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.
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.
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.
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.
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.