> Those experiences have transmuted me into a full throated advocate for democracy.
And if a majority of wolves vote for a sheep dinner?
And if a majority of wolves vote for a sheep dinner?
If you have participation, where all are heard, and real work is made for a consensus - voting doesn't have to have centre stage. Voting makes sense for simple decisions, where little discussion is needed. It's a pretty poor way to foster participation (You voted, you lost, you can't complain).
That said, sometimes the sheep needs to be eaten. If that is taken literally, that a group votes to eat one of its members - the situation should be rather extreme - like people stranded without food. One might agree to draw straws. But it would be much better to avoid such situations in the first place...
Your right to vote is the mechanism by which your right to participate is ensured.
If you have participation, where all are heard, and real work is made for a consensus, voting doesn't have to have centre stage
And yet in practice, the only reason for a political party to hear all (including its opposition) and to seek consensus is to seek the number of votes need to pass a rule. Therefore, in practice, voting does take the center stage.
> Your right to vote is the mechanism by which your right to participate is ensured.
It's a shallow form of participation. Being educated, informed, and being part of the decision process - drafting bills, finding alternatives - forming political parties, being part of committees , being available for election, all the work that is done before a vote his held is arguably more important. And if most people aren't involved in that part, you don't IMNHO have what can reasonably be called a real democracy.
It's of course much easier to just present "the people" with the choice of a red or green bike shed, rather than discuss alternative economies that might make the nuclear plant less relevant.
I manged to get several thousand people a better pension by using the democratic process but I suspect as a dual wonk/nerd I am in a minority.
I did half consider going to work in the HOC if one of my colleagues had got the speaker ship.
In representative democracies [1], they usually don't get involved at all. You delegate your rights to someone else (eg members of parliament), who then act on your behalf, so to speak.
The alternative of direct democracy [2] is much rarer.
This is exactly my point - real democracy means engaging in the political decision process on all levels, and taking/feeling a sense of ownership of/to it.
> It's a shallow form of participation.
It's not a form of participation at all.
>Being educated, informed, and being part of the decision process - drafting bills, finding alternatives - forming political parties, being part of committees , being available for election, all the work that is done before a vote his held is arguably more important.
You are arguing about how the right to vote is exercised. With the right to vote as a given, I would agree with you on all of the above.
However, none of the above is relevant without the right to vote (and other rights), hence why I'm arguing that the right is more important.
That's just one mechanism. Your right to participate is also ensured by freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and the ability to get your name on the voting ballot.
Another very prominent example would be freedom of press.
How do you currently choose new hires? Decide to ship (go/no go)? Probably something like Roman Evaluation.
How do you triage defects or choose features? Probably something like Approval Voting.
Ie vote on your priorities and what you want to get done. Then use a prediction market (possibly on a very informal level, if it's a small group), to decide on a policy to reach those goals.
And then that party proceeds to blackmail everybody all the time.
Thus all the governments need to pander to this particular party and they get to gridlock the government whenever they feel the smallest slight or displeasure.
Of course they can, they just choose not to. What you are saying is that the parties are choosing a blackmailer over a self-declared "enemy". That's a choice, it's not inevitable.
Besides, if the political landscape is diverse enough, a minority coalition can be a boon for everyone: it means that the ruling parties must actually learn to cooperate with the opposition instead of dictating policy for the duration of their term.
However our political landscape is polarized to a degree where minority coalition has no chance of doing anything.
Not that any political problem could solve people acting as idiots.
There are many ways of doing this, with various suitability depending on context, but e.g. one alternative is simply to guarantee the right of withdrawal - if you can always remove yourself from the group if a decision is unacceptable to you, a majority will need to seek compromise if it wishes to avoid shedding members. Other alternatives include requiring super-majorities for particularly important decisions, guaranteeing rule of law and basic human rights.
The problem lies there, not with democracy - whatever system you use, such an assemblage is going to screw the sheep over.
In a democracy, there's at least a sense of shared responsibility, and hence in real life there'd be a dampening of the wolf's id by each one's conscience.
In monarchic or oligarchic systems (and these terms don't have to be restricted to governments), the top person(s) will still probably end up being a wolf in such a condition, only now the other wolves would be "just following orders" and be more efficient in making dinner.
If that happens, you don't want to live in that society anyway, under whatever system. In other words, this is an extremely pessimistic view of human society.
What if the sheep can't arm themselves? What if the wolves are better armed?
There's also a question of whether there is such a thing as "basic human nature" at play. As long as we are driven to compete with each other for access to the most desirable mates, etc., it seems there might always be some cause for humans to attempt to stomp on one another in various ways. Even if there was no shortage of material goods, food, water, etc., I suspect we'd still find some kind of basis to compete on, which could still lead to conflict.