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> Give them more decision making power, not less. I can't see this working out at all. In the 2016 US election 43% of you failed to vote. For Brexit 28% of p

> Give them more decision making power, not less. I can't see this working out at all. In the 2016 US election 43% of you failed to vote. For Brexit 28% of people failed to vote. And the younger the demographic, the fewer people who voted. In Australia where voting is compulsory, we have close to 6% informal votes. Donkey votes are believed to be close to 2%. I shudder to think of the people who vote for Labour or Libs because "their votes doesn't really count anyway". And you don't have to vote that often! You had one job!

Swenrekcah 10y ago
The thing is, when all you can do is vote once every 4 years, you don't have a lot of influence. If I were tasked with steering a cruise ship but my only tool was to splash my arms in the sea to make waves, I would give up pretty quickly. So the point about having more referendums, not less, is I think completely spot on to try to fix this issue.
mike-cardwell 10y ago
My statement was that giving people more referendums would make them use them more wisely, and I gave some reasoning for that. Your response was that, not many people vote. I'm not sure how that addresses what I wrote?
- bostik 10y ago
  > giving people more referendums would make them use them more wisely Psychology and sociology disagree with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_fatigue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_fatigue The only solution I can think of is to enact a set of laws that require and enforce science and evidence based legislation. However, this is such an affront to all the lobbying groups that even the suggestion of such laws will be aggressively attacked from every direction possible.
  - mike-cardwell 10y ago
    That link doesn't actually argue either way. It just presents some ideas with lots of "could be" and "under certain circumstances" and "proponents often counter" and so on. No sources. It does provide one example. But the example has nothing to do with referendums, it's about people being asked to vote on the same sort of question repeatedly in a short period of time. I would argue that the nature of a referendum is completely different to that of an election, so the behaviour may be completely different. Do you have a better link?
    - bostik 10y ago
      There is research into the phenomenon, but since I don't want to even try to link to [cough sb], I can provide a couple of pointers for further research. - 10.2307/2108922 - (no idea why, but this has no DOI: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25791895 http://www.jstor.org/stable/25791895) - (no DOI either: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379401000476 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379401...) > I would argue that the nature of a referendum is completely different to that of an election I think you are being somewhat dishonest here, and I would suspect you actually know that. From an individual voter's point of view there is very little practical difference: you are supposed to set time aside to go to the polling station at a given date, and cast your vote on an issue where it is HIGHLY unlikely that you have enough data to make an educated decision. Referendums attempt to distill a complex issue (or a set of issues) into a binary decision. (I find it relevant that binary option trading is a common source of scams: http://scambroker.com/binary-options-trading-scam/); http://scambroker.com/binary-options-trading-scam/); elections attempt to distill a complex set of competing and mutually exclusive issues into a personality contest. Either way the only repeatibly reliable result is that no matter whose side wins, all the voters will eventually feel they have been shafted.
      - mike-cardwell 10y ago
        I don't know why you felt the need to call me dishonest. An election is for choosing who you want to defer decision making power to. Often you only agree with some of the things that person intends to do. The headline actions. And even then, you realise that they may not do some of the things they said they would, and will probably do many other things you never even hear about. A referendum is about answering a specific question. One you have probably never been asked in your life time. And hopefully one where the result will be an actual thing that takes place, e.g Brexit. I find it hard to believe that concepts such as voter fatigue would apply equally to those two considerably different things.
- 2muchcoffeeman 10y ago
  Right, you said: > What if the political and economic experts disagree with the majority, not just because of their political and economic knowledge, but because they are a very limited demographic and don't even consider many of the things that are important to the people who are not experts in those fields? So my understanding of your idea is, the perspective of experts and general populous is different. If we give people more chances to vote, they will have more opportunity to vote in a way that will address issues important to them. But we already have the opportunity to vote "from our perspective". But a lot of people don't care to. So why would having more opportunities to vote improve the this?
  - mike-cardwell 10y ago
    Because voting in a general election is different to voting in a referendum. A lot of people see voting in general elections as futile, because as far as they can see, all they get from any party is more of the same. Regardless of whether or not that viewpoint is correct, it doesn't apply to referendums. A referendum is about voting for a specific thing and getting it, or not. I think that if we have more referendums, people will start to realise the difference, and take part more.

Swenrekcah 10y ago

The thing is, when all you can do is vote once every 4 years, you don't have a lot of influence. If I were tasked with steering a cruise ship but my only tool was to splash my arms in the sea to make waves, I would give up pretty quickly. So the point about having more referendums, not less, is I think completely spot on to try to fix this issue.

mike-cardwell 10y ago

My statement was that giving people more referendums would make them use them more wisely, and I gave some reasoning for that. Your response was that, not many people vote. I'm not sure how that addresses what I wrote?

bostik 10y ago
> giving people more referendums would make them use them more wisely Psychology and sociology disagree with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_fatigue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_fatigue The only solution I can think of is to enact a set of laws that require and enforce science and evidence based legislation. However, this is such an affront to all the lobbying groups that even the suggestion of such laws will be aggressively attacked from every direction possible.
- mike-cardwell 10y ago
  That link doesn't actually argue either way. It just presents some ideas with lots of "could be" and "under certain circumstances" and "proponents often counter" and so on. No sources. It does provide one example. But the example has nothing to do with referendums, it's about people being asked to vote on the same sort of question repeatedly in a short period of time. I would argue that the nature of a referendum is completely different to that of an election, so the behaviour may be completely different. Do you have a better link?
  - bostik 10y ago
    There is research into the phenomenon, but since I don't want to even try to link to [cough sb], I can provide a couple of pointers for further research. - 10.2307/2108922 - (no idea why, but this has no DOI: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25791895 http://www.jstor.org/stable/25791895) - (no DOI either: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379401000476 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379401...) > I would argue that the nature of a referendum is completely different to that of an election I think you are being somewhat dishonest here, and I would suspect you actually know that. From an individual voter's point of view there is very little practical difference: you are supposed to set time aside to go to the polling station at a given date, and cast your vote on an issue where it is HIGHLY unlikely that you have enough data to make an educated decision. Referendums attempt to distill a complex issue (or a set of issues) into a binary decision. (I find it relevant that binary option trading is a common source of scams: http://scambroker.com/binary-options-trading-scam/); http://scambroker.com/binary-options-trading-scam/); elections attempt to distill a complex set of competing and mutually exclusive issues into a personality contest. Either way the only repeatibly reliable result is that no matter whose side wins, all the voters will eventually feel they have been shafted.
    - mike-cardwell 10y ago
      I don't know why you felt the need to call me dishonest. An election is for choosing who you want to defer decision making power to. Often you only agree with some of the things that person intends to do. The headline actions. And even then, you realise that they may not do some of the things they said they would, and will probably do many other things you never even hear about. A referendum is about answering a specific question. One you have probably never been asked in your life time. And hopefully one where the result will be an actual thing that takes place, e.g Brexit. I find it hard to believe that concepts such as voter fatigue would apply equally to those two considerably different things.
2muchcoffeeman 10y ago
Right, you said: > What if the political and economic experts disagree with the majority, not just because of their political and economic knowledge, but because they are a very limited demographic and don't even consider many of the things that are important to the people who are not experts in those fields? So my understanding of your idea is, the perspective of experts and general populous is different. If we give people more chances to vote, they will have more opportunity to vote in a way that will address issues important to them. But we already have the opportunity to vote "from our perspective". But a lot of people don't care to. So why would having more opportunities to vote improve the this?
- mike-cardwell 10y ago
  Because voting in a general election is different to voting in a referendum. A lot of people see voting in general elections as futile, because as far as they can see, all they get from any party is more of the same. Regardless of whether or not that viewpoint is correct, it doesn't apply to referendums. A referendum is about voting for a specific thing and getting it, or not. I think that if we have more referendums, people will start to realise the difference, and take part more.