4 ms·
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
by 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 agoMaybe 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 agoRe-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.