3 ms·
> 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
by 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 agoDirect 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 agoPresumably 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 agoSorry, 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 agoProportional representation can do away with geographic districts and refuse to recognise political parties (though I don't know of country with proportional representation that does both). The US, Canada, France, the UK, Australia, Japan, the Republic of (South) Korea, Mexico and India are notable in lacking proportional representation for elections to their main legislative chambers. Most countries do use proportional representation, but I was guessing you weren't commenting from one of them, because satisfaction with democracy is higher where it is used. How would you implement your system in countries that don't already have proportional representation without 1st implementing proportional representation?
- chewz 9y agoWhy not? I didn't imagine taking every single decision by universal vote but rather a hybrid system which puts more decisions into hands of citizens rather then representatives. It works in Switzerland with referendums.. And with technologies at hand it could work on a larger scale.
- ivan_gammel 9y agoSometimes direct votes do make sense, but it's 1% of all decisions. They should exist, of course, but they won't scale to large and diverse countries like USA or China or India. They will not work even in countries like Spain or Ukraine.