Is democracy dying?

Really though, in government it died with Athens.

Reading the article though, this seems to be US-centric. Perhaps the title could be changed to "Is US democracy dying?", in which case, at least to an outsider looking in, it seems that death happened quite a long time ago. I'm not sure if Buckley v. Valeo was as big a turning point as some make out, or if it was really that different before that, but certainly modern US political decision-making seems quite disconnected from constituent concerns.

- We like to think that we keep our representatives accountable through transparency. Now we can no longer claim the information is too hard to get. Now tell me how often your rep voted in a way that suited your preference. Or tell me how many times he voted at all. Or tell me his name.

- Your representatives represent you on everything. Even things they didn't talk about in the election. And those things might actually matter to you.

- The space of politics has gotten huge. In the early days of democracy the state did not reach into every walk of life. Now of course there are political ideas about the size of government, but you can't deny the scope of it has massively increased. We're asking a lot of ordinary people to decide on things that they aren't experts on, that don't affect them because they are removed from that particular part of life.

- If you live in a country with multiple parties in parliament, your reps need to horse-trade issues they like for things they don't care so much about. Often this leads to them not being able to deliver on their program, with the excuse permanently being that they aren't a majority.

- Politics has become a career in most countries I follow. Especially in the European countries, it's almost like athletics: you have to have joined a party from a young age. Who makes it and who doesn't depends not on experience in the rest of society, but position within the party hierarchy. An old boy from my school was a UK MP, but he never made it to the front bench because he'd spent his whole working life doing an actual job in industry (rather than a job in media, which is a job in politics).

- Politics/career 2: once you're invested in a political career, the option to do a real life job is both closed and unappealing. There's some ordinary exits/sabbaticals: you get sent to Europe where you can hide from the media and spend lots of taxpayer's money without even showing up to work (they cheat and send their entry passes for one guy to scan), or you can work for a pseudo-government organisation like an NGO. But mainly you really, really want to just stay in your current position. Especially if you're a minister and you collect a lifetime pension after some threshold.

- Messiah Politics: If we elect Obama, a smart, educated guy who is a great speaker, everything will be better. He's so smart he'll know what to do about every issue. I don't have to do anything, he'll take care of it. And lets make the whole election campaign into a heartwarming movie.

- Organized interests: they're organized, and they know how to influence career politicians. Corporations that want to sell guns/butter, pollute the environment, and cheat the consumer. Trade unions who want unreasonable concessions. And so on. What can we do about this? And organized, specific interest group can win stuff because that interest is weighed against the diffuse interests of all other interests. To start with, we should probably make it completely clear who is doing the talking. Where is money coming from, and who have our reps been meeting with? I think the state of transparency varies a fair bit across countries, but I've never seen anywhere where it's completely clear and easy to discover this kind of information.

- Media culture: everything is sensational. Force the guy to say yes or no. Flip side of that, never say yes or no, just explain your position in a long winded way. Or talk around the question. Everything is myopic, there is no holistic impression, despite what I said about your rep being your rep on everything. Constant crisis: is this the issue that forces rep X to resign? Nothing is ever said that puts things into perspective, like the history of some topic (minimum wage, marijuana, gambling, everything...).

Potential improvements:

- Term limits. Ideas about how to govern, like liberalism or socialism don't die. But there's no reason a single person would have to stay in power to explain such ideas.

- Pay people what they made before. You don't discourage high earners from serving, and you don't encourage people for whom parliament is a huge salary increase.

- Complete transparency. Rep X will meet these people on these days. They represent XYZ organization, which is funded in these amounts by these people. Have an independent body review this, like the doping agency in sports.