I'm thinking about starting a new political party (in my country getting into parliament as a new party is e̶a̶s̶y̶ not virtually impossible, so it's not necessarily a waste of time). The motivation for this is that the current political process seems inefficient.

Mostly I'm wondering if this idea has come up before on lesswrong and if there are good sources for something like this.

The most important thing is that no explicit policies are part of the party's platform (i.e. no "we want a higher minimum wage"). I don't really have a party program yet, but the basic idea is as follows: There are two parts to this party; the first part is about Terminal Values and Ethical Injunctions. What do we want to achieve and what do we avoid doing even if it seems to get us closer to our goal. The Terminal Values could just be Frankena's list of intrinsic values. The first requirement for people to vote for this party is that they agree with those values.

The second part is about the process of finding good policies. How to design a process that generates policies that help to satisfy our values. Some ideas:

• complete and utter transparency to fight the inevitable corruption; publish everything the government does
• instruct experts to find good policies and then listen to them (how would professional politicians know better than them)
  • let the experts give probabilities on explicit predictions how well the policies will work
  • have a public score board that shows how well individual experts did in the past with their predictions
• when implementing a new policy, set a date at which to evaluate the efficacy and say in advance what you expect
• if a policy is found to be harmful, get rid of it; don't be afraid to change your mind (but don't make it unnecessarily hard for businesses to plan for the future by changing policies to frequently)
• react to feedback from the population; don't wait until the next election

The idea is that the party won't really be judged based on the policies it produces but rather on how well it keeps to the specified process. The values and the process is what identifies the party. Of course there should be some room for changing the process if it doesn't work...

The evaluation of policies in terms of how well they satisfy values seems to be a difficult problem. The problem is that Utilitarianism is difficult in practice.

So, there are quite a few open questions.