How is the last example different from an incumbents paradise? To me it looks like a road to autocracy.
As for the demarchists, The Orville had an episode about this. There are many reasons it does not work in practice at a medium or large scale.
As for the demarchists, The Orville had an episode about this. There are many reasons it does not work in practice at a medium or large scale.
> The demarchists were only several 100 people if I understood correctly
Demarchist society at/around Yellowstone was supposed to involve many millions of people, but the catch was the Glitter Band of federated space stations allowed a high degree of local control: different stations could vote themselves into being hippie communes or dictatorships or whatever, and one of the main roles of the overarching Demarchist organization (heh) was to make sure these little fiefs didn't violate the fundamental principles of the whole thing by preventing their inhabitants from voting in the broader hivemind or from leaving the station. That broader hivemind held together by largely staying out of hyperlocal concerns, focusing on the advancement of the overall system.
> they definitely ran into some problems
Yeah, though The Bad Thing that happens roughly halfway through the universe's chronology (some books set before The Event, some after) affects all the different polities and one of the more interesting aspects of the novels, at least personally, is how the different systems deal with this external shock; it's not quite that the Demarchist political system caused the event, although it did get itself into a variety of lesser scrapes.
It is a fun concept: representative democracy is indeed kind of a workaround for laggy, low-bandwidth communications. What's possible when that stops being a constraint?
The Demarchists were probably the most successful offshoot of Earth and are billions across multiple solar systems. They are not an hive mind and their societies are not exactly an utopia (but not dystopian either).
That may be true if your vote is also your guess. But if they are two different things (i.e. I vote for candidate A but guess candidate B will win) I don't see an issue. In theory it simply favors a well-informed citizenry.
I would be curious if exit pollsters have ever asked this question. Ask people who they voted for, but also who they think will win. It would be interesting to see how accurate guesses are.
This is a terrible "theory." No voter can be fully informed. I'm not even talking about the asymmetric information that leaders have (information from spy networks, experts, etc). Literally no single person can comprehend all these connections and complexities involved in many things. This is what representatives are supposed to resolve, but they frequently fail us. Your vote always is and always will be a guess. There may be a handful of subjects you're qualified to be an expert on, but the rest are effectively guesses. An "informed" voter is one that knows they are uninformed and doing their best.
This isn't a comment encouraging autocracy, but one against this myth of "education is the end all be all solution." We should inform people as much as possible but also be encouraging nuanced discussions. Wisdom of the crowds is powerful, but we also need to recognize the limitations.
> I would be curious if exit pollsters have ever asked this question. Ask people who they voted for, but also who they think will win. It would be interesting to see how accurate guesses are.
Absolutely not! We want to protect the secrecy of the vote. This can only encourage the degradation of that privacy. There are many ways to extract more information from votes without revealing identity. Cardinal methods, especially Score and STAR, give you a lot more information that you can use infer voter preferences. These methods also allow you to vote honestly, which defeats the entire purpose of your poll question.
The problem is that most people are biased towards thinking their favorite candidate will win, so if it's a close election then most people will guess the same as their vote.
> I would be curious if exit pollsters have ever asked this question. Ask people who they voted for, but also who they think will win. It would be interesting to see how accurate guesses are.
Political betting markets are kind of like that. Though, with money on the line, participants have a stronger incentive to avoid bias than they would in a poll.