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In representative democracy there's little to stop the officials from passing laws to suppress opposition or passing laws to hide the fact that they are doing s

by Xen9 2y ago

In representative democracy there's little to stop the officials from passing laws to suppress opposition or passing laws to hide the fact that they are doing so. In direct democracy, even while you may be in majority in the issues that do not impact your opposition negatively, you still need to convince the voters to actually attack them. Laws to obfuscate things are less likely to pass. Consequently to be in the minority; to disagree will be more dangerous in reprentative democracy. Thus Kropotkin's point in my interpretation was that (since the voters will inevitably be occasionnally wrrong and in these cases those who were right will be needed once the problems shows) this will effectively corrode a community: in the next election there may not be opposition because they have left away.

kcplate 2y ago
Perhaps I am dense or perhaps you are unclear, but I am still unconvinced how what you are describing as positive attributes of a direct vs representative democracy for the US would or could be any better than what we have now. It seems like you are assuming that there is no and never could be tyranny of the majority…or perhaps that’s a feature in your analysis that you feel is a net positive. In a smaller homogeneous country you could have a point (including our individual states), but in a country as large, diverse, and powerful as the united states it seems to me that you need that balance of power spread amongst the entities of the country..both the people in the form of their representatives and the states via their representatives (i.e. senate and electoral college) as it relates to election of the executive.
- Xen9 2y ago
  Tyranny of majority is of course possible! In general, parliaments will always have issues where there is no one representing them. For example privacy, encryptation, drug issues are commonly underrepresented here in Europe. This means for example that altough 1% agrees that privacy laws matter most to them, they may not have representatives. Additionally, the existence of parties in the parliament may lead to suppression of the "represenativeness" of certain representatives. Then, ALSO, representative democracy encourages politicians to make decisions to maximize vote count, instead of "good" alternatives. Additionally, with direct democracy if you really want to go against someone, you need to either make very clever legislation with a hole that others won't notice or to gain majority support for that. To convince a majority to vote to suppress your enemies can be difficult. If for nothing else, for the fact that small parliaments are likely to have disproportionate numbers of psychopathic and/or incompetent representatives at times. Voters tend to choose based on partisan loyalties and short-term possibly out-of-control events rather than holding politicians accountable for decision-making. If there are no representatives to hold accountable, this is not as much of problem. Past elections can be reviewed in time, say new decisions by default re-voted biannually, to minimize the short term bias. This is called "Continuous" voting. Direct democracy has worked well for the Swiss. With modern technology I do not believe that at scale continuous direct democracy where one gets to vote from their phone on elections rolling every 24, 36 or 48 hours would fail. Balance of power can of course be handled with (1) ministeries (2) presidential elections (3) judges. One could say that ministeries are representative, but the reality is that ministers (1) cannot form coalitions like parliaments (2) have measurable highly clear "performance" which can be tied to salary (3) will be much more likely chosen to represent what voters want because in every election for health minister the voters will be solely divided based on what they want from health minister, whereas representative democracy makes minister and other seats strategic tools.

by Xen9 2y ago

kcplate 2y ago

Perhaps I am dense or perhaps you are unclear, but I am still unconvinced how what you are describing as positive attributes of a direct vs representative democracy for the US would or could be any better than what we have now. It seems like you are assuming that there is no and never could be tyranny of the majority…or perhaps that’s a feature in your analysis that you feel is a net positive. In a smaller homogeneous country you could have a point (including our individual states), but in a country as large, diverse, and powerful as the united states it seems to me that you need that balance of power spread amongst the entities of the country..both the people in the form of their representatives and the states via their representatives (i.e. senate and electoral college) as it relates to election of the executive.

Xen9 2y ago
Tyranny of majority is of course possible! In general, parliaments will always have issues where there is no one representing them. For example privacy, encryptation, drug issues are commonly underrepresented here in Europe. This means for example that altough 1% agrees that privacy laws matter most to them, they may not have representatives. Additionally, the existence of parties in the parliament may lead to suppression of the "represenativeness" of certain representatives. Then, ALSO, representative democracy encourages politicians to make decisions to maximize vote count, instead of "good" alternatives. Additionally, with direct democracy if you really want to go against someone, you need to either make very clever legislation with a hole that others won't notice or to gain majority support for that. To convince a majority to vote to suppress your enemies can be difficult. If for nothing else, for the fact that small parliaments are likely to have disproportionate numbers of psychopathic and/or incompetent representatives at times. Voters tend to choose based on partisan loyalties and short-term possibly out-of-control events rather than holding politicians accountable for decision-making. If there are no representatives to hold accountable, this is not as much of problem. Past elections can be reviewed in time, say new decisions by default re-voted biannually, to minimize the short term bias. This is called "Continuous" voting. Direct democracy has worked well for the Swiss. With modern technology I do not believe that at scale continuous direct democracy where one gets to vote from their phone on elections rolling every 24, 36 or 48 hours would fail. Balance of power can of course be handled with (1) ministeries (2) presidential elections (3) judges. One could say that ministeries are representative, but the reality is that ministers (1) cannot form coalitions like parliaments (2) have measurable highly clear "performance" which can be tied to salary (3) will be much more likely chosen to represent what voters want because in every election for health minister the voters will be solely divided based on what they want from health minister, whereas representative democracy makes minister and other seats strategic tools.