Ranting about Representative Democracy
I have been mostly lurking on lesswrong for over a year, but never posted because I can generally dismiss whatever questions or theories I come up with faster than I can explain them on a forum. Essentially, I was waiting for a situation where I actually needed input from a larger group, thought my own conclusions were wrong, or had something which I thought was worth planting in other peoples minds. This post covers all of these, so without further ado, I would like to discuss a few questions about democratic government which have been on my mind recently.
I am not old enough to vote, but have tried working on petitions, and sending letters and emails to my MP or other politicians about issues when I thought I had something interesting to say. I have done this several times over the last year in an attempt to make changes from within the system. None of them have ever been answered, even with form letters, so as far as I can tell my attempts at politely making changes have been futile.
As I am already a partial anarchist, this did not do much to make me resent Canada’s government and the rest of the political world less. I still try once in a while to get through to leaders, but have almost given up on this course of action. My country at least is a democracy exclusively for people who are willing to fight for attention, and who support views that are already popular enough that they are probably being implemented by our leaders anyway.
Elected officials are most likely not maliciously ignoring every opinion they are sent, but it seems obvious that they do not have the time to actually address everyone’s concerns, learn about every issue they vote on, and are being expected to do a job which is simply impossible for a small group of humans. So I would like to know why we have representatives at all, would an aristocracy be much worse? Decisions are being made by an elite group who’s only direct incentive to keep everyone happy is avoiding rebellion and their own ethics anyway. If I want to have a say in national policy when I know something which makes a difference, it looks like I either have to run for parliament (which would fail drastically, I am not charismatic), lead a rebellion, or start my own country. (in order of how horrible these ideas are)
I would like to know what the general opinion of our governments is right now, so how do you expect each of the following systems would compare to the way democracy functions as it is in Canada, the USA, or other countries?
Direct democracy: Now that the internet is so common, we do not need to be face to face in the same room to reach a consensus anymore. Instead of having any representatives at all, anyone in the country could make a proposal online, promote it, and let the votes and comments of everyone else decide its fate. Like any other site, it could be hacked, DDOS’d, trolled, spammed, people could make duplicate accounts, etc. There are a nearly infinite number of ways this could go wrong, so a secure implementation is obviously essential.
Randomized Democracy: Our current system could be left exactly the same but voting and appointment completely replaced with random selection of individuals from the population.
Looks like a feature, not a bug. I don’t expect elected officials to be swayed by letters from random citizens, which have a lower signal-to-noise ratio than the advice of experts, academics, etc. Yes, in some cases, individual citizens will actually have insights of quality, but it may not be worth the effort to dig them up from the cranks.
It probably strongly depends of the topic, too—letters from random citizens on monetary policy or nuclear safety are probably best ignored, but it’d be normal for a mayor to respond to letters about municipal matters.
Which is why I plan on becoming an expert in the things that actually matter to me so people will take me seriously at some point.
But of course the popular views are more often implemented while the unpopular aren’t. How could it be otherwise? Your country is democracy for all, but it doesn’t mean that every person can extort visible influence. Among 30 million others it would be impossible.
Not only they want to prevent rebellion, they want to get reelected too. And you have a chance to become a member of that elite, which would be much smaller in an aristocratic system.
As for the proposed alternatives: Direct democracy to some degree is possible. In Swiss regional politics, a fairly large portion of decisions is made by referenda, which have a long tradition, and it works as well as the representative system.
My impression is that most proponents of direct democracy operate from the assumption that the main problem with the present state of affairs is representatives ignoring the public. In fact, the main problem is the public itself. Voters rarely rationally analyse the options, and most voters care about politics only as far as their biases go, except in rare situations where their own interests are clearly at stake. A typical socialist is going to vote for the socialist party, a conservative for the conservative party, and so on, not because they analyse the parties’ programmes, but because they trust their party more than the enemy faction. It somehow works, because the factions tend to be in approximative equilibrium, and nobody is going to attain excessive power.
A perfect direct democracy will deprive the voters of their favourite parties. I would expect two effects. First, wider disinterest in politics. After all, would you every day check politics.gov.ca to vote on dozens of proposals, such as 1997 grain trade limitation act, second amendment or wheelchair construction safety standards? I wouldn’t. It is extremely difficult to get attention to more technical issues and most of the laws would be unpassable (if 50% of all voters was needed) or be decided by a small minority of interested partisans (if 50% of voters participating in the poll was the threshold). Which may be good or bad.
The second effect I would expect is emergence of some substitutes of the older party system. Now, the factions would not compete for the seats in a parliament, but rather organise massive campaigns in the media to persuade the citizens to click on their proposals. If nothing goes wrong, the resulting state will not be much different from the present.
And of course, there is the issue of compatibility of laws. It is far more probable that an incompatibility is spotted and fixed during the standard legislative procedure in the parliament than during a public internet poll.
So, limited applications of direct democracy are fine, but abolishing the representative system altogether will be probably detrimental.
Randomised democracy: Although people seldom tell good things about politicians, the politicians are still at least rudimentarily qualified for their jobs. I don’t want to see a bunch of random men and women sitting in the government.
Back when I had the same question, I found http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/02/politics.html most enlightening. Once I realized it wasn’t really about making good policy or making sure people were really represented it made much more sense.
Your wording suggests you believe that Stross’s considerations don’t just support democracy, but also explain why democracy has mostly won out over other systems, or why people have believed in it, or something else that otherwise would be mysterious. Is the latter a claim you really intended to make?
I already came to that conclusion a while ago, but I like finding out what people in different groups think about it.
Yes, I think it would be,eventually. Much worse. Representative democracy provides a relief valve—if the ruling class or ruling party becomes too corrupt or too out of touch, the people can rise up and “throw the rascals out”. In an autocracy, it takes a revolution or coup to accomplish change, and that can be much bloodier and messier.
That is the theory anyways. But when I try to find examples, they don’t necessarily prove what I want them to prove. The Mexican electorate threw out the PRI, but it may not have made things better. India threw out Congress—I’m not sure India got better, though Congress maybe did. Japan threw out LDP—I suppose that was for the best.
For negative examples, I have Iran and Russia—two mostly failed non-violent revolutions. And then there are some cross-examples: Columbia, Peru, and Rwanda suffered bloody revolutionary violence even though they were mostly democratic.
Hmmm. The more I think about my examples, the less convinced I am of the advantages of representative democracy.
Make two lists, one with countries that have representative democracy, and one with countries that don’t.
Then decide which set you’d rather live in. Not experience a revolution, just live in normal times under.
That establishes correlation. What do I do to establish causation?
Hmm, you mean something like “If I hate oppression and oppression correlates with lack of democracy, does China’s oppression cause lack of democracy, or does China’s lack of democracy cause oppression? Or both, or neither?”
I don’t know. Figuring out causation is a big problem, not just for this issue, but for all issues—a relevant post is Timeless Causality
I think you’re mixing up a lot of things here.
1) Not getting responses: I’m very surprised by this. Here in the UK, politicians do tend to answer letters, although often with a fairly formulaic response
2) Not being able to make a difference: mainstream views will inevitably be more important in a democracy than minority ones. But change does happen: what you need to do is try to persuade others to agree with your views. Or to join a group that’s in the mainstream but also close enough to you.
3) Whether a democracy is beneficial over other systems: democrats don’t have to just avoid rebellion. Plenty of dictatorial governments exist against the will of most of their people by having the army etc. in their control. Assuming for a moment that they don’t express the ‘will of the people’ in a strong sense (which is debatable), democratic governments are better for the people because 1) they can be replaced while still powerful in the country by an understood constitution, so they don’t hang on until physically forced out. 2) they have to live in constant fear of being kicked out by the people, which means they have to avoid very unpopular policies 3) under universal suffrage they have to worry at least a bit about all significantly sized minorities
Direct democracy is interesting, but has the attached risk of a lack of systematic policy. I’m no expert, but I believe that California has suffered because of its system of popular plebiscites/referendums: in essence, people vote for more public services and lower taxes. Any body/organisation benefits from long term direction of policy. Not to mention that not everyone can be an expert in national policy. You might be interested in this, though. It’s an online system where people can vote, but can also give someone else the ability to vote for them on individual issues. So you could nominate an environmental expert who agreed with your Green policies to vote on those, but a free market person to vote on other economic issues if that was your economic position, for instance. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8046270/Jolitics-the-political-network-that-plans-to-empower-voters.html
As for rule by randomers, I think this could be quite interesting to form a second chamber to check legislation passed by the elected parliament. But it’s a big ask and risks living up to the cliche about jury service: we’d be ruled by a senate of 360 (say) people who weren’t clever, important or busy enough to get out of it. Or, worse, who started salivating with power-lust when they won the lottery. Not to mention that it makes fixing who’s in charge much easier than elections, where people notice if unpopular people win.
That’s at least half right, maybe more. California spends a lot on public services at every level. There was a ballot initiative in 1978 that permanently limited property tax rates. However, in America, property tax revenue usually goes to local governments—meaning, cities and counties. On the other hand, current California state income and sales tax rates are the highest in the Union. So, at the state level, California is generous with services and relatively high-tax, but still not high-tax enough to support its level of expenditure.
If political activity is worthwhile for producing change, it’s as a low probability, high payoff action. We live in large societies, with a single government acting over millions of people. That means that if you’re able to make a beneficial change, it can have a huge benefit (multiplied over the millions of people who are influenced). But it also means that your chances of having an effect are tiny, since political power is divided among millions of people.
This is most obviously true of voting, but it also holds for other forms of political activity. A legislature that gets millions of letters and emails each year from constituents is unlikely to devote much attention or consideration to any one of them (apparently the US Congress gets 200 million; not sure about Canadian Parliament). And this would also be true with other political systems, including direct democracy and randomized democracy, unless you happen to be one of the few unusually influential people (like one of the people who’s randomly selected in a randomized democracy).
Randomly grouping voters into districts might be worth considering. With geographic districts, incompetent and corrupt incumbents get reelected by bringing their district more than its share of national resources or by playing to regional prejudices (religion, etc.). If those options were off the table, character and competence might win more often.
The devil is in the details with both of these proposals.
The debate mappiing systems used in direct democracy proposal would determine any “attacks” on the same. How sensibly does a proposal have to be written, who determines that? How convincing does a rebuttal have to be ? Who decides that it was convincing? How many people minimum to support a proposal/to reject one? Does every proposal have to explain where the money is going to come from? If the government runs out of money, who decides the priority of ongoing programs? It’s a lot of detail.
In the randomized democracy proposal, I would guess you would end up handing over a lot of power to the relatively stationary military and civil services. I can also foresee powerful dark arts practitioners being employed by the lobbyists who can completely profile a person within a week or so, and present proposals that will satisfy the ego of the newly selected person very quickly. But it would still be a little better than our system today.
The point is, it is difficult to modify mature political systems. You can support sea-steading or charter cities which will theoritically acccelerate the experimentation process. A sideways approach could be to support SENS and hope that long lives will give better future orientation to any politicians who are elected.
If you had a lot of money...think billions...and were willing to spend it, I damn well guarantee you could have your MP and plenty of other officials slobbering at your feet in order to have your attention.
That doesn’t necessarily mean you would get your own way automatically. Politicians are promiscuous in their willingness to slobber at donors’ feet. There are other countervailing forces—other billionaires, for example. Also, even if they don’t have the time or interest in responding to your individual letters or (worse) emails, your elected representatives are keenly attentive to mass polling data. If it looks like the majority of likely voters will think better of a politician for taking position X, even in the face of a really, really, well-financed campaign for the opposed position Y, then bet on most politicians going with position X.
P.S.
It’s easy for someone with a lot of money to bid for politicians, but it’s harder to buy them such that they stay bought.
Buying politicians? no way. it would be cheaper and more effective in the long run to buy newspapers and television stations, so that people only choose between the politicians who agree with me.