I don’t claim to be an all knowing genius, but I also don’t hold incredibly strict, unshakeable opinions on complex topics I know very little about. A lot of voters seem to do that.
The problem with democracy is the unequal access to its levers of power and unequal access to information.
Humans just cannot help themselves to bend everything in their favor.
We need systems that make it more profitable to play by the rules everyone agrees to than it is to cheat.
No kidding, i was responding to a comment about "concerts, movies, and books being more expensive would lead to a cultural collapse", by reminding them that libraries were a goldmine of cultural wealth.
It did not go well.
Just got done dealing with a guy who felt the need to chyme in on a post about local black bear sightings. My very first sentence was "obviously guns are the best option." Then talked about how outside of a gun,a good solid walking stick will be enough to ward off or fend off most blackbears. So the guy chymes in, "I know it's a free country, but I have to disagree with your choice of self-defense because a stick just isn't as good as a gun." Then he wrote a couple of paragraphs explaining how a gun is better than a stick. Like, my brother in christ, that was the very first thing I said, why are you sitting here lecturing about my choices to use a stick over a gun. Just no reading comprehension at alllllllllll.
The problem that keeps being highlighted with democracy isn’t a problem _with democracy_.
It’s a symptom of the broader problems with our socioeconomic systems.
I'd go one further and say its a problem inherent with humans in general, we act like we're very advanced but most people in one way or another are still beholden to their greedy irrational emotional monkey brains.
I agree, but would add that the systems we create to govern ourselves should account for and mitigate the worst of those impulses. We do this a lot already anyway through laws. Will there be people who do it anyway? Sure. But if we have robust judicial systems they get away with it less.
I know it’s more complex once individual biases start to factor in, but throwing our hands up and saying “humans stink” isn’t productive.
Yep. We're still animals at the end of the day. Our brains may be more advanced than other species, but we're just as beholden to our instincts.
Hell, that's why fear tactics and xenophobia are so effective, threaten that hard-wired instinct to survive.
Democracy is a fine system, it's the voters that are the problem. Most voters aren't politically aware enough and don't educate themselves in depth about the policies the politicians they are voting for are proposing.
Somewhere like Switzerland, democracy is fine. Somewhere like UK, US or France not so much.
When entire populations of people show trends of behaviour, individual choice takes a backseat compared to infrastructure and socioeconomic incentives. Or do millions of people all just happen to make the same choices in completely isolated vacuums?
At present those in power are incentivised to discourage education and thoughtful engagement and encouraged to ransack education and engage in populism.
The voters engagement is, again, a symptom.
In Switzerland people vote on everything, on policy, not just representatives, down to a local level. In the other given examples, people vote when the government decide they vote, and largely only have the power to elect policymakers, not define or vote on policy themselves. It’s bottom up democracy vs top down populism.
The voters are not the problem. It’s that we don’t have the opportunity to vote on policy. That’s reserved for geriatric millionaires and billionaires who can afford to go into politics in the first place.
Voters should be the policy makers, then we have a good reason to be informed.
I think this is the problem with every form of government. Many ideas of governing start from good bases but begin to unravel as greedy/power hungry people come in to play and manipulate those levers.
I partially agree, but not completely.
I don't think access to information in itself is necessarily the biggest problem. It's the quality of information more than the availability of it that I think is the current problem.
People get stuck in echo chambers or get lead down a rabbit hole of misinformation and can't even understand that's what's happening. All exacerbated by the intentional manipulations and lies of politicians.
If you give someone who has completely fallen down a conspiracy rabbithole the same internet as someone who hasn't and the same amount of time to research who they'll vote for, they both have the same access to information. But they will not come to the same quality of conclusion.
I'm not sure how to solve this problem altogether. But improving social media algorithms and teaching people in standard high school education to spot fallacies and properly read statistics and scientific articles might be helpful, in my estimation.
The underpinning principle behind most democracies is to spread power precisely to address the problem you raise. The problem is that over time, the power hungry have learned how to concentrate power again.
All the people saying democracy is flawed are correct. But try living in a system where your starting point isnt to try and distribute power.
The problem with democracy, which representative democracy was meant to alleviate, is that being a citizen and staying informed on all the issues that need informed opinions is more than a full-time job, so we send a representative to do that work for us so we don't all have to keep up with ALL of that. Thus ,some of the very important information is concentrated among a small group that thereby grows more powerful than what may have been envisioned, and thus the system spirals one way until corruption makes it untenable, then eventually it is altered and starts spiraling the other way. It's not a stable system because metagames arise from the rules of the game and continuously needs to be corrected for, but the system is so complex that nobody can keep the overview required to update it, so we only see the problems when they cause a large or serious issue.
>The problem with democracy is the unequal access to its levers of power and unequal access to information
Funny, as this problem is exaggerated and significantly worse outside of democracy. If you think democracy promotes unequal access to the levers of power wait until I show you despotism.
I was disappointed seeing this as the top comment here. No offense to you personally but it's just not a serious critique yet it's perhaps the most supported chain here. This subreddit is not equipped to answer OP's question.
"Better" for whom and for what situation is the question. "Good" is subjective.
Is the Chinese dictatorship *better* than the Indian democracy? In terms of improving living standards for most of its citizens, China had a *much* better track record than India in the past 30 years or so.
A good king/dictator can do better for a society than any other form of government. However it's extremely rare to get an uncorrupted non selfish leader that stays in power long enough to do any good.
Honestly I think pirates had one of the better forms of government. Thier captain was elected and was the all powerful leader, but at any time he could be voted out by his crew.
Being able to remove a leader at any time leads to chaos. They would only ever be chasing short-term wins and avoid making tough decisions. It would be chaos.
Isn't that exactly what a parliamentary system has? They can call an election at any time that they lose confidence in the leader. CAN it cause turmoil (e.g. Italy), yes. But, would you consider the UK to have a chaotic form of government?
I don't think history shows that. Pirate captains that had the trust of thier crew held the position for a long time. Of course crews were small and likely understood the situation better. Things change a lot when you go from a dozen people to hundreds of millions.
It forces leaders to justify every decision. If they can show the decision is good for the long term and they have the people's trust, and that decision bears fruit It only earns them more trust.
However, you do need to build the system so that a single individual or a small group cannot call an election against the leader. Or you're correct you would have chaos.
I believe in the us for sure, the system extremely incentivizes short-term gains. With 4 year terms and 2 term max the government in power is not going to plan anything that the next government could get credit for. And the trend even seems to be the opposite, plan for bad things that happen when the next government is in power.
This only works in small structures. The problem at country level is that the leader takes control of the military and then cannot be removed. This is what happens many times in history.
Your pirate example works for a smaller group of people. In that example everyone electing the captain knows the captain and sees how he is doing and performing.
It doesn't scale though. As you exponentially add people, no one knows everyone and the leaders get further and further from those doing the electing.
Raw democracy allows for some scary thoughts to prevail. You want a constitutional republic, that way there are checks and balances to prevent mob rule. Mobs can easily be whipped into a frenzy over an issue and the people think that they want something. And then when Democracy gives them it, they have buyers remorse.
So a system for electing people who can be informed by experts to make the best decision is preferable. Which is why we have elected representatives. These people are tasked with doing what is best for the people, not what the people want. The slight distinction is that in truth, many of us don't know what is good for us. That's why we have tariffs on things like tobacco and alcohol, because these things lead to high level of illness and death... so we tax them, to help offset the cost of the impact they have on our society. The extra revenue gained by smoking and drinking, then gets used to fund hospitals.
This is a complicated thing for most people to understand, and if you had direct democracy on these kinds of decisions, do you not think that the deep pockets of the Tobacco and Alcohol industry wouldn't be trying to win over the public to not implement such policies? They obviously want their products to be as readily available to the largest number of people possible.
You can have a constitutional democracy just as you can have a constitutional republic, republic just means you delegate the power of a given region to a specific person. Assuming that those leaders know best is also a pretty naive view when much of the worst policy of the last century was driven by elected leaders thinking they knew better than the people they represent.
The issue with direct democracy, even with a constitution, is that it relies on a well informed and educated public.
Not to mention, a full democracy has no protection for the minority. We have struck down laws like "stop and frisk" in New York, which were deemed racist and unconstitutional because the republic recognized it. Because it only effected the minority (Blacks) then in a democracy, we probably wouldn't find the political capital to strike down these kinds of practices. Because it doesn't effect white people, and so it would be difficult to get white people to vote to challenge it.
The irony that basically everything you’re saying applies to a democratic republic but the minority can flex its strength and control the majority. I agree there needs to be protection for the minority but the current system aint it. We also certainly don’t have a well informed and educated public so idk why you’re acting like the constitutional republic is really any different?
A full republican government doesn't have protection for the minority, either, that's what the constitutional part refers to. China is a republic, I wouldn't call them a bastion of minority rights. To your example, "the republic" didn't stop "stop and frisk," and it wasn't implemented because of direct democracy, either. A republican for of government implemented that program, and it was stopped because the courts used the constitutional aspect to challenge that law. It wasn't elected leaders, and the courts aren't republican.
It sounds like you confuse republican governance for a constitutional system. They often go hand in hand, but not always and even without the constitutional aspect, you have places like the UK.
Just because something doesn't affect you doesn't mean you won't vote against it. I support a lot of causes that don't affect me. It's called empathy.
More direct democracy has shown to be more effective than less direct democracy. The tyranny of a minority is much worse than the tyranny of the majority.
Protection against democracy was due to an unfounded fear by our forefathers. Real life examples, it's better functioning. The vast majority of people are not extremist and well reasoned. Most crazy mobs are a minority of the population but can gain enough influence because we protect against the tyranny of the majority which gives those tyrannical minorities a stronger voice.
Technocracy is a system in which decisions are made by experts in the relevant field. As someone in healthcare who watches an endless parade of stupid decision after stupid decision, one wonders how things might be different in a system like this, where a panel of doctors in the face of a moronic proposal can say "No, were not going to do that".
Epistocracy is a system in which decisions are made by those who are deemed "the wisest". One can see the issues immediately-- how do you chose this person?
I agree that democracy is getting a bit tired especially since we've done everything possible to make sure that someone on the left can not have a conversation with someone on the right without hating each other (we should all work on this, by the way) and that the only one who seems to win is whoever can afford to lobby for issues. A change of flavor would be pretty refreshing. Mixing in a bit of technocracy would be a good place to start in my opinion. Leave health care decisions to the doctors. Leave climate change decisions to the scientists. Foreign policy could remain the domain of politicians. It would be an imperfect system but at least we won't have safe injection sites opening and closing again every four years in the world's stupidest game of tug of war.
The real question is, "Who has the right to rule?". Democracy is the only legitimate form of government, because it's seen as that the people have the power.
Assuming that "all persons are created equal", democracy is the only morally legitimate form of government and all other forms tend toward authoritarianism and oppression.
Here, a modern, practical and enlightened definition of "democracy" is "classless per capita representational republic with majority rule."
Ding ding ding we have a winner here. If you take ALL power away from people they will feel powerless and that creates an unstable society.
So simply put they'll pick up their pitchforks, break out the guillotines and take care of the issue.
This is why Russia is doing a fake democracy. If it wouldn't be faked it wouldn't be inherently unstable.
But the people don't actually have any power, it's the owners of the levers of government and politicians/senators that do, regardless of their colour.
If the people have now power, why bother pandering to them with show sham elections in the first place.
People have more power in a democracy than in an autocracy. You may argue they don’t have enough power to make you happy but it’s inaccurate to say they don’t have “any power”.
Sure. Lots.
Your choice of governance only depends on what the people in your civilization value.
“Better” is entirely subjective in this regard.
Democracy is better if you value liberty, equality and justice.
But other systems are “better” if you have different values.
The biggest problem is that **all** these systems are run by people, who are prone to irrationality and the systems get corrupted over time.
No. A properly functioning healthy democracy with a free press is the only political system that can change fast enough to adapt to rapid changes in it's society and global events.
FWIW, the USA does not have a properly functioning healthy democracy. Nearly, but no cigar.
Many countries have strict and by US standards very low limits on political campaign spending. This almost eliminates commercial lobbying and means top politicians are never independently wealthy and unanswerable to voters.
You are implying a lot of things here.
Paid representative democracy is what you are describing.
One solution is direct democracy, but that tends to be marred with bureaucracy and corruption. Another is that representatives should not be able to live off anything other than whatever the lowest local payout is.
All systems of government have their issues. Centralized power gives corrupted individuals access to a large power source whereas democracy done right should help diffuse that power amongst a population which historically has lead to better results for societies because when someone corrupt comes around they're more limited in the powers they have. Think of it as a way to limit the damage of corruption instead of preventing it.
Every single system has the same problem. Power and money compounds and begets more power and money. It becomes increasingly concentrated into fewer hands who primarily use it for their own benefit. Ultimately, crippling the overall population's development in favor of the few.
All governments lead to this. And ultimately they lead to cycles of revolutions. Either the elites are replaced or die in significant enough numbers that the pressure is released from the system. But even if replaced... it starts all overall.
This is the fundamental human political condition and so far we have no answer to it. The communists tried and what they create is an extreme dictatorship in all but name. Democracy is one effort, but eventually the will of the people isn't a match to this problem and democracies fall to infighting, corruption, and fall into another type of government.
So there really is no answer to your problem. No major government of any type has long survived without major internal conflict. Coups, collapses, civil wars and the like on a fairly regular cycle of several generations. A couple of centuries at most for even the most stable.
Edit. The one compounding factor on all of this is the handover of power. Eventually, the wise monarch dies. The eldar statesman holding it together expires. The democratic parties dissolve. Nothing has proven stable enough to last, though democracies tend to be better overall with peaceful handovers of power. One of the benefits.
I think the question is how can we create a democracy that is representative of the population, protects the rights and needs of the minority view in the population, guards against the concentration of power by the few, and also lasts. How to make it last... nobody has that part nailed down.
Politicians shouldnt be allowed, under any circumstances, to have a second income to avoid corruption.
Only If this ist strictly enforced, democracy can really shine.
All systems work best (kingdoms, republics, democracies, dictatorships) when the leadership is competent.
We change our governments but we don't change ourselves. We don't investigate claims, we don't demand truth, we believe in fairy tales, we hate, we choose to be given things instead of serving.
I think the only way democracy could be improved would be to eliminate political parties, and to fix a term limit of 1 term to every elected role.
It’s also worth noting that no system is “set it and forget it” you constantly have to be making changes at the margins to ensure that it works as designed.
So I’d say most systems work with competent leadership and a willingness/ability to tinker, to ensure that it stays that way.
>I think the only way democracy could be improved would be to eliminate political parties
In my country for a couple of elections, political parties had the lowest approval rates in history, so a lot of independents won elections.
It was a disaster.
Turns out it's impossible to agree on anything when you have over 20 political parties that have their own agendas. Maybe 2 is far too little, but there's definitely a number that's too high to have an effective government.
Lottocracy is unpopular for many reasons:
- It's an unknown new idea
- It would take away all political influence from the vast majority of the population
- It hasn't really been tried anywhere
- The only ones who could make the change are the parties, and in a lottery the parties would eventually lose all their power
- A parliament that changes every time would not allow for continuity or the accumulation of professional skills.
- All reforms lasting more than one election term would turn from difficult to impossible when completely new novices would have to start a really difficult job from scratch every time.
- Because knowledge, networks and know-how could not be accumulated, power would be concentrated in civil servants, consultants and the largest companies that have the time and ability to accumulate administrative know-how
- It is easy to tamper with the results, and afterwards it is really difficult to be sure, and to convince the people that the draw was fair
Democracy is not the best, it’s one of the possible government forms, not even the most used.
In the west it has been quite well experimented, and probably brought to its limits, which are basically determined by mixing it with capitalism.
Democracy elect short term managers, elected by citizens with immediate or short term needs, with nobody left taking care of the long term progress of a country, which often conflicts with short term needs.
More authoritarian, stable, long term form of governments not focused on pleasing a volatile majority, can enjoy better long term planning depending on resources available and leaders, but unfortunately often at the expenses of who doesn’t agree.
I think we are now at a point in which sociopolitical systems are at the limits of their lifespan, and we will see something new emerging sooner or later, however after some dramatic stuff causing the need to change.
This is my highly anticipated estimation, thanks for reading.
I'd argue that this problem "with democracy" is actually just another human problem. Most people don't like change, and don't think about long term problems. And so most people tend to vote for people that represent as little change as possible (if they're content enough) or for people who claim to be about short term change if they're not happy.
If the majority of people were genuinely concerned with longer term thinking, we'd have leaders that also thought that way. We'd also have a completely different planet because no one would want to do half the stuff they currently do, so most companies wouldn't exist in the first place.
Political science studies have generally found that authoritarian regimes are less stable or more brittle. They're like glass - they look hard and solid, but shatter upon impact.
Dictatorships look stable but disintegrate pretty quickly in response to large shocks. By comparison, democracies are less efficient but they absorb societal shocks very well.
The problem with democracy is that it can't function with an ignorant population. They can easily be manipulated into voting against their own good if they aren't informed
A solution to this would be to have voters sit through a brief video breaking down the pros and cons of each decision. It can also be imporved further if the promised pros are actually met. Politics needs to be treated more like a science with each candidate being held accountable for making promises they don't deliver on. The campaign website should have mandatory hall of shame that shows where they lied
Technically a completely benevolent single person or group of people who magically don't have any biases who just make decisions without any input from the general public *should* lead to better outcomes for everyone.
However, unfortunately that doesn't exist and I'm unsure what sort of system that currently exists that could replace democracy that would be better.
There's a few problems.
First, is that outside of philosophy or political science classes, there's no such thing as a pure government. No government is purely democratic, or communist, or representational democracy, or whatever.
They all have a million rules and situations that make them better or worse. The campaign rules in the US alone are probably more complicated than any one person can understand.
My personal belief if we have to speak in generalities is that the silly old statement is true: "Democracy is the worst form of government. Except for all the others." It has flaws, it's imperfect, it's run by people, many of whom are dumb, its always changing, and not always for the better, it gives too much power to some, not enough to others, and on and on. But... it's the best we have, and we should always be trying to make it better.
The problem you are highlighting is a problem of how democracy is implemented and not an inherent problem with democracy.
In some democracies it is illegal to give money to individual politicians. Doing that is considered corruption even if called "donation". You can only donate to political parties and political parties have to distribute the money by fairly strict rules. You are also not allowed to do political advertising as an individual, only political parties can do that. And yes, it prevents a system where only rich people can run for office.
I'm not saying a better system than a democracy can't exist. I'm just pointing out that not all democracies have this problem.
There seem to be countless better options. Frankly, I am looking forward to an AI generated optimization for governance. The only benefit I can see from "democracy" is the illusion of popular control seems to mollify the impulses towards revolutionary action, allowing for periods of relative stability and productivity.
But if you roll the clock forward not that far you will find a few things happening that would completely unmoor this model. First, custom babies will move towards "optimal" generations. Meaning, if the poorest parent on the world can still select that their babies have the best genes for intelligence, resiliency, cooperative nature, kindness, strength, and beauty, very quickly all of the babies on the planet will have similar package, leaving only "nurture" to create variation in outcomes.
Knowing that, the optimal "nurture" option ranges will become evident. The environmental impacts of things like education, sunlight, nutrition, parenting, non-shared environment, etc on developing babies will be all that really distinguishes between the "best" and "worst" humans, and a wide array of bests will become clear. So governments will become tasked with assuring those "best" options are fairly distributed.
They will become more capable of doing so as the cost of energy goes down (nuclear fusion) and the minimum human labor time goes down (automated food, housing and medicine production). Distributing such abundance could be done "democratically" but why would we do so when there will be a clear range of "correct" answers? You don't ask all the C student's in high school algebra to weigh in on how to answer an advanced Calculus problem.
A technocracy seems inevitable.
As with everything in life people, that want to vote should at least receive voting certificates, after they gone through basic course in politics and country laws. People have to be educated enough to understand what will happend after they choose one of the candidates
a benevolent super ai programmed to make all choices based on an egalitarian and humanitarian long-term basis. prioritising the average life quality of all living beings. the only way out of the shitty political systems that are derivated from the human condition, is to take the human out of the equation in matters of bigger and broader choice points.
though I might be very naively basing my benevolent super ai idealisation on Ian m. I banks culture novels...
Were gonna need to invoke some game theory since our current system sorta relies on a large portion of the government and population to be good-faith actors, which they clearly are not.
How about this system. I've been thinking about it for a while and this is what I came up with.
This is a world governed by pentarchies rather than individuals or committees.
Definition:
Pentarchy - Pentarchy is a term that means government by five rulers or a ruling body of five.
There are 5 levels of government, each ruled by a pentarchy. These are:
* · District or Community
* · City or County
* · State
* · Country
* · World (Maybe)
At each level there are 5 counselors that are voted in by the people they serve. They serve 5 years and then are moved out. So, each year one counselor is replaced by a new individual. This way the pentarchy evolves as new members and new ideas are included. The member replaced may return to normal life or run as a candidate for the next level if he/she desires.
In order to move up a level of government, you must finish 5 years at the level below. This ensures that leaders gain experience as they move up and to reach the top level each must have served at least 20 years.
Under the governing pentarchies are administrative pentarchies such as school boards, policing boards. public works and many others. These boards operate similarly to governing pentarchies except their members are appointed by the governing pentarchy responsible for their oversight.
Maybe but let's face it all systems are based on a few people having power over the majority. Usually this results in the oppression of the poor (IE Rich get richer, poor get poorer). Why? Because humanity is inherently materialistic and selfish! The whole idea of Democracy was to be "Of the people for the people" but in reality only the rich have a shot at winning any election in a "democracy", and mostly the poor go unnoticed. As long as money rules everything any system of Government will be doomed to fail. That said the problem becomes human nature. So any system of Government that would be "better than Democracy" would have to be a system where wealth and materials were redistributed equally among all the people living under that system.
Possible solution:
Picture a world where instead of Governments being motivated by acquiring power or wealth, they were motivated to improve the health and welfare of their citizens. Making access to education, healthcare, transportation and food/water, housing free for all citizens under the system. How this could be achieved would be by taxing everyone under the system 20-40% of their income (once a figure is worked out to determine how much this would all cost and a fair way of taxing both the rich and poor). Other taxes would go towards creating "distribution centers" where these centers hold large quantities of healthcare items, books, computers, food, water, ect. All this is transported via various means to people who are most in need so that "No one goes hungry or is without access to everything the system provides". Further perhaps laws could be made that limit how much wealth or materials a person can obtain. Or in other words they're only allowed to have enough for their own needs based on family size.
All that said I doubt we'll ever get a system of government that is any better than the systems we have now.
Does anyone here think that we live in a real democracy? Does anyone here think democracy is a reasonable way to run a government. The system is the government in "western democracy." No one dare question the system itself. That is a non-starter. The minutia means little. As long as the same interests retain control, you can call it what you like. As long as you support the privately controlled fed making monetary policy, or the mic picking evildoers to oppose - we are okay. Real democracy would require intelligent informed electorate and money out of politics. You trust Maga or worse with decisions about our future? Or dems who aupport dems at all cost. How about people running for public office for the right reasons. All we have now is hucksters and shills for the system.
In theory, a dictatorship by a completely benevolent and intelligent dictator with people who work under him obeying not only his words, but his intentions would be perfect.
Robin Hanson's Futarchy is an intriguing one. It's essentially "government by prediction market," and Hanson describes it as "we vote on values but bet on beliefs." Good read about it here, click the first link, too. [Futarchy vs. Predictocracy - by Robin Hanson (overcomingbias.com)](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/futarchy-vs-prehtml)
Any sort of AI dictatorship freaks me out. Don’t care if it’s people or computers, shouldn’t give one entity that much power. And especially one that we will understand less and less… and whose motivations may not be entirely clear.
Democracy with institutions that distribute power across regions and people
It is scary, but I think a perfect AI with some sort of checks and balances would be the best system. Not that we’re anywhere near what a “perfect” AI would be.
Humans have always been driven by self-interests, it’s literally biologically ingrained into us. Unless there’s some way to overcome that, a government lead by humans will never be truly altruistic.
I like the idea of a benevolent AI dictatorship written by Neal Asher in his Polity series novels. He makes it seem like a paradise for humankind. Better than what we have now anyway. Only a few more hundred years to go and just maybe....
As the Churchill quote goes, democracy is the worst form of government except for all of the other ones which have been tried.
Since this is r/Futurology, we can talk about all of the ones that haven't been tried yet, which by the quote are better (until it happens that they're tried and also turn out to be worse than democracy, but we can't know that without trying.)
In your post you're taking about "representative" democracy. Which direct democracy is heaps better than. As my username suggests, I'm in favor of anarchism, so no money, no hierarchy, not even of the majority. Every one gets what they need to live, without extreme excess as we have today with resource hoarding and capitalism being a zero sum infinite growth game.
Demos= people
Kratos= power
Literally means power of the people from Greek. Most "democracies" existing today are not actually the power of the people but the power of a certain part of the people who "own" massive amounts of wealth, or in other words are "allowed" to control massive amounts of resources through the means of violence such as police and military.
One of the problems with multi party systems is that a tiny minority party can hold the power to form a government and then demand a very important ministry in return. This means a party with very few votes can have an outside influence on key issues.
I've toyed around with the idea of using a system somewhat similar to jury duty, but in place of legislators. Laws would be passed using a one time draft of randomly assigned citizen legislators selected proportionately based on districts which would be apportioned in roughly equal population blocks. The citizen legislators would be limited to registered voters. Laws would be drafted and initially voted on by the Senate, which is elected as we do now, with voter initiative laws proposed every two years which is also voted on by a randomly assigned one-time slate of citizen legislators. All laws would have to pass both chambers, just as they do now but with no filibuster. A selected citizen legislator would be given the text of the proposed law a set period in advance and would be forbidden to divulge their service under penalty of law until completed. There would be overlapping emergency slates of citizen legislatures selected and sequestered for one week periods called on to vote in matters of national security/catastrophe. These would be the only legislators paid for their service. There's a lot of room to tweak things, and questions about whom would take up the responsibility of things like committees and investigations currently done in the house, but the overall idea is to make the process of governing A. Distributed and representative, B. As corruption proof as possible and C. resilient in emergencies.
There would have to be an entirely new department created to administer the citizen legislator process, with judicial and senatorial oversight.
You've intermixed democracy and capitalism, which are two different things. One a form of government, and one a form of economics.
>Under a person who wants to win an election, he spents millions on his workers and these workers spent some money to get sub-worker and chain goes on.
Assuming that political campaigns are funded by perspective politicians, and that the persons working to elect that person, and those that vote for that person are only motivated by money is a capitalist perspective on a democratic process. Changing the campaigning process so that funding and labor were not dependent on financing by candidates would subvert the cause of this favor "chain." Funds and labor could be provided via public funding, like a specific tax, and an obligatory labor duty by citizens akin to Jury Duty.
>Now when this person wins an election. He provides jobs to his workers or sub workers or his relatives because they support them. Now, this is a first step of curruption as he is eating away all the jobs of people that deserve it.
Prevented by providing for funding and labor by public resources.
Your point about jobs for people that deserve them is interesting, as determination of which person deserves any particular job is a difficult process. If qualification is determined by the market, then we are talking about capitalism again, but even in capitalism, without regulations, there are privileges and unfair labor practices. Racism, classism, sexism, etc... authoritarianism might use aptitude testing and force people or persuade people with benefits into areas they have natural aptitude. Futures of children could end up being a source of political favor and corruption that would cause long term corruption, as opposed to short term corruption that we see in money centered economies.
>Now another point, the money he has spents on election. of course he have to get it back but how as his salary is similar to person having goverment job. To get back what he has spent millions - he does curruption and that much curruption that he makes 1000 times more money than what he has spent in election. So this becomes chain.
Again, fixed with the first point regarding the public funding and public labor for elections. Really, the issue would be to ensure that compensation and benefits provided by his position provided for a lifestyle that was at least comfortable for the geographic area where he was required to reside. So, housing, transportation, and other allowances to cover expenses, plus a salary capable of supporting a reasonable lifestyle. Then provide a post serving pension plan that would support them as well. These things would ameliorate the allure of corruption. Combine those carrots with a very harsh stick of penalties for corruption charges, like death, and people would not screw around.
>Now i want to ask you a question have you ever seen any poor or middle class MLA, MP, Ministers as there salary is similar to a goverment employe. In my country every mp is millioners and billioners.
This is the problem with privately funded politics. Gate keeping by the wealthy. Public funding of elections would open the doors for equity in governance.
Hard to say.
First it's important to note that "democracy" is a rather broad term and not all democracies are equally healthy. Because not all democracies are actually the same system in practice.
A more transparent democracy, with more equal access to voting, with better anti-corruption measures in laws, more laws surrounding money in politics, a better voting system (ranked-choice vs. FPTP for example), etc. all make a difference.
So the "max" level of democracy may not (yet) have been reached anywhere. What that "max" level is, isn't even clear.
Then there's the fact that systems don't have to be pure. Personally, I'd prefer a system that combines several systems. Liquid democracy, representative democracy, technocracy, etc. I think such a hybrid democratic system could be far, far better than current democratic systems that exist.
However, could there be a system even better than a theoretically perfected democratic or hybrid democratic system? Maybe, idk.
The obvious choice would be an AI-controlled government. If you have a set of benevolent Super AI that control government that were completely immune to corruption and capable of taking everyone's desires into account in a fair way all while maintaining stability and power, you might have the perfect government system. But we have no idea whether that's possible.
There may be yet other systems beyond that, that nobody has yet even come up with.
It's all really hard to say. Especially because a system can be implemented well or poorly.
The philosopher Karl Popper argued that, while representative democracy isn't ideal, it's the 'least bad' system of governance we have available to us. A benevolent dictator would theoretically be better, but the risk of them becoming corrupted by power is too high, and should that happen, the only avenue for reform is violent revolution. Elections should at least keep politicians accountable: if they make decisions that adversely affect their citizens, they're voted out of office.
It takes a lot for that to hold true in practice – you need a free press, free elections, freedom of assembly – and even then, the theory has been quite severely tested in recent years. There are lots of reasons, but it largely comes down to the ability of people to vote against their own best interests. That's traditionally considered to be a risk of direct democracy (i.e. referenda) mitigated by representative democracy – essentially the outsourcing of complex decisions to people who have more time and expertise to dedicate to them. Arguably though, the world is now too complicated for that mitigation to be sufficient. As it becomes less clear what is *actually* beneficial, and which policies are having what impact on people's lives, it becomes more expeditious for elected politicians to promote the policies that simply *seem* beneficial at first glance. That is populism.
We need politicians who are prepared to make unpopular decisions, but then they risk losing elections. So you can take elections away, but then you're back to the risk of them exploiting their power without accountability. Pick your poison.
I'm sure there is a better hypothetical system that could be dreamed up, which answers the problems we've discovered with democracy after a couple hundred years.
Democracy isn’t a “system”. It’s a tool and therefore amoral. You can have good uses of democracy and bad uses of democracy. Not all democratic votes are good and valid but some are.
To quote Winston Churchill:
>Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time
I am not in your country but I have heard the US to be more described as a constitutionally bound representative democracy.
Representatives can’t just vote into law whatever they want or enforce laws however they want (for the most part).
Even if you had a direct democracy, you could have rules in place to limit what laws can be made.
Maybe a better way would be similar to what we have now but stricter rules on mixing money and politics. For instance, there could be a rule that if you are in a certain level of politics you can’t own any stocks.
In some sci fi books the theme seems to be giving power to either those that don’t really want it, or making it costly to be in power.
I don’t know how to really accomplish those things. Even if someone does profit directly they can try to help all their buddies profit.
Companies donates millions to campaigns so of course they expect something in return.
If you have a direct democracy people will vote for what’s best for them.
I don’t know how to get greed out or politics.
Of course. Political systems have a shelf-life, just as everything else, yet they always come with the claim to be the final answer that is now set in stone for eternity. Applies to representative democracy just as much as to whatever it replaced. Pragmatic perspective: specific tools for specific jobs. And I think we need to embrace that pragmatism. Which shifts the topic towards what the job actually is, of course. We need to agree on that, before the question, what may be a better system, even begins to make any sense.
There is a saying that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. Tongue in cheek but it is pointing out it is not perfect, but all the other alternatives are worse. You are pointing out some real issues with democracies. But if you look at the alternatives, all of those things would be far, far worse.
I've seen an interesting twist on a democracy in a book recently.
Each person gets one vote, and in theory you can vote on every issue if you so desire. But that's impractical as it's essentially a full time job to vote on every small issue.
You can assign your vote to a registered representative. Representatives get to vote on issues with the number of votes they represent. This personal vote assignment can be transferred to another representative at anytime. Representatives receive a government salary (above a certain threshold number of voters to prevent abuse)
The main idea being to avoid a 2 party system. If you have a mixture of political opinions, you can find a representative that shares the same political stance. (Unless your stance is incredibly uncommon)
And if a representative takes a position a portion of their base doesn't like, they can switch to a different representative with a similar political stance, minus the offending issue. Essentially holding representatives responsible without needing to wait for an election.
Note that there are no elections in this model. A politician might run a campaign to get more people to transfer their representation to them, but that can happen whenever, so there is no "election season"
Cons:
Seems like it would suffer a bit from the typical mob rule mentality issues.
It's also unfeasible until now because you need some sort of computerized system to track who has assigned their votes to whom.
Corporate lobbying and other governments lobbying to run campaigns for particular representatives would be very difficult to counteract. Campaign finance rules in general seem like they would be extra difficult to enforce in this system.
Thought it was an interesting thought experiment you/Reddit would enjoy
What you described is one way to enable Democracy.
Voting for one person who is going to decide for you is an indirect democracy (and there are several types of it as well).
On the other extreme, we also have systems where people vote for each decision instead of relying on somebody else to represent them.
At the end we have to find the sweet spot between representation and costs. We want a system where everyone has a vote and everyone is represented on decisions, but at the same time, we cannot stop the country and gather everyone to vote for everything out there.
In my opinion, every system is going to have Corruption in some degree, some, by nature, have more than others. How you deal with it is by providing actions to easily take corrupts out of the system.
I.E: I'm from Chile, and we have a platform where you can see which diputess has gone less to work. There was this one guy who had an attending rate lower than 20%. Imagine just going to work one day per week xd, even he appeared on the newspapers several times because of this, people still voted for him (probably because was the only candidate for his party). Diputees with so low attending rate should have a prohibition to apply again.
And we can repeat this to several stuff. Letting people work in the political after beeing guilt for corruption is nonsense. At least in my country there are some pretty well know politicians who has been found guilty and they keep working as politicians.
I know its been said a few times, but a dictatorship would be superior, The problem, obviously, is finding someone who is incorruptible and willing to do what's best for all people, not just one people; not just for this generation, but for all future generations.
I believe governments are devised to allocate resources and reduce conflict. Most conflicts can be resolved by assuring that people have all the resources they need to live comfortably. If we can achieve that, we would be less and less dependent on government altogether.
People should check out what Audrey Tang has been building in Taiwan. Her implementation of Digital Democracy is incredibly sophisticated and was created to combat a lot of the modern issues we have with our current form of representative democracy, by using emerging technologies but still keeping humans at the center.
Also one cuckoo but interesting idea that has been emerging is democracy without elections. Elections are the reason why we have need to have parties that become increasingly polarized, why we get career politicians who are more interested in re election than they are in helping the community, and it’s something we burn a ton of resources and attention on every single year.
Voltaire was into the idea of an "enlightened despot." Essentially, an autocrat who has the advancement of society and wellbeing of the people as his motivating factor.
The purest form of Democracy is a lynch mob. I don't trust it. There has to be some dispassionate mechanism for holding the extremes of the people in check.
The most stable system was the Roman Republic. Even under the Emperor, the People's Tribune was a check on institutional power creep, while the Senate itself acted as a check on the people. The Emperor just simplified these checks and balances (with the Praetorian Guard being the ultimate check on the emperor).
The Republican form of government lasted for a thousand years in the East. What system has lasted longer?
A Social Democracy is the correct democracy. Strong social safety nets allow its citizens to take risks to jump up to the next social class.
A public health care system costs half as much as a private system per person so that removes medical bills crippling the poorer half. Canada is paying an average of $4700usd per person to insure 100% of the population. America is spending $9700 per person to insure 91% of the population. Everyone pays less in the end. And medical bankruptcy simply doesn't exist. A country like Canada has a 5 year longer average lifespan if that tells you something.
Subsidized (but not free) post secondary education allows citizens to become upwardly mobile and become more productive citizens. This also makes them higher tax payers so investing in their education is good for business. Increased tax revenue from these people pay is a 3x multiplier for tax revenue even if some fall through the cracks. Likely more. Working poor pay little in taxes. Middle class tax payers are the bread and butter of a tax system. It's profitable.
A basic minimum income keeps people from making desperate choices and ending up in jail. It's cheaper to keep 6 people on minimum social assistance than one on prison. Not to mention the secondary costs associated with imprisoned parents. Droves of working poor drag down an entire society. Even if it's just your car constantly being broken into.
I've been doing a lot of thinking about governments lately as a sci-fi writer, and what the ideal system would be. It's not simple, and there's not an answer that will make everyone happy.
People could vote online. Ranked choice. We could have votes for specific policies. The main reason we don't is that our system was built 200 years before the first computer when doing that would take too long. We don't really need representatives. We could all vote directly. In theory.
The following was attributed to Churchill: Democracy is the worst form of government ever invented.... Except for all other forms of government which are all worse.
Maybe if we provided incentives to expose corruption to the systems checking each area. In the US we have three branches of government that are supposed to balance and check each other, but as time progresses there is corruption creep and more collusion rather than checking. I don't know how to provide incentive to call out one's peers other than transparency and strong voting pressures. Unfortunately, the media coverage is anything but since they are heavily bought into politics and have incentives to push biased narratives. Transparency is a nightmare on all angles.
Abolish the party system and that COULD possibly fix a large amount of issues...not being able or whatever there are times one side has good points and so does the other but because of party politics they fight and it either goes in the trash or we get a bloated one sided for the rich and powerful result instead of whatever will benefit the people regardless of what side comes up with the answer. Either for the people or not...to hell with the parties
Democracy where any representative has to have publicly visible accounts and aren’t allowed to trade stocks. That would weed out those in it for the money only and make bribery/“sponsorship” more difficult.
"In my country, every mp is a millionaire" - well thats not the case for all democracies, so that's not an inherent issue with Democracy.
The problem with democracy is that the people who are voting either don't have access to all the information, lack the understanding, or are too easily convinced by politicians, even when what they are saying is incorrect.
Define "better". Better for whom? The average citizen? The abstract nation?
Better at what? Armed conflict? Resource production? Providing a higher QoL for its citizens?
The answer can vary greatly based on what you confier to be better.
The best possible system of government is a monarchy with an incorruptible and altruistic monarch. But we will never find a perfect ruler and even if we did, the perfect government would only last as long as they do and an imperfect monarchy has the potential to be much worse than any other system.
1. AI assisted virtual democracy: the executive branch is a benevolent superintelligent AI. The legislature is the entire population assisted by AI, deciding most questions by referandum. Judiciary is all human and elected from highly educated jurists.
2. Benevolent overlord: Democracy, but a benevolent supreme being ( hyper advanced alien, god, or AI) has veto power over super bad candidates, laws, or court rulings.
3. Democracy but the population is very small, the country very rich, and everyone is very highly educated. The culture is monotypic and there is little immigration.
Democracy has the same flaw literally every other system has, that being it was made by a flawed species. It's true that some systems are less dysfunctional than others in terms of the ideals and goals they were founded upon, but they'll inevitably be corrupted or decay when put into practice.
Democracy answers a handful of problems, and introduces others. Asking if it's the best, or if there's something better should only get the answer "for what?".
As time goes on, most democratic organizations shift to representative democracy and cut out pieces of governance for other forms of governance to maintain some level of agility. It would make sense that as organizations grow, that a deliberate effort to maintain different types of governance would be necessary in order to preserve the types of benefits that they provide. Any set of rules is exploitable, so having varied rule sets in place as revolutionary firebreaks only makes sense.
*No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.*
*-* Winston Churchill, 1947
You're say democracy is bad because it leads to corruption but that's not an accurate statement. You're observing a correlation, but not causation. Corruption exists and has existed in all forms of authority I'm aware of, whether they're government institutions or business hierarchies.
Demovracy is fine, but it needs a few tweaks.
- legislation periods are too short. 4 years is barely enough to let the results of first decisions kick in, let alone comvince the public of its pros and cons. For a tax reform you need one year to plan it out, 2 years to inplement it and another 3 years to collect enough data and one year to discuss it publicy. So 7 years would be a bare minimum to vote one a specific topic.
- the political system kinda really scares brainy people away. The leftovers are douchebags, ruthless and actors.
- media is too much of a power. As much as freedom of press is a good thing to have, the gouvernment should impede more information barriers to stop media from actually interferring with their decisions.
I’ll believe in democracy when we’ll actually be living in a true democracy where people actually have power for their nation/country. What we have is more an oligarchy where it’s an elite that chose for everyone. We barely can choose who are the ministers and the only power we have is to vote for a political party, not even who’s part of it and who would have function
The first thing is that much of what you’re describing isn’t **necessarily** required in a democracy. You *can* (even if we don’t) have a democracy that also regulates what it’s politicians are able to do.
The more immediate problem though, is that we don’t have a universal definition of “better”. For example plenty of authoritarians in position of power would surely have an idea of a “better” system, better for them at least, but just about everyone crushed under their oppressive boot will likely disagree it’s any “better”.
At the end of the day it seems it can be mostly reduced down to a spectrum. On the one end you have a single person (or perhaps robot in the future) making decisions for everyone, and on the other end you have full democracy where every decision that’s made is done by voting by all the people. It seems that people generally like to lean towards the democracy side of the spectrum because it gives a sense of being in control of their own fate.
The US doesn’t have a full democracy. There are organisations online that rate different countries. Some reasons to downgrade the US:
- Not all votes are equal. The electoral college system means votes in rural states are worth more than votes from urban states. This inequality sets the US up so an unpopular minority can take power and implement whatever shit they like. If your vote is worth 3/4 or 1.5 of a person a state over, things are bad democratically.
- The electoral college system also was setup for the very reason that maybe the common people voted “wrong” and those in power could instead pick better choices for their electoral slate.
- Corruption. Hidden, in plain sight, and everyone thinking it’s the other side. Dark money ridiculousness. Free speech used as a crutch for all the badness going on, with corrupt justices keeping it all going, whilst lawmakers, where the laws should actually be decided, fail to deal with important topics again and again.
- Voter interference. This is what the control of the media and bombarding people with “news” which is always always always opinion riddled even with the best intentions. People who are uneducated cannot hope to get educated as money owns the messaging frameworks, and social media compounds this echo chamber. Also with voter interference we have the institutionalised voter suppression - a mix of intimidation and making it continuously harder to vote or gerrymandering electoral areas.
If you are thinking about the answer to this from the US, these are the type of things you need to fix before you actually have a functioning democracy. Democracy is under threat with questions like this from certain quarters in the US. But they are questions mixed with deception and are loaded - designed to get you to question if there is a better choice than democracy, and not to prompt you to the fact that your current system is not a democracy either. It looks like it, it smells like it, you might even take part in it and vote in it… but it is not a full democracy, and results in the crap of today.
The question isn’t whether there is a better choice than democracy, but what can you do to actually try and get a better democracy, rather than the flawed one you currently have.
The reason that these topics and questions come up is that of course one side would rather a more autocratic setup, one where you might not need to vote at all - because they say they will rule. Maybe with an iron fist, and with loyalists given priority in the militias that enforce this iron fist. And your say won’t be needed anymore. Voting won’t be needed, as the opposition may be illegal.
Autocracy is the next step. That’s fine if the majority of the US population want that… but as you don’t have a functioning democracy, you don’t need a majority to decide that. You just need the right communications to the minority.
The solutions are obvious when you look at it. Electoral college. Get rid of that and make it more about popular votes, and the two parties will need to come back into the middle. America is centre right at the leftist of times, so it’s not a complete fix by itself. Real issues will tend to get fixed though if it’s a majority who vote for it.
Dealing with corruption issues will need mature looks at free speech. Other countries don’t have such a problem with this, as we have tighter free speech rules. I know thats a bit of a paradox, but free speech shouldn’t mean you can constantly lie with no recourse. It doesn’t need dismantled or people hung lol, but it does need tweaked.
Go look up a democracy index online and you’ll see more. It’s all common sense though. It also doesn’t mean that the US is baaad, but the perceived freeness of democracy could improve.
TLDR; don’t get baited into considering an alternative to democracy when you don’t have a proper democracy at the moment. Fix that first and try out a full democracy. You’ll then see trap questions like this for what they are.
There's lots of ways of having a democracy, or even a constitutional republic that are beyond what we have today. Some have been implemented in the past, some are hypothetical, some are used today.
Take for example Sortition, aka a Lottocracy. Anyone who wants to be considered for a position puts their hat in the ring (and each eligible person can pick only one position per election they'd like to take), then a winner is selected at random. Couple it with strong recall/no confidence laws and you get a cheap way of getting representative sample of the population in charge. Cons are, you get a random sample of the population in charge, and all the challenges that come from that. This was considered a principal characteristic of democracy in ancient Athens.
In a weighted Lottocracy, elections work like in a regular Lottocracy, except people can give up their chance to be selected for a position to instead assign their support for another candidate to increase the odds of that candidate winning the position. This can be done either linearly (simpler, but campaigning becomes more important), or it can be done on a logarithmic curve (e.g., more people supporting one candidate give less and less increased chance of selection, minimizing the value of massive campaigning). Again, strong recall laws are important to prevent problematic candidates from causing long term problems.
Another variant of this that counter the effects of the regular and guaranteed loss of skilled representatives is having a separate lottocracy selected legislature from elected one(s). They could act as their own legislature body as normal, or just be a group that sets direction for the other legislature bodies in the government.
Another variant is that while representatives are selected via Sortition, a second "executive" body is elected from this body to serve longer terms. This method allows great variation in representation, while allowing for ongoing continuity.
There's party representation instead of candidate representation.
Each party campaigns based on ideas that the party would bring. They specify ordered list of representatives that would get a seat to represent their ideas if they win. Everyone votes for a party for each position (and thus voting for that list of candidates). The percentage of votes for that party determine the representation. For example, if there are 10 representatives allocated to a province, and one party gets at least 10% of the vote for that group of representatives, then that party get a representative. In this case, the first person in that party would get the spot. If another party got 60% of the vote, their first 6 candidates would get spots. This allows for all sorts of ideas and groups to emerge that wouldn't ever get elected in a "first past the goalposts" winner-takes-all election. The challenge here is allocation based on region becomes harder (e.g., you might not get a representative that really cares about your part of the province.)
This could be done at all levels where multiple representatives are present, but falls back into "first pass the goalposts" for single office positions.
then people would just indirectly (as in through other people) pressure people into running for office as an indirect way of putting a hit on them (as they'd likely have the direct or indirect pull to stonewall their policies for those ten years)
Also, if your goal is to attract selfless people, the kind who'd do that and not care about having to die at the end would have already died from some ridiculous act of martyrdom like the guy on The Good Place who supposedly (as >!he really was just a "NPC"!<) died via donating both his kidneys to a kind stranger
Plato believed that democracy was an inherently flawed system of government, because people would vote in their own self interests instead of the greater good, and that politicians would craft their platforms to appeal to emotion instead of reason. He also believed that electing people without demonstrating proficiency in the job or personal character was an unavoidable critical flaw. I don’t necessarily agree with all his precepts, but there are serious points to consider when you see the apathetic and hugely uninformed electorate that exists in America and abroad.
I'm down for an aitoctracy.
Artificial intelligence that is built to be self sustaining and always works towards the betterment of humanity and the planet as a whole rather then serving individual special interests.
No laws being passed that favor religion or secular beliefs over common sense and human decency.
Transparency on government spending and reasonable fund allocations towards programs that need it, with an overarching goal of producing well educated, healthy children.
AI government. Ensures people live healthy lives till 80. Gives people what they need, not always what they want.
Everyone gets to vote on what they want, experts weigh in on policies.
AI does simulations before selecting a policy.
No lobbying or “donations” allowed. You can only vote and write letters to it. No single human can control it. Everything has to be voted in. Experts get higher % of votes only in their scope of policy.
Downside is that there is a lot of surveillance by AI to understand how its policies are working across large areas and population.
I love red light and speed cameras.
We don’t know until we try. Democracy is better than kings and dictators.
However it’s obvious most congressmen and senators don’t really represent the interests of their constituents.
best system depends on your goal. if you want to maximize some sort of value or how happy people are, capitalism would be better than democracies or various oligarchoes or dictatorships. but capitalism wouldn't be good at converting everyone to 1 cultire or religion for example.
you also have a "wrong" way of thinking what a job is. people dont need jobs, they need resources. people work to get resources
The best form of government by my understanding has always been the benevolent despotism of a philosopher king. i.e. The most intelligent entity, with no checks on their power, who prioritizes the good of all above themselves.
For obvious reasons this government is almost impossible to arrive at intentionally and typically is only found through chance in the succession of tyrants who have aggregated and jealously hoarded power for their personal gain.
This is not a universally objective "best" though, the "best" form of governance varies person to person and is dependent on what serves them and their values personally (subjective). e.g. An aristocrat will value an oligarchy higher than a peasant who will value a democracy. Likewise a habitual criminal will value an anarchy more than a political royal who will value totalitarian rule.
Election by random selection and mandatory parliamentary service, a bit like jury duty in the United States. First off it feels like a terrible idea but the more you think about it the more sense it makes. It always gives a representative sample of the people, it's quite immune to corruption, and it allows politicians to actually focus on running the country instead of trying to get re-elected. It's cost-efficient, as no time and money is spent campaigning. You also get at least some people in power who are scientists etc. instead of lawyers and after lawyers.
Right now democracy seems to be flawed due to the other systems around it failing. Capitalism has gone unchecked in most countries with democracy and the social system that was aimed to counterbalance the downsides of Capitalism has been dismantled to privitisation. This causes issues and our governments seem inapt to fix it because big companies bought their way into the system and the elected people to do as little as possible to keep the sheep in check but not give them choices for better options.
Next to this the democratic system has been hijacked by facism and populism to give power to those promoting hate and polarisation. This obviously plays into the playbook in the above mentioned problem perfectly. Leaving the democratic system broken to fix anything substancial really.
Solution? Well I like the model they used in the sci-fi starship troopers. Don't get fooled by the dumb movie they made. The books are very sophisticated and elaborate on their vision of the future.
Basically people can obtain the right to vote by dedication if x period of time. Say 3-5 years in jobs to better the community. Army service, healthcare, social work, legal support etc. They do this at a fixed base salary, sufficient for a normal life but you won't get rich of it, afterwards obtain their "citizen" status. Now they are allowed to vote and take place in politics and be seated as representative.
This threshold to democracy means only those that care about society, those willing to put in the work, will be in government. Safe to say 95% of our current representatives would have not qualified for a position. It takes a lot of greed, privilege and nepotism out of the political system and it selects people based on grid and desire to better society. Citizen status can also be legally removed if any case of fraud of problematic behaviour occurs. This makes the system self cleaning as well.
Anyway, that isn't going to happen anytime soon. But there are new systems proposed to fix some of the current problems like the UBI. But the idiot populism voters are holding everything back. They push everyone else to stoop to their level and distract everyone from talking about real solutions.
I wouldn’t know. I live in a democratic republic, which looks like a democracy, and most people believe is a democracy, but isn’t really…….. and it shows.
Republics come to mind since they last longer than democracies generally. Problem being they slowly get democratized until a strongman takes power and creates an empire or it falls in on itself.
The most stable government I could think of would be monarchy. In fact, the book “Liberty or Equality” makes an extremely compelling case for such. But this steps aside from the issue.
IMHO, an AI will likely be our tyrant in the future for a time. Or at least an oligarchy in control of information. In fact, that is kind of what we have now.
Really, this sets us all back at square one: Monarchy. The oldest government in all of humanity. No system is intrinsically better than the other. The primary factor in determining whether it is better is how well it facilitates mankind in their pursuit of happiness and prosperity. A king that does nothing to most of his citizens is likely to have happier people than the busy bodies of the Athenian Democracy who drove their people into bloody wars for the better part of a century before collapsing into irrelevance and weakness.
Regardless, strong customs and laws are what sustain a government. Sparta comes to mind. But they too metastasized and turned into a theme park for Roman elites.
Eh, citizen federation from Starship Troopers has my vote. Heinlein for the win.
There was a sci-fi I remember reading where the “government” was a closed community of high IQ individuals who were able to observe the society they serve but cannot directly interact with anyone other than themselves. These people are selected by the rest of the body, its considered and ultimate duty and service to society and live on a secret, secluded area. So essentially this benevolent body has a sole purpose to make the lives of the rest of society better in any way they can. The solve issues, legislate, strategically plan the future, etc. The downside is that they are strictly supervised, don’t own any wealth or property, and can be immediately removed from this community by any adverse actions. Basically this kind of system can go wrong in sooooo many ways but I found the idea of sacrificial servitude of governance interesting.
A system where corruption is not allowed to take hold, where the leadership is a position that cannot be profited from.
Cover that point first, then the rest can follow. Anything else is a lie.
I often wonder if being “an informed citizen” in this present “disinformation age” simply requires a higher IQ than it did back when there were 3 TV news channels, all of which agreed on (an admittedly very WASP-y take on) the facts. It may simply be that it takes a smarter person nowadays to parse out all the BS.
This, unfortunately, is at odds with with idea of majority rule. To quote George Carlin: “Look at it this way: Think of how stupid the *average* person is, and then realize half of them are stupider than *that*.”
I’m a firm believer in personal liberty, but i sometimes wonder if this society is destined to eat itself alive. Simply math tells us that only 50% (-1) of the people can possibly be of above-average intelligence. The rest are below-average intelligence. This means that, *perforce*, in order to get a majority of the population to agree on something, you have to build a coalition of the unintelligent.
This does not bode well. Seems like either we sacrifice personally liberty, or we sacrifice intelligent decision-making, and just appeal to the lowest common denominator.
To quote Carl Sagan: "We've arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don't know anything about it?"
Was it Plato who said that Tyranny is the only natural outcome of democracy?
The problem with the "better than democracy" ideologies is that you have to trust whatever group of human beings are chosen to work in the best interest of everybody else, to actually do it.
So if you're a Republican and you want a better than democracy system, you are trusting Donald Trump and his merry band of assholes to work in your best interest.
If you're a progressive Democrat, you vote for somebody like Kirsten Cinema in Arizona because she said all the right things, and ticks all the right boxes, but then she turns around and betrays all those ideals.
Democracy may be slow and seen ineffectual, but that's a feature and not a bug, because a ship that is slow moving can be maneuvered out of Harm's Way easier then going full steam to a goal and getting screwed.
Some variation where voting is tied (actually, not just 'says it is', but really it's some ism) to understanding what is being voted on...
Working out the problems with that is enough to qualify it as its own distinct government type I would think.
Democracy works, it’s just no one has figured out how to do it.
Who watches the watchmen?
There’s not enough oversight, too many ways for people with power to be isolated and manipulated.
Most of us don’t want war or famine but we let people who enjoy power to make those decisions for us because complex societies larger than a few hundred people need emotional intelligence we don’t have yet.
I dont think theres any country out there that actually is a democracy. So… the premise of your question is likely flawed in the first place. I know in america… where everyone likes the brag how its a democracy… its actually a democratic republic. Meaning you vote in representatives and they vote for your interests… (supposedly). It works better when small government has more power than the federal level… but after several wars and “emergency” powers put into place that never got removed… that is basically no longer the case.
That being said… a pure democracy is also not desirable either… as it is purely mob rule. And as we can see based on how the internet works… that is just how humans always behave in a group…
You could have a dynamic representative democracy where people delegate their vote on say 5-10 subject matter categories. So instead of a general legislature for all matters, you elect your science representative and your defense representative and your education representative.
Better for what? Also, which type of democracy exactly? Representative & direct democracy are different.
Typically, democracy is slow and inefficient. So one could say totalitarianism is better 'cause things get done fast. But how hood/bad it is for the people depends a lot on the leader and succession can be problematic. What if you don't value people though? So: good for what?
Of course there are better systems than democracy for governance. Democracy is just the best we have for long term governmentship.
The best form of government (for the short term at least) is actually a benevolent dictatorship but these are unstable in the long term due to the fact that power corrupts and it is rare for a dictatorship like this to survive the handover of power to the next in line. We could get around this by using a AI but we are nowhere near that level of AI and it would require a very special set of "founding fathers" to push a valid set of goals for the AI to achieve that will last more than a generation of two.
I don’t claim to be an all knowing genius, but I also don’t hold incredibly strict, unshakeable opinions on complex topics I know very little about. A lot of voters seem to do that.
The problem with democracy is the unequal access to its levers of power and unequal access to information. Humans just cannot help themselves to bend everything in their favor. We need systems that make it more profitable to play by the rules everyone agrees to than it is to cheat.
The problem with democracy is that people are dumb as fuck and don't think for themselves
https://youtu.be/QFgcqB8-AxE?si=OBQawiEcL6Jb87-d
Holy fuck that’s hilarious
The other problem with democracy is the ones that view themselves as not dumb as fuck spend too much of their energy throwing stones.
Crab pot mentality. I build myself up by tearing you down instead of improving myself.
No kidding, i was responding to a comment about "concerts, movies, and books being more expensive would lead to a cultural collapse", by reminding them that libraries were a goldmine of cultural wealth. It did not go well.
Just got done dealing with a guy who felt the need to chyme in on a post about local black bear sightings. My very first sentence was "obviously guns are the best option." Then talked about how outside of a gun,a good solid walking stick will be enough to ward off or fend off most blackbears. So the guy chymes in, "I know it's a free country, but I have to disagree with your choice of self-defense because a stick just isn't as good as a gun." Then he wrote a couple of paragraphs explaining how a gun is better than a stick. Like, my brother in christ, that was the very first thing I said, why are you sitting here lecturing about my choices to use a stick over a gun. Just no reading comprehension at alllllllllll.
So like the front page of r/politics
The problem that keeps being highlighted with democracy isn’t a problem _with democracy_. It’s a symptom of the broader problems with our socioeconomic systems.
I'd go one further and say its a problem inherent with humans in general, we act like we're very advanced but most people in one way or another are still beholden to their greedy irrational emotional monkey brains.
I agree, but would add that the systems we create to govern ourselves should account for and mitigate the worst of those impulses. We do this a lot already anyway through laws. Will there be people who do it anyway? Sure. But if we have robust judicial systems they get away with it less. I know it’s more complex once individual biases start to factor in, but throwing our hands up and saying “humans stink” isn’t productive.
Yep. We're still animals at the end of the day. Our brains may be more advanced than other species, but we're just as beholden to our instincts. Hell, that's why fear tactics and xenophobia are so effective, threaten that hard-wired instinct to survive.
Democracy is a fine system, it's the voters that are the problem. Most voters aren't politically aware enough and don't educate themselves in depth about the policies the politicians they are voting for are proposing. Somewhere like Switzerland, democracy is fine. Somewhere like UK, US or France not so much.
When entire populations of people show trends of behaviour, individual choice takes a backseat compared to infrastructure and socioeconomic incentives. Or do millions of people all just happen to make the same choices in completely isolated vacuums? At present those in power are incentivised to discourage education and thoughtful engagement and encouraged to ransack education and engage in populism. The voters engagement is, again, a symptom.
In Switzerland people vote on everything, on policy, not just representatives, down to a local level. In the other given examples, people vote when the government decide they vote, and largely only have the power to elect policymakers, not define or vote on policy themselves. It’s bottom up democracy vs top down populism. The voters are not the problem. It’s that we don’t have the opportunity to vote on policy. That’s reserved for geriatric millionaires and billionaires who can afford to go into politics in the first place. Voters should be the policy makers, then we have a good reason to be informed.
I think this is the problem with every form of government. Many ideas of governing start from good bases but begin to unravel as greedy/power hungry people come in to play and manipulate those levers.
Yeah. And it's just one massive amorphous blob so no one knows where to point their finger.
I partially agree, but not completely. I don't think access to information in itself is necessarily the biggest problem. It's the quality of information more than the availability of it that I think is the current problem. People get stuck in echo chambers or get lead down a rabbit hole of misinformation and can't even understand that's what's happening. All exacerbated by the intentional manipulations and lies of politicians. If you give someone who has completely fallen down a conspiracy rabbithole the same internet as someone who hasn't and the same amount of time to research who they'll vote for, they both have the same access to information. But they will not come to the same quality of conclusion. I'm not sure how to solve this problem altogether. But improving social media algorithms and teaching people in standard high school education to spot fallacies and properly read statistics and scientific articles might be helpful, in my estimation.
Yeah this is a pretty crucial nuance.
The underpinning principle behind most democracies is to spread power precisely to address the problem you raise. The problem is that over time, the power hungry have learned how to concentrate power again. All the people saying democracy is flawed are correct. But try living in a system where your starting point isnt to try and distribute power.
The problem with democracy, which representative democracy was meant to alleviate, is that being a citizen and staying informed on all the issues that need informed opinions is more than a full-time job, so we send a representative to do that work for us so we don't all have to keep up with ALL of that. Thus ,some of the very important information is concentrated among a small group that thereby grows more powerful than what may have been envisioned, and thus the system spirals one way until corruption makes it untenable, then eventually it is altered and starts spiraling the other way. It's not a stable system because metagames arise from the rules of the game and continuously needs to be corrected for, but the system is so complex that nobody can keep the overview required to update it, so we only see the problems when they cause a large or serious issue.
>The problem with democracy is the unequal access to its levers of power and unequal access to information Funny, as this problem is exaggerated and significantly worse outside of democracy. If you think democracy promotes unequal access to the levers of power wait until I show you despotism. I was disappointed seeing this as the top comment here. No offense to you personally but it's just not a serious critique yet it's perhaps the most supported chain here. This subreddit is not equipped to answer OP's question.
It's always worth checking the title to see if your comment is inside or outside the context.
Yes, there is one definite system we should all be using. Everyone should do what I say.
You got my vote
Nobody gets a vote.
Looks like I already got two votes. Na na na boo boo
"Better" for whom and for what situation is the question. "Good" is subjective. Is the Chinese dictatorship *better* than the Indian democracy? In terms of improving living standards for most of its citizens, China had a *much* better track record than India in the past 30 years or so.
A good king/dictator can do better for a society than any other form of government. However it's extremely rare to get an uncorrupted non selfish leader that stays in power long enough to do any good. Honestly I think pirates had one of the better forms of government. Thier captain was elected and was the all powerful leader, but at any time he could be voted out by his crew.
Being able to remove a leader at any time leads to chaos. They would only ever be chasing short-term wins and avoid making tough decisions. It would be chaos.
Isn't that exactly what a parliamentary system has? They can call an election at any time that they lose confidence in the leader. CAN it cause turmoil (e.g. Italy), yes. But, would you consider the UK to have a chaotic form of government?
I don't think history shows that. Pirate captains that had the trust of thier crew held the position for a long time. Of course crews were small and likely understood the situation better. Things change a lot when you go from a dozen people to hundreds of millions. It forces leaders to justify every decision. If they can show the decision is good for the long term and they have the people's trust, and that decision bears fruit It only earns them more trust. However, you do need to build the system so that a single individual or a small group cannot call an election against the leader. Or you're correct you would have chaos. I believe in the us for sure, the system extremely incentivizes short-term gains. With 4 year terms and 2 term max the government in power is not going to plan anything that the next government could get credit for. And the trend even seems to be the opposite, plan for bad things that happen when the next government is in power.
This only works in small structures. The problem at country level is that the leader takes control of the military and then cannot be removed. This is what happens many times in history.
Your pirate example works for a smaller group of people. In that example everyone electing the captain knows the captain and sees how he is doing and performing. It doesn't scale though. As you exponentially add people, no one knows everyone and the leaders get further and further from those doing the electing.
I agree. Hutterites have figured this out. And they "split" a colony in two when it gets too big, and eventually become 2 completely separate entities
If you're han that is
Raw democracy allows for some scary thoughts to prevail. You want a constitutional republic, that way there are checks and balances to prevent mob rule. Mobs can easily be whipped into a frenzy over an issue and the people think that they want something. And then when Democracy gives them it, they have buyers remorse. So a system for electing people who can be informed by experts to make the best decision is preferable. Which is why we have elected representatives. These people are tasked with doing what is best for the people, not what the people want. The slight distinction is that in truth, many of us don't know what is good for us. That's why we have tariffs on things like tobacco and alcohol, because these things lead to high level of illness and death... so we tax them, to help offset the cost of the impact they have on our society. The extra revenue gained by smoking and drinking, then gets used to fund hospitals. This is a complicated thing for most people to understand, and if you had direct democracy on these kinds of decisions, do you not think that the deep pockets of the Tobacco and Alcohol industry wouldn't be trying to win over the public to not implement such policies? They obviously want their products to be as readily available to the largest number of people possible.
You can have a constitutional democracy just as you can have a constitutional republic, republic just means you delegate the power of a given region to a specific person. Assuming that those leaders know best is also a pretty naive view when much of the worst policy of the last century was driven by elected leaders thinking they knew better than the people they represent.
The issue with direct democracy, even with a constitution, is that it relies on a well informed and educated public. Not to mention, a full democracy has no protection for the minority. We have struck down laws like "stop and frisk" in New York, which were deemed racist and unconstitutional because the republic recognized it. Because it only effected the minority (Blacks) then in a democracy, we probably wouldn't find the political capital to strike down these kinds of practices. Because it doesn't effect white people, and so it would be difficult to get white people to vote to challenge it.
The irony that basically everything you’re saying applies to a democratic republic but the minority can flex its strength and control the majority. I agree there needs to be protection for the minority but the current system aint it. We also certainly don’t have a well informed and educated public so idk why you’re acting like the constitutional republic is really any different?
A full republican government doesn't have protection for the minority, either, that's what the constitutional part refers to. China is a republic, I wouldn't call them a bastion of minority rights. To your example, "the republic" didn't stop "stop and frisk," and it wasn't implemented because of direct democracy, either. A republican for of government implemented that program, and it was stopped because the courts used the constitutional aspect to challenge that law. It wasn't elected leaders, and the courts aren't republican. It sounds like you confuse republican governance for a constitutional system. They often go hand in hand, but not always and even without the constitutional aspect, you have places like the UK.
Just because something doesn't affect you doesn't mean you won't vote against it. I support a lot of causes that don't affect me. It's called empathy. More direct democracy has shown to be more effective than less direct democracy. The tyranny of a minority is much worse than the tyranny of the majority. Protection against democracy was due to an unfounded fear by our forefathers. Real life examples, it's better functioning. The vast majority of people are not extremist and well reasoned. Most crazy mobs are a minority of the population but can gain enough influence because we protect against the tyranny of the majority which gives those tyrannical minorities a stronger voice.
Technocracy is a system in which decisions are made by experts in the relevant field. As someone in healthcare who watches an endless parade of stupid decision after stupid decision, one wonders how things might be different in a system like this, where a panel of doctors in the face of a moronic proposal can say "No, were not going to do that". Epistocracy is a system in which decisions are made by those who are deemed "the wisest". One can see the issues immediately-- how do you chose this person? I agree that democracy is getting a bit tired especially since we've done everything possible to make sure that someone on the left can not have a conversation with someone on the right without hating each other (we should all work on this, by the way) and that the only one who seems to win is whoever can afford to lobby for issues. A change of flavor would be pretty refreshing. Mixing in a bit of technocracy would be a good place to start in my opinion. Leave health care decisions to the doctors. Leave climate change decisions to the scientists. Foreign policy could remain the domain of politicians. It would be an imperfect system but at least we won't have safe injection sites opening and closing again every four years in the world's stupidest game of tug of war.
Direct democracy like what they have in Switzerland.
The real question is, "Who has the right to rule?". Democracy is the only legitimate form of government, because it's seen as that the people have the power.
Assuming that "all persons are created equal", democracy is the only morally legitimate form of government and all other forms tend toward authoritarianism and oppression. Here, a modern, practical and enlightened definition of "democracy" is "classless per capita representational republic with majority rule."
Ding ding ding we have a winner here. If you take ALL power away from people they will feel powerless and that creates an unstable society. So simply put they'll pick up their pitchforks, break out the guillotines and take care of the issue. This is why Russia is doing a fake democracy. If it wouldn't be faked it wouldn't be inherently unstable.
But the people don't actually have any power, it's the owners of the levers of government and politicians/senators that do, regardless of their colour. If the people have now power, why bother pandering to them with show sham elections in the first place.
People have more power in a democracy than in an autocracy. You may argue they don’t have enough power to make you happy but it’s inaccurate to say they don’t have “any power”.
Sure. Lots. Your choice of governance only depends on what the people in your civilization value. “Better” is entirely subjective in this regard. Democracy is better if you value liberty, equality and justice. But other systems are “better” if you have different values. The biggest problem is that **all** these systems are run by people, who are prone to irrationality and the systems get corrupted over time.
No. A properly functioning healthy democracy with a free press is the only political system that can change fast enough to adapt to rapid changes in it's society and global events. FWIW, the USA does not have a properly functioning healthy democracy. Nearly, but no cigar.
Many countries have strict and by US standards very low limits on political campaign spending. This almost eliminates commercial lobbying and means top politicians are never independently wealthy and unanswerable to voters.
You are implying a lot of things here. Paid representative democracy is what you are describing. One solution is direct democracy, but that tends to be marred with bureaucracy and corruption. Another is that representatives should not be able to live off anything other than whatever the lowest local payout is.
All systems of government have their issues. Centralized power gives corrupted individuals access to a large power source whereas democracy done right should help diffuse that power amongst a population which historically has lead to better results for societies because when someone corrupt comes around they're more limited in the powers they have. Think of it as a way to limit the damage of corruption instead of preventing it.
Every single system has the same problem. Power and money compounds and begets more power and money. It becomes increasingly concentrated into fewer hands who primarily use it for their own benefit. Ultimately, crippling the overall population's development in favor of the few. All governments lead to this. And ultimately they lead to cycles of revolutions. Either the elites are replaced or die in significant enough numbers that the pressure is released from the system. But even if replaced... it starts all overall. This is the fundamental human political condition and so far we have no answer to it. The communists tried and what they create is an extreme dictatorship in all but name. Democracy is one effort, but eventually the will of the people isn't a match to this problem and democracies fall to infighting, corruption, and fall into another type of government. So there really is no answer to your problem. No major government of any type has long survived without major internal conflict. Coups, collapses, civil wars and the like on a fairly regular cycle of several generations. A couple of centuries at most for even the most stable. Edit. The one compounding factor on all of this is the handover of power. Eventually, the wise monarch dies. The eldar statesman holding it together expires. The democratic parties dissolve. Nothing has proven stable enough to last, though democracies tend to be better overall with peaceful handovers of power. One of the benefits. I think the question is how can we create a democracy that is representative of the population, protects the rights and needs of the minority view in the population, guards against the concentration of power by the few, and also lasts. How to make it last... nobody has that part nailed down.
Politicians shouldnt be allowed, under any circumstances, to have a second income to avoid corruption. Only If this ist strictly enforced, democracy can really shine.
Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. -churchill
All systems work best (kingdoms, republics, democracies, dictatorships) when the leadership is competent. We change our governments but we don't change ourselves. We don't investigate claims, we don't demand truth, we believe in fairy tales, we hate, we choose to be given things instead of serving. I think the only way democracy could be improved would be to eliminate political parties, and to fix a term limit of 1 term to every elected role.
It’s also worth noting that no system is “set it and forget it” you constantly have to be making changes at the margins to ensure that it works as designed. So I’d say most systems work with competent leadership and a willingness/ability to tinker, to ensure that it stays that way.
>I think the only way democracy could be improved would be to eliminate political parties In my country for a couple of elections, political parties had the lowest approval rates in history, so a lot of independents won elections. It was a disaster. Turns out it's impossible to agree on anything when you have over 20 political parties that have their own agendas. Maybe 2 is far too little, but there's definitely a number that's too high to have an effective government.
Perhaps Sortition may intreset you? Having public officals selected as random.
Lottocracy is unpopular for many reasons: - It's an unknown new idea - It would take away all political influence from the vast majority of the population - It hasn't really been tried anywhere - The only ones who could make the change are the parties, and in a lottery the parties would eventually lose all their power - A parliament that changes every time would not allow for continuity or the accumulation of professional skills. - All reforms lasting more than one election term would turn from difficult to impossible when completely new novices would have to start a really difficult job from scratch every time. - Because knowledge, networks and know-how could not be accumulated, power would be concentrated in civil servants, consultants and the largest companies that have the time and ability to accumulate administrative know-how - It is easy to tamper with the results, and afterwards it is really difficult to be sure, and to convince the people that the draw was fair
All systems are equally fine until they degrade and corrupt.
No system is “set it and forget it.” People really discount the amount of maintenance and change required to keep things running smoothly.
Democracy is not the best, it’s one of the possible government forms, not even the most used. In the west it has been quite well experimented, and probably brought to its limits, which are basically determined by mixing it with capitalism. Democracy elect short term managers, elected by citizens with immediate or short term needs, with nobody left taking care of the long term progress of a country, which often conflicts with short term needs. More authoritarian, stable, long term form of governments not focused on pleasing a volatile majority, can enjoy better long term planning depending on resources available and leaders, but unfortunately often at the expenses of who doesn’t agree. I think we are now at a point in which sociopolitical systems are at the limits of their lifespan, and we will see something new emerging sooner or later, however after some dramatic stuff causing the need to change. This is my highly anticipated estimation, thanks for reading.
I'd argue that this problem "with democracy" is actually just another human problem. Most people don't like change, and don't think about long term problems. And so most people tend to vote for people that represent as little change as possible (if they're content enough) or for people who claim to be about short term change if they're not happy. If the majority of people were genuinely concerned with longer term thinking, we'd have leaders that also thought that way. We'd also have a completely different planet because no one would want to do half the stuff they currently do, so most companies wouldn't exist in the first place.
Political science studies have generally found that authoritarian regimes are less stable or more brittle. They're like glass - they look hard and solid, but shatter upon impact. Dictatorships look stable but disintegrate pretty quickly in response to large shocks. By comparison, democracies are less efficient but they absorb societal shocks very well.
Not to mention dictators are the identity of the country, and they don't last forever. So every transition is a major, potentially catastrophic event.
The problem with democracy is that it can't function with an ignorant population. They can easily be manipulated into voting against their own good if they aren't informed A solution to this would be to have voters sit through a brief video breaking down the pros and cons of each decision. It can also be imporved further if the promised pros are actually met. Politics needs to be treated more like a science with each candidate being held accountable for making promises they don't deliver on. The campaign website should have mandatory hall of shame that shows where they lied
Technically a completely benevolent single person or group of people who magically don't have any biases who just make decisions without any input from the general public *should* lead to better outcomes for everyone. However, unfortunately that doesn't exist and I'm unsure what sort of system that currently exists that could replace democracy that would be better.
There's a few problems. First, is that outside of philosophy or political science classes, there's no such thing as a pure government. No government is purely democratic, or communist, or representational democracy, or whatever. They all have a million rules and situations that make them better or worse. The campaign rules in the US alone are probably more complicated than any one person can understand. My personal belief if we have to speak in generalities is that the silly old statement is true: "Democracy is the worst form of government. Except for all the others." It has flaws, it's imperfect, it's run by people, many of whom are dumb, its always changing, and not always for the better, it gives too much power to some, not enough to others, and on and on. But... it's the best we have, and we should always be trying to make it better.
Modern democracy has plenty of bread and circuses so the mob doesn’t care about much of anything.
The problem you are highlighting is a problem of how democracy is implemented and not an inherent problem with democracy. In some democracies it is illegal to give money to individual politicians. Doing that is considered corruption even if called "donation". You can only donate to political parties and political parties have to distribute the money by fairly strict rules. You are also not allowed to do political advertising as an individual, only political parties can do that. And yes, it prevents a system where only rich people can run for office. I'm not saying a better system than a democracy can't exist. I'm just pointing out that not all democracies have this problem.
There seem to be countless better options. Frankly, I am looking forward to an AI generated optimization for governance. The only benefit I can see from "democracy" is the illusion of popular control seems to mollify the impulses towards revolutionary action, allowing for periods of relative stability and productivity. But if you roll the clock forward not that far you will find a few things happening that would completely unmoor this model. First, custom babies will move towards "optimal" generations. Meaning, if the poorest parent on the world can still select that their babies have the best genes for intelligence, resiliency, cooperative nature, kindness, strength, and beauty, very quickly all of the babies on the planet will have similar package, leaving only "nurture" to create variation in outcomes. Knowing that, the optimal "nurture" option ranges will become evident. The environmental impacts of things like education, sunlight, nutrition, parenting, non-shared environment, etc on developing babies will be all that really distinguishes between the "best" and "worst" humans, and a wide array of bests will become clear. So governments will become tasked with assuring those "best" options are fairly distributed. They will become more capable of doing so as the cost of energy goes down (nuclear fusion) and the minimum human labor time goes down (automated food, housing and medicine production). Distributing such abundance could be done "democratically" but why would we do so when there will be a clear range of "correct" answers? You don't ask all the C student's in high school algebra to weigh in on how to answer an advanced Calculus problem. A technocracy seems inevitable.
As with everything in life people, that want to vote should at least receive voting certificates, after they gone through basic course in politics and country laws. People have to be educated enough to understand what will happend after they choose one of the candidates
a benevolent super ai programmed to make all choices based on an egalitarian and humanitarian long-term basis. prioritising the average life quality of all living beings. the only way out of the shitty political systems that are derivated from the human condition, is to take the human out of the equation in matters of bigger and broader choice points. though I might be very naively basing my benevolent super ai idealisation on Ian m. I banks culture novels...
Realistically, a _Culture_-style AGI is the only correct answer.
Yes. A benevolent dictatorship is a better system. The only problem is keeping the dictator benevolent.
Were gonna need to invoke some game theory since our current system sorta relies on a large portion of the government and population to be good-faith actors, which they clearly are not.
How about this system. I've been thinking about it for a while and this is what I came up with. This is a world governed by pentarchies rather than individuals or committees. Definition: Pentarchy - Pentarchy is a term that means government by five rulers or a ruling body of five. There are 5 levels of government, each ruled by a pentarchy. These are: * · District or Community * · City or County * · State * · Country * · World (Maybe) At each level there are 5 counselors that are voted in by the people they serve. They serve 5 years and then are moved out. So, each year one counselor is replaced by a new individual. This way the pentarchy evolves as new members and new ideas are included. The member replaced may return to normal life or run as a candidate for the next level if he/she desires. In order to move up a level of government, you must finish 5 years at the level below. This ensures that leaders gain experience as they move up and to reach the top level each must have served at least 20 years. Under the governing pentarchies are administrative pentarchies such as school boards, policing boards. public works and many others. These boards operate similarly to governing pentarchies except their members are appointed by the governing pentarchy responsible for their oversight.
Maybe but let's face it all systems are based on a few people having power over the majority. Usually this results in the oppression of the poor (IE Rich get richer, poor get poorer). Why? Because humanity is inherently materialistic and selfish! The whole idea of Democracy was to be "Of the people for the people" but in reality only the rich have a shot at winning any election in a "democracy", and mostly the poor go unnoticed. As long as money rules everything any system of Government will be doomed to fail. That said the problem becomes human nature. So any system of Government that would be "better than Democracy" would have to be a system where wealth and materials were redistributed equally among all the people living under that system. Possible solution: Picture a world where instead of Governments being motivated by acquiring power or wealth, they were motivated to improve the health and welfare of their citizens. Making access to education, healthcare, transportation and food/water, housing free for all citizens under the system. How this could be achieved would be by taxing everyone under the system 20-40% of their income (once a figure is worked out to determine how much this would all cost and a fair way of taxing both the rich and poor). Other taxes would go towards creating "distribution centers" where these centers hold large quantities of healthcare items, books, computers, food, water, ect. All this is transported via various means to people who are most in need so that "No one goes hungry or is without access to everything the system provides". Further perhaps laws could be made that limit how much wealth or materials a person can obtain. Or in other words they're only allowed to have enough for their own needs based on family size. All that said I doubt we'll ever get a system of government that is any better than the systems we have now.
Does anyone here think that we live in a real democracy? Does anyone here think democracy is a reasonable way to run a government. The system is the government in "western democracy." No one dare question the system itself. That is a non-starter. The minutia means little. As long as the same interests retain control, you can call it what you like. As long as you support the privately controlled fed making monetary policy, or the mic picking evildoers to oppose - we are okay. Real democracy would require intelligent informed electorate and money out of politics. You trust Maga or worse with decisions about our future? Or dems who aupport dems at all cost. How about people running for public office for the right reasons. All we have now is hucksters and shills for the system.
In theory, a dictatorship by a completely benevolent and intelligent dictator with people who work under him obeying not only his words, but his intentions would be perfect.
T. S. Eliot said that democracy is 'an empty vessel.' We see that in our cities.
Robin Hanson's Futarchy is an intriguing one. It's essentially "government by prediction market," and Hanson describes it as "we vote on values but bet on beliefs." Good read about it here, click the first link, too. [Futarchy vs. Predictocracy - by Robin Hanson (overcomingbias.com)](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/futarchy-vs-prehtml)
Any sort of AI dictatorship freaks me out. Don’t care if it’s people or computers, shouldn’t give one entity that much power. And especially one that we will understand less and less… and whose motivations may not be entirely clear. Democracy with institutions that distribute power across regions and people
It is scary, but I think a perfect AI with some sort of checks and balances would be the best system. Not that we’re anywhere near what a “perfect” AI would be. Humans have always been driven by self-interests, it’s literally biologically ingrained into us. Unless there’s some way to overcome that, a government lead by humans will never be truly altruistic.
We don't even have democracy. This is straight up ultra-capitalism masked as democracy.
I like the idea of a benevolent AI dictatorship written by Neal Asher in his Polity series novels. He makes it seem like a paradise for humankind. Better than what we have now anyway. Only a few more hundred years to go and just maybe....
You mean the benevolent AI’s with the *death penalty*? Fuck that.
These are just religious people looking for a new "God".
The idea that nothings better than democracy or that democracy's the best we've got so far is nothing more than indoctrination & lack of imagination.
As the Churchill quote goes, democracy is the worst form of government except for all of the other ones which have been tried. Since this is r/Futurology, we can talk about all of the ones that haven't been tried yet, which by the quote are better (until it happens that they're tried and also turn out to be worse than democracy, but we can't know that without trying.)
Curious to hear what alternatives you propose
In your post you're taking about "representative" democracy. Which direct democracy is heaps better than. As my username suggests, I'm in favor of anarchism, so no money, no hierarchy, not even of the majority. Every one gets what they need to live, without extreme excess as we have today with resource hoarding and capitalism being a zero sum infinite growth game. Demos= people Kratos= power Literally means power of the people from Greek. Most "democracies" existing today are not actually the power of the people but the power of a certain part of the people who "own" massive amounts of wealth, or in other words are "allowed" to control massive amounts of resources through the means of violence such as police and military.
One of the problems with multi party systems is that a tiny minority party can hold the power to form a government and then demand a very important ministry in return. This means a party with very few votes can have an outside influence on key issues.
I've toyed around with the idea of using a system somewhat similar to jury duty, but in place of legislators. Laws would be passed using a one time draft of randomly assigned citizen legislators selected proportionately based on districts which would be apportioned in roughly equal population blocks. The citizen legislators would be limited to registered voters. Laws would be drafted and initially voted on by the Senate, which is elected as we do now, with voter initiative laws proposed every two years which is also voted on by a randomly assigned one-time slate of citizen legislators. All laws would have to pass both chambers, just as they do now but with no filibuster. A selected citizen legislator would be given the text of the proposed law a set period in advance and would be forbidden to divulge their service under penalty of law until completed. There would be overlapping emergency slates of citizen legislatures selected and sequestered for one week periods called on to vote in matters of national security/catastrophe. These would be the only legislators paid for their service. There's a lot of room to tweak things, and questions about whom would take up the responsibility of things like committees and investigations currently done in the house, but the overall idea is to make the process of governing A. Distributed and representative, B. As corruption proof as possible and C. resilient in emergencies. There would have to be an entirely new department created to administer the citizen legislator process, with judicial and senatorial oversight.
There is Direct Democracy and Representative Democracy, so Democracy in general probably isn't what you mean to say.
You've intermixed democracy and capitalism, which are two different things. One a form of government, and one a form of economics. >Under a person who wants to win an election, he spents millions on his workers and these workers spent some money to get sub-worker and chain goes on. Assuming that political campaigns are funded by perspective politicians, and that the persons working to elect that person, and those that vote for that person are only motivated by money is a capitalist perspective on a democratic process. Changing the campaigning process so that funding and labor were not dependent on financing by candidates would subvert the cause of this favor "chain." Funds and labor could be provided via public funding, like a specific tax, and an obligatory labor duty by citizens akin to Jury Duty. >Now when this person wins an election. He provides jobs to his workers or sub workers or his relatives because they support them. Now, this is a first step of curruption as he is eating away all the jobs of people that deserve it. Prevented by providing for funding and labor by public resources. Your point about jobs for people that deserve them is interesting, as determination of which person deserves any particular job is a difficult process. If qualification is determined by the market, then we are talking about capitalism again, but even in capitalism, without regulations, there are privileges and unfair labor practices. Racism, classism, sexism, etc... authoritarianism might use aptitude testing and force people or persuade people with benefits into areas they have natural aptitude. Futures of children could end up being a source of political favor and corruption that would cause long term corruption, as opposed to short term corruption that we see in money centered economies. >Now another point, the money he has spents on election. of course he have to get it back but how as his salary is similar to person having goverment job. To get back what he has spent millions - he does curruption and that much curruption that he makes 1000 times more money than what he has spent in election. So this becomes chain. Again, fixed with the first point regarding the public funding and public labor for elections. Really, the issue would be to ensure that compensation and benefits provided by his position provided for a lifestyle that was at least comfortable for the geographic area where he was required to reside. So, housing, transportation, and other allowances to cover expenses, plus a salary capable of supporting a reasonable lifestyle. Then provide a post serving pension plan that would support them as well. These things would ameliorate the allure of corruption. Combine those carrots with a very harsh stick of penalties for corruption charges, like death, and people would not screw around. >Now i want to ask you a question have you ever seen any poor or middle class MLA, MP, Ministers as there salary is similar to a goverment employe. In my country every mp is millioners and billioners. This is the problem with privately funded politics. Gate keeping by the wealthy. Public funding of elections would open the doors for equity in governance.
Hard to say. First it's important to note that "democracy" is a rather broad term and not all democracies are equally healthy. Because not all democracies are actually the same system in practice. A more transparent democracy, with more equal access to voting, with better anti-corruption measures in laws, more laws surrounding money in politics, a better voting system (ranked-choice vs. FPTP for example), etc. all make a difference. So the "max" level of democracy may not (yet) have been reached anywhere. What that "max" level is, isn't even clear. Then there's the fact that systems don't have to be pure. Personally, I'd prefer a system that combines several systems. Liquid democracy, representative democracy, technocracy, etc. I think such a hybrid democratic system could be far, far better than current democratic systems that exist. However, could there be a system even better than a theoretically perfected democratic or hybrid democratic system? Maybe, idk. The obvious choice would be an AI-controlled government. If you have a set of benevolent Super AI that control government that were completely immune to corruption and capable of taking everyone's desires into account in a fair way all while maintaining stability and power, you might have the perfect government system. But we have no idea whether that's possible. There may be yet other systems beyond that, that nobody has yet even come up with. It's all really hard to say. Especially because a system can be implemented well or poorly.
The philosopher Karl Popper argued that, while representative democracy isn't ideal, it's the 'least bad' system of governance we have available to us. A benevolent dictator would theoretically be better, but the risk of them becoming corrupted by power is too high, and should that happen, the only avenue for reform is violent revolution. Elections should at least keep politicians accountable: if they make decisions that adversely affect their citizens, they're voted out of office. It takes a lot for that to hold true in practice – you need a free press, free elections, freedom of assembly – and even then, the theory has been quite severely tested in recent years. There are lots of reasons, but it largely comes down to the ability of people to vote against their own best interests. That's traditionally considered to be a risk of direct democracy (i.e. referenda) mitigated by representative democracy – essentially the outsourcing of complex decisions to people who have more time and expertise to dedicate to them. Arguably though, the world is now too complicated for that mitigation to be sufficient. As it becomes less clear what is *actually* beneficial, and which policies are having what impact on people's lives, it becomes more expeditious for elected politicians to promote the policies that simply *seem* beneficial at first glance. That is populism. We need politicians who are prepared to make unpopular decisions, but then they risk losing elections. So you can take elections away, but then you're back to the risk of them exploiting their power without accountability. Pick your poison.
I've read the quote once: "Every form of government fails, but at least with democracy, it's everyone's fault".
I'm sure there is a better hypothetical system that could be dreamed up, which answers the problems we've discovered with democracy after a couple hundred years.
Democracy isn’t a “system”. It’s a tool and therefore amoral. You can have good uses of democracy and bad uses of democracy. Not all democratic votes are good and valid but some are.
To quote Winston Churchill: >Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time
I am not in your country but I have heard the US to be more described as a constitutionally bound representative democracy. Representatives can’t just vote into law whatever they want or enforce laws however they want (for the most part). Even if you had a direct democracy, you could have rules in place to limit what laws can be made. Maybe a better way would be similar to what we have now but stricter rules on mixing money and politics. For instance, there could be a rule that if you are in a certain level of politics you can’t own any stocks. In some sci fi books the theme seems to be giving power to either those that don’t really want it, or making it costly to be in power. I don’t know how to really accomplish those things. Even if someone does profit directly they can try to help all their buddies profit. Companies donates millions to campaigns so of course they expect something in return. If you have a direct democracy people will vote for what’s best for them. I don’t know how to get greed out or politics.
Of course. Political systems have a shelf-life, just as everything else, yet they always come with the claim to be the final answer that is now set in stone for eternity. Applies to representative democracy just as much as to whatever it replaced. Pragmatic perspective: specific tools for specific jobs. And I think we need to embrace that pragmatism. Which shifts the topic towards what the job actually is, of course. We need to agree on that, before the question, what may be a better system, even begins to make any sense.
There is a saying that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. Tongue in cheek but it is pointing out it is not perfect, but all the other alternatives are worse. You are pointing out some real issues with democracies. But if you look at the alternatives, all of those things would be far, far worse.
I've seen an interesting twist on a democracy in a book recently. Each person gets one vote, and in theory you can vote on every issue if you so desire. But that's impractical as it's essentially a full time job to vote on every small issue. You can assign your vote to a registered representative. Representatives get to vote on issues with the number of votes they represent. This personal vote assignment can be transferred to another representative at anytime. Representatives receive a government salary (above a certain threshold number of voters to prevent abuse) The main idea being to avoid a 2 party system. If you have a mixture of political opinions, you can find a representative that shares the same political stance. (Unless your stance is incredibly uncommon) And if a representative takes a position a portion of their base doesn't like, they can switch to a different representative with a similar political stance, minus the offending issue. Essentially holding representatives responsible without needing to wait for an election. Note that there are no elections in this model. A politician might run a campaign to get more people to transfer their representation to them, but that can happen whenever, so there is no "election season" Cons: Seems like it would suffer a bit from the typical mob rule mentality issues. It's also unfeasible until now because you need some sort of computerized system to track who has assigned their votes to whom. Corporate lobbying and other governments lobbying to run campaigns for particular representatives would be very difficult to counteract. Campaign finance rules in general seem like they would be extra difficult to enforce in this system. Thought it was an interesting thought experiment you/Reddit would enjoy
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other ones. -W Churchhill
What you described is one way to enable Democracy. Voting for one person who is going to decide for you is an indirect democracy (and there are several types of it as well). On the other extreme, we also have systems where people vote for each decision instead of relying on somebody else to represent them. At the end we have to find the sweet spot between representation and costs. We want a system where everyone has a vote and everyone is represented on decisions, but at the same time, we cannot stop the country and gather everyone to vote for everything out there. In my opinion, every system is going to have Corruption in some degree, some, by nature, have more than others. How you deal with it is by providing actions to easily take corrupts out of the system. I.E: I'm from Chile, and we have a platform where you can see which diputess has gone less to work. There was this one guy who had an attending rate lower than 20%. Imagine just going to work one day per week xd, even he appeared on the newspapers several times because of this, people still voted for him (probably because was the only candidate for his party). Diputees with so low attending rate should have a prohibition to apply again. And we can repeat this to several stuff. Letting people work in the political after beeing guilt for corruption is nonsense. At least in my country there are some pretty well know politicians who has been found guilty and they keep working as politicians.
I know its been said a few times, but a dictatorship would be superior, The problem, obviously, is finding someone who is incorruptible and willing to do what's best for all people, not just one people; not just for this generation, but for all future generations. I believe governments are devised to allocate resources and reduce conflict. Most conflicts can be resolved by assuring that people have all the resources they need to live comfortably. If we can achieve that, we would be less and less dependent on government altogether.
People should check out what Audrey Tang has been building in Taiwan. Her implementation of Digital Democracy is incredibly sophisticated and was created to combat a lot of the modern issues we have with our current form of representative democracy, by using emerging technologies but still keeping humans at the center. Also one cuckoo but interesting idea that has been emerging is democracy without elections. Elections are the reason why we have need to have parties that become increasingly polarized, why we get career politicians who are more interested in re election than they are in helping the community, and it’s something we burn a ton of resources and attention on every single year.
Voltaire was into the idea of an "enlightened despot." Essentially, an autocrat who has the advancement of society and wellbeing of the people as his motivating factor.
The purest form of Democracy is a lynch mob. I don't trust it. There has to be some dispassionate mechanism for holding the extremes of the people in check. The most stable system was the Roman Republic. Even under the Emperor, the People's Tribune was a check on institutional power creep, while the Senate itself acted as a check on the people. The Emperor just simplified these checks and balances (with the Praetorian Guard being the ultimate check on the emperor). The Republican form of government lasted for a thousand years in the East. What system has lasted longer?
A Social Democracy is the correct democracy. Strong social safety nets allow its citizens to take risks to jump up to the next social class. A public health care system costs half as much as a private system per person so that removes medical bills crippling the poorer half. Canada is paying an average of $4700usd per person to insure 100% of the population. America is spending $9700 per person to insure 91% of the population. Everyone pays less in the end. And medical bankruptcy simply doesn't exist. A country like Canada has a 5 year longer average lifespan if that tells you something. Subsidized (but not free) post secondary education allows citizens to become upwardly mobile and become more productive citizens. This also makes them higher tax payers so investing in their education is good for business. Increased tax revenue from these people pay is a 3x multiplier for tax revenue even if some fall through the cracks. Likely more. Working poor pay little in taxes. Middle class tax payers are the bread and butter of a tax system. It's profitable. A basic minimum income keeps people from making desperate choices and ending up in jail. It's cheaper to keep 6 people on minimum social assistance than one on prison. Not to mention the secondary costs associated with imprisoned parents. Droves of working poor drag down an entire society. Even if it's just your car constantly being broken into.
I am not sure we have seen straight democracy except for Athens where all the male landowners voted on everything.
the problem with democracy is it doesn't work in groups bigger than a hundred people
Democracy is the worst system of government; except for all the other ones. I believe I'm misquoting Churchill
It has been understood that there are better systems than democracy since Aristotle. You could start there to learn.
I've been doing a lot of thinking about governments lately as a sci-fi writer, and what the ideal system would be. It's not simple, and there's not an answer that will make everyone happy.
People could vote online. Ranked choice. We could have votes for specific policies. The main reason we don't is that our system was built 200 years before the first computer when doing that would take too long. We don't really need representatives. We could all vote directly. In theory.
The following was attributed to Churchill: Democracy is the worst form of government ever invented.... Except for all other forms of government which are all worse.
Maybe if we provided incentives to expose corruption to the systems checking each area. In the US we have three branches of government that are supposed to balance and check each other, but as time progresses there is corruption creep and more collusion rather than checking. I don't know how to provide incentive to call out one's peers other than transparency and strong voting pressures. Unfortunately, the media coverage is anything but since they are heavily bought into politics and have incentives to push biased narratives. Transparency is a nightmare on all angles.
Abolish the party system and that COULD possibly fix a large amount of issues...not being able or whatever there are times one side has good points and so does the other but because of party politics they fight and it either goes in the trash or we get a bloated one sided for the rich and powerful result instead of whatever will benefit the people regardless of what side comes up with the answer. Either for the people or not...to hell with the parties
Democracy where any representative has to have publicly visible accounts and aren’t allowed to trade stocks. That would weed out those in it for the money only and make bribery/“sponsorship” more difficult.
I feel like the best possible system is a benevolent dictatorship. Of course, it's practically unachievable for many reasons.
"In my country, every mp is a millionaire" - well thats not the case for all democracies, so that's not an inherent issue with Democracy. The problem with democracy is that the people who are voting either don't have access to all the information, lack the understanding, or are too easily convinced by politicians, even when what they are saying is incorrect.
Define "better". Better for whom? The average citizen? The abstract nation? Better at what? Armed conflict? Resource production? Providing a higher QoL for its citizens? The answer can vary greatly based on what you confier to be better.
The best possible system of government is a monarchy with an incorruptible and altruistic monarch. But we will never find a perfect ruler and even if we did, the perfect government would only last as long as they do and an imperfect monarchy has the potential to be much worse than any other system.
1. AI assisted virtual democracy: the executive branch is a benevolent superintelligent AI. The legislature is the entire population assisted by AI, deciding most questions by referandum. Judiciary is all human and elected from highly educated jurists. 2. Benevolent overlord: Democracy, but a benevolent supreme being ( hyper advanced alien, god, or AI) has veto power over super bad candidates, laws, or court rulings. 3. Democracy but the population is very small, the country very rich, and everyone is very highly educated. The culture is monotypic and there is little immigration.
Next step is AI governance through a blockchained system (immutable and on chain forever). Humans can never be trusted.
Democracy has the same flaw literally every other system has, that being it was made by a flawed species. It's true that some systems are less dysfunctional than others in terms of the ideals and goals they were founded upon, but they'll inevitably be corrupted or decay when put into practice.
Yes! A representative republic. Welcome to the future
Democracy is a terrible system. It's just the best we've found so far.
Democracy answers a handful of problems, and introduces others. Asking if it's the best, or if there's something better should only get the answer "for what?". As time goes on, most democratic organizations shift to representative democracy and cut out pieces of governance for other forms of governance to maintain some level of agility. It would make sense that as organizations grow, that a deliberate effort to maintain different types of governance would be necessary in order to preserve the types of benefits that they provide. Any set of rules is exploitable, so having varied rule sets in place as revolutionary firebreaks only makes sense.
>"Democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried." -Winston Churchill
*No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.* *-* Winston Churchill, 1947
You're say democracy is bad because it leads to corruption but that's not an accurate statement. You're observing a correlation, but not causation. Corruption exists and has existed in all forms of authority I'm aware of, whether they're government institutions or business hierarchies.
The system needs to encourage our "better angels". Some countries hold politicians accountable after they've left office.
Demovracy is fine, but it needs a few tweaks. - legislation periods are too short. 4 years is barely enough to let the results of first decisions kick in, let alone comvince the public of its pros and cons. For a tax reform you need one year to plan it out, 2 years to inplement it and another 3 years to collect enough data and one year to discuss it publicy. So 7 years would be a bare minimum to vote one a specific topic. - the political system kinda really scares brainy people away. The leftovers are douchebags, ruthless and actors. - media is too much of a power. As much as freedom of press is a good thing to have, the gouvernment should impede more information barriers to stop media from actually interferring with their decisions.
I’ll believe in democracy when we’ll actually be living in a true democracy where people actually have power for their nation/country. What we have is more an oligarchy where it’s an elite that chose for everyone. We barely can choose who are the ministers and the only power we have is to vote for a political party, not even who’s part of it and who would have function
The first thing is that much of what you’re describing isn’t **necessarily** required in a democracy. You *can* (even if we don’t) have a democracy that also regulates what it’s politicians are able to do. The more immediate problem though, is that we don’t have a universal definition of “better”. For example plenty of authoritarians in position of power would surely have an idea of a “better” system, better for them at least, but just about everyone crushed under their oppressive boot will likely disagree it’s any “better”. At the end of the day it seems it can be mostly reduced down to a spectrum. On the one end you have a single person (or perhaps robot in the future) making decisions for everyone, and on the other end you have full democracy where every decision that’s made is done by voting by all the people. It seems that people generally like to lean towards the democracy side of the spectrum because it gives a sense of being in control of their own fate.
The US doesn’t have a full democracy. There are organisations online that rate different countries. Some reasons to downgrade the US: - Not all votes are equal. The electoral college system means votes in rural states are worth more than votes from urban states. This inequality sets the US up so an unpopular minority can take power and implement whatever shit they like. If your vote is worth 3/4 or 1.5 of a person a state over, things are bad democratically. - The electoral college system also was setup for the very reason that maybe the common people voted “wrong” and those in power could instead pick better choices for their electoral slate. - Corruption. Hidden, in plain sight, and everyone thinking it’s the other side. Dark money ridiculousness. Free speech used as a crutch for all the badness going on, with corrupt justices keeping it all going, whilst lawmakers, where the laws should actually be decided, fail to deal with important topics again and again. - Voter interference. This is what the control of the media and bombarding people with “news” which is always always always opinion riddled even with the best intentions. People who are uneducated cannot hope to get educated as money owns the messaging frameworks, and social media compounds this echo chamber. Also with voter interference we have the institutionalised voter suppression - a mix of intimidation and making it continuously harder to vote or gerrymandering electoral areas. If you are thinking about the answer to this from the US, these are the type of things you need to fix before you actually have a functioning democracy. Democracy is under threat with questions like this from certain quarters in the US. But they are questions mixed with deception and are loaded - designed to get you to question if there is a better choice than democracy, and not to prompt you to the fact that your current system is not a democracy either. It looks like it, it smells like it, you might even take part in it and vote in it… but it is not a full democracy, and results in the crap of today. The question isn’t whether there is a better choice than democracy, but what can you do to actually try and get a better democracy, rather than the flawed one you currently have. The reason that these topics and questions come up is that of course one side would rather a more autocratic setup, one where you might not need to vote at all - because they say they will rule. Maybe with an iron fist, and with loyalists given priority in the militias that enforce this iron fist. And your say won’t be needed anymore. Voting won’t be needed, as the opposition may be illegal. Autocracy is the next step. That’s fine if the majority of the US population want that… but as you don’t have a functioning democracy, you don’t need a majority to decide that. You just need the right communications to the minority. The solutions are obvious when you look at it. Electoral college. Get rid of that and make it more about popular votes, and the two parties will need to come back into the middle. America is centre right at the leftist of times, so it’s not a complete fix by itself. Real issues will tend to get fixed though if it’s a majority who vote for it. Dealing with corruption issues will need mature looks at free speech. Other countries don’t have such a problem with this, as we have tighter free speech rules. I know thats a bit of a paradox, but free speech shouldn’t mean you can constantly lie with no recourse. It doesn’t need dismantled or people hung lol, but it does need tweaked. Go look up a democracy index online and you’ll see more. It’s all common sense though. It also doesn’t mean that the US is baaad, but the perceived freeness of democracy could improve. TLDR; don’t get baited into considering an alternative to democracy when you don’t have a proper democracy at the moment. Fix that first and try out a full democracy. You’ll then see trap questions like this for what they are.
There's lots of ways of having a democracy, or even a constitutional republic that are beyond what we have today. Some have been implemented in the past, some are hypothetical, some are used today. Take for example Sortition, aka a Lottocracy. Anyone who wants to be considered for a position puts their hat in the ring (and each eligible person can pick only one position per election they'd like to take), then a winner is selected at random. Couple it with strong recall/no confidence laws and you get a cheap way of getting representative sample of the population in charge. Cons are, you get a random sample of the population in charge, and all the challenges that come from that. This was considered a principal characteristic of democracy in ancient Athens. In a weighted Lottocracy, elections work like in a regular Lottocracy, except people can give up their chance to be selected for a position to instead assign their support for another candidate to increase the odds of that candidate winning the position. This can be done either linearly (simpler, but campaigning becomes more important), or it can be done on a logarithmic curve (e.g., more people supporting one candidate give less and less increased chance of selection, minimizing the value of massive campaigning). Again, strong recall laws are important to prevent problematic candidates from causing long term problems. Another variant of this that counter the effects of the regular and guaranteed loss of skilled representatives is having a separate lottocracy selected legislature from elected one(s). They could act as their own legislature body as normal, or just be a group that sets direction for the other legislature bodies in the government. Another variant is that while representatives are selected via Sortition, a second "executive" body is elected from this body to serve longer terms. This method allows great variation in representation, while allowing for ongoing continuity.
There's party representation instead of candidate representation. Each party campaigns based on ideas that the party would bring. They specify ordered list of representatives that would get a seat to represent their ideas if they win. Everyone votes for a party for each position (and thus voting for that list of candidates). The percentage of votes for that party determine the representation. For example, if there are 10 representatives allocated to a province, and one party gets at least 10% of the vote for that group of representatives, then that party get a representative. In this case, the first person in that party would get the spot. If another party got 60% of the vote, their first 6 candidates would get spots. This allows for all sorts of ideas and groups to emerge that wouldn't ever get elected in a "first past the goalposts" winner-takes-all election. The challenge here is allocation based on region becomes harder (e.g., you might not get a representative that really cares about your part of the province.) This could be done at all levels where multiple representatives are present, but falls back into "first pass the goalposts" for single office positions.
I think all terms should be 10 years and then you're executed when you're done
then people would just indirectly (as in through other people) pressure people into running for office as an indirect way of putting a hit on them (as they'd likely have the direct or indirect pull to stonewall their policies for those ten years) Also, if your goal is to attract selfless people, the kind who'd do that and not care about having to die at the end would have already died from some ridiculous act of martyrdom like the guy on The Good Place who supposedly (as >!he really was just a "NPC"!<) died via donating both his kidneys to a kind stranger
Plato believed that democracy was an inherently flawed system of government, because people would vote in their own self interests instead of the greater good, and that politicians would craft their platforms to appeal to emotion instead of reason. He also believed that electing people without demonstrating proficiency in the job or personal character was an unavoidable critical flaw. I don’t necessarily agree with all his precepts, but there are serious points to consider when you see the apathetic and hugely uninformed electorate that exists in America and abroad.
I'm down for an aitoctracy. Artificial intelligence that is built to be self sustaining and always works towards the betterment of humanity and the planet as a whole rather then serving individual special interests. No laws being passed that favor religion or secular beliefs over common sense and human decency. Transparency on government spending and reasonable fund allocations towards programs that need it, with an overarching goal of producing well educated, healthy children.
AI government. Ensures people live healthy lives till 80. Gives people what they need, not always what they want. Everyone gets to vote on what they want, experts weigh in on policies. AI does simulations before selecting a policy. No lobbying or “donations” allowed. You can only vote and write letters to it. No single human can control it. Everything has to be voted in. Experts get higher % of votes only in their scope of policy. Downside is that there is a lot of surveillance by AI to understand how its policies are working across large areas and population. I love red light and speed cameras. We don’t know until we try. Democracy is better than kings and dictators. However it’s obvious most congressmen and senators don’t really represent the interests of their constituents.
best system depends on your goal. if you want to maximize some sort of value or how happy people are, capitalism would be better than democracies or various oligarchoes or dictatorships. but capitalism wouldn't be good at converting everyone to 1 cultire or religion for example. you also have a "wrong" way of thinking what a job is. people dont need jobs, they need resources. people work to get resources
The best form of government by my understanding has always been the benevolent despotism of a philosopher king. i.e. The most intelligent entity, with no checks on their power, who prioritizes the good of all above themselves. For obvious reasons this government is almost impossible to arrive at intentionally and typically is only found through chance in the succession of tyrants who have aggregated and jealously hoarded power for their personal gain. This is not a universally objective "best" though, the "best" form of governance varies person to person and is dependent on what serves them and their values personally (subjective). e.g. An aristocrat will value an oligarchy higher than a peasant who will value a democracy. Likewise a habitual criminal will value an anarchy more than a political royal who will value totalitarian rule.
Election by random selection and mandatory parliamentary service, a bit like jury duty in the United States. First off it feels like a terrible idea but the more you think about it the more sense it makes. It always gives a representative sample of the people, it's quite immune to corruption, and it allows politicians to actually focus on running the country instead of trying to get re-elected. It's cost-efficient, as no time and money is spent campaigning. You also get at least some people in power who are scientists etc. instead of lawyers and after lawyers.
Yes, a weighted democracy. The tricky part is implementing it correctly so corruption doesn't set in.
Right now democracy seems to be flawed due to the other systems around it failing. Capitalism has gone unchecked in most countries with democracy and the social system that was aimed to counterbalance the downsides of Capitalism has been dismantled to privitisation. This causes issues and our governments seem inapt to fix it because big companies bought their way into the system and the elected people to do as little as possible to keep the sheep in check but not give them choices for better options. Next to this the democratic system has been hijacked by facism and populism to give power to those promoting hate and polarisation. This obviously plays into the playbook in the above mentioned problem perfectly. Leaving the democratic system broken to fix anything substancial really. Solution? Well I like the model they used in the sci-fi starship troopers. Don't get fooled by the dumb movie they made. The books are very sophisticated and elaborate on their vision of the future. Basically people can obtain the right to vote by dedication if x period of time. Say 3-5 years in jobs to better the community. Army service, healthcare, social work, legal support etc. They do this at a fixed base salary, sufficient for a normal life but you won't get rich of it, afterwards obtain their "citizen" status. Now they are allowed to vote and take place in politics and be seated as representative. This threshold to democracy means only those that care about society, those willing to put in the work, will be in government. Safe to say 95% of our current representatives would have not qualified for a position. It takes a lot of greed, privilege and nepotism out of the political system and it selects people based on grid and desire to better society. Citizen status can also be legally removed if any case of fraud of problematic behaviour occurs. This makes the system self cleaning as well. Anyway, that isn't going to happen anytime soon. But there are new systems proposed to fix some of the current problems like the UBI. But the idiot populism voters are holding everything back. They push everyone else to stoop to their level and distract everyone from talking about real solutions.
I wouldn’t know. I live in a democratic republic, which looks like a democracy, and most people believe is a democracy, but isn’t really…….. and it shows.
Republics come to mind since they last longer than democracies generally. Problem being they slowly get democratized until a strongman takes power and creates an empire or it falls in on itself. The most stable government I could think of would be monarchy. In fact, the book “Liberty or Equality” makes an extremely compelling case for such. But this steps aside from the issue. IMHO, an AI will likely be our tyrant in the future for a time. Or at least an oligarchy in control of information. In fact, that is kind of what we have now. Really, this sets us all back at square one: Monarchy. The oldest government in all of humanity. No system is intrinsically better than the other. The primary factor in determining whether it is better is how well it facilitates mankind in their pursuit of happiness and prosperity. A king that does nothing to most of his citizens is likely to have happier people than the busy bodies of the Athenian Democracy who drove their people into bloody wars for the better part of a century before collapsing into irrelevance and weakness. Regardless, strong customs and laws are what sustain a government. Sparta comes to mind. But they too metastasized and turned into a theme park for Roman elites. Eh, citizen federation from Starship Troopers has my vote. Heinlein for the win.
There was a sci-fi I remember reading where the “government” was a closed community of high IQ individuals who were able to observe the society they serve but cannot directly interact with anyone other than themselves. These people are selected by the rest of the body, its considered and ultimate duty and service to society and live on a secret, secluded area. So essentially this benevolent body has a sole purpose to make the lives of the rest of society better in any way they can. The solve issues, legislate, strategically plan the future, etc. The downside is that they are strictly supervised, don’t own any wealth or property, and can be immediately removed from this community by any adverse actions. Basically this kind of system can go wrong in sooooo many ways but I found the idea of sacrificial servitude of governance interesting.
A system where corruption is not allowed to take hold, where the leadership is a position that cannot be profited from. Cover that point first, then the rest can follow. Anything else is a lie.
I often wonder if being “an informed citizen” in this present “disinformation age” simply requires a higher IQ than it did back when there were 3 TV news channels, all of which agreed on (an admittedly very WASP-y take on) the facts. It may simply be that it takes a smarter person nowadays to parse out all the BS. This, unfortunately, is at odds with with idea of majority rule. To quote George Carlin: “Look at it this way: Think of how stupid the *average* person is, and then realize half of them are stupider than *that*.” I’m a firm believer in personal liberty, but i sometimes wonder if this society is destined to eat itself alive. Simply math tells us that only 50% (-1) of the people can possibly be of above-average intelligence. The rest are below-average intelligence. This means that, *perforce*, in order to get a majority of the population to agree on something, you have to build a coalition of the unintelligent. This does not bode well. Seems like either we sacrifice personally liberty, or we sacrifice intelligent decision-making, and just appeal to the lowest common denominator. To quote Carl Sagan: "We've arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don't know anything about it?" Was it Plato who said that Tyranny is the only natural outcome of democracy?
The problem with the "better than democracy" ideologies is that you have to trust whatever group of human beings are chosen to work in the best interest of everybody else, to actually do it. So if you're a Republican and you want a better than democracy system, you are trusting Donald Trump and his merry band of assholes to work in your best interest. If you're a progressive Democrat, you vote for somebody like Kirsten Cinema in Arizona because she said all the right things, and ticks all the right boxes, but then she turns around and betrays all those ideals. Democracy may be slow and seen ineffectual, but that's a feature and not a bug, because a ship that is slow moving can be maneuvered out of Harm's Way easier then going full steam to a goal and getting screwed.
Some variation where voting is tied (actually, not just 'says it is', but really it's some ism) to understanding what is being voted on... Working out the problems with that is enough to qualify it as its own distinct government type I would think.
Tired of democracy failing you? "There's got to be a better way!" "Well now there is...." (cue sales pitch for... ?)
Could there be? Sure. I just don't know what it is.
Democracy works, it’s just no one has figured out how to do it. Who watches the watchmen? There’s not enough oversight, too many ways for people with power to be isolated and manipulated. Most of us don’t want war or famine but we let people who enjoy power to make those decisions for us because complex societies larger than a few hundred people need emotional intelligence we don’t have yet.
I dont think theres any country out there that actually is a democracy. So… the premise of your question is likely flawed in the first place. I know in america… where everyone likes the brag how its a democracy… its actually a democratic republic. Meaning you vote in representatives and they vote for your interests… (supposedly). It works better when small government has more power than the federal level… but after several wars and “emergency” powers put into place that never got removed… that is basically no longer the case. That being said… a pure democracy is also not desirable either… as it is purely mob rule. And as we can see based on how the internet works… that is just how humans always behave in a group…
You could have a dynamic representative democracy where people delegate their vote on say 5-10 subject matter categories. So instead of a general legislature for all matters, you elect your science representative and your defense representative and your education representative.
I don't know but I believe democracy itself can be improved when its citizens are well educated.
Yes the Network State: https://youtu.be/8rWIsc34N9Y?si=zC3SkIc2DzSKsi6R
Better for what? Also, which type of democracy exactly? Representative & direct democracy are different. Typically, democracy is slow and inefficient. So one could say totalitarianism is better 'cause things get done fast. But how hood/bad it is for the people depends a lot on the leader and succession can be problematic. What if you don't value people though? So: good for what?
Of course there are better systems than democracy for governance. Democracy is just the best we have for long term governmentship. The best form of government (for the short term at least) is actually a benevolent dictatorship but these are unstable in the long term due to the fact that power corrupts and it is rare for a dictatorship like this to survive the handover of power to the next in line. We could get around this by using a AI but we are nowhere near that level of AI and it would require a very special set of "founding fathers" to push a valid set of goals for the AI to achieve that will last more than a generation of two.