9 ms·

I am anxiously awaiting the day we do this for politicians. A new political party whose beliefs, policy platform, speeches, and votes are tied to constantly ev

• ioseph 5y ago
  That's several direct democracy parties where I live but to date none have won a seat. It's an interesting concept but I can think of many ways it could go horribly wrong (think Reddit with the marathon bombing). Also wouldn't such a system still be beholden to lobbying groups (possibly more so)?
  • avereveard 5y ago
    We have had one direct democracy party reach majority and form a government with hilarious results. The moment they had power direct democracy ideas died. In a single term they found themselves at government with the left, the alt right, then a large coalition, then a technical government. They should have self financed the direct democracy platform using their salary, and basically stopped doing that most immediately. The platform holder dragged them to tribunal, and party ownership is currently undecided.
    • mstipetic 5y ago
      Which country/party is that? When did that happen?
      • wolfpack_mick 5y ago
        The FiveStar party in Italy did this. They had an online platform for their members, and apparently the way it went was that they'd first massage everyones opinion in the forums, and then let them vote. I read it in a great long read from Wired called 'What Happens When Techno-Utopians Actually Run a Country'.
• frosted-flakes 5y ago
  Without the payment aspect though.
• chr1 5y ago
  One issue preventing such parties, is that people do not have time and interest to think about all the issues and there needs to be a way to delegate and trade votes. In Australia there is https://voteflux.org https://voteflux.org which solves the first issue. But another issue is lack of an easy way to onboard new people, because now a party needs to gather a large support to become useful. Maybe if they partner with a petition site like change.org that would both try to influence existing politicians and serve as a way for new people to get involved with the real thing, they would get the necessary viral growth.
• pelorat 5y ago
  Direct democracy is a terrible idea. Voters have shown again and again they that they don't understand what they are voting for. Most voters only understand "pretty words" and have no intention or will to understand issues at a deeper level.
  • argvargc 5y ago
    Politicians have also shown again and again they don't understand what they are voting for, and/or don't care. Caring about the outcome is at least an improvement.
  • thcwhuzzle 5y ago
    Politicians don’t even read the laws they vote on. In many circumstances they literally aren’t even given the time to read the text.
    • netrus 5y ago
      I have strong opinions on a lot of laws I have not actually read. I will rely on experts, and so do politicians (that might be experts within their party, staff, lobbyists ...). The main skill is to decide whom to trust. I do not really see any alternative - I do not think a parliament with hundreds of delegates spending most of their day reading complex legal texts would be any better than what we see today. Still, I am sure most politicians spend much more time and resources to inform their vote than the average citizen.
      • throwaway3699 5y ago
        What happens when those expert staff are deliberately pushing an agenda? Perfect example of politicians not knowing anything about what they're voting for is the absurd Article 13 in EU. Something that was impossible for anyone not called Alphabet or Facebook. If they did know what they were voting for, that is far worse...
      • BeFlatXIII 5y ago
        If professional full-time legislators cannot understand the legislation they’re voting on, they should not write it to be that unwieldy.
• spiotrek 5y ago
  + for the payment part and it's not direct democracy - only a guided one
• chki 5y ago
  There is some interesting research into this, also known as liquid democracy, if somebody wants to Google that. I'm personally not a big fan, because it's very difficult to organize it in such a way that there is not some form of mob mentality. Representative democracy has some downsides but it also has a lot of advantages that we simply take for granted.
• teachingassist 5y ago
  I like the advantages of representative democracy, and would keep it, but modify it so that you have a continuous vote. Your decision-making representative can change each day as people move their vote around; rather than only on election day. I think a lot of disillusionment in democracy comes when you expect to see political corruption the day after the election, and can't do anything about it for N years.
  • pbronez 5y ago
    Maybe you could get those advantages in a practical and safe way with a recall mechanism. You’d have the standard representative, multi-year-term for most stuff, but a continuous recall poll (with a fairly high bar). This would essentially establish an approval floor. It would be tricky to implement this. It’s hard enough to get people to vote one a year. If you go digital you have security and equity issues. You’d need some kind of rolling window to count votes. Probably not practical.
    • teachingassist 5y ago
      Re-call polls don't appear to work in practice. Either the bar for re-call is too low, such that evidently popular candidates face an energy-, cash-, and time-wasting re-election campaign, or the bar is too high, because a signature-collecting campaign can never match the energy of election day. Continuous voting is (more) practical. Elected candidates would face a constant risk of being out-voted, but it's generally a very low risk, because the balance of the votes is unlikely to switch overnight - it was either foreseeable or there was some democratically-relevant scandal.
• everdrive 5y ago
  It would be a populist hellhole. Huge masses of people who believe that some crazy thing happened (which didn't really happen) and demand the government do something about it.
  • istjohn 5y ago
    Hmmm, that sounds familiar...
  • mistermann 5y ago
    Is "it would be a populist hellhole" reasonable, and real?
    • mistermann 5y ago
      Testing 1,2,3.
• WA 5y ago
  We have this already. App is called lobbyism and is pay-to-win.
• Vinnl 5y ago
  You mean something like "Twitch plays politics"?
• tomc1985 5y ago
  That sounds like it would be a great target for all the emotional manipulators of our world.
• codingdave 5y ago
  How would you represent the will of people who cannot afford the devices needed to run the app? Or whose lives are too busy working multiple jobs to keep up with the app?
  • hermannj314 5y ago
    I tried to answer this a few times but I am reserved to the fact that I am not able to solve this problem in a comment section. America's 200+ year old democracy still has around 56% turnout for national and 27% turnout for local elections (quick Google 2020). This does not even address how poorly the current system still fails the 56% of people that manage to vote. It is not perfect. If any alternative or improvement proposed to that system is held to a standard of 'must be perfect', I think they will fall short no matter how good the intention may be or how good it improves on the current way.
    • codingdave 5y ago
      If poor people cannot vote, it is voter suppression and not acceptable. This is not about reaching perfection, it is about not backsliding to exclude a major demographic.
      • hermannj314 5y ago
        Agreed, I am sorry that my idea was presented that way. I was proposing modifying how we interact with elected officials, not modifying how we elect them. I realize there are bad actors actively working to suppress voters rights in many places in many ways. and I dont want to even be accidently hitched to that bandwagon.
      • chr1 5y ago
        When people will be able to vote on individual issues, and will be able to introduce new law projects, the whole dynamics of voting will change. Because people will be able to trade votes. Buying a phone for someone so that your law gets one more vote will be very natural, so all the poor people will get new phones very soon. And that will not be a bad thing, because politician will not be able to buy votes then pass a law to take the same money back from people. In effect this will morph into a sort of UBI, where some people pay others to keep society running with laws that they think are beneficial for everyone. And people who think they know better will be able to gather in separate cities and try out the laws they think will be better.
• intricatedetail 5y ago
  This already works for big corporations. If you are big enough you have direct line to key people in govs.
• dokem 5y ago
  You don't want everyone voting on every issue, and I don't want you voting on every issue. This is why we have a representative democracy, it's also why we have separate specializations for doctors and mechanics.
• rahoulb 5y ago
  I was talking to a guy who's planning to launch a series of hyper-local political parties in the UK (starting in Harrogate). He told me about how things work in Taiwan - using a bit of software called Polis - designed to find consensus amongst differing opinions, and using that as the basis for policy decisions. This guy was going to use Polis to poll party members so the representatives would be governed directly by feedback from members - with Polis ensuring that it didn't break down into factionalism. Information about how Polis is used in Taiwan is here: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-media https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-medi...
  • Cyril_HN 5y ago
    Who?
    • rahoulb 5y ago
      Andrew Gray. I've not spoken to him for a long time; I'm guessing his plans got put on hold by the pandemic.
  • pabs3 5y ago
    Have you tried getting the Polis open source code running? Last time I tried there was some sort of error resulting in not passing JS files to the browser.
• hyko 5y ago
  Sounds like a fucking nightmare to be honest. We’ve had the technology to do this for many decades, but we don’t do it because of the insane overheads at modern scale, and because the permanent campaigning and rabble-rousing required would make governance for even the medium term very difficult. The general public are unlikely to produce a coherent set of policies one bill at a time, and trying to manage the contradictions they produce will suck any government into the quagmire. For example, the U.K. electorate were happy to vote for Brexit paradoxes like the NI border, which parliament and the government are still unable to square after years of trying.
• pedalpete 5y ago
  I was thinking about something like this about 15 years ago. Speaking to friends in politics, there feeling wasn't that people wouldn't grasp the issues themselves, but rather that the long-term consequences of decisions often wouldn't be considered. This is a "rich" statement coming from politicians, but if you look at how easily people are influenced by media, you can probably see how this could go wrong very quickly. However, perhaps there is a solution that meets in the middle. Another issue of course is that commercial interests who in many cases would be able to (and already do) outbid the public.