I, for one, am exceedingly happy that the media establishment has so loudly proclaimed their disdain for democracy in the last week. Open your eyes people, they think they can run your lives better than you and they're quite upset that you've dared fight back.
Elections are bad for democracy
31–40 of 86 posts
Re: Elections are bad for democracy
#32Sortition is just too corruptible and disagreeable I would think. You can sample a society and "educate" them but then that process will forever be under fire too.
I believe that in a democracy things should be hard to change. Changing things should take a super majority. This will lead to more compromise and possibly better results for all. If there was a 2/3 requirement to change things then there would be little room for controversial changes to occur that cause an uproar among the citizenship. There would be more cooperation because to change something you'd need to compromise with your opponent for them to get a change they want instead of trying to get a slim majority in the government by election, etc.
If this principal was applied in the first place the UK never would have joined the EU and Brexit wouldn't have ever even been an issue. In fact, many of the things a lot of people find disagreeable wouldn't have happened.
We are divided because we let our form of democracy divide us.
Re: Elections are bad for democracy
#33This 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…
Did you read the whole article? His most significant proposal is that modern democracies adjust their procedures to use something called "sortition" that dates back to ancient Greece. In sortition, rather than polling the entire populace about complicated issues on which they are likely not well informed, we select a balanced random sample of people from the populace , provide them information, and then allow them to…
I read the whole article, and my criticism was addressed at sortition.
> In sortition, rather than polling the entire populace about complicated issues on which they are likely not well informed, we select a balanced random sample of people from the populace , provide them information, and then allow them to engage each other on the issue. Then we have those people vote.
This is utopian, and fraught with difficulties. Who decides what constitutes balanced? Does anyone elect the deciders? How can a sample be both balanced and random? Through what forum do they engage? How do we ensure a genuine discussion takes place, rather than both sides talking past each other. How do we overcome the problem that the larger the sample, the harder it will be to have a discussion? How do we prevent the media playing a role in influencing the decision making?
The referendum campaign was poorly articulated on the Remain side, and played to people's most base fears on the Leave side. Remain should have known that touting the impact of Brexit on big business would fall on deaf ears with those that feel powerless in their own communities. That's an argument for making better information available during the course of a referendum campaign. Of course, had the Remain campaign won, as it nearly did, no-one would be questioning it, just as they didn't call for an overhaul of democracy in the wake of the (equally disgracefully fought) NO2AV campaign.
Re: Elections are bad for democracy
#34"No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." - Winston Churchill, House of Commons, November 11, 1947
The same could have been said of the horse until someone tried a train for the first time. We've never tried sortition on a large scale, and on smaller scales it's already been shown effective. A perfect opportunity to experiment with it would be the Canadian senate, IMO. Also note: sortition is a form of democracy. In fact I would argue it's the most democratic process proposed which does not run a risk of mob rule.…
> sortition is a form of democracy.
No, its not. Democracy is either direct (in which each citizen has a direct vote on proposals) or indirect (in which each citizen has a vote on representatives, who either directly vote on proposals or select other officials who do.) The common element of democracy is that there is a chain of choice from the citizenry at large to the decision, what differs among forms of democracy is whether there are intermediate links on that chain, and how many, what those particular intermediate links look like.
Sortition is does not share the unifying characteristic of democracy, it is, instead, one of many forms of rule by an unelected, not-democratically-accountable elite.
> and is at less risk of being easily corrupted by special interest groups.
People that aren't trying to get reelected , and which are rotated fast enough to be "constantly changing" (which also means that public attention on each of them is fleeting), is, if anything, more subject to corruption.
They may be less valuable to corrupt (since you are more likely to be renting them for a single decision than buying them for a whole extended career), but I don't think that the combined effect makes them less risk of being corrupted. At a minimum, I think that claim requires substantial support that hasn't been offered.
Re: Elections are bad for democracy
#35I 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…
I believe the technical term for this approach is called "bicameralism".
No, bicameralism means you have two legislative bodies (for example, the US House and Senate). So in a sense it's the same thing, because a bill, to become law, has to be voted on (and pass) twice.
But bicameralism doesn't refer to two votes by the public in order to pass one referendum or elect one person. That's... something else. I don't know what to call it, but it's not bicameralism.
Re: Elections are bad for democracy
#36I 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…
The result would be a very low turnout on the first vote, with a meaningless result that may or may not be representative of the entire population (because everyone knows the first vote is meaningless so why bother voting), followed by a large turnout on the second vote... and then followed by howling and wailing by which ever side loses and the demanding of a third referendum. Interesting New Zealand recently had a…
The Nz referendum was a) pick a flag in round 1 and b) decide if you really want to commit to the chosen flag in round 2.
It was a sensible approach given that the flag choices were so underwhelming that nobody wanted to change in the end.
I guess it's a little different because you're voting for different things but I guess it's similar. Have a vote and then have the power to bail out.
Re: Elections are bad for democracy
#37This article can be summarized as "Oh no! The 'wrong sorts of people' are winning! Lets ditch popular elections."
Or, specifically, the people voted the wrong way on the referendum. Let's stop letting people vote on referendums.
You see the same thing with the EU Constitution - the voters rejected it in two countries. That can't be allowed. So we'll do the same thing via the Lisbon Treaty, but we won't let anybody vote on that, because they might vote wrong.
Re: Elections are bad for democracy
#38"No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." - Winston Churchill, House of Commons, November 11, 1947
The same could have been said of the horse until someone tried a train for the first time. We've never tried sortition on a large scale, and on smaller scales it's already been shown effective. A perfect opportunity to experiment with it would be the Canadian senate, IMO. Also note: sortition is a form of democracy. In fact I would argue it's the most democratic process proposed which does not run a risk of mob rule.…
I see the appeal of sortition, and I'd like to see it tried. My biggest concern is that, in any transition to election-by-lot, the chosen representatives are at a disadvantage compared to the lobbyists and the national bureaucracy. I worry that these entrenched interests would find it very easy to manipulate representatives who have much less policy experience than they do.
Re: Elections are bad for democracy
#39"No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." - Winston Churchill, House of Commons, November 11, 1947
The same could have been said of the horse until someone tried a train for the first time. We've never tried sortition on a large scale, and on smaller scales it's already been shown effective. A perfect opportunity to experiment with it would be the Canadian senate, IMO. Also note: sortition is a form of democracy. In fact I would argue it's the most democratic process proposed which does not run a risk of mob rule.…
Sortition also may be less corruptible. If the group is constantly changing, that may be harder to corrupt than having the same representative in DC for 30 straight years.
Re: Elections are bad for democracy
#40Sortition is just too corruptible and disagreeable I would think. You can sample a society and "educate" them but then that process will forever be under fire too. I believe that in a democracy things should be hard to change. Changing things should take a super majority. This will lead to more compromise and possibly better results for all. If there was a 2/3 requirement to change things then there would be little r…
Whilst I agree that a supermajority is an excellent idea for changing things, it's still staightforward for politicians ( or more precisely, civil service mandarins ) to play the long-game to achieve what they want regardless. They can operate on a longer timeline than the average voter,for whom there are more pressing daily concerns.
For example, de Gaulle originally blocked the UK's entry into the EEC. So the UK went off and formed the rival EFTA with some peripheral nations, until EFTA was eventually folded into the ECSC / EEC.
By the time a referendum on remaining was eventually held, in 1975, the UK was already deep in the EEC. Change had been achieved without a majority, or even a minority.