Just to clarify, I meant advanced with respect to our country (Czech Republic), not Europe in general. In many respects I consider some west and north European countries more advanced today. However, it's also true that lot of states in US have implemented direct democracy on local or state levels a lot sooner than many European countries. Unfortunately, the progressive movement wasn't able to implement these measures on federal level (it was hindered by involvement of US in the first World War); if they would, maybe US would be another Switzerland today, and direct democracy would become a western standard.
There exist examples like that - some of the states with direct democracy in the US, I believe - had the taxes increased with referendums.
Moreover, it has been shown statistically both in US and Switzerland that direct democracy enforces a better balanced budget, and budget savings of 10-15% have been reported.
The references can be found in a free book I already mentioned somewhere else in this discussion.
Yes, that means that a minority can stop a majority from imposing tyranny of the majority onto the minority.
I thought about it and here is a problem with this idea: You are basically giving minority more power just on the basis that it is a minority. The problem is, the average person from minority can also be more powerful than the average person from the majority. If we would assume that everybody has the same probability of being powerful in the society, then the optimal level of power we should give to a minority would be proportional to its own size. Which is majority voting.
So, to sum up, I don't think giving minority more powers on the basis it's a minority alone is a good idea. The fallacy here is IMHO that minority has always somehow less power in the society than it should. This can be true for minorities such as racial, but it doesn't have to hold for ad hoc minorities that will form during decision of some issue.
I actually believe that laws that protect (weak) minorities are somehow orthogonal to the democratic framework and cannot be provably attained in direct democracy. Not all hope is lost however - it is usually practical for people to cooperate (to guard against people who divide them to stay in power), which means to help minorities as well.
Well, while it maybe addresses some of my concerns, it is still very vague. If the rules are vague, then there always exist a possibility that some group will game the system. The fact I can't predict (and I am quite smart, I think) how much decision power each person will have in this system really repulses me.
On the other hand, maybe the system really is just majority voting, with some additional precautions taken so that greater majority can be reached in certain special cases.
Switzerland is a representative direct democracy, the only benefit they have (and it is a nice one, I think) is that they can choose to try to override federal decisions with a popular vote, they do not however vote on everything or even most things.
Yes, but there is also a feedback loop that arises from that. When politicians can be kept in check directly, then they don't try to cheat so much. Therefore even the legislation coming from government is usually agreed with by the majority.
I don't know how well the system would scale given the lengths our system has gone to to try and prevent larger groups from gaining unquestionable power, I can see it making it very hard to make necessary but unpopular moves.
I am not sure what country do you refer to, but I don't see why there should be any scaling problems. And if you are referring to USA, I don't think it quite succeeded in preventing "larger groups from gaining unquestionable power", despite having explicitly written such attempt into constitution.
I also consider "necessary but unpopular" moves a bit of oxymoron. In our country, when politicians refer to something like that, I know for sure it will go against my interests.
I looked there, it was mentioned already, but honestly, I don't believe that consensus is going to work better than majority voting. I have several reasons for that:
1. I believe consensus scales a lot worse than majority voting.
2. If there is no consensus, then a status quo is preserved, which may be minority opinion - thus, in effect, enforcing minority rule over majority. This I consider worse than the dreaded "majority rule over minority".
3. There are no clear rules when the consensus has or has not been established. On the other hand, in voting, the winner and rules are obvious.
4. Making a compromise among parties can be solved by having consecutive votes about more and more compromising proposal. If a new compromising proposal is acceptable to more people than the old proposal, more people will prefer it.
5. In general, I have a bad experience with Wikipedia system of consensus decision-making. I have seen it fail so that the minority enforced their view over majority.
As long as people are believe what they are told, without applying critical thinking and seeking multiple sources then they should not be directly involved with running the country.
Who should run the country then? Surely not the people who are feeding other people with incorrect information?
And of course, the basic question remains - why would you allow such stupid people to vote at all - when they cannot decide the issue, how can they decide who decides correctly?
Also, this poses another interesting problem. There are people who are critical thinking in one area and not in another. What would you do with them, can they decide or not?
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.
In fact, that's not clear at all. For example, our country has been building a new nuclear power plant. There was a question whether we should build it or not. Most people (about 70% IIRC) supported building it. The negative voices were mostly (financially) supported by Austrians, because they have hydrodynamic energy from Alpine glaciers and don't need nuclear power.
Anyway, now it's actually questionable if it was good or bad. CEZ (the energy firm that built it, which has almost monopoly on energy creation and distribution here) insisted that if the power plant gets built, it will switch off some of the coal power plants. That was their major argument for building the nuclear plaint. It didn't happened, and we now export the excess energy.
Note: I am not against nuclear energy, just saying that things are not always black and white.
Well, when direct democracy supporters (like myself) talk about "direct democracy", they mostly mean "semidirect democracy" ala Switzerland. Still think it cannot be implemented?
Well, as I already pointed out, direct democracy is not a cure-all solution. I don't think Athenean democracy (as any other society from that era) can be really held to today's society standards.
But this is not an issue. The issue is if the direct democracy (or semidirect, which is actually what I mean when I talk about it) is better than representative one.
In practice, this is not a problem for several reasons:
1. If you are not interested in the issue, you just don't vote - it's as simple as that.
2. If you are interested, you are going to get the information. And there are simple solutions to this problem too - for example, in Switzerland, every voter receives a summary which contains details and debate points about the legislation they are voting about.
3. If someone is completely ignorant, then he votes randomly, and effect of such people in voting will cancel out.
4. If someone is manipulated (so he votes against his interests but not randomly, as in point 3), then there exists a manipulator. This manipulator thus can be exposed, and, moreover, to manipulate large amount of individual people, albeit stupid, requires more resources than to manipulate individual politicians. So even in this case, direct democracy is superior.
I am not underestimating anything, I am referring to empirical experience with direct democracies. It's you who are making things up.
I recommend this book as a source of information. It answers all your misconceptions.
About technocracy - it would not be good at all. In the real world, the main issue is power. If you would give power to small elite, it would quickly degenerate. In my country, communist party tried to run a country based on such a system (planned economy and society), and it spectacularly failed.
Direct democracy could solve global warming quite easily. For example, Switzerland was always a leader in ecology-oriented legislation.
Monitoring is not an issue. Monitoring does happen (thanks to free speech). The problem is power. People don't have power to change things easily when something goes wrong.
Direct democracy _cannot_ go beyond the issues the society has. In particular, it cannot solve problem with religion. But neither can representative democracy. And gay marriages are (unfortunately) a religious issue in the US.
There exists similar examples like this from Switzerland. However, in general, people are happier there and trust each other more. There exist excesses both in representative and direct democratic systems, but there is less of them in the latter.
Actually, the practical experience with direct democracy (for example from Switzerland) says the exact opposite.
People are _very_ conservative and don't like the change, even if it's for better.
It's funny that you are talking about media influence, but at the same time parroting the power elite's propaganda about why the direct democracy cannot work.
Czech Republic. Our country is much less democratic than the US (or most of Western European countries), and it shows a lot. Even though the situation got a lot worse in recent years in the west too.
This is solved by direct democracy. In direct democracy, you vote about the laws directly, so you directly control that the laws you want are passed.
Note this is simpler (thus superior) solution to having court decide if the politician kept his promise. In such a system, whoever would control the court would control the politicians. Then you would have to vote about people in the court, and you couldn't rely on them either. So in comparison with direct democracy, you would have an additional set of people and you couldn't completely rely on them anyway.
So it's a simple matter of fact that if you want direct control over the issues, you actually want to decide them directly.
I don't understand your objection about direct democracy. If you don't think voters are rational or worse as leaders, why have democracy at all? I think people who don't want direct democracy actually don't want democracy at all, they just either don't say it in open or don't realize there is a logical inconsistency in their statements.
By the way - I am from Europe and believe that the reason why USA was so much advanced is really the fact they had very advanced democracy (in some cases direct) on national and local level. If you had direct democracy on federal level, maybe you wouldn't have any problems you have now with war and debt.
About your constitution - your founders may have been wrong. They were just people, anyway (they also didn't consider women and other races equal to white males). And at the time, there were no practical results with direct democracy. But they are now, and show very good results (increased happiness, better budget management, higher voter turnout, etc.).
There are certain issues that can make people really angry, and could be in principle used to pass more democratic laws. However, what happens in such cases is that the current powers will much rather compromise on the specific problem than to allow more democracy (which could cause them more problems in the long run). So it's not impossible to fight for, but democracy itself needs more awareness among people not to be satisfied with such compromises.
I wanted to map laws that are passed in Czech parliament to simple statements (such as "increases taxes", "limits freedom of speech") and then anybody could create their own profile and test this profile against all the laws that have been passed, and this would be connected to parliament voting data to select which party he should vote for. And all the data would be publicly available (except for the personal profiles, of course), so anyone could reproduce the result.
Also, I have been thinking about social networking. It would be cool if we could get past the reputation systems that just have a reputation as a single number, and we could also measure reputation depending on how the reputation is connected among people; so it would be impossible for an isolated group of people (connected to single entity) gain high reputation by giving high reputation to each other.
I like what these people are doing, and I applaud them for trying to make the system more democratic.
I agree. I maintain or improve some 30+ years old mainframe applications (in COBOL, C and mainframe assembler). They are not written in any "reusable" way at all. And we still have to re-architecture them somehow, and we manage to do that with the minimal amount of change required.
On the other hand, we have some Java and distributed people over there (and I know of others from other companies). They are trying to do things in a reusable way (OOP, patterns and whatnot).
The funny thing is, it actually seems that Java folks are much more prone to rewrites (for example, into another framework) than we are, even though they supposedly use better methodologies. I think this is a psychological problem - they have 5 years old app, and it looks horrible, and they think, OMG, we have to rewrite it so it's more maintainable in the future. If it would be here 30 years, it would look even more horrible, and still, it would be possible to maintain it somehow. What I mean is that good maintainability is partly an illusion that depends on age of the application and maybe experience of programmer with maintenance of really old apps.
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And where would you put Switzerland on that scale?
Just to clarify, I meant advanced with respect to our country (Czech Republic), not Europe in general. In many respects I consider some west and north European countries more advanced today. However, it's also true that lot of states in US have implemented direct democracy on local or state levels a lot sooner than many European countries. Unfortunately, the progressive movement wasn't able to implement these measures on federal level (it was hindered by involvement of US in the first World War); if they would, maybe US would be another Switzerland today, and direct democracy would become a western standard.
There exist examples like that - some of the states with direct democracy in the US, I believe - had the taxes increased with referendums.
Moreover, it has been shown statistically both in US and Switzerland that direct democracy enforces a better balanced budget, and budget savings of 10-15% have been reported.
The references can be found in a free book I already mentioned somewhere else in this discussion.
Yes, that means that a minority can stop a majority from imposing tyranny of the majority onto the minority.
I thought about it and here is a problem with this idea: You are basically giving minority more power just on the basis that it is a minority. The problem is, the average person from minority can also be more powerful than the average person from the majority. If we would assume that everybody has the same probability of being powerful in the society, then the optimal level of power we should give to a minority would be proportional to its own size. Which is majority voting.
So, to sum up, I don't think giving minority more powers on the basis it's a minority alone is a good idea. The fallacy here is IMHO that minority has always somehow less power in the society than it should. This can be true for minorities such as racial, but it doesn't have to hold for ad hoc minorities that will form during decision of some issue.
I actually believe that laws that protect (weak) minorities are somehow orthogonal to the democratic framework and cannot be provably attained in direct democracy. Not all hope is lost however - it is usually practical for people to cooperate (to guard against people who divide them to stay in power), which means to help minorities as well.
Well, while it maybe addresses some of my concerns, it is still very vague. If the rules are vague, then there always exist a possibility that some group will game the system. The fact I can't predict (and I am quite smart, I think) how much decision power each person will have in this system really repulses me.
On the other hand, maybe the system really is just majority voting, with some additional precautions taken so that greater majority can be reached in certain special cases.
Switzerland is a representative direct democracy, the only benefit they have (and it is a nice one, I think) is that they can choose to try to override federal decisions with a popular vote, they do not however vote on everything or even most things.
Yes, but there is also a feedback loop that arises from that. When politicians can be kept in check directly, then they don't try to cheat so much. Therefore even the legislation coming from government is usually agreed with by the majority.
I don't know how well the system would scale given the lengths our system has gone to to try and prevent larger groups from gaining unquestionable power, I can see it making it very hard to make necessary but unpopular moves.
I am not sure what country do you refer to, but I don't see why there should be any scaling problems. And if you are referring to USA, I don't think it quite succeeded in preventing "larger groups from gaining unquestionable power", despite having explicitly written such attempt into constitution.
I also consider "necessary but unpopular" moves a bit of oxymoron. In our country, when politicians refer to something like that, I know for sure it will go against my interests.
I looked there, it was mentioned already, but honestly, I don't believe that consensus is going to work better than majority voting. I have several reasons for that:
1. I believe consensus scales a lot worse than majority voting.
2. If there is no consensus, then a status quo is preserved, which may be minority opinion - thus, in effect, enforcing minority rule over majority. This I consider worse than the dreaded "majority rule over minority".
3. There are no clear rules when the consensus has or has not been established. On the other hand, in voting, the winner and rules are obvious.
4. Making a compromise among parties can be solved by having consecutive votes about more and more compromising proposal. If a new compromising proposal is acceptable to more people than the old proposal, more people will prefer it.
5. In general, I have a bad experience with Wikipedia system of consensus decision-making. I have seen it fail so that the minority enforced their view over majority.
As long as people are believe what they are told, without applying critical thinking and seeking multiple sources then they should not be directly involved with running the country.
Who should run the country then? Surely not the people who are feeding other people with incorrect information?
And of course, the basic question remains - why would you allow such stupid people to vote at all - when they cannot decide the issue, how can they decide who decides correctly?
Also, this poses another interesting problem. There are people who are critical thinking in one area and not in another. What would you do with them, can they decide or not?
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.
In fact, that's not clear at all. For example, our country has been building a new nuclear power plant. There was a question whether we should build it or not. Most people (about 70% IIRC) supported building it. The negative voices were mostly (financially) supported by Austrians, because they have hydrodynamic energy from Alpine glaciers and don't need nuclear power.
Anyway, now it's actually questionable if it was good or bad. CEZ (the energy firm that built it, which has almost monopoly on energy creation and distribution here) insisted that if the power plant gets built, it will switch off some of the coal power plants. That was their major argument for building the nuclear plaint. It didn't happened, and we now export the excess energy.
Note: I am not against nuclear energy, just saying that things are not always black and white.
Well, when direct democracy supporters (like myself) talk about "direct democracy", they mostly mean "semidirect democracy" ala Switzerland. Still think it cannot be implemented?
Well, as I already pointed out, direct democracy is not a cure-all solution. I don't think Athenean democracy (as any other society from that era) can be really held to today's society standards.
But this is not an issue. The issue is if the direct democracy (or semidirect, which is actually what I mean when I talk about it) is better than representative one.
In practice, this is not a problem for several reasons:
1. If you are not interested in the issue, you just don't vote - it's as simple as that.
2. If you are interested, you are going to get the information. And there are simple solutions to this problem too - for example, in Switzerland, every voter receives a summary which contains details and debate points about the legislation they are voting about.
3. If someone is completely ignorant, then he votes randomly, and effect of such people in voting will cancel out.
4. If someone is manipulated (so he votes against his interests but not randomly, as in point 3), then there exists a manipulator. This manipulator thus can be exposed, and, moreover, to manipulate large amount of individual people, albeit stupid, requires more resources than to manipulate individual politicians. So even in this case, direct democracy is superior.
I am not underestimating anything, I am referring to empirical experience with direct democracies. It's you who are making things up.
I recommend this book as a source of information. It answers all your misconceptions.
About technocracy - it would not be good at all. In the real world, the main issue is power. If you would give power to small elite, it would quickly degenerate. In my country, communist party tried to run a country based on such a system (planned economy and society), and it spectacularly failed.
Direct democracy could solve global warming quite easily. For example, Switzerland was always a leader in ecology-oriented legislation.
Monitoring is not an issue. Monitoring does happen (thanks to free speech). The problem is power. People don't have power to change things easily when something goes wrong.
Direct democracy _cannot_ go beyond the issues the society has. In particular, it cannot solve problem with religion. But neither can representative democracy. And gay marriages are (unfortunately) a religious issue in the US.
There exists similar examples like this from Switzerland. However, in general, people are happier there and trust each other more. There exist excesses both in representative and direct democratic systems, but there is less of them in the latter.
Actually, the practical experience with direct democracy (for example from Switzerland) says the exact opposite.
People are _very_ conservative and don't like the change, even if it's for better.
It's funny that you are talking about media influence, but at the same time parroting the power elite's propaganda about why the direct democracy cannot work.
Czech Republic. Our country is much less democratic than the US (or most of Western European countries), and it shows a lot. Even though the situation got a lot worse in recent years in the west too.
This is solved by direct democracy. In direct democracy, you vote about the laws directly, so you directly control that the laws you want are passed.
Note this is simpler (thus superior) solution to having court decide if the politician kept his promise. In such a system, whoever would control the court would control the politicians. Then you would have to vote about people in the court, and you couldn't rely on them either. So in comparison with direct democracy, you would have an additional set of people and you couldn't completely rely on them anyway.
So it's a simple matter of fact that if you want direct control over the issues, you actually want to decide them directly.
I don't understand your objection about direct democracy. If you don't think voters are rational or worse as leaders, why have democracy at all? I think people who don't want direct democracy actually don't want democracy at all, they just either don't say it in open or don't realize there is a logical inconsistency in their statements.
By the way - I am from Europe and believe that the reason why USA was so much advanced is really the fact they had very advanced democracy (in some cases direct) on national and local level. If you had direct democracy on federal level, maybe you wouldn't have any problems you have now with war and debt.
About your constitution - your founders may have been wrong. They were just people, anyway (they also didn't consider women and other races equal to white males). And at the time, there were no practical results with direct democracy. But they are now, and show very good results (increased happiness, better budget management, higher voter turnout, etc.).
I believe that it's a lot more subtle than that.
There are certain issues that can make people really angry, and could be in principle used to pass more democratic laws. However, what happens in such cases is that the current powers will much rather compromise on the specific problem than to allow more democracy (which could cause them more problems in the long run). So it's not impossible to fight for, but democracy itself needs more awareness among people not to be satisfied with such compromises.
..as I have been thinking about such system too.
I wanted to map laws that are passed in Czech parliament to simple statements (such as "increases taxes", "limits freedom of speech") and then anybody could create their own profile and test this profile against all the laws that have been passed, and this would be connected to parliament voting data to select which party he should vote for. And all the data would be publicly available (except for the personal profiles, of course), so anyone could reproduce the result.
Also, I have been thinking about social networking. It would be cool if we could get past the reputation systems that just have a reputation as a single number, and we could also measure reputation depending on how the reputation is connected among people; so it would be impossible for an isolated group of people (connected to single entity) gain high reputation by giving high reputation to each other.
I like what these people are doing, and I applaud them for trying to make the system more democratic.
Umm, no. Playing Civilization on computer can be fun even if you are not inclined being a dictator or conqueror.
In terms of software architecture, it's like mixing of too much Turing completeness into this particular DSL.
I agree. I maintain or improve some 30+ years old mainframe applications (in COBOL, C and mainframe assembler). They are not written in any "reusable" way at all. And we still have to re-architecture them somehow, and we manage to do that with the minimal amount of change required.
On the other hand, we have some Java and distributed people over there (and I know of others from other companies). They are trying to do things in a reusable way (OOP, patterns and whatnot).
The funny thing is, it actually seems that Java folks are much more prone to rewrites (for example, into another framework) than we are, even though they supposedly use better methodologies. I think this is a psychological problem - they have 5 years old app, and it looks horrible, and they think, OMG, we have to rewrite it so it's more maintainable in the future. If it would be here 30 years, it would look even more horrible, and still, it would be possible to maintain it somehow. What I mean is that good maintainability is partly an illusion that depends on age of the application and maybe experience of programmer with maintenance of really old apps.