There are of course other scary scenarios one can draw. You believe that stupidity in voting is due to the very brief time span encountered. Maybe. But I found myself questioning if, in fact, most people truly want liberty. Do they actually want to recognize their own sovereinty? I am not sure. I look back at America’s history, and I think to myself: you know this liberty idea was pretty much just rushed and hoodwinked in by a very small handful of charismatic people. And from then on people who want to exercise autonomy have had to fight tooth and nail. And frankly, there is a dirth of true protest.

I don’t know what I will become if I truly accept that I am a member of a small group of sentient human beings who wants my autonomy recognized and set free. I don’t know if I want to wait 1000 years for these other assholes to catch up.

Well, I aplogize if I rambled, but this is a subject close to my heart. I certainly cast my will for open source democracy to be viable.

I think that political manouverings are becoming very visible due to the plethora of communication methods but it seems difficult to do anything about even the worst excesses. (Iraq, weapons of MD, did they lie? Of course they did but spin and sacrificial lambs and more spin and diversions and delays move the issue onto the back burner.) This idea, a sort of instant referendum at reasonable expense, could move towards overcoming this. But it needs teeth so that results cannot be swept under the carpet. And our current reps have to approve it. Think freedom of info act. “I’m an MP. I don’t think that I should be subject to this. I’m a special case.”

As for decentralisation, I agree. The role of the centralised elected body should simply to be to coordinate those collective efforts beyond the scope and remit of more local bodies, which should in turn only be have the role of organising and coordinating those collective efforts beyond the scope and remit of individual sovereignty.

Everyone who has commented thus far – Until we perform experiments to see how this system works, I think predictions about how often leaders would change remains unfair. I think it is likely the vast majority of the populace would not change their support very often, thus creating a very stable government forced to stay in touch.

Irene – since one of my proposals was for this system to be used in a ’second house’ scenario, such as the house of lords in the uk, the staff you mention may well be accountable elected figures from the first house. Granted there are also nameless civil servants that support them, but they are already there. I fail to see how a more representative body would somehow be more likely to fall under its influence. In fact, since they would could theoretically be held immediately to account for a betrayal of their supporters, they wouldn’t actually be able to get away with it.

A consequence of this would be, that as the focus of the “voting” populace changed the leadership would change, but people are notoriously fickle and it would make implementing an important change very difficult.

Whoever was in charge would be changing almost from day to day, their replacement would then spend most of their time being briefed by the staff.

The staff would, of course need to be there permanently, so will be the actual government, unseen and all powerful.

Just a few thoughts.

Irene.

Well the probably I see with participatory democracy is that it allows in populism if you have a majoritarian system. I don’t want to get bogged down in debates over elitism vs egalitarianism, but its a simple fact that most people in Britain want to bring back hanging and the only reason we dont have it is because our politicians know better (on this issue at least). So more popular voting would lead to more populism and intolerance in my opinion. This is why I prefer consensus decision making rather than voting. But this would be difficult to implement here.

I agree also with the earlier commenter that changing personnel at the top constantly could lead to instability, but then again not changing it will simply lead to tyranny. I think the answer is to decentralise decision making away from the top, so these people become rubber stampers and overseers without any planning or decision making powers in themselves. Then it would not really matter who they were or how long they were there as long as they were the right peeps. They could sanction or block any initiative from below at any time. Hence we would be voting for their wisdom and moral integrity more than anything else.

Failing that I vote for anarchist revolution during aggrevated system collapse )

Nice Blog
Will comment intelligently soon.

K

The point is that my proposal my seem unstable, and subject to the whim of tabloid populism, but I actually suspect the opposite. I suspect that populism and tabloid politics survives only because we get one chance, and only one chance to vote every five years.

And the very idea of democracy probably seemed unstable to people used to living in the old European Monarchies.

And just because people have the potential to change their vote at any time, doesn’t mean they will. I suspect a large number of people will be content to leave their vote well alone providing everything seems to be working, but will have the freedom to change it if the horse they back suddenly starts doing something they don’t like.

Also, it would be a lot harder for any one group to assume overall control in such a system, and that has to be a good thing as it will force politicians into cooperative modes of thinking as opposed to the competitive oppositional thinking the current system encourages. That in itself would tend to create stability.

But also, it would mean politicians would have to tread a lot more carefully and consider the opinions of their electorate a LOT more carefully. I suspect the best of them will get very good at holding on to their votes.

As for Northern Ireland, it hasn’t yet evolved a fully functional old style democracy yet, so its a bit premature to speculate about how an open source democracy might fare there. Of course, having said that, you may have illustrated why a move to this kind of system HAS to be emergent. If the people themselves demand it, the chances are it will work. But if it is forced on them from above, the chances are they aren’t ready for it.