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I don't think the voting system matters as much as we think. The main attack vector that interest groups use against democracy is shaping the public opinion in
by breuleux 4y ago
I don't think the voting system matters as much as we think. The main attack vector that interest groups use against democracy is shaping the public opinion in the direction that benefits them. Certainly, some systems may be easier to game, but ultimately interest groups will do neither more nor less than the minimum required to win. If they only need to make 30% of the population rabid in order to win, that's what they will do, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking they couldn't make 51% of the population rabid if they needed to.
Basically, if people's stated preferences are ill-thought-out and/or manipulated, then even the perfect voting system that perfectly reflects the people's preferences will yield bad results. Voting reform in this case would be fixing the symptoms, not the disease. The disease, in my view, is that given the sheer complexity of the issues, the poor attention budget of people, the outsized influence of media, the impossibility of directly interacting with decision-makers, there's basically no way people can make an informed decision.
Personally I think we should ditch elections and just pick representatives purely at random, and then pay them to think about their preferences full time, discuss them with each other, directly interview candidates for executive positions, and so on. The basic idea is that I think collective decision making probably reaches an optimum around Dunbar's number and falls off precipitously beyond that.