the same amount of time as those in the current system.
I heard this idea, or variants of it, quite a lot recently.
Some of the examples I've seen it tried - I've seen the people setting it up trying to fix the outcome by carefully choosing the question, then providing expert advice on options scoped by the question.
Framing of the question is a powerful tool to promote the outcome you want, and avoiding ever asking certain questions is another.
Not saying it doesn't have it's place - you just need to be careful that the process isn't used to try and legitimise what would otherwise be unpopular policies via concentrated persuasion on a small number of people.
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Look at how the American hate jury lottery, I doubt this would be welcomed in the state.
It may work in some other country..
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> When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes.
I think there is more to it. A large part of democracy is delegating decision making to people with time and expertise to investigate issues more thoroughly than most individuals can or want to.
I have some broad opinions about the environment etc. but I am by no means an expert in the details, so I am happy to delegate day to day decision making to someone with more expertise who's opinions broadly align with my own.
I'd agree that referendums do make more sense on "issues of conscience" though, like whether to have a death penalty, voting reform etc.
If you make it legal to sell your vote, it’d become very obvious very quickly how much money is in politics.
I am not sure the hard part of direct democracy was ever only the logistics of voting
Representative democracy is rooted in the idea that the average person is kind of a moron. Just look at states where it's incredibly easy to get state-wide referendums on basically anything on the ballot and you'll see the legal landscape there quickly becomes a mess.
> idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy
In the US at least, no it is not. The founders were incredibly concerned about the ‘passions of the mob’ and deliberately built a system that they hoped would temper the excesses of the public.
And after seeing the wacko stuff going on in California, I can’t blame them!
Is there such a thing as "unbiased public opinion" at all though? The memetic effects of language and communication means propaganda and similar tools of rhetoric and leveraged communication will always work, with or without an internet. There's no "solution", only "good enoughs".
Direct democracy is cool, but also impractical. I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance. So what's a level of direct democracy that's "good enough"? How do we make sure we're directly voting in things relevant to our lives? What if "relevant to our lives" is unrelated to our geographic location and is very interests based? If anyone can vote for anything, but most folks don't ever vote for most things, how do you prevent brigading of votes via coordination by groups who see that their group alone can swing what would be a small local vote whatever way they want by virtue of sheer numbers? How do you prevent trolls from going through every vote and just voting no on every "community center paper-and-ink budget" across the entire country?
There are so many questions I have about direct democracy systems! Do you have more information?
> I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance.
The best way to do this is through a combination of subsidiarity and constitutional rights.
You have a central government but its primary purpose is to set out and uphold fundamental rights. It essentially sets out what the local governments can't do, so you can't have ex post facto laws, censor speech, detain people without trial, try to enforce local laws on actions performed in remote jurisdictions, etc.
In particular, the central government should not be in the business of regulating private conduct. Only the local governments do that.
Then you don't have to be worried about appropriations for road maintenance in some other county because you don't live there. Whereas the appropriations in your county are coming out of your pocket, and aren't such a far away thing that your vote is being diluted into irrelevance, so then maybe you want to be paying some attention to that.
A solution is “liquid democracy”, or instantly revocable delegation of your vote. With good UX, you could build a system that allows you to have a nominal representative you trust for different types of votes, with manual override for votes you want to make yourself. It would require some procedural changes to ensure that people have time to read and debate bills.
(This otherwise great in theory idea is mooted by the fact that remote legislative votes are a terrible idea, as security is a shitshow literally everywhere.)
> Direct democracy is cool, but also impractical. I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance. So what's a level of direct democracy that's "good enough"?
This particular question has an extremely simple answer - derived from the decades of practical development of consensus based systems in democratic spaces (art spaces, leftist political groups etc). You vote / participate in the consensus decision making of the issues that are most important to you. It's that simple. Every issue is democratically decided, and you just 'tune in' to the ones that matter to you.
In terms of brigading / trolling are harder. In consensus institutions they're usually dealt with by limiting the amount of blocking (forcing tabling of an issue) and ensuring that voting / consensus participation is limited to those who are actively involved in the community. This is obviously far more complex on a societal level.
Overall this requires a bigger investment of time, but you're in no way required to care about everything. Over time though, the group / institution / society, is forced to grow up. Or at least grow out of the learned helplessness that dominates contemporary representative democracy.
I think everyone can agree that having O(100M) people vote on every local initiative is absurd.
But a lot of countries are somewhere on the "direct" vs "representative" spectrum. The US actually abnormally lacking in direct mechanisms, for example. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_by_country
> The US actually abnormally lacking in direct mechanisms
only on a federal level. states like california or texas are more direct than a lot of western europe in some ways. like the fact that ballot props are binding law or sheriffs and state attorneys are elected.
>I think everyone can agree that having O(100M) people vote on every local initiative is absurd.
I'm one of those everyones, and I don't agree.
Except if you mean local initiatives that don't concern 100M people, but e.g. some regional municipality. Of course then just the locals can vote, be they 100K or 1M.
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>Is there such a thing as "unbiased public opinion" at all though?
Doesn't really matter except philosophically. There's something close enough to unbiased public opinion when there are no government propaganda campaings, censorship, press owned by conglomerates, and corporate messaging.
In most political systems the two functions of government are rationing and ideological control for the poor and profiteering for the rich. The media provide marketing and propaganda support for both.
It's very hard to have truly independent media.
The Swiss succeeded in this, maybe we should look at their model and improve.
Switzerland is a country with a total population approximately the size of the state of New Jersey. This being too centralized for most things, they then further divided that population into 26 cantons ranging in size from approximately the size of New Hampshire at the high end to "that number of people would be classified as a town rather than a city" at the low end.
The median size looks to be around 200,000 people, so maybe start by dividing the US population into cantons of around that size and doing most of the rulemaking at that level.
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The best level of democracy is no democracy. The problem of voting for road repairs is a problem we created by democracy. We voted ourselves into a system we can't escape, just because people back in the days couldn't fully comprehend side effects of their collective decisions.
Very few people realize that there is option to not use government cohersion as a solution to everything.
I know this is unpopular opinion. The system is designed for this to be unpopular opinion.
But the problem is not the democracy, but the level of power we give to the government. If the only power of government would be to pick flag colors and national anthem, no one would care about it.
No one cares about UK having a king, because it doesn't change a thing.
> The best level of democracy is no democracy.
That's a quite fatal view. I'm not going to defend the shortcomings of democracy as a system or the issues all real implementations have. But democracy has a feature that is unique about it: as long as it actually is a democracy, as soon as things go a way that the people don't like, they can do something about it and change course. For better or worse, but they can. That's the main point of democracy.
Besides, having votes or electionsor is really just a minor detail of the concept of democracy. There is much more to it, like a free conversation in society, strong independent education, journalism, justice, protection of minorities, etc. The will of the people doesn't fall from the sky or is set in stone. It's a permanent conversation which needs all the other mechanisms. If all that happens is a vote every few years, that's not at all indicative of a democracy. Neither is democracy synonymous with majority rule.
> Very few people realize that there is option to not use government cohersion as a solution to everything.
What is "cohersion"? There are "cohesion" and "coercion". Assuming the latter, what does this have to do with democracy? An autocracy or dictarship or whatever non-democratic system you can imagine also likely has a government, and their coercion mechanisms tend to be worse than in democracies. In a democracy you have an independent judical system that you can use against government overreach.
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> No one cares about UK having a king, because it doesn't change a thing.
Which is the position the Monarchy absolutely wants you to have, and they definitely don't want you to know that they have veto power over all laws, and regularly intervene and get laws modified so that they're not included in scope.
Meanwhile they just gave themselves a massive pay rise, at a time when government is cutting public spending in all areas.
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Actually quite a few people care about the UK having a king, in the UK. In Northern Ireland, there is a considerable republican (small "r" population) for political reasons.
The BBC promotes the monarchy heavily as it is under royal charter.
There were significant protests at the Queen's funeral cortege and the current king's coronation. The state clamped down hard, in one case arresting someone for holding up a blank bit of paper.
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2 ideas about direct democracy.
Selling your vote becomes a nonissue when everybody is doing it.
An LLM informed by a reddit-style discussion tree might be a good way to implement the policy-creating part of a direct democracy.
> When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes.
REPLACE FED CHAIR WITH DOVE OR HAWK?
BUILD NEW STRATEGIC BOMBERS?
START A WAR WITH IRAN?
VOTE NOW!
Imagine the chaos. Imagine all the ads.