Unfortunately, we're actually trending more towards direct democracy with an increasing number of referendums that often have terrible results. Representatives and their staff usually do a better job of writing bills.
Ah yes, the anti democracy scare. Switzerland is doing hundreds of referendums and is now closer to a thousand referendums than to 0 and they are doing better than the rest of Europe.
Both referendums and elections are fundamentally broken and not particularly democratic to begin with. Deliberative citizens assemblies are the future of democracy. Randomly selected citizens, selected by stratified sampling for representativeness, are able to deliberate at a farm higher standard of discourse than elected officials. Such assemblies have performed extremely well so far in Ireland, France and Belgium
I don’t doubt the competency of representatives & staff when it comes to writing bills. I just doubt who they are writing the bills for…
The USA has never been direct democracy (if that form of govt is even desirable, likely not).
I see you're the kind of guy who wants his senators appointed by the state legislature. I, too, enjoy having wiser heads, who know better, prevail!
If you are ever on trial, I wonder if you'd prefer having a judge thinking about reelection when making decisions ...
Senators should be appointed by citizens assemblies/elector juries imo.
Winston Churchill: “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”
This seems discontinuous with the Center for Election Science's earlier push for approval voting. Approval voting maximizes the consent of the governed; this, while it may arguably do a better job at evaluating candidates, minimizes the consent of the governed, as most constituents would not have the opportunity to consent to any candidate. It's an interesting idea, but I would be very concerned about the outcome being perceived as illegitimate by the general population.
Hell yes. Also just citizens assemblies in general, whether for appointing officials or directly deliberating on issues. Turns out randomly selected citizens actually perform far better than elected officials.
Germans don't elect their chancellor. USA has more direct democracy than you think.