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Elections are bad for democracy

theguardian.com

71–80 of 86 posts

Re: Elections are bad for democracy

#71
post #32

Sortition 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…

If you impose too high a barrier to change, then laws cannot stay in sync with society, and that will lead to severe unrest.

For sure and maybe 2/3 is too high. Certainly if you impose too low a barrier you get unrest as well - as we are witnessing across democracies today.

I would love to see a study that uses the scientific method to determine what the best percentage is for keeping the most people happy. My gut tells my 70% is too high and 50% is too low but that's conjecture.

Re: Elections are bad for democracy

#72
post #22
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A jury is a very restricted case. There is a supervising judge and two (or more) competing advocates. The process for choosing those advocates is very formalized (defendant selection and public official). Every one of these other participants breaks the analogy enough to make it useless.

I see I may have skipped showing my work on too many steps here for my point to have made sense initially. Sorry, my fault (no sarcasm). So, when you try to concretely manifest the sortition idea, you find yourself stepping in an awful lot of the same problems you get with juries. With a twist, but very similar. I'd intend to have advocates on hand for the various positions, and if you think the bureaucracy won't be stepping in here with procedures and rules, probably enforced by a process moderator that looks an awful lot like a "judge", along with formalized rules for the other parts of the process, you don't know bureaucracies. Surely we don't expect the participants to all be auto-didacts? And yet, we can't just have one person teaching the relevant issues, or that one person has too much of the power.

And I don't say this often, but the bureaucrats would be right here. They would be necessary.

There's no way sortition is going to be "randomly choose 100 people, stick them in a room with nothing but a problem statement, accept their decision". It shouldn't be, either; it needs more structure than that. Right down to things like shielding the chosen participants from undue influences, and a lot of really interesting questions around transparency... again, quite like a jury.

Re: Elections are bad for democracy

#73

Now, where is the "wisdom of the crowds" when it comes to decisions that we, "the elites", don't like? This annoys me. There is no doubt the result would have been "very fair" if it had been remain. What we are seeing now is IMO hypocrisy and contempt of ordinary people at a scary level. Now, did I want Brexit? No (I had no opinion). Do I think they should have requested more than 50% of the votes? As a conservative…

> where is the "wisdom of the crowds" when it comes to decisions that we, "the elites", don't like? The crowds wisely thought the sun orbited the flat earth, and have voted for many bad decisions throughout history. Democracy is supporting their self-determination - the crowds have the power. That doesn't at all mean that every decision is a good one. EDIT: As Abe Lincoln is quoted: You can fool all the people some o…

Ironically, if you want to talk about what the crowd believes, the crowd believes that people used to believe the Earth was flat.

The historical evidence that this was ever a widespread belief is quite weak. People generally either didn't think about it, or knew it was round.

Re: Elections are bad for democracy

#74
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On corruptibility, true, it's not been tested so one can't say one way or the other. But at least in principle it rules out many of the common paths to corruption.

Let's take four major forms corruption takes: (1) a big bag of money dropped on your table. (2) I rub your back, you rub mine, reciprocal relationship. (3) Blackmail. (4) Personal: the desire for power.

(1) is of course still possible, but you're gonna need a lot more bags, and you're gonna have to be very careful with how you approach. Usually, the path to bribing someone requires a "romancing" phase; you have to make sure the other side is open to your proposal and, most importantly, won't give you up. This is a lengthy process that is much easier when the pool of candidates is small and doesn't change very often. How valuable is that bag of money when that person won't have any influence in 4 years' time? You're gonna need a lot more bags, and you're gonna have to be a lot more careful about who to approach.

(2) This one is out of the question. These sort of reciprocal relationships take years to cultivate, and we've immediately removed one of the prime motivating factors which is campaign funding.

(3) Blackmail. This one will still work, but again: you're gonna need a lot more detective work to dig up brand new dirt, every 4 years, on every member of a senate. This becomes very impractical. Also I'm gonna go out on a limb and say the sort of secrets an average sample of the population can be blackmailed on is not the same as that of a small group of career politicians.

(4) Again, mostly out of question. There is a much higher incentive to pass laws that benefit people "like you", but not much you can do to benefit yourself directly (excluding the unlikely chance that the person who drew the lottery ticket is, say, CEO of some large corporation), and still, this only works if by some chance a large proportion of other lottery winners are like you. Otherwise, strategically, the only personal benefit you can get out of a position of power is to pass laws that benefit the country as a whole.

On the definition of Democratic. Yes, that's a fair point. Or perhaps sortition lives in a sort of quantum state being both democratic and dictatorial.

I hope someone manages to test this out. To me it seems obvious that the biggest threat to society is not climate change, or antibiotic resistance, or bad economies or poverty: all of these have a single root cause: corruption.

There's no lack of scientific innovation to solve the other problems; it's corrupt institutions that stand in their way.

Our number one focus as a species right now should be to figure out how eliminate corruption from our institutions and lessen the impact of bad actors.

Re: Elections are bad for democracy

#75
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

On corruptibility, true, it's not been tested so one can't say one way or the other. But at least in principle it rules out many of the common paths to corruption. Let's take four major forms corruption takes: (1) a big bag of money dropped on your table. (2) I rub your back, you rub mine, reciprocal relationship. (3) Blackmail. (4) Personal: the desire for power. (1) is of course still possible, but you're gonna nee…

Notably, you leave a widely-recognized big source of corrupting influence: a moneyed special interest establishing a reputation for providing rewards (often in the form of high-paying jobs) to people in government who serve their interest when they leave government, without an explicit quid pro quo.

This, of course, remains eminently workable with sortition, especially a rapid turnover form, where decision-makers will be leaving government soon after decisions are made and are no longer prefiltered to tend to include people who have fairly excellent job prospects even without corrupt rewards.

Re: Elections are bad for democracy

#76
post #20
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Unless you make voting in the first vote a pre-condition to vote on the second vote.

to howls of "VOTER SUPRESSION!"

Re: Elections are bad for democracy

#77

I 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…

[deleted]

Re: Elections are bad for democracy

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't believe mainstream media ever worked in a neutral, non-biased, fact based way. ... they are "free" - which means they actually serve Moloch[0], by writing what sells. That is, the most outrage-inducing, biased misrepresentations (and often outright lies) they can get away with. ... media isn't "a place to go for trusted information" ... I think painting all news media with the same brush is significantly mi…

I don't think it misconstrues the situation much. To follow your comparison - sure, we don't say software developers are all toxic[0]. But we like to complain that almost all software is shit. There are gems of almost perfect beauty and usability, and we love them, but there are so few of those. Here on HN we sometimes like to discuss dynamics of what makes most of software shit - and we often find similar sort of ec…

> we like to complain that almost all software is shit

People like to use hyperbole, but IME I've never met someone who thought all software was bad or equally bad. There is a very wide range of quality.

Re: Elections are bad for democracy

#79
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you mean with "make decision making worse". Are you suggesting that having the EFTA option explicitly listed might have made even less people choose "remain in EU"? I'd say that in that case, the government has been given a clear mandate on what route to pursue. Right now, I don't think the Leave side has any idea if the public wants the EFTA option, the "own island first" option, or the chunnel opt…

I'm saying that if we're agreed that EFTA is the moderate Brexit option, having nuclear options (destroy chunnel) on the ballot means that you effectively give a democratic mandate for the nuclear implementation (which let's face it, will always be appealing to a substantial minority, see Corbyn) and sideline moderate voices. Saying that the public are in control of the direction of travel but leaving the experts in…

Given his stance, I find it ironic that you'd equate Corbyn with the nuclear option...

As I see it, it doesn't really matter if we agree that EFTA is the moderate brexit option: the primary focus of the Leave campaign was on freedom of movement, and it was clear (even before the referendum, given the situation with Norway and Switzerland) that freedom of movement is an integral part of the single market treaties -- a point reiterated by Merkel and Tusk over the past few days.

So regardless that you and I may prefer for the Leave side to explore the EFTA route, it isn't in their mandate -- they won on a campaign of curbing free movement. Had the "moderate Brexit" been a separate choice on the ballot, they might have had a mandate to go for that option. But right now, nobody really knows how many of the Leave voters voted against free movement, and how many voted "just" against the EU.

Re: Elections are bad for democracy

#80
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sortition is based on chance, instead of agreeableness. Referendums are a great idea, but I think that the British yes/no vote was way too simple to game. Using hindsight to save the day, given that there appears to be no gameplan for where to go now, maybe the different options should have been explored before putting it to a vote: * remain in the EU * leave the EU, remain in the single market * leave the single mar…

I wonder if a referendum constructed in that way would actually make decision making worse. As I see it, the public have voted to Leave, but some of the options for Leave are actually quite appealing, and would even appeal to some pragmatic Remainers (Norway-style EFTA agreement, join Schengen, negotiate trade agreements with the EU from the outside on a common basis with other EFTA countries, allow Eurozone to integ…

> but some of the options for Leave are actually quite appealing ... Norway-style EFTA agreement, join Schengen, negotiate trade agreements with the EU from the outside on a common basis with other EFTA countries

While those are options that Britain could attempt to pursue if it leaves the EU, they aren't things that Britain can just choose to do. They are things that Britain can try to do after it leaves the EU (but may or may not succeed in, even if it tries.)

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