I like this because it is so detailed as to almost be actionable; my first suggestion would be to try and target a much lower governance level (like local government or organizational governance) so it could be tested.
Rather than a series of specific ideas I would like to point to something that seems to underlie the parts which stuck out to me, which I suspect of being an assumption you made: the expectations of the public. This has two components—how the public views things, and what they will need to do.
I think the viewpoint component is best encapsulated by this critique of the current system you listed:
9. Two-party dominance rewards negative campaigning, where each candidate focuses on stoking fear and hatred of the other candidate rather than making a rational case for their own ideas, since fear and hatred are more powerful motivators.
The weight here rests on “rational case for their own ideas.” The trouble is, I think there are actually zero groups of people on the face of the earth who would make their decisions based on a rational case. You would think that this community would be an excellent candidate, but one of our oldest norms is that politics is the mindkiller and there is limited interest in dispensing with it. Even where a rational case is made for an idea in an explicitly rational field, to fellow experts in that field, the decision is not made on fully rational grounds; scientists joke that progress is made one funeral at a time. The other component consists of responding to polls and voting, which includes things like dividing the vote to arbitrary precision, and this assumes that the end user can and/or is willing to handle high levels of complexity.
Now we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good; if adding more parties accomplished nothing but to switch out fear-and-hatred campaigning for hope-and-inspiration campaigning I would still consider it an improvement because I expect the externalities of hope-and-inspiration to be better. All I think would be required is to be explicit about the assumptions about the public, and once that is done conclusions about specific policy points will fall out naturally. The specific suggestion that I have is to incorporate an assumption that people will engage with the system differently both because of preference and because of ability.
I like this because it is so detailed as to almost be actionable; my first suggestion would be to try and target a much lower governance level (like local government or organizational governance) so it could be tested.
Rather than a series of specific ideas I would like to point to something that seems to underlie the parts which stuck out to me, which I suspect of being an assumption you made: the expectations of the public. This has two components—how the public views things, and what they will need to do.
I think the viewpoint component is best encapsulated by this critique of the current system you listed:
The weight here rests on “rational case for their own ideas.” The trouble is, I think there are actually zero groups of people on the face of the earth who would make their decisions based on a rational case. You would think that this community would be an excellent candidate, but one of our oldest norms is that politics is the mindkiller and there is limited interest in dispensing with it. Even where a rational case is made for an idea in an explicitly rational field, to fellow experts in that field, the decision is not made on fully rational grounds; scientists joke that progress is made one funeral at a time. The other component consists of responding to polls and voting, which includes things like dividing the vote to arbitrary precision, and this assumes that the end user can and/or is willing to handle high levels of complexity.
Now we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good; if adding more parties accomplished nothing but to switch out fear-and-hatred campaigning for hope-and-inspiration campaigning I would still consider it an improvement because I expect the externalities of hope-and-inspiration to be better. All I think would be required is to be explicit about the assumptions about the public, and once that is done conclusions about specific policy points will fall out naturally. The specific suggestion that I have is to incorporate an assumption that people will engage with the system differently both because of preference and because of ability.