What Would Democracy Look Like if it Were Invented Today?

This again. It's a bad idea. It will always be a bad idea.<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2936365" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2936365</a><p>The reason we have representative democracy is not because of scaling factors.<p>It's because direct, voluntary democracy usually leads to utter failure. Our ancestors, who studied a tedious problem-domain subject called "History", could examine the case studies and draw this conclusion with some confidence.<p>There are better places to direct your attention if you don't like the outcome of the current system.<p>For example, should the power to create the laws and the power to appropriate funds be vested in the same body? Hayek wrote an interesting hypothetical Constitution based on this simple question.<p>My pet peeves are all around voting systems. For instance, voting in most countries is voluntary. That has well-understood failure modes.<p>And the UK and the USA have first-past-the-post voting. Which is ... just dreadful, actually. Arrow's Theorem shows that there is no "perfect" voting system possible, but some are definitely better than others. FPTP is not high on such lists.<p>Special footnote for the UK and other Parliamentary democracies -- winner-takes-all electorates are a feature, not a bug, because of the fused executive. Somebody has to govern, in Westminster systems, that somebody is the majority party in Parliament. Proportional Representation is terrible at forming stable governments that can get any time to focus on the purely administrative side. Ask the Kiwis.

I think the biggest problem with an "always on" system like this is that without well-defined election periods, people's tendency to be fickle would surface and wreak havoc on progress.<p>Imagine people vote to construct a bridge, and the vote passes by a narrow margin. Then, 3 months later when people first get hit with the tax that pays for it, many of them decide that's it's more money than they want to be spending, and they change their position on the matter. Now we have a partially constructed bridge that sits because the people who voted for it changed their mind.<p>Part of the reason that periodic voting works for us is that it allows a block of time for the new policies and projects to be executed without interruption. If voting happened continuously, no one would ever be able to develop a flow, and the system would feel a lot like an old man driving a car. <i>jerk forward, stop, jerk forward, stop, jerk forward....</i>

This is a terrible idea, because it allows voters to be coerced. Any voting system that exposes who voted for what has this problem, even if vote-buying is technically illegal. It happens on a small scale with absentee ballots, where dependents can be coerced by their spouses, parents, or children. It could happen on a much larger scale if the voting records were public. Think of the social implications from people's churches, their friends, or their employers if voting records were public.<p>Allowing votes to be explicitly sold would be even worse. It would lead to much more control by special interests and the powerful. For someone who is poor, selling their votes as a package deal for a chunk of change in the short term would seem like a great deal. In the long term, they've probably just made their future even worse. Who knows what the end-game would be in this system, but it's almost guaranteed to be miserable for almost everyone.

There's a scale between 100% direct democracy and 100% dictatorship/plutocracy. I think most of the current republics are significantly closer to the latter than the first, as besides voting once every 4 years in most countries, there isn't much the population can do to help shape political decisions (other than protests and media scandals, but those don't really have much to do with direct democracy).<p>So the specifics can be discussed, but I think in principle we need to get a lot closer to the direct democracy spectrum (while still preserving representatives and allowing them to have the final word, legally, to maintain the idea of the republic - but have a much more democratic republic).<p>I also think that campaign donations are basically an alternative "voting system", and it's currently extremely skewed towards the people with a lot of money. We have the "equal vote" system, but the "money voting" system is not equal at all, and I think it should be, to equalize the influence one person can have on a certain politician. Therefore donations should be limited to say $100 per person, and only people can donate. Companies can not.<p>I don't buy the idea that a company needs free speech. When a company uses its wealth to buy elections, it's not really the idea of all the people working in that company - only of its bosses. But besides, only people should vote - not entities. This should be a fundamental principle in any democracy. If most people in the company would actually agree with their boss - then they should just donate their $100, and vote for that politician. There's no reason to have people as a group or as an entity vote directly, or vote indirectly through money.

That sounds like liquid democracy: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy</a><p>There is an implementation of it: <a href="http://liquidfeedback.org/" rel="nofollow">http://liquidfeedback.org/</a> and it is used by many Pirate Parties (mostly informally but - I've heard the Italian Pirate Party uses it as the sole governing body).

<i>Conditional on the premise that the majority should govern in the first place, I think this sounds like a reasonably attractive system.</i><p>Not necessarily the case. The problem even has a name: "Tyranny of the majority" [1].<p>I'd argue that decisions in government should be made by a majority vote, <i>with each person's vote being weighted by the impact the decision will have on them</i>. Currently, we have the idea that everyone should have an equal vote. Yes, determining the weightings verges on the impossible, but is there someway the Internet might make it possible?<p>Note that such a scheme would make the concept of "nation" and other levels of government irrelevant. Local decisions would automatically be make by a local cluster of people, whilst decisions with a global impact would be determined by a larger group.

I'm sure many people in this comment thread would say that this is a terrible idea. But lets say we had a different type of structure in the UK and someone drew up the current system for the UK - no doubt it would look like a terrible idea.<p>Democracy appears to be the least worst system we have, with varying implementations of it (as with Communism, varying implementations existed or exist each with their pros and cons).<p>If a system looks great on paper, chances are we've missed something.

It is nearly a description of "Liquid Democracy"<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy</a><p><a href="http://globalfree.wordpress.com/2011/11/06/liquiddemocracy/" rel="nofollow">http://globalfree.wordpress.com/2011/11/06/liquiddemocracy/</a><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiquidFeedback" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiquidFeedback</a>

I'm pretty sure that a lot of the government can be decentralized and automated with technology. Instead of lines and offices, people could do things online. Instead of publication requirements in newspapers, or requests for data by mail, things could be published online.<p>So what do we need government of cities, etc. to really do?<p>I guess I'm going to suggest more of a minarchist vision with government playing the role of fulfilling the minimum expectations of the people.<p>Suppose the entire population really needs something (clean water, education, medical insurance, housing etc.)<p>Then the government should be able to pay for the basic amount of it (primary education, basic nationalized health insurance, etc.) through a single payer system. By using their collective bargaining power, the country's consumers could form a monopsony to achieve really affordable prices for these basic goods and services for everyone.<p>But, this would only be subsidized up to a point. For example, the first $10k per year of education per child would HAVE to be bought by the government. If you wanted more, you could simply buy it on the private market.<p>In a sense, this is the basic welfare state which leverages the power of collective bargaining through a single payer. But everything is out in the open, including the budgets. Everything we value as a society would be openly budgeted and justified on the internet.<p>The other part of what government does is regulations. Here we have a question of whether they need to force businesses to not do something. For example, if a building is not built up to code, should the government just condemn it and not allow anyone to use it, or should it simply require the building to advertise its shortcomings and let people decide whether to use it anyway? If a workplace has unsafe conditions, should the government force a shutdown or force advertising of the unsafe conditions?<p>Any system we where we give power to the government to expand its powers on our behalf, use could be hijacked by swaying the majority of voters little by little -- which is different from the majority of the people, because not everyone votes. The problem for example if very few people vote to close a particular program, or are even aware of its existence, but many people can motivate the expansion of a program by giving it new things to do.<p>In a sense, it becomes more and more costly to operate a democratic government over time, and we don't have effective systems to scale it back.

This is almost exactly the project I have started:<p><a href="https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/wiki/Interests%20Page" rel="nofollow">https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/wiki/Interests%...</a><p>Feel free to contribute your ideas to the wiki.

The same idea is proposed here: <a href="http://www.jadeleaf.co.uk/voting-is-bad" rel="nofollow">http://www.jadeleaf.co.uk/voting-is-bad</a>

I wonder if a similar concept could be adopted to run a company.

&#62; An alternative would be for the state to pay a salary to every proxy in proportion to how many principal-votes he casts throughout the year<p>Seems pretty good, I'd be interested in ideas in how you could game this system.<p>&#62; An even more intriguing possibility would be to allow any and all side payments and let the market determine compensation. Citizens could pay politicians directly for their services, or politicians could pay citizens to be allowed to represent them. Proxies could have a policy of negotiating a price for their votes and then distributing the proceeds to their principals<p>This strikes me as a horrible idea, especially allowing politicians to pay citizens to be allowed to represent them. Where do they get that money besides lobbyists? It couldn't be from their proportional salary or the payment would be too tiny for anyone to care. There are way too many people who would happily sell their votes to whoever payed the most. This is unfortunate but it's precisely the problem a republic is supposed to balance.<p>This is the same reason you wouldn't want citizens to pay politicians for their "services". Too many people wouldn't care about anything but paying nothing or as little as possible. A modern updated democracy should strive to be about giving citizens equal democratic power with no bias towards class.<p>One issue not really addressed here is that you can't invent a system like this as if all actors are rational and self interested. You have to assume that a large percentage are completely apathetic, will act against their own self interest and the interested and powerful use every manipulative and dishonest tactic possible to game the system.<p>Another is how you would stop political parties from dominating the landscape, which is likely closely tied to access to television airtime. You would need some system of free airtime (and no privately paid political advertising allowed) for politicians with a minimum percentage of public support (who else is singing the Bulworth rap in their head now?).<p>You still probably wouldn't stop big political parties from emerging and using a common brand to succeed, especially with apathetic voters.<p>And I'm fairly confident that too much proportional representation would quickly result in a tragedy of the commons effect for a lot of things. Taxation policy would get interesting really fast. Unpopular minority groups would be in constant danger without a very strong court system. You're entire society would be much much less stable.<p>Other than that the whole idea of using proxies to implement a republic where citizens can directly vote on those issues they care about and let a representative proxy vote for those they don't (or don't understand) is fascinating.<p>Then again, I also find systems where you elect only a local representative and those representatives elect the next level and those elect the next, etc. to also be fascinating and that's nearly the opposite of a system like this.

Switzerland