Direct democracy is a terrible idea. Voters have shown again and again they that they don't understand what they are voting for. Most voters only understand "pretty words" and have no intention or will to understand issues at a deeper level.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961, pp. 188–189
Counterpoint quote
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Who's doing the explaining? What viewpoints do they offer? How much time and mental energy do the people have to educate themselves on the issues?
Frantz Fanon, from heaven, hypothetically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
Maybe the public needn't understand, or vote on what "is" - but they can vote on what "ought" to be.
They cannot vote that every bus be on time - this isn't guaranteed to be possible, nor should politicians imply it could be. But they can set the priority, and % of the budget, allocated to improving bus times.
You cannot vote that the sky is green, or that 2 + 2 =5; but you can dictate that society be governed as if these things are true. You can't dictate results: that all endeavours are successful, all wars won; but you can say what endeavours are budgeted, wars are fought - and what resources are allocated to them.
The problem is that informed framing is so hard that this isn't always possible without truth being held hostage by motivated gatekeepers.
Nobody wants the public to understand, they want the public to support their position. So the information that the public receives will always be completely distorted, and people who work will not have the time to untwist it.
[citation needed]
Seriously. I would love to see these so-called "again and again" examples.
Anecdote: I'm involved in local politics and one of the biggest problems I see resulting from "direct" citizen/constituent involvement initiatives is that they are fundamentally predicated on attracting people who want to oppose & object to things (sometimes to bad things, but very often to positive, progressive initiatives). Because of the effort barrier to involvement, those who are actively engaged tend to be people who have a problem with something, which means the "I agree with this ongoing initiative" voice is lost.
Take Brexit, and let's lay aside the question of whether or not it was a good idea, for the sake of argument let's just acknowledge there were strong feelings on both sides.
The fact that it was a referendum meant that for the sake of a very small margin, an enormous number of people are very unhappy with the result.
And if the government had backtracked on the referendum result, the same issue would apply - in terms of being a united nation we were screwed either way.
In representative democracy, by way of comparison, such a small margin would mean the winner had to tread a very careful line with any legislation they tried to pass, thus in general leading to more reasonable compromise solutions.
The EU is an unbelievably abstracted entity, and with trans-national issues in general, I think it would be difficult to find any example of a resolution that makes everyone happy.
Here's a few observations though:
- I'm guessing from your comment you would rather Brexit hadn't passed. Do you think it wouldn't have happened if it had been up to govt. (without referendum)?
- one should also look at things holistically: do you think Brexit would have ever been proposed (in the form that it was) if people were more directly involved in the decision-making that led to its formation as an idea?
- a vote for Brexit was ultimately a vote of dissatisfaction with a large range of other political issues people felt they didn't have enough of a direct say in. If those various areas were more open to public involvement, would we have had the level of discontent that drove the Brexit vote?
> In representative democracy, by way of comparison, such a small margin would [...] (lead) to more reasonable compromise solutions.
Ultimately, I don't buy this. It's not necessarily true at all. But even if it were, the same would be true of a direct-democracy approach because what you're comparing is representative democracy with 1 big binary vote at the end, where in reality greater engagement in the process as a whole would lead to a very different referendum proposal document (if any).
I used to be in favour of direct democracy btw and somewhat changed my mind lately. The 2019 Reith lectures may have something to do with it - Sumption raised quite a lot of points I hadn't thought of before, in particular making a link between direct democracy and our lawyer-up culture of everyone-suing-everyone-else-all-the-time (the linking factor being the appropriate role of judges in society). I think he would also say it's the first past the post system that has caused so much alienation from the political process (when so many have votes that don't count), rather than there being a problem with representative democracy per se. Worth a listen (also on any podcast app): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00057m9/episodes/player
I would add that there's a bunch of other issues that caused that alienation, not least mainstream economics being so far divorced from reality for so long; also our media is a disgrace (not that I have any ideas for fixing it I'm afraid).
So would it have happened if we had direct democracy beforehand? I don't know, but I reckon we'd have replaced one problem with another one generating just as much discontent.
Sorry I had missed your context on local issues, you are right about the EU being abstract to most people, though there will always be issues in trying to draw a line between local and global.
I think I'd agree with this analysis. I live in Ireland, where we have PRSTV (for somewhat hilarious historical reasons while we were under British rule—a Unionist minority wanting better representation in local politics[0]), and while our representative democracy is still riddled with problems and voter alienation, I still think those are multifaceted and have various other complex causes; PRSTV itself is pretty decent as far as representative systems go.
[0] https://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-his...
Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Orban, and so many others wouldn’t be possible here.
And that’s a killer feature.
Answer that explicitly (without changing the language used by the opposition) and you might make more, um, progress.
A very useful question. In any disagreement, it's important to answer both "What would change my mind?" and "How will I know I am done/have won?"
Without answers to both of those, it is difficult to win over anyone who doesn't already agree. The first question shows that one is acting in informed good faith. The second lets people know exactly what they are being asked to agree with.
Of course not all progress is positive so I was narrowing the scope of the word to limit it to only progressive initiatives that benefit a majority of constituents (in particular, in this example, an absent majority)
No, but those politicians are at least able appoint reasonably competent unelected government officials.
Not saying its the best system but just want to point out that there is a time element. People can't spend time understanding each piece of legislation in general.
(I'm actually not sure if this argues for or against the point. I guess it depends on your management!)
This has been successfully implemented in places.
Unfortunately, it's rather difficult to draw a dividing line between ordinary voters and powerful ones in a liquid democracy method to satisfy both of these criteria.
There is a curious historical fact, that in ancient Rome secret ballot was introduced in 137 BC only 14 years before Gaius Gracchus, when people being able to vote for reforms but not being able to support that reforms greatly contributed to the downfall of the republic.
Moreover the main reason that we need secret ballot now, is that elections are rare, reward for intimidating someone is huge (4 years of power), and reward for voting differently is tiny and uncertain (one or the other politician not keeping promises). But with issue based voting reward for intimidating is very small as the law can be repealed when people understand that they were forced to do something harmful to themselves, and reward for not being intimidated is much more certain.
Another source of intimidation is the opinion of friends and peers, but if you support a law for which your friends do not want to talk with you, either they are not real friends or you should not support that law. In either case being open is better than lying.
Firstly people will be afraid to support their opinion via voting in many cases because they will be concerned not so much with their friends, but with their employers and colleagues. In Rome only citizens could vote, and sure not all citizens were rich but they were generally speaking not the bottom rungs of society and would be less concerned about their job than many of the poorest citizens in today's society.
It isn't just intimidation it is also a method by which buying votes directly is disincentivized.
Sure technically I can claim to sell my vote now, but the person buying it is taking it on faith I am actually selling it, which means nobody tries to actually buy votes directly. They will attempt to buy votes by say, bribing people in certain positions to endorse them, but they won't try and do so directly.
In Rome there was a clear hierarchy of patrons that was much more influential than what we have in today's society. Secret ballot broke it, and the result was a disaster.
Take a look at https://voteflux.org which explains the idea better than i do. To pass a law you need a large majority to support it, and the rest to accept it enough to not go to constitutional court. And if you are able to bribe such a large number of people continously, it means that they get more profit from the law than from repealing it, so your law is good for society.
An algorithm like that would balance the exploitation of showing current highly upvoted posts first with the exploration of showing posts with few votes first, so that every post gets its chance while still penalizing spam posts once they're conclusively known to be bad.
Imagine being able to go back and see what the constituents demanded, and what the representative decided. One could then look at outcomes and determine how reliable a politician's judgment is.
This includes politicians, senators and every other kind of 'representative'. Often they don't even read what they vote on, and you can duckduckgo that.
OP was proposing replacing the current system with direct democracy whereas the swiss simply hold referenda on specific issues while they still have representatives to govern them.
Meanwhile, on the issues that they do vote on through referenda, it can result in popular support for discriminatory laws like the ban on ....Muslim temples with pointy roofs:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Swiss_minaret_referendu...
> The Swiss government recommended that the proposed amendment be rejected as inconsistent with the basic principles of the constitution.[3] However, after the results were tabulated, the government immediately announced that the ban was in effect.[4]
The problem is that people tend to believe that the outcome of an election or a referendum should be allowed to overrule basic human rights and national constitutions.
The jump from there to direct democracy was already an straw-man. The jump from that to "no representatives on the middle" is completely baseless.
I fail to see how that is substantially different from direct democracy.
What good would representative democracy be if each representative was just an empty vessel carrying out the collective wishes of a mass of Internet commenters?
Shit show either way IMO until (if) we get our heads out of our collective ass.
When, exactly?
There are also plenty of cases where voters have chosen admirably, but lobbying and politics have chosen otherwise.
I don't think direct democracy but I would like a second level that is local. The number of people represented by each politician is 10x higher than it was 200 years ago. I would like there to be 10 elected officials instead and have a delegate in DC that votes as the 10 dictate. It would be easy to do with today's technology. It greatly helps with disenfranchisement. It also gives people someone they can go to with issues that need solved.
If they did know what they were voting for, that is far worse...
[0] https://votes.parliament.uk/Votes/Commons there was 12 votes in 3 days last week in the House of Commons
I respectfully disagree. The MPs (Members of Parliament) receive substantial remuneration to represent their constituents ─ including business expenses related to equipment, premises, staff, maintaining a second home etc. The main remit of their job is to be knowledgeable and informed of the bills they are voting upon. Most of these bills go through a lengthy process of debates, stages, readings and 'ping-pong' between HoC and HoL, before gaining the Royal Assent. There are absolutely no excuses for having a 'brief pack' and then vote based on a toss of a coin. Your reasonable expectation breeds complacency and apathy, absolving public servants of responsibility. As a taxpayer and a citizen, it is especially important to demand more at this crucial juncture, where they are stripping away any laws, which can be used to hold themselves accountable, whilst introducing Draconian measures.
It shouldn't be like that: people should be elected for a duty, and after their duty is done, they should go back to their normal job, not seek infinite re-election.
I don’t know what the best solution is but if the system is only practically open to those that don’t need to work for a living then things surely will stay the same.
There's 20 different ways to fix it already implemented in the rest of the world. Starting with a sane vote-counting system and low threshold on financing political parties from anywhere except the state budget.
It wasn't all that long ago that basic reading and arithmetic were beyond the majority of people, but we recognized that and took steps to remedy it, with some decent success.
Deploying such a system into production would be a long, careful process, running it in parallel (with no power) to simply measure public sentiment would be extremely informative, and it would also get the public thinking seriously about things...simply using a well designed system would make them smarter.