[liberationtech] Democracy (was: Re: Would you like to put the list under permanent moderation?

[Rand Strauss]

I did reject any empirical determination.  But I didn’t mean to.  I reject the current empirical determinations, judging legislative outcomes vs polled desires.  Better (and more expensive) would be a comparison of legislative outcomes to the desires of people involved in deliberative democracy exercises.  But for this to work, the participants would also have to know that their desires at the end of the exercises would be taken as indicative of the nation’s- they’d need to feel responsible for shaping their future.

This might be a good metric for how democratic a political system is- polling people to ask them:  How much do your desires guide national legislation? I suspect it’s similar in America’s to our 20% approval rating of Congress, a bit high due to people’s lack of being well informed- that is, these people are happier.  That suggests another metric: How much responsibility do you have to guide political decisions that decide your country’s future?  In particular, how much responsibility daily, weekly or monthly?

Mostly I reject limiting the conversation to existing political systems.  While this is valuable basic work, I believe there are no good ones yet, so this limit cuts off possibilities.  People seem very reluctant to consider changes or additions.  They quickly become negative, like on this list someone said, "But who’ll moderate the moderator?" instead of asking, "How can we ensure moderation isn’t biased?"

As someone else said, the existing political systems with better results are smaller and have amore homogeneous citizenry. This lessens the diversity of viewpoint allowing a poor political system to work well enough.  It’d be like measuring the quality of road maintenance systems and ranking highly the country that lives is a completely flat region.


I propose augmenting America’s political system with a communication system where voters have two new political responsibilities, with respect to accountability.  If you read the links I sent <https://blog.peoplecount.org/accountability/what-is-political-accountability/> (and if so, I don’t know- you’re welcome to send me feedback or acknowledgement), you know that political accountability is basically a relationship where the voters tell politicians what to do and then receive and judge their reports.  To act together, voters must also communicate to each other what they want and their judgements.  Atop this, much, much more is possible, but this would create the first democratic political system that actually has a sufficient foundation to work.

The crux of this system is that it gives citizens ongoing responsibility with respect to government- as much or as little as they want.  While it isn’t entirely equitable, favoring people more competent at these tasks and those with more time, I believe it can provide the peaceful revolution in governance that humanity so desperately needs.

I could go on about how this solves almost every current political problem, or leads to its solution, but the above is probably already too much…  (There’s plenty written about this- I seem to lack the ability to put it into a book, though…)
-r


> On Jan 12, 2020, at 1:23 AM, David Stodolsky <dss at socialinformatics.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On 12 Jan 2020, at 02:25, Rand Strauss <Rand at PeopleCount.org <mailto:Rand at PeopleCount.org>> wrote:
>> 
>>> Direct democracy and generally direct action assumes an interaction between an individual and a state of the world / physical object. So, the above definition is limited to a republican form of governance. It isn’t possible to compare two things, if the definitional frame eliminates one from consideration.
>> 
>> We’re not comparing "two things."  We’re looking at how democratic current political systems are.  Republics aim to be democratic as well as constitutional.  They can be evaluated along both axes.  They can be evaluated along other axes as well as others, such as how free they are, or how equitable they are, though these aren’t part of the explicit definition of "republic"…
>> -r
> 
> 
> We are not looking at how democratic systems are. You specifically rejected any empirical determination and you reject the theoretical distinction I presented. My question is how to operationalize a concept like representation within a republican form of government.
> 
> 
> dss
> 
> David Stodolsky, PhD                   Institute for Social Informatics
> Tornskadestien 2, st. th., DK-2400 Copenhagen NV, Denmark
> dss at socialinformatics.org <mailto:dss at socialinformatics.org>          Tel./Signal: +45 3095 4070

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ghserv.net/pipermail/lt/attachments/20200112/b78c86e3/attachment-0001.html>