On 09/02/2013 09:23 PM, Vidar Wahlberg wrote:
I once considered a hybrid system that *would* use elections, but in
a quite different way: first you'd select a significant number of
people at random, and then these would elect from among their
number. It does away with continuity both for ill (problem with
consistency of plans) and good (no monolithic party machines).
This reminds me a bit about how comments on slashdot.org are rated by
the readers. Perhaps you're familiar with this system?
They claim it works fairly well for their needs, but will it work for
electing a government? Even if you select a subset of the population,
those are susceptible to fearmongering, glorifying and generally create
a distorted image of the various candidates/parties to influence the
voter in a certain direction.
That's not quite what I meant. By "among their number" I meant that the
people who were selected would elect a subset of their own. So you might
pick, say, 500 for the initial level. Among these, the different people
give reasons for why they should govern. Then the 500 elect 150 of their
own to become the actual legislature.
I thought of that kind of system as a way of countering the most common
objection against a randomly picked assembly: that the average person
would rule, and he would be average in both the good and bad sense. So
the electoral stage is supposed to remove the lower quality members of
the random group. Since the initial group is picked at random, there's
no direct way for a party to gain access to government: the chance that
any given randomly picked person would be a party member is extremely low.
One could argue that the flipside of this kind of system is that it
destroys the kind of continuity of planning that the parties provide.
But in a sense, that continuity is also always subject to being changed
by the changes in support.
I guess what you thought I was thinking of was a method where you pick a
smaller sample that then run the traditional election (that is, choose
parties etc). The benefit of that system would be that each member of
the small sample would have a greater incentive to investigate the
issues, but it's not the system I was thinking of, and to the extent
that voting is also a participatory thing, the general population would
not like having their choice taken away from them.
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