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The Venn diagram overlap of: 1)Is a good policy idea (and therefore is at least somewhat complex, because the loving world is complicated) 2)The median voter who doesn't pay much attention to politics can be realistically convinced is a good idea 3)Can't be done through the normal legislative process is not exactly a large one. Almost every problem that a national referendum could potentially solve would be better served by just changing the legislative process in question to be more representative (fairer districts, proportional representation, etc) and more competent (actual pay for state legislators so that they can do it as a full time job rather than having to be already wealthy, more staff resources, more technical expertise available to the legislature as a body so they don't have to rely on lobbyists for information), with less potential negative side effects.
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Jun 18, 2020 08:02
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People should have more input into the broad goals of the government and society generally. Giving them up down votes on specific pieces of legislation is a terrible idea because the world is loving complicated. The idea of a "citizen-legislator" who works half time then goes back to the farm or whatever is and always has been bullshit in that legislating effectively is not something you can do half-time, it is and should be a full-time job with a support staff of people who likewise do it for a living, supported by reliable institutional sources of information. Other people have said this, but basically every problem that direct democracy would solve could be solved by making legislatures more representative and giving them more resources. Direct democracy is basically a ONE WEIRD TRICK that attempts to get around the unsexy and boring work of actually building good institutions. Fill Baptismal fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Jun 21, 2020 |
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Jun 21, 2020 03:39
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"Liquid democracy" is literally just normal representative democracy with referendums and recalls once you scale it up to anything beyond the hyper-local level. Again, you can't ONE WEIRD TRICK your way out of the principle-agent problem. Sooner or later you, the citizen, have to delegate authority to someone. Crumbskull posted:The vast majority of the full US populous is broadly supportive of instituing European style social welfare programs, just as an example, so I think this is less true than you believe. Letting the population vote on, and have a contest between, parties with differing postions on "should we have a bigger welfare state" (in a way that accurately represents every citizen, such as proportional representation) is good. Having them vote on every specific minutia of said welfare state is bad. Fill Baptismal fucked around with this message at 10:26 on Jun 27, 2020 |
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Jun 27, 2020 10:09
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There is no problem that direct democracy/referendums/etc "solve" that couldn't also be addressed by making legislative institutions better designed and more representative, and there are several new ones that they introduce. Things like Mixed Member Proportional Representation or improving legislative decision making by giving them better access institutional sources of information may be unsexy and boring, but they've been shown to work. Right now I'm voting on like a dozen different ballot initiatives, it's loving stupid. Some of them are on pretty complex and technical stuff that honestly should be handled by the legislature. A well designed political system should put as few barriers in the way of the electorate being able to translate their views into policy as possible, and having to dig deep into the intricacies of bond financing or whatever to figure out just what the hell I'm voting for is a absolutely an obstacle to that. Crumbskull posted:Friendly reminder thay societies that practice economic democracy, e.g. co-operatively own and operate enterprises and public assets have significanty higher rates of democratic participation. Yeah, but if you're talking about places like Nordic Social Democracies here(which I assume you are because they have much higher rates of public ownership, etc), they do "direct democracy", stuff like referendums, etc. far less often than the US. They have them like once every decade or so on stuff like adopting the Euro, not every election cycle. They also have less elections total than the US, which is likely why they have higher levels of political participation, because you have more consolidated elections every few years rather than having midterms, primaries, off-year state and local elections, etc (To be clear, I think this is good, not bad. Things like off-year elections are basically designed to ensure minimal possible turnout, elections should be as consolidated as possible in order to reduce the amount of time that it takes for people to participate in the political process). Fill Baptismal fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Sep 26, 2020 |
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Sep 26, 2020 02:31
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Crumbskull posted:I'm talking about literally everywhere there is high levels of cooperstive ownership incl. Nicarauga, Chiapas, Basque Spain, Reggio Emillio, New Zealand etc. I dont actually know much about the state of the movement in Scandanavia, outside of Finlanf I guess. Also, I would argue that direct democracy becomes less neccessary the more widespread and diffuse democratic decision making is going on in general. The studies controlled for things like 'elections less often' and etc. But I don't have access to my hard drics with my Zotero save at the moment so I can't actually give you the citation. Pretty sure the UN did it back in the 'year of the co-operative' in 2012 or whenever. Things like co-determination (with unions having seats on boards of directors), employee owned businesses, or state owned enterprises (when done right) are all good and cool, and if you said that they made the economy, or even society in general, meaninfully more democratic, I wouldn't disagree with you. But that's conceptually separate from the idea of direct democracy, which is generally understood to be the electorate voting directly on policy that effects the polity as a whole. I don't actually think we really disagree, we're just using different terms. I think it's good for workers to have a vote in how their employer conducts business, whether through the mechanism of union board members or the business being directly owned by them. But that's codetermination or syndicalism. Direct democracy is me having to vote on poo poo like bond financing.
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Oct 7, 2020 08:34
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