Ranting about Representative Democracy

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.

Looks like a feature, not a bug. I don't expect elected officials to be swayed by letters from random citizens, which have a lower signal-to-noise ratio than the advice of experts, academics, etc. Yes, in some cases, individual citizens will actually have insights of quality, but it may not be worth the effort to dig them up from the cranks.

It probably strongly depends of the topic, too - letters from random citizens on monetary policy or nuclear safety are probably best ignored, but it'd be normal for a mayor to respond to letters about municipal matters.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Back when I had the same question, I found http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/02/politics.html most enlightening. Once I realized it wasn't really about making good policy or making sure people were really represented it made much more sense.

I would like to know why we have representatives at all, would an aristocracy be much worse?

Yes, I think it would be,eventually. Much worse. Representative democracy provides a relief valve - if the ruling class or ruling party becomes too corrupt or too out of touch, the people can rise up and "throw the rascals out". In an autocracy, it takes a revolution or coup to accomplish change, and that can be much bloodier and messier.

That is the theory anyways. But when I try to find examples, they don't necessarily prove what I want them to prove. The Mexican electorate threw out the PRI, but it may not have made things better. India threw out Congress - I'm not sure India got better, though Congress maybe did. Japan threw out LDP - I suppose that was for the best.

For negative examples, I have Iran and Russia - two mostly failed non-violent revolutions. And then there are some cross-examples: Columbia, Peru, and Rwanda suffered bloody revolutionary violence even though they were mostly democratic.

Hmmm. The more I think about my examples, the less convinced I am of the advantages of representative democracy.

I think you're mixing up a lot of things here.

1) Not getting responses: I'm very surprised by this. Here in the UK, politicians do tend to answer letters, although often with a fairly formulaic response

2) Not being able to make a difference: mainstream views will inevitably be more important in a democracy than minority ones. But change does happen: what you need to do is try to persuade others to agree with your views. Or to join a group that's in the mainstream but also close enough to you.

3) Whether a democracy is beneficial over other systems: democrats don't have to just avoid rebellion. Plenty of dictatorial governments exist against the will of most of their people by having the army etc. in their control. Assuming for a moment that they don't express the 'will of the people' in a strong sense (which is debatable), democratic governments are better for the people because 1) they can be replaced while still powerful in the country by an understood constitution, so they don't hang on until physically forced out. 2) they have to live in constant fear of being kicked out by the people, which means they have to avoid very unpopular policies 3) under universal suffrage they have to worry at least a bit about all significantly sized minorities

Direct democracy is interesting, but has the attached risk of a lack of systematic policy. I'm no expert, but I believe that California has suffered because of its system of popular plebiscites/referendums: in essence, people vote for more public services and lower taxes. Any body/organisation benefits from long term direction of policy. Not to mention that not everyone can be an expert in national policy. You might be interested in this, though. It's an online system where people can vote, but can also give someone else the ability to vote for them on individual issues. So you could nominate an environmental expert who agreed with your Green policies to vote on those, but a free market person to vote on other economic issues if that was your economic position, for instance. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8046270/Jolitics-the-political-network-that-plans-to-empower-voters.html

As for rule by randomers, I think this could be quite interesting to form a second chamber to check legislation passed by the elected parliament. But it's a big ask and risks living up to the cliche about jury service: we'd be ruled by a senate of 360 (say) people who weren't clever, important or busy enough to get out of it. Or, worse, who started salivating with power-lust when they won the lottery. Not to mention that it makes fixing who's in charge much easier than elections, where people notice if unpopular people win.

If political activity is worthwhile for producing change, it's as a low probability, high payoff action. We live in large societies, with a single government acting over millions of people. That means that if you're able to make a beneficial change, it can have a huge benefit (multiplied over the millions of people who are influenced). But it also means that your chances of having an effect are tiny, since political power is divided among millions of people.

This is most obviously true of voting, but it also holds for other forms of political activity. A legislature that gets millions of letters and emails each year from constituents is unlikely to devote much attention or consideration to any one of them (apparently the US Congress gets 200 million; not sure about Canadian Parliament). And this would also be true with other political systems, including direct democracy and randomized democracy, unless you happen to be one of the few unusually influential people (like one of the people who's randomly selected in a randomized democracy).

Randomly grouping voters into districts might be worth considering. With geographic districts, incompetent and corrupt incumbents get reelected by bringing their district more than its share of national resources or by playing to regional prejudices (religion, etc.). If those options were off the table, character and competence might win more often.

The devil is in the details with both of these proposals.

The debate mappiing systems used in direct democracy proposal would determine any "attacks" on the same. How sensibly does a proposal have to be written, who determines that? How convincing does a rebuttal have to be ? Who decides that it was convincing? How many people minimum to support a proposal/to reject one? Does every proposal have to explain where the money is going to come from? If the government runs out of money, who decides the priority of ongoing programs? It's a lot of detail.

In the randomized democracy proposal, I would guess you would end up handing over a lot of power to the relatively stationary military and civil services. I can also foresee powerful dark arts practitioners being employed by the lobbyists who can completely profile a person within a week or so, and present proposals that will satisfy the ego of the newly selected person very quickly. But it would still be a little better than our system today.

The point is, it is difficult to modify mature political systems. You can support sea-steading or charter cities which will theoritically acccelerate the experimentation process. A sideways approach could be to support SENS and hope that long lives will give better future orientation to any politicians who are elected.

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 ..., lead a rebellion, or start my own country.

If you had a lot of money...think billions...and were willing to spend it, I damn well guarantee you could have your MP and plenty of other officials slobbering at your feet in order to have your attention.

That doesn't necessarily mean you would get your own way automatically. Politicians are promiscuous in their willingness to slobber at donors' feet. There are other countervailing forces -- other billionaires, for example. Also, even if they don't have the time or interest in responding to your individual letters or (worse) emails, your elected representatives are keenly attentive to mass polling data. If it looks like the majority of likely voters will think better of a politician for taking position X, even in the face of a really, really, well-financed campaign for the opposed position Y, then bet on most politicians going with position X.

P.S.

It's easy for someone with a lot of money to bid for politicians, but it's harder to buy them such that they stay bought.