Elections are bad for democracy
theguardian.com
Elections are bad for democracy
1–10 of 86 posts
Re: Elections are bad for democracy
#2Bit long winded, but boils down to recommending sortition, which I had not heard of. Interesting:
"With sortition, you do not ask everyone to vote on an issue few people really understand, but you draft a random sample of the population and make sure they come to the grips with the subject matter in order to take a sensible decision."
Re: Elections are bad for democracy
#3There are a ton of great alternatives. My favourite is the Demand-Revealing Referendum:
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...
Re: Elections are bad for democracy
#4Democracy has always been about the people being able to remove their leaders from power when they become egregiously bad. Kind of like evaporative cooling. The means by which they choose them is a second order consideration.
Re: Elections are bad for democracy
#5I propose a simple fix for major elections such as referendums and presidential elections. I call it the "really?" approach:
An election needs to get the same results twice back to back.
So for instance, you could replace the primaries and November presidential elections with that system. Vote once: whoever is first needs to win the next round to become president. Candidates may decide to drop out, or not. The public knows: if on round two, they still vote for the candidate that won the first round, that's the winner.
For the UK referendum, a second vote would have eliminated the protest vote. You see the results of the first vote, and you really ask yourself: really? Do I want this to happen? And vote one more time to confirm.
Simple system, with one huge caveat: no guaranteed outcome. But it would eliminate the need for polling, and hopefully result in better democratic decisions.
Re: Elections are bad for democracy
#6Bit long winded, but boils down to recommending sortition, which I had not heard of. Interesting: "With sortition, you do not ask everyone to vote on an issue few people really understand, but you draft a random sample of the population and make sure they come to the grips with the subject matter in order to take a sensible decision."
Who decides when someone has "come to grips" with a topic? I mean, anyone who disagrees with me obviously hasn't come to grips with the issue, right?
Re: Elections are bad for democracy
#7You know, there is so much "Blah blah blah" about how bad democracy is, implicitly in context because "I think it came to the wrong conclusion" (which I , that I really expected the article to segue into something that basicaly amounted to "elites should just be given the power". I expected all the blah blah was trying to obfuscate this. But that's not where it went.
If you are interested in reading the whole article, please be my guest, but if you'd like to jump to the payload, use your browser search for "sortition".
(Though I can't help but point out the article undercuts its own premise accidentally. The EU, to the extent that it is even a democracy, is certainly subject to the exact same flaws described in the first half of the article! Therefore, logically, the decision to leave an organization where democracy is failing must not be so bad, even if it was made by a process that was itself democratically flawed. This does not "destroy the argument", in the parlance of the day, but it weakens this particular vote being used as the hook for the article. A vote on any other topic would arguably work better.)
Re: Elections are bad for democracy
#8Bit long winded, but boils down to recommending sortition, which I had not heard of. Interesting: "With sortition, you do not ask everyone to vote on an issue few people really understand, but you draft a random sample of the population and make sure they come to the grips with the subject matter in order to take a sensible decision."
Who decides when someone has "come to grips" with a topic? I mean, anyone who disagrees with me obviously hasn't come to grips with the issue, right?
It's very similar to jury duty. And you'd try to use similar mechanisms to keep the system fair and balanced. And it would have similar failure cases, but "system without failure cases" isn't really on the table here.
Re: Elections are bad for democracy
#9Democracy is not failing, but elites do. You need to educate people, rather than labeling everyone who disagrees as a racist.
Re: Elections are bad for democracy
#10This sounds like a variation of Plato's Philosopher Kings, which uses the 'random sampling' argument to get around the obvious criticism of the elites being given the power.
> The Ship of State is a famous and oft-cited metaphor put forth by Plato in Book VI of the Republic (488e–489d). It likens the governance of a city-state to the command of a naval vessel and ultimately argues that the only men fit to be captain of this ship (Greek: ναῦς) are philosopher kings, benevolent men with absolute power who have access to the Form of the Good. The origins of the metaphor can be traced back to the lyric poet Alcaeus (frs. 6, 208, 249), and it is found in Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes before Plato.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_State
Unfortunately, many of the same criticisms apply to sortition as apply to Plato. The problem is that no-one really has access to the "Form of the Good", and no-one can accurately predict what the overall outcome of a decision is going to be over the very long run, however much they study it. In fact, as Popper argues, you're quite likely to draw the wrong conclusion and end up going horribly wrong.
On balance, I'd rather put my faith in a large number of people selected from all social backgrounds than a small number of people selected from a potentially narrow social background. There's also a sense of shared agency about the decision making. If it turns out the wrong decision has been made, what are we to say to the person who is not only on the receiving end of said bad decision, but wasn't even allowed to vote on it?
It also seems to me that one should be wary about making sweeping statements about a system that has endured for thousands of years in the wake of a decision that they themselves disagreed with.