I have been mostly lurking on lesswrong for over a year, but never posted because I can generally dismiss whatever questions or theories I come up with faster than I can explain them on a forum. Essentially, I was waiting for a situation where I actually needed input from a larger group, thought my own conclusions were wrong, or had something which I thought was worth planting in other peoples minds. This post covers all of these, so without further ado, I would like to discuss a few questions about democratic government which have been on my mind recently.
I am not old enough to vote, but have tried working on petitions, and sending letters and emails to my MP or other politicians about issues when I thought I had something interesting to say. I have done this several times over the last year in an attempt to make changes from within the system. None of them have ever been answered, even with form letters, so as far as I can tell my attempts at politely making changes have been futile.
As I am already a partial anarchist, this did not do much to make me resent Canada's government and the rest of the political world less. I still try once in a while to get through to leaders, but have almost given up on this course of action. My country at least is a democracy exclusively for people who are willing to fight for attention, and who support views that are already popular enough that they are probably being implemented by our leaders anyway.
Elected officials are most likely not maliciously ignoring every opinion they are sent, but it seems obvious that they do not have the time to actually address everyone's concerns, learn about every issue they vote on, and are being expected to do a job which is simply impossible for a small group of humans. So I would like to know why we have representatives at all, would an aristocracy be much worse? Decisions are being made by an elite group who's only direct incentive to keep everyone happy is avoiding rebellion and their own ethics anyway. If I want to have a say in national policy when I know something which makes a difference, it looks like I either have to run for parliament (which would fail drastically, I am not charismatic), lead a rebellion, or start my own country. (in order of how horrible these ideas are)
I would like to know what the general opinion of our governments is right now, so how do you expect each of the following systems would compare to the way democracy functions as it is in Canada, the USA, or other countries?
Direct democracy: Now that the internet is so common, we do not need to be face to face in the same room to reach a consensus anymore. Instead of having any representatives at all, anyone in the country could make a proposal online, promote it, and let the votes and comments of everyone else decide its fate. Like any other site, it could be hacked, DDOS'd, trolled, spammed, people could make duplicate accounts, etc. There are a nearly infinite number of ways this could go wrong, so a secure implementation is obviously essential.
Randomized Democracy: Our current system could be left exactly the same but voting and appointment completely replaced with random selection of individuals from the population.
But of course the popular views are more often implemented while the unpopular aren't. How could it be otherwise? Your country is democracy for all, but it doesn't mean that every person can extort visible influence. Among 30 million others it would be impossible.
Not only they want to prevent rebellion, they want to get reelected too. And you have a chance to become a member of that elite, which would be much smaller in an aristocratic system.
As for the proposed alternatives: Direct democracy to some degree is possible. In Swiss regional politics, a fairly large portion of decisions is made by referenda, which have a long tradition, and it works as well as the representative system.
My impression is that most proponents of direct democracy operate from the assumption that the main problem with the present state of affairs is representatives ignoring the public. In fact, the main problem is the public itself. Voters rarely rationally analyse the options, and most voters care about politics only as far as their biases go, except in rare situations where their own interests are clearly at stake. A typical socialist is going to vote for the socialist party, a conservative for the conservative party, and so on, not because they analyse the parties' programmes, but because they trust their party more than the enemy faction. It somehow works, because the factions tend to be in approximative equilibrium, and nobody is going to attain excessive power.
A perfect direct democracy will deprive the voters of their favourite parties. I would expect two effects. First, wider disinterest in politics. After all, would you every day check politics.gov.ca to vote on dozens of proposals, such as 1997 grain trade limitation act, second amendment or wheelchair construction safety standards? I wouldn't. It is extremely difficult to get attention to more technical issues and most of the laws would be unpassable (if 50% of all voters was needed) or be decided by a small minority of interested partisans (if 50% of voters participating in the poll was the threshold). Which may be good or bad.
The second effect I would expect is emergence of some substitutes of the older party system. Now, the factions would not compete for the seats in a parliament, but rather organise massive campaigns in the media to persuade the citizens to click on their proposals. If nothing goes wrong, the resulting state will not be much different from the present.
And of course, there is the issue of compatibility of laws. It is far more probable that an incompatibility is spotted and fixed during the standard legislative procedure in the parliament than during a public internet poll.
So, limited applications of direct democracy are fine, but abolishing the representative system altogether will be probably detrimental.
Randomised democracy: Although people seldom tell good things about politicians, the politicians are still at least rudimentarily qualified for their jobs. I don't want to see a bunch of random men and women sitting in the government.