4 ms·

A week or two ago, I was wondering how long it will be (or perhaps, have we already) before we've surpassed the usefulness of location-based politics. That is,

A week or two ago, I was wondering how long it will be (or perhaps, have we already) before we've surpassed the usefulness of location-based politics. That is, we have congressional representatives who are there to (ostensibly) represent their constituency, with that constituency being defined (gerrymandering aside) based on geographic location. This is useful for things near me, like roads and schools, but not so useful for other things we may care about, like the internet. A "reddit candidate" in New Mexico may win a few hundred (maybe a few thousand?) extra votes for being the "reddit candidate", but obviously they still need to mostly focus on things more important to their local community to win. There's a rather large population of people in the USA who care just as much about whether or not their internet is censored as they do about the nearest bit of highway construction, though. What I'm getting at is this: how much does our geographic location still define us? A great deal, no doubt, but in a more connected world, it's becoming less and less important. I may have a great deal more in common with a couple of hundred thousand other people scattered around the USA than I do with the other people in my (geographically-defined) congressional district. As such, am I being fairly represented?

newbusox 15y ago
I think that's a really interesting point and, to some extent, it's an argument that extends back to the idea of representation in a republic in general. You can either think of your representative as functioning as your agent in all matters--that is, someone to parrot your views on everything and, inasmuch as your representative votes differently than you do, that is bad; or you can think your representative as your trustee--that is, someone who you empower with the ability to make decisions on your behalf, but you may not care about, or be aware of, many issues that the representative makes decisions on. If you favor the agentic model, you probably care more about your individual desires and goals being met, whereas in the trustee model, you probably care more about the "greater good" or "national interest" and so on being met, and so care less if your individual preferences are supplanted for the greater good. If you adopt a trusteeship model, you would argue that your elected representative can (and actually, should) make decisions based on what he or she thinks is best for the world/community as a whole, including decisions about the internet. That person would not be beholden to any "special interests" (as in, whatever people in the constituency might care about like roads or etc.) but would be beholden to whatever he or she thought most important--so, presuming you elected someone with whom you agreed generally, and who implicitly adopted this way of thinking about their role in government, you would probably be "fairly" represented. If you adopt an agentic model, then likely the interests that are most important to the majority of people who elected that official will get priority. Since you may have nothing in common with those people except that you live in the same area, you would probably argue that you’re not being fairly represented, since those people likely do not represent your views.
arjunnarayan 15y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation discusses this issue. There are a fixed number of seats, but you collect together by party. So if you formed a new party (say the Hacker news party), people all over the US could vote Hacker News. And the intent of the system is that at the end of the day, if x% of the US population voted Hacker News, approximately x% of the representatives would be Hacker News reps. The difference is that people self-identify to group together by party, instead of location. So your rep would then be the Hacker News rep. Problems with this system involve fragmentation (you end up with dozens of parties and nothing gets done). Imagine instead of one Ron Paul voting no on every issue, every congressman votes no on every issue because they are all so fragmented. You need a civilized bunch of people who actually believe in consensus and giving ground to get things done (good luck with that). Look, we all know the US electoral system is broken. It's designed by a group of dead guys, who were smart and forward thinking, but they didn't know of things like Arrows Impossibility Theorem or mechanism design. If we got the smartest 10 guys alive today to design a new constitution from the ground up, we'd surely do better. But of course that's a non-starter. And I've surely destroyed the conversation by not adhering to the current convention of mindless hero worship of the founding fathers. But face it, the constitution is obsolete. It is over 200 years old and aging and creaking. Will Wilkinson's take on the original Fareed Zakaria article here is probably the best Piece I've read on this issue: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/04/constitution http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/04/co...
tlb 15y ago
Maybe we're just not gerrymandering finely enough. If you got down to single-house precision, you could have congressional districts that are just free culture people, or pro-family, or whatever. You couldn't do this in the old days with paper ballots and door-door canvassing, but you could make it work now.

newbusox 15y ago

I think that's a really interesting point and, to some extent, it's an argument that extends back to the idea of representation in a republic in general. You can either think of your representative as functioning as your agent in all matters--that is, someone to parrot your views on everything and, inasmuch as your representative votes differently than you do, that is bad; or you can think your representative as your trustee--that is, someone who you empower with the ability to make decisions on your behalf, but you may not care about, or be aware of, many issues that the representative makes decisions on. If you favor the agentic model, you probably care more about your individual desires and goals being met, whereas in the trustee model, you probably care more about the "greater good" or "national interest" and so on being met, and so care less if your individual preferences are supplanted for the greater good. If you adopt a trusteeship model, you would argue that your elected representative can (and actually, should) make decisions based on what he or she thinks is best for the world/community as a whole, including decisions about the internet. That person would not be beholden to any "special interests" (as in, whatever people in the constituency might care about like roads or etc.) but would be beholden to whatever he or she thought most important--so, presuming you elected someone with whom you agreed generally, and who implicitly adopted this way of thinking about their role in government, you would probably be "fairly" represented. If you adopt an agentic model, then likely the interests that are most important to the majority of people who elected that official will get priority. Since you may have nothing in common with those people except that you live in the same area, you would probably argue that you’re not being fairly represented, since those people likely do not represent your views.

arjunnarayan 15y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation discusses this issue. There are a fixed number of seats, but you collect together by party. So if you formed a new party (say the Hacker news party), people all over the US could vote Hacker News. And the intent of the system is that at the end of the day, if x% of the US population voted Hacker News, approximately x% of the representatives would be Hacker News reps. The difference is that people self-identify to group together by party, instead of location. So your rep would then be the Hacker News rep. Problems with this system involve fragmentation (you end up with dozens of parties and nothing gets done). Imagine instead of one Ron Paul voting no on every issue, every congressman votes no on every issue because they are all so fragmented. You need a civilized bunch of people who actually believe in consensus and giving ground to get things done (good luck with that). Look, we all know the US electoral system is broken. It's designed by a group of dead guys, who were smart and forward thinking, but they didn't know of things like Arrows Impossibility Theorem or mechanism design. If we got the smartest 10 guys alive today to design a new constitution from the ground up, we'd surely do better. But of course that's a non-starter. And I've surely destroyed the conversation by not adhering to the current convention of mindless hero worship of the founding fathers. But face it, the constitution is obsolete. It is over 200 years old and aging and creaking. Will Wilkinson's take on the original Fareed Zakaria article here is probably the best Piece I've read on this issue: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/04/constitution http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/04/co...

tlb 15y ago

Maybe we're just not gerrymandering finely enough. If you got down to single-house precision, you could have congressional districts that are just free culture people, or pro-family, or whatever. You couldn't do this in the old days with paper ballots and door-door canvassing, but you could make it work now.