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Politics 2.0 - what do you think?

3stripe3stripe ✭✭
edited November 2006 in Vanilla 1.0 Help
I'm planning a blog article about this, but first want to ask you guys, who know about the web 2.0, what you think.

If you applied the attributes of web 2.0 (eg community-driven, to politics, what would you end up with?

I love the idea of an open-source, participatory, user-friendly and accessible form of government that put things back in the hands of communities and let everyone have a say in things, if they wanted to.

Speaking as a UK citizen, I find our notion of "democracy" to be slightly flawed and out-dated, in that all I'm entitiled to is a vote once every x years to choose someone to represent me in parliament, and don't actually have much of a say in major decisions that are made. For example the last Scottish referendum was nearly 10 years ago!

What if you took the model for direct domocracy and employed some of the qualities of web 2.0 to it? I'm not suggesting that politics should go digital, just that it needs to catch up with 21st century living.

Please note: when I say "web 2.0" I categorically DO NOT mean any of the cliched graphic styles associated with this phrase, eg gradients, reflections, "beta" stars etc, and have no interest in talking about these or even taking the piss out of them. Just so you know.
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Comments

  • MarkMark Vanilla Staff
    edited November 2006
    Things like wikipedia fill me with a sense of promise. I love what wikipedia has achieved, but it is a rarity. For every wikipedia there is a myspace, and myspace scares me to my core. Can you imagine myspace running the country?

    For that reason alone I'd avoid any kind of community driven government. I do think that there are fatal flaws in government (just look at the Bush administration). But if we took an important question and asked everyone their opinion, we'd end up with a hijacked discussion about rap music mac vs pc or something. We need a change, but I think the required change might just be a set of better leaders nominated and elected by us.

    /2c
  • Rap music? Not a mac-pc flamewar? Sorry I couldnt resist.
  • MarkMark Vanilla Staff
    hahaha
  • 3stripe3stripe ✭✭
    edited November 2006
    Myspace running the country.... woahhh!!!!

    I know what you're saying Mark, perhaps the scope of people's inputs would need to be limited to particularly important decisions... and there are a lot of stupid people to contend with as well. On the flip side, there are a lot of intelligent people who might have good input.

    mini, don't tempt fate!
  • In my point of view, direct democracy does not work. Especially the part "citizens who choose to participate" is kind of problematic. A thing voted on by less than 50% of the citizens means that at least 50% of the people do vote against it or do not support it. Which ends up in not being legitimised. That's why only one industrialised country in the world is using an election method, where a simple majority is enough, to decide who gets head of their country. And Switzerland is not a good example on modern vote systems, I think, as they allow women to vote just until 1985. Sorry, my English is horrible today (only today? hmm...) and after 10 hours of listening to lecturers I am totally exhausted. Anyway I wanted to give an answer.
  • MarkMark Vanilla Staff
    edited November 2006
    One thing I hate about the electoral system is that you *have* to choose someone on the ballot. I think there should be one more option:

    * I choose to not vote for any of the candidates.

    That way we *really* get a proper choice. If that box gets more votes than each of the candidates, then the election has to start over with new candidates.
  • MarkMark Vanilla Staff
    Well, I don't *really* believe that - it's just a thought...
  • @ Mark: Definitely right. It sounds absolutely logic to me, too. The theory proposes exactly such a box. It could also help to avoid pushing extreme parties just out of protesting.
  • hsthst
    edited November 2006
    And Switzerland is not a good example on modern vote systems, I think, as they allow women to vote just until 1985. /TEX

    You're right and the swiss voting record carries a serious anti-immigration bias as well. I think one of the main feats of modern representational democracy is that the many follies of public opinion are eliminated through a slow bureaucratic policy process.

    However, community-driven politics is an interesting idea, but I would argue that it would be better to apply it to a restructured party system rather than to a direct democracy-system. We retain Schumpeter's ideas of politicians with full autonomy as entrepreneurial agents in politics who compete for the electorate, but enable easier entry for parties into the political arena with a community-driven party-framework where the electorate can commit his or her support for a given party for a given amount of time. The idea is to have a continually changing support indicator rather than regular elections. For instance, this would, in principle, remove the election bias for economic policy and make it easier for new actors to enter into politics. Of course, this is easier to envision in parliamentary systems than in presidential, but the principle would still be reasonable although a proportional electoral system is a necessary requirement for the legislature.

    *edit* btw this is my first post on this board, hi all :)
  • Woah. For a first post my head's spinning! Or maybe thats the beer... Welcome aboard!
  • you could take a closer look at swiss democracy here ... http://www.swissworld.org/dvd_rom/eng/direct_democracy_2005/index.html
  • Someone famous once said...

    "Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on lunch!

    pic
  • we no longer live in democracies we live instead in corpocracies i.e. big business run our countries. Now this may not be news to Merikans....but these past 10 years, the evolvement into a corpocracy has been massive news to British folks. PS - I have been advocating for years what Mark said above i.e. have a box on the ballot paper that allows people to vote for 'None of the Above'. And if a certain level of such votes are reached (eg say 40 percent or more) then new elections and politicans need to be established.
  • good analogy, wanderer!
  • Some say the big problem with direct democracy is that yes, everyone votes for more money to be spent on education and hospitals, and yes, everyone votes for lower taxes, and then what does the poor government do?
  • ercatli: ...and then what does the poor government do?

    Stop spending on lavish overseas trips, chauffeur-driven gas-guzzling limousines, buying multi-million dollar pieces of art that just sit there to be looked at, paying for huge advertising campaigns telling us how good they are...
  • Ercatli has a point but so does wanderer. There was an interesting fact i read a while ago (it might have been utter bullshit but it was interesting nontheless)... If the US government took 1% off their army budget and spread it across a few of the most needy areas of their budget it would solve nearly all their money issues. Worth considering...
  • We spend more shipping drugs and guns than to educate our sons...

    Thats a line in a song by Megadeth, but true.
  • "pieces of art that just sit there to be looked at" :-D
  • "pieces of art that just sit there to be looked at"

    Yes years ago they paid millions for a Jackson Pollock painting called Blue Poles...

    pic

    I was painting my dad's house at the time, I could have donated my drop-sheet and saved them the money!
This discussion has been closed.