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Comment by tommiegannert | Hacker News Reader

> I'm sad because I no longer an doing my civic duty to stay informed and have an educated opinion

At the same time, you must have been questioning whether you were staying informed, or was used as a democracy puppet by lobbyists. It takes a lot more energy to stay informed than to just read news.

Here in Switzerland, the people vote on lots of things, four times a year. But the participation rates are always 40-60%. It's almost like people only need to stay informed about the particular questions they care about. I find it a refreshing organisation, compared to my native Sweden. When I only vote for politicians, I need to know their opinions on everything. That, I find, is exhausting.

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In Switzerland you still have to vote for politicians who take decisions on their own. It is only on some specific questions where the population can vote. So it means you have to keep track of more, both the politicians you vote for and some of the questions you can vote on.

A bit of a drawback with having the general public vote on some of these questions is that it is difficult for the general public to be well informed about these questions so they vote to keep things as is or they take the easy path. That's probably why Switzerland often are behind on many questions, for example voting for women, environment etc.

    > compared to my native Sweden. When I only vote for politicians, I need to know their opinions on everything. That, I find, is exhausting.

I am surprised to hear this. For most parliamentary democracies, political parties publish a political platform statement before each election. Isn't the summary enough to make a decision?

That very strongly depends on which issues are important to you and which aren't. The more nuanced your opinions about any given topic, the harder it is to take anything useful away from a summary. Political platforms as summaries tend to be too broad in my opinion, e.g. reduce this or that or improve this or that, but without saying on account of what. In politics, everything is a trade off and if you want to increase spend on something then that money has to come from somewhere else, whether that's increased taxes, reduced spending on some other topic, or etc. Saying they want to increase the spend on something without saying how they're gonna get there is not useful.

Do you really think your vote matters that much? You are overthinking it. Your vote, while important to a functioning democracy, does not matter that much in an election.

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