Some of the other comments have reminded me of your linkpost about digital democracy. Specifically, the idea of seeking surprising agreement which was mentioned.
In the OP, I posited that “the new center” should have a strong, simple set of issues, pre-selected to cater to people who are sick of both sides. But I think Stuart Anderson is right: it shouldn’t focus so much on the battle between the two sides; it should focus on the surprising commonality between people.
As Steven Byrnes mentioned, swing voters aren’t exactly moderate; rather, they tend to have extreme views which don’t fit within existing party lines. The article Byrnes linked to also points out that the consensus within party elites of both parties is very different from the consensus within the party base.
I find myself forming the hypothesis that politicians have a tendency to over-focus on divisive issues, and miss some issues on which there is broad agreement. (This would be an interesting question to investigate, if someone really did a feasibility study on the whole idea.)
My new suggestion for the new-center platform would be, rather than distilling complaints about both sides, seek surprising agreement in the way mentioned in that podcast you linked.
The proposal would be something like this:
You register with The New Center platform. This involves “signing” a non-binding agreement to vote according to the New Center recommendations.
I’m imagining that you’re never asked to promise to vote a specific way, but rather, you are asked to affirm that you agree with the argument that making such a commitment would increase your voting power overall. (Mostly because something feels shady to me about actually making people promise to vote a specific way.)
The platform crowdsources issues, and aggregates New Center opinions on those issues, looking for issues where there is broad agreement.
This might be done by something like quadratic voting, letting people spend points to indicate how much they care about an issue, so that you get information on the strength of preferences rather than only their existence.
The platform publicizes the issues on which there is broad agreement. The main purpose of this is so that politicians know the issues on which they will be judged. A secondary purpose is to attract new people to the New Center platform, if the current New Center consensus resonates with them.
Finally, the platform rates political candidates on the consensus criteria, and makes recommendations on that basis. (This is probably also done in a democratized way.)
It could also be interesting to keep track of New Center’s preferences wrt bills being voted on in legislative bodies, and keep track of politician’s record in terms of voting with New Center. Politicians with a record of voting according to New Center recommendations should be rewarded by the system, even if their voting record goes against what’s now the consensus of New Center, because (in the long term) the hope is that some politicians end up deferring to New Center’s opinions (at least some of the time). So you want to avoid punishing that behavior just because New Center flip-flops on an issue. However, that’s a corner case which may not be that important (because hopefully, New Center finds issues with broad appeal on which there isn’t so much flip-flop in public opinion over time).
Some of the other comments have reminded me of your linkpost about digital democracy. Specifically, the idea of seeking surprising agreement which was mentioned.
In the OP, I posited that “the new center” should have a strong, simple set of issues, pre-selected to cater to people who are sick of both sides. But I think Stuart Anderson is right: it shouldn’t focus so much on the battle between the two sides; it should focus on the surprising commonality between people.
As Steven Byrnes mentioned, swing voters aren’t exactly moderate; rather, they tend to have extreme views which don’t fit within existing party lines. The article Byrnes linked to also points out that the consensus within party elites of both parties is very different from the consensus within the party base.
I find myself forming the hypothesis that politicians have a tendency to over-focus on divisive issues, and miss some issues on which there is broad agreement. (This would be an interesting question to investigate, if someone really did a feasibility study on the whole idea.)
My new suggestion for the new-center platform would be, rather than distilling complaints about both sides, seek surprising agreement in the way mentioned in that podcast you linked.
The proposal would be something like this:
You register with The New Center platform. This involves “signing” a non-binding agreement to vote according to the New Center recommendations.
I’m imagining that you’re never asked to promise to vote a specific way, but rather, you are asked to affirm that you agree with the argument that making such a commitment would increase your voting power overall. (Mostly because something feels shady to me about actually making people promise to vote a specific way.)
The platform crowdsources issues, and aggregates New Center opinions on those issues, looking for issues where there is broad agreement.
This might be done by something like quadratic voting, letting people spend points to indicate how much they care about an issue, so that you get information on the strength of preferences rather than only their existence.
The platform publicizes the issues on which there is broad agreement. The main purpose of this is so that politicians know the issues on which they will be judged. A secondary purpose is to attract new people to the New Center platform, if the current New Center consensus resonates with them.
Finally, the platform rates political candidates on the consensus criteria, and makes recommendations on that basis. (This is probably also done in a democratized way.)
It could also be interesting to keep track of New Center’s preferences wrt bills being voted on in legislative bodies, and keep track of politician’s record in terms of voting with New Center. Politicians with a record of voting according to New Center recommendations should be rewarded by the system, even if their voting record goes against what’s now the consensus of New Center, because (in the long term) the hope is that some politicians end up deferring to New Center’s opinions (at least some of the time). So you want to avoid punishing that behavior just because New Center flip-flops on an issue. However, that’s a corner case which may not be that important (because hopefully, New Center finds issues with broad appeal on which there isn’t so much flip-flop in public opinion over time).