5 ms·

This is why direct democracy doesn't work, and it is also why representative democracy is good. We have just gotten ourselves into a position where decades of

by zanny 10y ago

This is why direct democracy doesn't work, and it is also why representative democracy is good. We have just gotten ourselves into a position where decades of "let the people decide" has led to your ballot including a dozen citizen choices you do not care about. In a saner world, we would be focusing on the representative part of the republic - why am I directly electing judges, magistrates, and prosecutors when it would be significantly better to select representatives to make all these electoral choices for me? Political parties have become a bad proxy for true representation. People just start voting party line and the powers that be love that kind of model - it means great persons cannot rise independent of them, and it means you can blame the bad on the individuals but the success on the party as a whole. And party affiliation has always been a horrible proxy for effective leadership. Instead, we are in a situation where our "representatives" are representing millions of people individually, while we vote for dozens of esoteric local elections for things that aren't particularly representative. What we should have is much more localized elections of representatives that then make such bureaucratic appointment decisions themselves, including for the higher levels of government beyond them. IE, you can have a representative for every 3 thousand rather than 3 million people, and that representative will join a local council that appoints the judges, city council, higher level reps, etc.

ravenstine 10y ago
"[...] why am I directly electing judges, magistrates, and prosecutors when it would be significantly better to select representatives to make all these electoral choices for me?" Yes, exactly.
gautamdivgi 10y ago
> And party affiliation has always been a horrible proxy for effective leadership. Very true - isn't that the fascist/communist model? Party affiliation trumps independence & ability?
- sidlls 10y ago
  Yes, which is one reason why I think of the system in the US as being very much closer to a fascist system than many or most are comfortable contemplating.
  - likeclockwork 10y ago
    Pretty sure it was the US' model first.
  - ravenstine 10y ago
    It's authoritarian, but I'm not sure that it's nationalist. So I'm not sure fascist is the right term, but you are otherwise correct.
slg 10y ago
>In a saner world, we would be focusing on the representative part of the republic - why am I directly electing judges, magistrates, and prosecutors when it would be significantly better to select representatives to make all these electoral choices for me? >Political parties have become a bad proxy for true representation. People just start voting party line and the powers that be love that kind of model - it means great persons cannot rise independent of them, and it means you can blame the bad on the individuals but the success on the party as a whole. And party affiliation has always been a horrible proxy for effective leadership. The problem is that these two ideas conflict with each other in a first past the post system. Representatives are motivated to band together to help secure their election and with first past the post the largest group is the only one who benefits. The end results will always be two large political parties.
astazangasta 10y ago
The situation you're describing is exactly what exists in a huge number of municipalities: a city manager, an appointed official who runs the city, while the elected officials (city council members) basically do nothing but pass toothless resolutions. It isn't that great. Representation isn't that great, and why should we expect it to be? How the hell is one person ever going to represent the perspective of a million people? A representative is not some sort of averaging function; they are just a person, and the demands on a process for matching this person to the desires of the electorate are nearly impossible to satisfy. I tend to think that the problem is not the system of representation or the ballot at all; the problem is our individual abdication of responsibility to be involved in the process. We surrendered our control of democracy to managers - officials - to decide for us and make laws for us. Well, guess what happens if you do that? The government fills up with venal people who respond to the interests of powerful elites. The solution is not a change in representation, it is engagement from the public. That means you, as an individual, probably spending 12% of your time actively working on improving your municipality and your country, being informed and engaging in a deliberate process to study and express opinions - in both measured and unmeasured ways. If the public is so removed from the process, does not participate in democracy, then it is no surprise that the process - whatever it is - has drifted so far from what we need it to be.
phhlho 10y ago
Agree completely on voting for one person to act on my behalf. I absolutely loathed needing to mark yes or no for two pages worth of judges when I voted in Chicago. I always promoted a plan of voting no for every single judge. I figured if every judge failed to be retained during one election cycle, the powers that be would finally take the power away from the people for good!
someone7x 10y ago
I would like for there to be a greater discourse on "true representation". When I look at citizens per representative I absolutely don't believe it's representative. I think for congress it's near 600,000 or something now. In LA we have the county board of supervisors, and that's a group of 5 people running a city of 10,000,000 I find these numbers mind-blowingly unrepresentative, nowhere near "true representation".
- denzil_correa 10y ago
  One radical proposal would be to pick a representative of the population (Read : Stratified Sampling) and allow them to vote.
  - karmelapple 10y ago
    Juries - chosen at random and vetted from a representative sampling of the population - choose whether a defendant is guilty or not. It's part of the civic duty of a US citizen / resident. Could we make choosing people to choose whether a law should be passed or not a similar responsibility? "Oh I have to take a week off to go to Washington DC, there's some law I have to hear testimony on and decide the outcome." First I've heard of such an idea!
  - r00fus 10y ago
    We would need to be very sure that the sample individuals are, in fact, chosen randomly. Every input to elections is a potential vulnerability; it's best of those processes are participatory and verifiable as opposed to black-box.
- messick 10y ago
  Since you mention 10,000,000 people, you are confusing Los Angeles County with the City of Los Angeles. There may be 5 County Supervisors, but the city has a mayor and 15 council members. The other cities (Burbank, Santa Clarita, Glendale, Long Beach, etc.) also have their own mayors and city councils and whatnot.
JoshTriplett 10y ago
> This is why direct democracy doesn't work, and it is also why representative democracy is good. The indirection of electing a representative that may or may not represent all of your views proves quite frustrating, compared to individually deciding on various issues. Representatives are a package deal: you can only pick from the available choices. If none of those representatives represents your views, you have no recourse. An individual voter will almost never find a representative that exactly represents their views, so they have to determine which ones they weight more heavily and focus on those. Successfully elected candidates thus focus on issues that the most people care the most strongly about, nearly to the exclusion of all else, which then produces polarizing candidates. Representative democracy has two advantages: people don't have to deal with day-to-day issues, and representatives can have discussions and negotiations and work out novel solutions in ways that large numbers of individuals cannot. As an alternative model, suppose that instead of an all-or-nothing election of one representative, all legislative issues (above a certain adminstrative level, such as things Congress would normally vote on) were directly voted on, but people could choose to delegate their vote to a proxy so they didn't have to deal with it themselves. Any proxy, and not necessarily all the same one, or for the same issue. So a sufficiently motivated individual could vote on every issue, but they could also choose to pool their vote with many others, and the vote of those representatives carried exactly as much weight as the number of proxies they represented. Representatives holding enough proxy votes would then carry enough weight to have discussions and negotiations. I've seen many different proposals for that kind of process. While it would require some new infrastructure to handle, it still seems vastly preferable to the current approach. All the people who want to argue over a tiny handful of polarizing issues can go fight over those, but that doesn't disenfranchise all the people who care about everything else. > What we should have is much more localized elections of representatives that then make such bureaucratic appointment decisions themselves, including for the higher levels of government beyond them. IE, you can have a representative for every 3 thousand rather than 3 million people, and that representative will join a local council that appoints the judges, city council, higher level reps, etc. At one time, the expectation in the US was that the states could determine their electoral college votes arbitrarily, not necessarily by popular vote.
- Debugreality 10y ago
shkkmo 10y ago
Representatives are a good way to create specialists who can investigate, and care about the decisions that need to be made. Democracy is a pretty horrible way to select representatives. In the US, democratic selection tends to select white male lawyers at a rate way above their presence in the population. It means that our representatives are really only representing some sort of average ideology, not the actual distribution of beliefs. I think a lottery (like long term jury duty) would be a much more effective methodology of selecting representatives who are representative population they represent.

by zanny 10y ago

ravenstine 10y ago

"[...] why am I directly electing judges, magistrates, and prosecutors when it would be significantly better to select representatives to make all these electoral choices for me?" Yes, exactly.

gautamdivgi 10y ago

> And party affiliation has always been a horrible proxy for effective leadership. Very true - isn't that the fascist/communist model? Party affiliation trumps independence & ability?

sidlls 10y ago
Yes, which is one reason why I think of the system in the US as being very much closer to a fascist system than many or most are comfortable contemplating.
- likeclockwork 10y ago
  Pretty sure it was the US' model first.
- ravenstine 10y ago
  It's authoritarian, but I'm not sure that it's nationalist. So I'm not sure fascist is the right term, but you are otherwise correct.

slg 10y ago

>In a saner world, we would be focusing on the representative part of the republic - why am I directly electing judges, magistrates, and prosecutors when it would be significantly better to select representatives to make all these electoral choices for me? >Political parties have become a bad proxy for true representation. People just start voting party line and the powers that be love that kind of model - it means great persons cannot rise independent of them, and it means you can blame the bad on the individuals but the success on the party as a whole. And party affiliation has always been a horrible proxy for effective leadership. The problem is that these two ideas conflict with each other in a first past the post system. Representatives are motivated to band together to help secure their election and with first past the post the largest group is the only one who benefits. The end results will always be two large political parties.

astazangasta 10y ago

The situation you're describing is exactly what exists in a huge number of municipalities: a city manager, an appointed official who runs the city, while the elected officials (city council members) basically do nothing but pass toothless resolutions. It isn't that great. Representation isn't that great, and why should we expect it to be? How the hell is one person ever going to represent the perspective of a million people? A representative is not some sort of averaging function; they are just a person, and the demands on a process for matching this person to the desires of the electorate are nearly impossible to satisfy. I tend to think that the problem is not the system of representation or the ballot at all; the problem is our individual abdication of responsibility to be involved in the process. We surrendered our control of democracy to managers - officials - to decide for us and make laws for us. Well, guess what happens if you do that? The government fills up with venal people who respond to the interests of powerful elites. The solution is not a change in representation, it is engagement from the public. That means you, as an individual, probably spending 12% of your time actively working on improving your municipality and your country, being informed and engaging in a deliberate process to study and express opinions - in both measured and unmeasured ways. If the public is so removed from the process, does not participate in democracy, then it is no surprise that the process - whatever it is - has drifted so far from what we need it to be.

phhlho 10y ago

Agree completely on voting for one person to act on my behalf. I absolutely loathed needing to mark yes or no for two pages worth of judges when I voted in Chicago. I always promoted a plan of voting no for every single judge. I figured if every judge failed to be retained during one election cycle, the powers that be would finally take the power away from the people for good!

someone7x 10y ago

I would like for there to be a greater discourse on "true representation". When I look at citizens per representative I absolutely don't believe it's representative. I think for congress it's near 600,000 or something now. In LA we have the county board of supervisors, and that's a group of 5 people running a city of 10,000,000 I find these numbers mind-blowingly unrepresentative, nowhere near "true representation".

denzil_correa 10y ago
One radical proposal would be to pick a representative of the population (Read : Stratified Sampling) and allow them to vote.
- karmelapple 10y ago
  Juries - chosen at random and vetted from a representative sampling of the population - choose whether a defendant is guilty or not. It's part of the civic duty of a US citizen / resident. Could we make choosing people to choose whether a law should be passed or not a similar responsibility? "Oh I have to take a week off to go to Washington DC, there's some law I have to hear testimony on and decide the outcome." First I've heard of such an idea!
- r00fus 10y ago
  We would need to be very sure that the sample individuals are, in fact, chosen randomly. Every input to elections is a potential vulnerability; it's best of those processes are participatory and verifiable as opposed to black-box.
messick 10y ago
Since you mention 10,000,000 people, you are confusing Los Angeles County with the City of Los Angeles. There may be 5 County Supervisors, but the city has a mayor and 15 council members. The other cities (Burbank, Santa Clarita, Glendale, Long Beach, etc.) also have their own mayors and city councils and whatnot.

JoshTriplett 10y ago

> This is why direct democracy doesn't work, and it is also why representative democracy is good. The indirection of electing a representative that may or may not represent all of your views proves quite frustrating, compared to individually deciding on various issues. Representatives are a package deal: you can only pick from the available choices. If none of those representatives represents your views, you have no recourse. An individual voter will almost never find a representative that exactly represents their views, so they have to determine which ones they weight more heavily and focus on those. Successfully elected candidates thus focus on issues that the most people care the most strongly about, nearly to the exclusion of all else, which then produces polarizing candidates. Representative democracy has two advantages: people don't have to deal with day-to-day issues, and representatives can have discussions and negotiations and work out novel solutions in ways that large numbers of individuals cannot. As an alternative model, suppose that instead of an all-or-nothing election of one representative, all legislative issues (above a certain adminstrative level, such as things Congress would normally vote on) were directly voted on, but people could choose to delegate their vote to a proxy so they didn't have to deal with it themselves. Any proxy, and not necessarily all the same one, or for the same issue. So a sufficiently motivated individual could vote on every issue, but they could also choose to pool their vote with many others, and the vote of those representatives carried exactly as much weight as the number of proxies they represented. Representatives holding enough proxy votes would then carry enough weight to have discussions and negotiations. I've seen many different proposals for that kind of process. While it would require some new infrastructure to handle, it still seems vastly preferable to the current approach. All the people who want to argue over a tiny handful of polarizing issues can go fight over those, but that doesn't disenfranchise all the people who care about everything else. > What we should have is much more localized elections of representatives that then make such bureaucratic appointment decisions themselves, including for the higher levels of government beyond them. IE, you can have a representative for every 3 thousand rather than 3 million people, and that representative will join a local council that appoints the judges, city council, higher level reps, etc. At one time, the expectation in the US was that the states could determine their electoral college votes arbitrarily, not necessarily by popular vote.

Debugreality 10y ago

shkkmo 10y ago

Representatives are a good way to create specialists who can investigate, and care about the decisions that need to be made. Democracy is a pretty horrible way to select representatives. In the US, democratic selection tends to select white male lawyers at a rate way above their presence in the population. It means that our representatives are really only representing some sort of average ideology, not the actual distribution of beliefs. I think a lottery (like long term jury duty) would be a much more effective methodology of selecting representatives who are representative population they represent.