Democracy: It’s A Goal, Not A Destination

One of the big problems with democracy is that it’s reeeaallly sloooow at any significant scale.

It takes a long time for millions of votes to be collected and counted.

This limits how many questions can effectively be dealt with democratically in any given time period, since voter attention is a limited resource.

It also limits the kind of questions that can be dealt with democratically, since anything that needs a decision in less than a week or two just can’t go to a nationwide vote even with the best systems in use today. When the U.S. was founded, it could take months to get a vote from the entire country.

And so we have republics, with a bunch of elected representatives hanging around to deal with these things.

And republics can be problematic.

Representatives tend to start thinking of themselves as rulers instead of public servants after being in office for a while, and addressing that with term limits cycles in new representatives at the cost of any built up knowledge or expertise.

So minimizing the role of representatives is good, to keep a lid on burgeoning autocrats, but we can’t do much by vote because the systems just can’t take it. So the best we can really hope for is to find an effective, but still reasonably democratic, balance.

And the system really needs to pre-define what kinds of decisions must be voted on and what kinds can be made by representatives, to reduce the … temptation … for representatives to overstep their bounds.

As anyone who’s been watching the news lately is well aware, this is a very real problem. And sadly, there’s really no best solution.

But there are better solutions than the system we have today.

Finding a better solution needs to start with a set of design principles the solution needs to implement, so here’s some suggestions as a starting point:

define who makes which decisions:
- policy decisions should require a vote
- structural and systemic decisions should require a vote
- specialist decisions should be left to predefined specialists
- implementation details should be left to representatives
- emergency decisions should be specifically detailed in advance, then made by a representative and confirmed or overruled by a vote at the earliest opportunity
courts should be immediate: interpretation of law is the job of the courts, after all, but courts will have to be capable of making very quick decisions, rather than taking weeks, months or years as they do today
each vote should use the smallest-possible voter pool: decisions should be made by the smallest voter pool that can encompass the entire population that should be involved in a decision; this means a federated system with sovereignty starting small, and being inherited by the larger layers

We can also increase how many decisions can be made by votes by improving our voting systems, making it easier and faster to collect and count votes,

That does not look very much like the system we have today, does it?

But that’s to be expected.

The system we have today was designed 250 years ago, before most of what we call science was really a thing and political science in particular hadn’t been thought of at all; it would be foolish to expect us not to have learned anything new about this stuff in all that time.

So maybe we should take all that learning and build a better system with it.