What prevents the green team from registering 200 yellow candidates who will all submit yellow-sounding platforms in order to split the vote?
Don’t we want to allow the public to judge candidates on more than their ability to write a single speech? Politics and representation is picking someone to perform tasks as our agent that go well beyond writing a single short speech with lots of lead time.
It has nothing to do with what GP was suggesting of "banning campaigns" lol
How do you allocate that? Surely you can't give anyone who asks the same amount. So you favour parties which are already entrenched. Of course that has quite a few upsides but it doesn't seem like an inherently democratic system.
In worst (of course not unavoidable) you also might end up with indirect equivalent of what your re trying to ban, e.g. private media companies with a lot of resources that are biased towards certain candidates influencing public opinion (without crossing the legal boundaries) or those already in power using the state media to do the same.
e.g. in Hungary most funding comes from the government. How did that work out for them?
- parties repeatedly getting 2% over 4 years get gov donations
- parties can take capped membership fees
- private citizen can forward a minuscule part of incomes tax towards a specific party, fully anonymously
- during campaigning, private people can donate to parties, capped to a small percentage of donator official incomes.
Fun thing is, this was put in place after an attempt to install a local equivalent of Orban. Bankrolled by a businessman with close ties to Russia.
In a representative system where you vote directly for candidates and not parties like in the US you need to know who is who and what they support.
Banning campaigning hurts challengers to the status quo.
I could keep picking your naive suggestion apart but this is I believe sufficient evidence that you haven’t done your homework.
e.g. that doesn't seem to be working that well in Hungary or Turkey and presumably quite a few other countries. Banning or severely limiting external funding or support makes it rather easy for politicians with authoritarian policies to keep their grip on power.
You win the election, you tweak the system to make it easier for you to win next time, you get more funding and your opponents less. Rinse and repeat and you can weaken the opposition to such an extent that you can stay in power more or less indefinitely. That's what Orban or Erdogan are doing.
Another option is you spend a lot of money, win, then change the rules to ban or limit external funding so that nobody else can do that to challenge you.
And in our case the alternative is Russian money making it into politics. Which is exactly what could lead to issues.
But, what if instead of doing typical advertising, a candidate coordinates secretly with people outside your jurisdiction. Co-conspirators could spend months or years running stories about some issue—crime, homelessness, drugs, etc, that might even have some kernel of truth (but be wildly overblown). People in your society might jump in with their own stories related to the problem, legitimate stories of things that happened to them, but filtered up by “the algorithm.” Then, the malicious candidate can just reference the well-known (overblown) issues in their pamphlet. It’s perfect because they don’t even have to make or defend any specific claims, just gesture broadly at the fears that individuals have self-selected.
What do we ban? Getting your news from outside the jurisdiction? Discussing your experiences? Politicians meeting people outside jurisdiction? I don’t really see it…
I dunno. My gut feeling is that we just have to come to terms with the idea of democracy requiring some sort of media literacy. But then if people were good at identifying ads and ignoring them, they wouldn’t be used so widely.
Currently, they are only used for some positions like presidency, are usually 2 terms and don't apply to other positions.
IMO:
1) We should get rid of presidents and other single-person positions altogether and replace them with groups of at least 5. Power concentrated in the hands of one individual attracts the worst individuals.
2) Term limits should apply to many more positions.
3) I am undecided whether the limit counter should be shared among all positions (i.e. if 2 terms is the max, you can serve 2 years as president, 2 as senator, or 1 as president and 1 as senator - changing position would not reset it). This would mean there would be no career politicians but also the politicians would be less experienced. The opposite is requiring people to ascend through the ranks (perhaps starting as low as a mayor of a town) but only allowing one term in each position. That way people can judge them on their past performance.
Then there is room for quite a lot of direct or indirect corruption. e.g. if you know you won't have a job in 4-8 years major corporations and other organizations offering you a cushy job if you do the "right things" might become quite a bit more appealing.
But yes, having a distinct class of career politicians has some significant downsides as well..
> The opposite is requiring people to ascend through the ranks (perhaps starting as low as a mayor of a town)
Might work fine or there might be a lot of gatekeeping if you just want to get on the first step since that will likely be controlled quite tightly by the established parties/cliques.
With tongue in cheek, that qualifies you as the "people like Stalin" category. Not a good idea.