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The Net Party seems like it defeats the purpose of representative democracy. The system was designed to let congress people differ from their electorate on cert

The Net Party seems like it defeats the purpose of representative democracy. The system was designed to let congress people differ from their electorate on certain matters. If you take the Net Party concept (as I understand it) to it's logical conclusion, isn't that changing the basic form of government from representative to direct democracy? Or in essence saying "Nice try James Madison, but we have something different in mind"? It's great to to give citizens a forum for debate and anything that encourages communication between government and the governed is generally a good thing. Not sure how much I like the idea of making major changes to the basic process of government though, at least here in the United States. I can think of many examples of good things that might not have passed in congress if representatives had to vote the way that citizens using a particular software app wanted them to vote (slavery, income tax, segregation, healthcare). I wish you good luck and it sounds like you're doing good things. Experimentation is good, even if it poses risks.

deleted 12y ago
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vidarh 12y ago
One of the arguments against representative democracy at all was basically the same: People were supposedly too uninformed, and someone else needed to moderate their wishes. The arguments against expanding the electorate from land owners to all males in many countries were the same. The arguments against allowing women to vote, again largely along similar lines. As was the resistance to steadily lowering the voting ages. As I'm sure you can tell, I don't really buy that this would be such a huge problem. Sure, some decisions will end up different. It's not clear it will be better or worse. But personally I believe that giving people more direct ownership of decisions is valuable in itself. As is improving representation - with current systems (even proportional ones), a lot of people are very poorly represented because finding a party or candidate that fits their views and that has a chance of getting elected is near impossible. There are many mechanisms to counter the issues of an uninformed electorate, such as for example allowing people to delegate votes to representatives (possibly with indirection, so you can e.g. delegate your vote to the candidate from some minor party you agree with, knowing they'll be able to try to parlay a voting block into influence with the parties with seats), or vote "I don't care / I don't know enough about this issue to want to influence it, so I want my representative to count my vote the way they prefer", and many others, while still allowing people to take control and override for things where they do care about deeply about the outcome.
- PJDK 12y ago
  The trouble is people are quite rationally in favour of more spending (especially for people like me) and against more taxes (or in favour of taxes for "the rich" i.e. people who are richer than me). And let's not even get started on the dangers of a tyranny of the majority.
santisiri 12y ago
Think about how our current (200 year old) representative democracy scales: you have only 500 people for a population of 300 million. Power certainly needs to be a little bit more decentralized. Wikipedia is a great example of how bottom-up approach works better in practice than in theory.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

vidarh 12y ago

One of the arguments against representative democracy at all was basically the same: People were supposedly too uninformed, and someone else needed to moderate their wishes. The arguments against expanding the electorate from land owners to all males in many countries were the same. The arguments against allowing women to vote, again largely along similar lines. As was the resistance to steadily lowering the voting ages. As I'm sure you can tell, I don't really buy that this would be such a huge problem. Sure, some decisions will end up different. It's not clear it will be better or worse. But personally I believe that giving people more direct ownership of decisions is valuable in itself. As is improving representation - with current systems (even proportional ones), a lot of people are very poorly represented because finding a party or candidate that fits their views and that has a chance of getting elected is near impossible. There are many mechanisms to counter the issues of an uninformed electorate, such as for example allowing people to delegate votes to representatives (possibly with indirection, so you can e.g. delegate your vote to the candidate from some minor party you agree with, knowing they'll be able to try to parlay a voting block into influence with the parties with seats), or vote "I don't care / I don't know enough about this issue to want to influence it, so I want my representative to count my vote the way they prefer", and many others, while still allowing people to take control and override for things where they do care about deeply about the outcome.

PJDK 12y ago
The trouble is people are quite rationally in favour of more spending (especially for people like me) and against more taxes (or in favour of taxes for "the rich" i.e. people who are richer than me). And let's not even get started on the dangers of a tyranny of the majority.

santisiri 12y ago

Think about how our current (200 year old) representative democracy scales: you have only 500 people for a population of 300 million. Power certainly needs to be a little bit more decentralized. Wikipedia is a great example of how bottom-up approach works better in practice than in theory.