I had an idea yesterday, it was, basically, crowdsourced politicians. You'd have a number of politicians, as many as you could get elected in parliament, and you would have a website detailing every law currently under vote. Anyone could vote on these laws on the website, and the politician(s) would all have to vote the way the online poll went.
Of course, this is ripe for abuse and corruption (one website controlling an entire country), but interesting idea nonetheless.
Sounds exactly like the Senator Online party that ran in the 2007 Australian federal elections. They did pretty poorly (according to Wikipedia) but still...
Would it be possible to build a party with the sole intent on producing transparent government and the eventual ability to open all debate to the public via the internet.
In essence, the reason for representatives is that historically people could not take the time out of work to participate in a debate. Even more so if this meant travelling to a debate.
You're supposed to debate locally, and have your representative go represent your area, but what really happens is that your rep is party of a party and the party agree a line and they vote regardless of local voices.
So... if voting was open on all debates for the people to partake in... what's the worst that could happen? Where would it fall down?
Initially I think security issues would be interesting, could they be open and transparent?
And everyone would initially vote for NIMBY policies, so it would grind a lot of stuff to a halt.
The big question, are people able to think of big things that benefit the whole of society even at the cost of them as individuals.
But then, that's the crux of a lot of political issues.
I read once that originally, politicians were not paid by the government. Their only form of income was from the people that that person represented: if the constituents believed that the politician did a good job representing them, then it was up to the individual people to pay that politician what they believed s/he was worth.
I guess the idea was that if you don't do a good job, you don't get paid. On the other hand, if you don't pay the representative fairly, then they won't run the following year. "You get what you pay for".
Would this work in the grand scheme of things these days? I always think that there are too many 'key people' and too many companies with so much financial clout that the money they give would overshadow what the constituents would pay privately. The one saving grace there, I guess, is that at the end of the day, the person still needs to be voted back in...
Government salary is not necessarily their main source of income...
* They often own businesses, which often benefit significantly from government contracts
* Direct or indirect kickbacks from other business owners/lobbyists in return for more favorable legislation
That's a good point about them owning their own businesses: I guess it didn't matter so much back when the majority were farmers and landholders.
Kickbacks etc. are going to be a problem no matter how they are 'officially' paid. This comes back to voters paying attention and caring, I guess, so...
>And everyone would initially vote for NIMBY policies //
I think this shows the problem, the tyranny of the masses. Basically as I grow older I'm more inclined to think that pure democracy won't work because people won't make short term sacrifices for long term gains or sacrifice there own benefit for the larger benefit of more others.
That said I do think we (I'm in the UK) need more representation for the demos. That, for example, we should have a system like Suisse where a proportion of the population can force a referendum.
My personal opinion is that a country works better if some of it's forces can operate covertly too.
This tends to work great in theory, but voters are extremely fickle. You can look at California as an example of this. The populace have voted on referendum after referendum to pass new laws without passing the budget to match (since budgets are hard but single sentence laws are easy). Now they face a massive budget shortfall and have no idea how they are going to pay it.
That's a great lead in for something that contrasts fact and theory. Unfortunately....
> You can look at California as an example of this. The populace have voted on referendum after referendum to pass new laws without passing the budget to match
That's simply not true. The referendum-required spending is a small fraction of CA's budget.[1]
The closest thing to an exception is that 50% of the budget has to go to education. However, that doesn't mandate a level of spending.
Even if CA had a huge amount of voter-mandated spending, that doesn't justify or require other spending.
CA has a budget problem because its income tax system is fairly volatile because it is very progressive. (Property tax receipts, thanks to prop 13, is actually fairly stable.) That's a problem because the governor and legislature see good years as opportunities to increase spending, which can't be paid for when bad years come along.
When I lose income, I cut back. CA govt doesn't. (And no, increases in unemployment compensation aren't the problem.)
[1] I'm ignoring the bond measures because they're put on the ballot by the legislature and required for all significant borrowing. The relevant projects aren't referendum-spending.
Of course, this is ripe for abuse and corruption (one website controlling an entire country), but interesting idea nonetheless.