I don't like it. But it raises another problem: What's a democracy? Is Turkey a democracy? If not, why not? Is it a flawed [1] democracy then?
[1] Like the US? https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/america-de...
[1] Like the US? https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/america-de...
The problem with our form of democracy is that once voted in, the winner is given power.
Instead, power should be expendable.
Votes that a party wins should be able to be used to either to push through legislation or to defeat legislation, and once those votes are used, they’re gone. This would lead politicians to be much more careful about how they expend their power, spending votes in what they really want, and spending votes to stop what they really disagree with.
Closely related concept is that it should not be “one person, one vote”. Instead, everyone should get 100 or 1000 votes to distribute across the politicians/parties that represent their many interests and values.
Politicians get votes to spend, either on backing or opposing legislation.
May countries have voting systems where candidates and parties take proportional seats in parliament according to their votes. This means there is a need for coalitions and consensus seeking across in order to get anything voted through parliament.
I notice something, with your proposal one person can keep proposing 100 to 1000 votes to make all taxes go to them, effectively killing the government.
Expendable power is the idea, not unlimited power, which is what we have now.
In fact, if I offer 1 billion dollars to each politician that votes for my bill of 1 trillion dollars for me? Well, I get 1 trillion dollars, and politicians get a cut. I keep at least 600 billion dollars. Still overall a loss for democracy.
I think culture is the issue. Independence of judiciary and anti-corruption investigations will lead to a golden democracy. Few countries can accomplish this.
Would USA's effectively having a two party system be better definition of democracy?
Meanwhile, most other democracies have multi-party systems.
So in a different culture with different "influencers" at the top, and therefore a different public sphere, the outcome can be something completely different from what most people associate with democracy (positive and negative freedom). It's basically a shared experience.
Religion was first as centralizing force, then came the traditional mass media and now there is social media and individual influencers, everything is getting less gated.
The dilemma is that most people didn't learn the true hierarchies in school, or how the system and democracy really works and what holds it together. And those who research it on their own may easily drift off into conspiracy stuff, because conspiracies feed the people with tiny bits of the truth (among many lies) they weren't meant to know.
Some say not.
> If not, why not?
Probably because the elections are thoroughly suspect, and people have a weird habit of being abducted.
> Is it a flawed democracy like the US?
Well, it is probably flawed in the sense that the elections are thoroughly suspect and people seem to be getting abducted a lot. Neither of these particular criticisms apply to the U.S. in anything approaching the same capacity.
> https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/america-de...
Ah yes, the UK EIU calling the U.S. a "flawed democracy", and not the UK, when in the UK politicians are seen openly calling to discard the result of the largest referendum with the highest turnout in the history of the country, more or less because they do not agree with the people. I don't know what their indicators are, mainly because I don't want to fill out a twenty-field survey just to find out if the PDF even explains their methodology, but what could they possibly be measuring?
As for the question what is a democracy, I feel like it's easier to answer what isn't a democracy. In China, the President has committed to live out the rest of his life in the office; so maybe we start there.
Whose system?
There's a reason we have delegates making decisions for us. People generally don't know the weight and consequences of decisions. We saw this with so many posts of what is the European Union originating out of UK in the days before and after the refeurandaum.
Sure, but we're talking about democracy not expertocracy.
When called to a referendum, the people have a say in the question you ask; if you want the answer to a different question, then call a different referendum.