So, politics...

[azekeil]

A quick post while I think of it.

I mentioned in my previous post that I found the world of politics too complex and without enough choice (I possibly meant differentiation here).

It struck me, why are we voting for politicians? I'm interested in certain policies coming into being, but uninterested or even actively against others happening. Why can't we vote for policies? We have the technology to enable this.

There is of course another aspect to this, which is about how politicians handle situations. Perhaps they could also put forward their principles and ideals so that we can vote for the traits we would most like to see, such as hard line vs. compassionate, strong national identity vs. international coordination, etc.

This granularity would much better represent the people's wishes and would give a much clearer picture of what people want than the current (effective) choice of three main parties. I think it would even inspire the political apathetics like myself to vote as it would be something I could really have my proper say.

Thoughts?

Comments

[apathyintheuk.livejournal.com]

Unfortunatly what the masses may want and would vote for may not be whats best for the country in the longer term. Take the example of abolishing the 10p tax band and lowering the 25p band that happened recently. That would have probably been voted for by the majority (I know I would have), giving them a few extra quid which makes little diffence to their pay packet, but left some people worse off where that few quid makes all the difference.
I am sure there are other examples but like you I am politically apethetic (Unless its a policy that directly affects my pay packet, then I am politically selfish)
I certainly can't keep up with all the ins and outs of politics on a large scale so I just vote for who I feel best suits me for the next term. Unfortunatly for once I am on the fence at the moment.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

So policy wouldn't include specific issues. It would be more around the general approach towards taxation. Certainly initially it would be the party manifesto split up into policy suggestions.

Perhaps people wouldn't vote initially for unpopular things; that's fine. Control would still go to the party amassing the most votes on their policies so they would still be free to enact the less popular things.

People could see that a vote for a bunch of policies made it more likely a certain party would come to power, and could also examine their other policies they didn't like and represent their dislike of certain policies through voting too - a scale of like - neutral - dislike, perhaps.

It would be a bit confusing at first, but political parties would get a much clearer message from the public.

[theeighth.livejournal.com]

There's only really one reason this will never happen.
That is that it is not in the interest of politicians, who after all professionals in the business of being voted for.

Their words are masked behind obfuscation and double-talk, using weasely words that nobody would disagree with, but that really mean something else. "Family values" becomes "governmental control of popular ideology" as if by magic and people keep voting for the parties they've always voted for.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting observation.

[theeighth.livejournal.com]

I'm a cynic :D

[gerald_duck]

The first, big problem with direct representation on individual issues is that the majority of the population wants both lower taxes and more public services, so would vote for both. The one absolutely indispensable rôle of politicians is to form a set of policies that's mutually consistent. Well, you could have unelected civil servants do that part (people who watch Yes Minister will understand that to some extent they do anyway), but it's generally seen as a good thing that we have elected officials doing the job.

Beyond that, personally I'm deeply cynical about democracy. The aphormism "democracy is based on the fallacy that more than half the people are right more than half the time" definitely applies. Most people aren't competent to make reasonable politicial decisions. I don't want to live in a country where every knee-jerk reaction and blind prejudice was translated directly into law; if I did, I'd go live in one of the more backward cantons of Switzerland.

Yes, it would be nice if we could vote on broad values. However, in practice nobody is motivated to become a politician in order to faithfully execute the will of the people; people become politicians to promote and execute their own agendas. Therefore, a hard-liner who wants to be elected when the voters want compassion will attempt to appear compassionate. Politicians always try to achieve their own aims while appearing to achieve the aims of a majority of the electorate. This is inherent and inevitable, so successful politicians will always seem dishonest. To muddy the waters, what people mean by even such fundamental terms as "socialist", "liberal", "compassionate", "nationalist", "collectivist", "centralist" etc. will differ, even within the UK, but certainly across Europe or between the UK and USA. Currently, I'd say that Labour is our most right-wing party and the LibDems our most left-wing with the Conservatives in the middle ground, but they're all considerably to the left of both Republicans and Democrats in the USA.

Further, there's a nice analogy that Ian Stewart gave in one of his books. Consider a beach 1km long with two ice cream sellers. Where should they be, so that people have to walk as short a distance as possible for an ice cream? They should be at the 250m and 750m marks, so people are on average 125m from their nearest ice cream. However, one day the seller at the 250m mark realises he can get more customers by moving to the 350m mark. That way, anyone up to 550m across the beach is closer to him than the other seller and he gets 10% more custom. The 750m seller will naturally compensate by moving to the 650m mark — or maybe even closer to the middle, to get even more custom. Eventually, the two sellers end up back to back at the 500m mark. They still each have only half the beach buying from them, but now people have to walk an average of 250m for an ice cream.

Similarly, in a two-party system the two parties will naturally tend to end up only very slightly differentiated in the middle ground, and the average person has to vote for a party with views much more median than their own rather than a patry that more closely represents them.

On the other hand, although this leads to very substantial disillusionment on the part of the voters, it does at least mean we end up with more moderate government (as does our using first-past-the-post instead of proportional representation).

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

I mentioned this to apathyintheuk above, but essentially I think it should primarily be the parties' manifestos split into policies and voters allowed to say how much they like or dislike each policy. Voters would then be aware that voting for policies from one particular manifesto increased the liklihood that that party would come into power (and thus the negative policies they suggest would also come into being). This would automatically be balanced for them by the ability of the voter to say they disliked certain policies.

The information from such elections should be of vast interest and importance to the parties as it would essentially be the voice of the voter.

This gets around the abstractions of term definitions while still keeping the idea of a party, etc.

[sayuri-eve.livejournal.com]

I don’t really follow politics as much as I probably should but I’m not really sure how the idea of splitting party policies would work. On the surface it seems somehow more logical and fair but I can imagine parties tailoring specific policies to suit the climate to an even greater degree than they do now, it’s always been about quick fixes and being seen to do something to resolve issues that take effect as soon as possible. I’m sure things could genuinely be made better if people were prepared to actually wait for things to work and take effect but they never will – something that doesn’t work immediately is more often than not viewed as a failure, but in order to make a genuine difference there has to be some shaky ground before things improve, and no one’s ever prepared for that. I think people will always side with what appears to be the winning horse, acting emotively and what not. It seems to suffer from the same thing you see in every office, things are continually shuffled around to cover up a much wider problem, things appear to change, money is initially saved, and the managers appear happy.

I also don’t think polices on paper can ever be seen as they appear, everything is of course carefully worded in seemingly people-friendly, digestible and understandable chunks, what they really represent of course is something else. Dare I say it I only think you need to look at the near comical national obsession with paedophilia, which exploded in the media, fuelled by government policy, which was actually a rather neat way of spreading fear over the internet, thus gaining some control over something that is very unpredictable and difficult to control. The internet is possibly the closest thing to freedom we have. Of course it’s a valid crime, its despicable etc etc, but blown out of all proportion.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Yes. All you say is quite quite true.

I think some of this can be avoided by talking more about approaches than specific policies - but there needs to be some sort of accountability so parties will stick to what they said they'd do in their manifestos.

I do accept that policies tend to be written with 'weasely words' as theeighth puts it. This shouldn't be the case but it seems to be standard fayre. People will adopt to it though.

Perhaps a test where people are invited to vote using the new system alongside the old system and see how the results compare (continuing to use the old system for determining elections) to allow tweaking before it gets used?

Yes, I see how the media and politicians manipulate words and people's fear to achieve control over things that there isn't much control over currently (by restricting freedom).