There's another way to achieve something similar less chaotically: demarchy, which was used for some things in ancient Greece. This involves electing people at random for a limited time period; if the selection is truly random, then the outcome of a couple hundred randomly selected people voting on something should usually match the outcome of the whole population voting on something. And due to it only being for a short period of time, you avoid anyone accumulating too much power.
If you want people to vote meaningfully on issues, you have to empower them to cast the very best vote they could cast, and demarchy is basically the only way this could be done practically in a large society. The concept of a general election or general referendum is aberrant.
If you select people at random, they will have even less understanding of the issues they vote on than career politicians. They don't have established networks of experts they believe they can trust. They lack the skills to have effective meetings between more than a handful of people, to negotiate, and to make collective decisions. Administrators would have to provide all that.
That would be bureaucracy in the literal sense of the word.
Career politicians are better than monarchs or aristocrats, but the fact is that making governance decisions is technically easy. Anyone can do it in principle. Politicians literally don't understand what they are voting on because the breadth of topics is too large and famously the US Congress can go from proposing to voting on complex trillion-dollar spending bills [0] in 48 hours. There is literally no way a random pool of people can do worse than that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Appropriations_Ac...
In the EU, and especially in national parliaments, political parties are the primary actors. While individual politicians are often ignorant of the topics they vote on, the parties usually have the relevant expertise, though they are not always willing to take advantage of it. After all, one of the primary functions of a political party is to provide a pool of resources and trusted expertise that is independent both from the government and lobbyists.
Furthermore, I personally just flat out don't believe "parties usually have the relevant expertise". What exactly, in detail, is that supposed to mean? Because as I've never seen that technical expertise coming out of a political party.
It's the same thing as with elections. You can trust the elections without trusting the government running them, because the party you vote has its own people overseeing the elections. And it's always a party you vote, even in systems where you nominally cast your vote for an individual candidate, because individuals acting on their own are too weak to challenge the system.
The experts you are aware of may be members of a political party, participating in the internal processes of the party to varying degrees. It's one way to be an active citizen. You usually don't know that, because it's not your business to know. Political affiliation is a private matter, after all.
This isn't necessarily true. Politicians aren't selected for understanding; their ability to obtain and retain power is entirely due to their ability to attract voters and make deals with other politicians. If you assume a normal distribution of traits, then when people are selected based on scoring a high percentile in just one trait (in this case, political charisma), on average they'll be worse at other traits than if you'd selected a similar number of people completely randomly.
People have done some research on that in Finland. Due to mandatory military service, the vast majority of men have taken the same intelligence and personality tests. The research found that male politicians performed better in the intelligence test and were more likely to have favorable personality traits than men in the general population. The effect was already present among the candidates in local elections. The higher up you went, the more significant the effect became.
In real life these people do not produce legislation/recommendations that are of less quality than politicians.
I recommend a book called "open democracy" that goes into detail about this kind of decision making processes. The OCED has also done a lot of work and has a few reports on the matter too, if you look at their recommendations for "the future of democracy".
Some big experiments in this area have been done in France as recent as a few months ago, in Ireland, in Iceland and the European union as a whole did a very big one a few years ago.
This reminds me of Varoufakis wanting to take the issue to the Greeks, during the Greek bailout negotiations, being told that he was "putting [his] people in a difficult situation of having to make a pivotal decision on complicated matters". He replied "Yes, it's called democracy".
of corrupting lobbyists, that the main thing they are missing.
The average age in the Senate is what, 65? The percentage of people with degrees in science, architecture or engineering is like 10%.
These people are not keeping up with changes in the world, they are not more informed than an average Joe and are definitely less capable of processing new information.
There is no formal qualification required to become a politician and they are not selected based on intellectual merit. In fact my local politician is a ex-convict.
How could the US collectively decide the eligible population of representative candidates for a demarchy?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_t...
There was so much uncertainty around it and who wanted what that a lot of people voted against their best interests. I'm still meeting people who thought they were voting against Uber and Lyft with that proposition.
The ads were constant and incredibly misleading. And that was one issue. Every time these propositions come up, I can usually find 3 or 4 that are not what they seem (the Diveta props are similar but very different tactics afaict).
If all state business was done this way it would be overwhelming to filter through it all.
For evidence of this, consider how many suburban boomers are eager to hire illegal immigrants to do lawn work around their McMansion for less than minimum wage. Most would probably tell you that minimum wage laws are good or that illegal immigrants should be deported (one or the other, depending on what side of the aisle they're on...) but when push comes to shove they both choose the lowest bidding contractor to do their yardwork. After all, they aren't yard-workers, just like most Californians aren't uber drivers.
> New Law: "Propaganda is illegal"
> Turnout: 93% for 5% against, 2% abstained
> Law approved.
Well boys we did it, propaganda is no more.
This happens a lot in the US in the primary elections. Everyone complains about the poor quality of Republican candidates and how they wish there were better options but the primary voter has already limited the field.
Second trouble is the dictatorship of the majority - you'll never get minority rights or issues of the disenfranchised addressed.
There is a better way: Checks and balances.
Suppose that in order to pass anything of this nature it had to go through more steps: The union legislature had to agree, then a majority of the member state legislatures had to agree, then the general public had to vote in favor of it too. But to repeal it, it only takes one of those.
That doesn't make it impossible for something terrible to happen -- in waves of populism everyone will vote for something terrible because to do otherwise is seen as siding with the "enemy" -- but it helps. Raises the threshold before something dangerous makes it into law.
And it's the easier path to repeal which is the thing we most lack. It should be much easier for bad laws to be removed.
We're really lucky that slavery was mostly abolished before we regressed to this stage.
Full disclosure, I’m originally from a EU country but I am now a resident in Switzerland.
Everyday I feel blessed to be living in a country where my fellow humans are in charge and not some ignorant fools who’s primary skill is to elbow themselves to power.
Although people were voting, there was a lot of political parties "advocating" fairly hard for different views, and the opinion of Australians flipped as a result of that. Seems like spreading FUD is effective.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2023...
But it sounds like you don't actually understand anyone's views, at is often the case for young people. There's just your initial reaction (correct) and "fear" (incorrect). Emotional politics at its greatest.