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How Social Software Can Improve Democracy
Geek Satire writes "Politics breeds cynicism; politicians seem to pander to contradictory focus groups to get elected, then break their promises to everyone. Mass mailings and faxings overwhelm their staffs, and who knows if you can tell your representatives what you really think? Experienced techie and political consultant Silona Bonewald (creator of the Transparent Federal Budget) believes that simple software solutions can fix these problems and more. O'Reilly News recently discussed with her how social software can improve democracy and leadership."
You simply have to understand that the more power you give politicians, the more corrupt they will become.
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There is a similar thing for UK parliament here. Seems they've opened up the source too.
There is a growing but now well-established community of techies focusing on this at the federal level, especially for the U.S. Congress. There are open-source projects like my GovTrack.us http://www.govtrack.us/getinvolved.xpd and oGosh!: Open Government Open Source Hacking http://wiki.opengovdata.org/index.php/OGosh and on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=45606565313.
There's no end to what techies can do to work on improving civic life. I really encourage you to check out any of those links to get involved.
I invite you to explore the Metagovernment project.
Or if you'd like something a little less sweeping of a change, there are also a number of smaller projects listed there.
A lot of people are interested but not informed. Consider nuclear power. The vast majority of interested people get their information from Greenpeace, and other similarly-biased sources. People have strong opinions on a wide variety of topics that are not based on a rational assessment of the issues.
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It's actually amazing how many Americans don't understand the roots of their foreign policy. If you would have direct democracy, Osama bin Laden would never plan 9/11 - he wouldn't know who the Americans are.
Also, people believed connection between 9/11 and Iraq because George Bush lied and emphasized it. And you are going to blame common people, rather than him, for that.
So instead of doing something with the leaders that give people incorrect information, you argue that people who were deceived by incorrect information are the danger. This "sleight of mind" is getting really old and boring.
Populism (which I assume you mean when you say, "direct democracy") is theoretically broken. Basically, while an individual's preferences may be transitive (a prerequisite for rationality), a group of people voting in a populist setting can have intransitive (i.e., irrational) preferences.
Take the following example, where people are voting on what vegetable should be served in school cafeterias:
Person 1 prefers Asparagus to Broccoli, and Broccoli to Carrots (A > B > C)
Person 2 prefers Broccoli to Carrots, and Carrots to Asparagus (B > C > A)
Person 3 prefers Carrots to Asparagus, and Asparagus to Broccoli (C > A > B)
Each one of them has rational preferences. However, together they vote irrationally. If cafeterias are currently serving asparagus, people will object because there are more that would prefer carrots. There would be a vote, and now carrots are in. But now there are more people that prefer broccoli; we'd have a vote, and broccoli is in. But now we have more people that prefer asparagus; we have a vote, and asparagus is in. But now we have more people that prefer carrots....
This is called a "voting cycle," and it's why populism (or direct democracy) doesn't work very well. Society can iterate through a bunch of different configurations without making real progress. When I took an experimental economics class in college, they talked about how things like a bicameral legislature, if structured correctly, can prevent these cycles from happening. True, they're no longer serving, "the will of the people" (if they were then they'd have to enter into these voting cycles), but then again, the "will of the people" doesn't really know what it wants either.
I didn't say that. I just don't think the Magna Carta had the effect you think it did. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 on the other hand was about when power shifted from the Crown to Parliament, legally anyway. Obviously the Civil War etc had huge practical effects before that. What Magna Carta did was to introduce the concept of the rule of law; it did not arrogate the powers of the monarch to the barons/representatives or whatever it is you're trying to say. I see your point, but you can't keep repeating the phrase 'Magna Carta', especially as we got rid of it just now.
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