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Punoxysm comments on Gaming Democracy - Less Wrong Discussion
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This is a very long-winded way to re-invent the idea of a lobbying organization.
Are you really unaware of all the organizations that already operate on this model, from the NRA to religious groups to literally any organization that has organized a letter-writing campaign?
Actually, I think, it's just re-inventing the idea of a political party.
I think both of you are incorrect. This leverages a specific flaw in the FPTP system which wouldn't work in a PR system that gives a small, tightly coordinated group in a swing seat a disproportionate amount of power. Insofar as both political parties and lobby groups can exist in a PR system, this cannot be either of those things since it could not exist in a PR system.
More specifically, it is not a political party because (amongst other things) it has no general platform and does not seek to acquire power. It is also not a lobby group because it doesn't really 'lobby' in any meaningful sense to get the law changed. I think the example of the NRA is a red herring - it is hard to believe the NRA is well-enough coordinated to get a large number of its members to vote for a party they don't like. Do you have any evidence they have ever been successful at swinging a seat in this way?
Names don't matter much here. The basic idea is to pressure a political candidate by promising him a voting block which you assert you can deliver and that is entirely standard operating procedure in contemporary democracies. It's very commonly done by unions in municipal elections, for example.
Most successful groups actually exercise influence through get-out-the-vote. That is, instead of having 60% of people who favor candidate X anyways to vote, they get 80% to vote and change the minds of 5% of people favoring candidate Y, within the single-issue group. The result is still a large impact; the NRA is very successful at this, and combined with it's legal and policy work, substantially influences national legislation.
The NRA is HUGE and well-coordinated, and by most reasonable measures has "won" it's policy battles consistently.
Targeting close districts is also an old strategy, but targeting primaries can produce higher yields since people are more amenable to switching votes between candidates within their favored party than to abandoning their party.
That may be so, but it doesn't mean it might not be effective; before facebook, social networking websites hadn't really taken off, and-to give an example already in the post-fundraisers existed even before kickstarter; it doesn't mean kickstarter didn't make things easier for a lot of people.
The main draw of this kind of program, I think, is that it would remove a lot of the trivial inconveniences that come with voting, and it could work as a beeminder-like prompt for slacktivists, thereby making them actually useful.