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Democracy is supposed to be more involved then showing up every 4-5 years. For most Western democracies the reason governments have been increasingly aligned w

Democracy is supposed to be more involved then showing up every 4-5 years. For most Western democracies the reason governments have been increasingly aligned with corporate interests is those have been the interests actually doing the hard work of democracy. They gather like minded people together, lobby, and keep sustained pressure on elected officials. They constantly work at a democracy whereas most people seem to think politics is an every 4 year divisive inconvenience that's best not discussed. In other words, democracy is captured by corporate interests precisely because they lobby daily whereas most people can barely be counted on to show up to vote.

Joe-Z 9y ago
But normal people also don't have huge amounts of money and time to spend on sending someone to the parliament to speak for their interests. What they have is parties they can vote for, which are then supposed to make policies as promised to their voters. What happens though is that lobbyists step in and buy them off. So please don't try to sell lobbyists as some pillar of democracy.
- vertex-four 9y ago
  The people have political organisations of our own, you realise - I donate to a few in my country that regularly have people talking to our elected representatives and the people in charge of creating Government policy. It doesn't actually cost a lot of money to lobby the Government when enough people are actually interested in a problem. The problem is broadly apathy.
  - gtvwill 9y ago
    Yeah but your a small percentage of the population to actually have the disposable income to donate to a cause you feel is worthy. I'd love to donate money to plenty of causes, but then I wouldn't be able to eat or pay rent. So I'm at the perils of lobbyists as I can't afford to make my voice heard. Heaps democratic isn't it.
    - confounded 9y ago
      I’m not sure if the percentage is as small as you think. Trade unions for example are a traditional working class way of clubbing together resources to do some lobbying. Making even small contributions is meaningful, and you have time and enthusiasm to offer, that’s worth a lot too.
  - imregbannd 9y ago
    The problem more broady is economic incentive. There are free rider issue that we all share the rights we currently have, so no one wants to pay to keep these rights. Then there is profit incentive, there is none, either in keeping our rights or increasing them. Corporate entities however have both these incentives. Instead of non profit agencies, a better structure would be a corporation profiting from the freedoms people desire, purchase equity in the company and have a board that finds profit incentive in various freedoms and rights. Philosophically this is libertarism or anarcho-capitalism.
    - confounded 9y ago
      I’ll bite. How does having limitations on your freedom depend on someone else’s profit motive, increase your liberty? Can you give any examples of how this would work, and the advantage that the profit motive brings?
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  Can you call your congressperson? Congratulations, you can lobby.
  - throw2016 9y ago
    Corporate lobbying is more than just organizing to 'be heard'. It's a sophisticated and entrenched patronage system that involves party donations, individual donations, favours, junkets, nepotism, revolving doors and more. Comcast, Mylan, Oxycontin, Monsanto, the current FCC chair just a few egregious recent examples, taking decisions against public interest even in the face of strong vocal resistance from the public so calling won't help. Lobbyists are a major portion of the Washington political establishment.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > But normal people also don't have huge amounts of money and time to spend on sending someone to the parliament to speak for their interests I call my Senators and Congressperson. I go to monthly neighborhood political meetings. (I'm often the only person under 40 not running to become, or be promoted, as a judge.) From time to time goes above and beyond for a (usually first-time) candidate. I'm in a startling minority. Despite living in a Congressional district in the middle of Manhattan, I am often the only one to call regarding issues like encryption, the TSA or nominations. Several times, the SLA copied themselves in and requested follow-up conversations or copies of articles or papers I referenced. On a small handful of occasions, a publicly-announced position was backtracked on. A minority of the population understand the long-term implications of what the record labels are doing. A minority, the labels, stand to profit. If only one side is giving representatives talking points, they don't need donations or promises of cushy jobs to win votes. They just need to hold their monopoly on the information vacuum informed citizens cede when they sleep between elections. None of this takes money nor a ton of time. It takes some effort, however, which is apparently enough.
  - Benjamin_Dobell 9y ago
    > None of this takes money nor a ton of time. It takes some effort, however, which is apparently enough. Most people are struggling to make ends meet, when they're not working they're sleeping. You can't judge most people for not having time to petition politicians. In my experience it's extremely time consuming to even get your voice heard in a local council (Australia) meeting; and 99% of the time you're dismissed even when you have multiple people making the same point against one corporate entity. For the most part it's futile and exhausting... and depressing. Don't forget corporate entities have people whose job it is to petition governments, it's those people's livelihood. Meanwhile, your average person petitioning is typically adversely affecting their own livelihood.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
      In support of this: I work in structural steel fabrication in Tasmania. Between working 56hr weeks and taking care of the dog, I don't have much to do anything else. I recently bought a house, so I have been meaning to pay more attention to local council.
tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago
Corporate interests can lobby daily because they’ve got capital. Ask most people to lobby daily and they will ask you how they are supposed to pay rent if they are busy lobbying and not working. The problem is the accumulation of capital. The more capital you have, the more influence you can buy, the more capital you can accumulate, the more influence you can buy. The idea of parties is to be a lobby group for the common man. The population delegates lobbying to a dedicated group (a party) of their choice. This group represents (or is supposed to represent) the interests of their voters. In the meantime, the voters can go back to work and try to earn money to pay the next rent.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  It takes 5 minutes to call your congressperson. Don't give me this "Too busy" garbage.
  - confounded 9y ago
    It takes longer than five minutes to build a coherent argument to present to them, and much longer than that to read enough to stay abreast of important developments, expert opinion in them, and form your personal priorities. I completely agree that we (as individual technologists concerned about people’s freedoms) should use our democratic rights as much as possible. But it’s not that easy for John Doe to even understand what is his iPhone does vs. Facebook vs. his cell provider vs. his ISP, less understand the political implications.
    - intended 9y ago
      Which is why I personally find a few topics of interest to me, and work on them till I can boil them down into a few lines and share them with friends. That’s what I can do easily, and that’s my ability and time others can leverage. As the other poster said - not having enough time in this day and age is not a barrier. You don’t have to do everything in one day, and often many of these topic are just interesting on their own. It’s doable by your lonesome. But with the internet it’s quite easy to find others who’ve done a lot of the searching or other heavy lifting for you.
sinnoh 9y ago
> Democracy is supposed to be more involved than* showing up every 4-5 years Which biases democracy into "Rule by the people who can show up more often than once every 4-5 years and keep up professionally with developments in the meantime", which would be wealthy private interests. Agree with throw2016's assessment, this issue and crony capitalism/rule by the wealthy are inextricably linked. > whereas most people can barely be counted on to show up Because most people on the wealth curve get edged out on the means. Inextricably linked.
chewz 9y ago
> Democracy is supposed to be more involved then showing up every 4-5 years. Representative democracy is just oligarchy of a political class. Classic Athenian democracy had been based on taking most of decision by direct vote of 30-40 thousand (and sometimes 100 thousand) citizens. That had been impractical for administering larger states hence only cities could have been republic in Greek world and later in Middle Ages. Luckily in XXI century we have the tools that could enable return to direct democracy for larger organism.
- ivan_gammel 9y ago
  Direct democracy is impractical in XXI century. Very often the good and the needed policies are complicated and counter-intuitive, and majority of citizen is simply not qualified enough to make a reasonable decision. We need to fix representative democracy instead, and indeed there are tools for that. We need to be able to delegate the decision making in different fields to different people (for example, on civil rights to a liberal, on military to a conservative and on environmental policy to a green). Or, better, we could delegate our votes to an expert we trust. We should be able to re-cast our votes any time we lost our confidence in our representative and, in general, the system needs to be much more flexible, so that the influence of voters would be really visible.
  - lambertsimnel 9y ago
    Presumably the delegating and recasting of votes that you recommend would involve the abolition of single-member districts. Why not implement proportional representation as a stepping stone to your system? Proportional representation is already widely used. Evidence shows it increases turnout and improves government in a wide range of ways.
    - ivan_gammel 9y ago
      Sorry, I don't know what country you are talking about, but it actually does not matter. I don't think that any restrictions like representation by political parties or geographic districts really make any sense. Modern political parties today are hostages of their own agenda and promises to the sponsors. They rot and smell and loose their power everywhere.
lambertsimnel 9y ago
> most people can barely be counted on to show up to vote One reason so few people vote is voting systems that make some voters very much more influential than others. Political parties realise this and target the most influential voters. Many of the least powerful voters correctly perceive either that their votes are less influential than other votes or that the political parties are neglecting them. These voting systems are susceptible to gerrymandering. Such systems are used for the main legislative elections in the US, Canada, France, the UK and Australia. Even if not purposely gerrymandered, these systems almost always represent voters highly unequally. Australia has papered over the cracks by making voting compulsory. In the dozens of European countries other than France and the UK, proportional voting systems are used, giving each vote approximately equal weight and therefore resisting gerrymandering. These systems are associated with an increase in turnout of 5% or more.

Joe-Z 9y ago

But normal people also don't have huge amounts of money and time to spend on sending someone to the parliament to speak for their interests. What they have is parties they can vote for, which are then supposed to make policies as promised to their voters. What happens though is that lobbyists step in and buy them off. So please don't try to sell lobbyists as some pillar of democracy.

vertex-four 9y ago
The people have political organisations of our own, you realise - I donate to a few in my country that regularly have people talking to our elected representatives and the people in charge of creating Government policy. It doesn't actually cost a lot of money to lobby the Government when enough people are actually interested in a problem. The problem is broadly apathy.
- gtvwill 9y ago
  Yeah but your a small percentage of the population to actually have the disposable income to donate to a cause you feel is worthy. I'd love to donate money to plenty of causes, but then I wouldn't be able to eat or pay rent. So I'm at the perils of lobbyists as I can't afford to make my voice heard. Heaps democratic isn't it.
  - confounded 9y ago
    I’m not sure if the percentage is as small as you think. Trade unions for example are a traditional working class way of clubbing together resources to do some lobbying. Making even small contributions is meaningful, and you have time and enthusiasm to offer, that’s worth a lot too.
- imregbannd 9y ago
  The problem more broady is economic incentive. There are free rider issue that we all share the rights we currently have, so no one wants to pay to keep these rights. Then there is profit incentive, there is none, either in keeping our rights or increasing them. Corporate entities however have both these incentives. Instead of non profit agencies, a better structure would be a corporation profiting from the freedoms people desire, purchase equity in the company and have a board that finds profit incentive in various freedoms and rights. Philosophically this is libertarism or anarcho-capitalism.
  - confounded 9y ago
    I’ll bite. How does having limitations on your freedom depend on someone else’s profit motive, increase your liberty? Can you give any examples of how this would work, and the advantage that the profit motive brings?
s73ver_ 9y ago
Can you call your congressperson? Congratulations, you can lobby.
- throw2016 9y ago
  Corporate lobbying is more than just organizing to 'be heard'. It's a sophisticated and entrenched patronage system that involves party donations, individual donations, favours, junkets, nepotism, revolving doors and more. Comcast, Mylan, Oxycontin, Monsanto, the current FCC chair just a few egregious recent examples, taking decisions against public interest even in the face of strong vocal resistance from the public so calling won't help. Lobbyists are a major portion of the Washington political establishment.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> But normal people also don't have huge amounts of money and time to spend on sending someone to the parliament to speak for their interests I call my Senators and Congressperson. I go to monthly neighborhood political meetings. (I'm often the only person under 40 not running to become, or be promoted, as a judge.) From time to time goes above and beyond for a (usually first-time) candidate. I'm in a startling minority. Despite living in a Congressional district in the middle of Manhattan, I am often the only one to call regarding issues like encryption, the TSA or nominations. Several times, the SLA copied themselves in and requested follow-up conversations or copies of articles or papers I referenced. On a small handful of occasions, a publicly-announced position was backtracked on. A minority of the population understand the long-term implications of what the record labels are doing. A minority, the labels, stand to profit. If only one side is giving representatives talking points, they don't need donations or promises of cushy jobs to win votes. They just need to hold their monopoly on the information vacuum informed citizens cede when they sleep between elections. None of this takes money nor a ton of time. It takes some effort, however, which is apparently enough.
- Benjamin_Dobell 9y ago
  > None of this takes money nor a ton of time. It takes some effort, however, which is apparently enough. Most people are struggling to make ends meet, when they're not working they're sleeping. You can't judge most people for not having time to petition politicians. In my experience it's extremely time consuming to even get your voice heard in a local council (Australia) meeting; and 99% of the time you're dismissed even when you have multiple people making the same point against one corporate entity. For the most part it's futile and exhausting... and depressing. Don't forget corporate entities have people whose job it is to petition governments, it's those people's livelihood. Meanwhile, your average person petitioning is typically adversely affecting their own livelihood.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    In support of this: I work in structural steel fabrication in Tasmania. Between working 56hr weeks and taking care of the dog, I don't have much to do anything else. I recently bought a house, so I have been meaning to pay more attention to local council.

tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago

Corporate interests can lobby daily because they’ve got capital. Ask most people to lobby daily and they will ask you how they are supposed to pay rent if they are busy lobbying and not working. The problem is the accumulation of capital. The more capital you have, the more influence you can buy, the more capital you can accumulate, the more influence you can buy. The idea of parties is to be a lobby group for the common man. The population delegates lobbying to a dedicated group (a party) of their choice. This group represents (or is supposed to represent) the interests of their voters. In the meantime, the voters can go back to work and try to earn money to pay the next rent.

s73ver_ 9y ago
It takes 5 minutes to call your congressperson. Don't give me this "Too busy" garbage.
- confounded 9y ago
  It takes longer than five minutes to build a coherent argument to present to them, and much longer than that to read enough to stay abreast of important developments, expert opinion in them, and form your personal priorities. I completely agree that we (as individual technologists concerned about people’s freedoms) should use our democratic rights as much as possible. But it’s not that easy for John Doe to even understand what is his iPhone does vs. Facebook vs. his cell provider vs. his ISP, less understand the political implications.
  - intended 9y ago
    Which is why I personally find a few topics of interest to me, and work on them till I can boil them down into a few lines and share them with friends. That’s what I can do easily, and that’s my ability and time others can leverage. As the other poster said - not having enough time in this day and age is not a barrier. You don’t have to do everything in one day, and often many of these topic are just interesting on their own. It’s doable by your lonesome. But with the internet it’s quite easy to find others who’ve done a lot of the searching or other heavy lifting for you.

sinnoh 9y ago

> Democracy is supposed to be more involved than* showing up every 4-5 years Which biases democracy into "Rule by the people who can show up more often than once every 4-5 years and keep up professionally with developments in the meantime", which would be wealthy private interests. Agree with throw2016's assessment, this issue and crony capitalism/rule by the wealthy are inextricably linked. > whereas most people can barely be counted on to show up Because most people on the wealth curve get edged out on the means. Inextricably linked.

chewz 9y ago

> Democracy is supposed to be more involved then showing up every 4-5 years. Representative democracy is just oligarchy of a political class. Classic Athenian democracy had been based on taking most of decision by direct vote of 30-40 thousand (and sometimes 100 thousand) citizens. That had been impractical for administering larger states hence only cities could have been republic in Greek world and later in Middle Ages. Luckily in XXI century we have the tools that could enable return to direct democracy for larger organism.

ivan_gammel 9y ago
Direct democracy is impractical in XXI century. Very often the good and the needed policies are complicated and counter-intuitive, and majority of citizen is simply not qualified enough to make a reasonable decision. We need to fix representative democracy instead, and indeed there are tools for that. We need to be able to delegate the decision making in different fields to different people (for example, on civil rights to a liberal, on military to a conservative and on environmental policy to a green). Or, better, we could delegate our votes to an expert we trust. We should be able to re-cast our votes any time we lost our confidence in our representative and, in general, the system needs to be much more flexible, so that the influence of voters would be really visible.
- lambertsimnel 9y ago
  Presumably the delegating and recasting of votes that you recommend would involve the abolition of single-member districts. Why not implement proportional representation as a stepping stone to your system? Proportional representation is already widely used. Evidence shows it increases turnout and improves government in a wide range of ways.
  - ivan_gammel 9y ago
    Sorry, I don't know what country you are talking about, but it actually does not matter. I don't think that any restrictions like representation by political parties or geographic districts really make any sense. Modern political parties today are hostages of their own agenda and promises to the sponsors. They rot and smell and loose their power everywhere.

lambertsimnel 9y ago

> most people can barely be counted on to show up to vote One reason so few people vote is voting systems that make some voters very much more influential than others. Political parties realise this and target the most influential voters. Many of the least powerful voters correctly perceive either that their votes are less influential than other votes or that the political parties are neglecting them. These voting systems are susceptible to gerrymandering. Such systems are used for the main legislative elections in the US, Canada, France, the UK and Australia. Even if not purposely gerrymandered, these systems almost always represent voters highly unequally. Australia has papered over the cracks by making voting compulsory. In the dozens of European countries other than France and the UK, proportional voting systems are used, giving each vote approximately equal weight and therefore resisting gerrymandering. These systems are associated with an increase in turnout of 5% or more.