I think there’s a lot of interesting potential in such ideas—but that this isn’t ambitious enough! Democracy isn’t just about compromising on the issues on the table; the best forms involve learning more and perhaps changing our minds… as well as, yes, trying to find creative win-win outcomes that everyone can at least accept.
I think that trying to improve democracy with better voting systems is fairly similar to trying to improve the economy with better price and capital-allocation sytems. In both cases, there have been enormous advances since the mid-1800s; in both there’s a realistic prospect of modern computers enabling wildly better-than-historical systems; and in both cases it focuses effort on a technical subproblem which not sufficient and maybe not even necessary. (and also there’s the spectre of communism in Europe haunting both)
A few bodies of thought and work on this that I like:
classic speeches, letters, and essays on citizenship, such as Citizenship in a Republic or Letter from a Birmingham Jail
(“the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them”)
consensus decision-making. I’m particularly familiar with and fond of the UCA Manual for Meetings; Beyond the Majority Rule gives a decent account of similar practices. Good practice feels like a large dance event; there’s enough structure that you can all work together but not so much that you can’t improvise when that’d work better.
I think there’s a lot of interesting potential in such ideas—but that this isn’t ambitious enough! Democracy isn’t just about compromising on the issues on the table; the best forms involve learning more and perhaps changing our minds… as well as, yes, trying to find creative win-win outcomes that everyone can at least accept.
I think that trying to improve democracy with better voting systems is fairly similar to trying to improve the economy with better price and capital-allocation sytems. In both cases, there have been enormous advances since the mid-1800s; in both there’s a realistic prospect of modern computers enabling wildly better-than-historical systems; and in both cases it focuses effort on a technical subproblem which not sufficient and maybe not even necessary. (and also there’s the spectre of communism in Europe haunting both)
A few bodies of thought and work on this that I like:
classic speeches, letters, and essays on citizenship, such as Citizenship in a Republic or Letter from a Birmingham Jail (“the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them”)
consensus decision-making. I’m particularly familiar with and fond of the UCA Manual for Meetings; Beyond the Majority Rule gives a decent account of similar practices. Good practice feels like a large dance event; there’s enough structure that you can all work together but not so much that you can’t improvise when that’d work better.
computer-enabled ideas like Polis (and relevantly e.g.) or the Collective Intelligence Project, The Computerization of Society (1978, France), arguably Alan Kay’s Dynabook concept, Wikipedia and open source / open culture movements, …
But as usual, the hard and valuable part is the doing!
Yes, I agree that this is at best just one piece of the puzzle. I have a doc collecting ideas here: Governance and Epistemics resources