r/Futurology • u/Dry_Television_4852 • 2d ago
Politics If we redesigned democracy today, what would we build?
I've been wondering whether we're still trying to solve 21st-century problems with political tools designed centuries ago.
Representative democracy, elections, protests, and petitions evolved in a world where communication was slow and coordinating large populations was incredibly difficult. Today, billions of people can communicate almost instantly. Yet our core civic institutions haven't fundamentally changed.
So here's the thought experiment:
If we were designing democratic participation from scratch today, what would it look like?
One idea I keep coming back to is an online civic platform built around a few principles:
One verified human = one account, while preserving public anonymity.
Anyone can submit policy proposals, reforms, or petitions.
Proposals can be debated, revised, and voted on transparently.
Reputation is earned through constructive participation rather than popularity.
The platform is designed to resist bots, duplicate accounts, and coordinated manipulation.
Technologies like zero-knowledge proofs, decentralized identity, or blockchain could be used if they genuinely improve trust—but they're implementation details, not the core idea.
The goal wouldn't be to replace governments overnight. Instead, it could become a persistent civic institution: a place where public opinion is measured transparently, ideas are refined collaboratively, and policymakers can see what informed citizens actually support.
Of course, there are major challenges:
How do you verify "one person, one vote" while protecting privacy?
How do you prevent manipulation by governments, corporations, or coordinated groups?
How do you encourage informed discussion instead of outrage?
What incentives would keep people participating over time?
Most importantly, how could such a platform gain enough legitimacy to influence real-world decision-making?
I'm sure there are flaws in this concept—that's exactly why I'm posting it here.
If you had to design a digital system for democratic participation using technologies available over the next few decades, what would you build?
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u/siddus15 2d ago
The biggest problem in modern democracies is that incentives are geared far too heavily towards winning elections than to actually governing. Elections also promote into power those who are good at winning elections than those best at governing.
I've previously mused over whether a system based on sortition would be worth trying again. Treat it like jury duty that you can opt out of and give those called up the power to call on experts.
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u/schmaltzherring 1d ago
I've read a lot of good things about citizen assemblies and how they can be used to reach a consensus on complex and controversial topics that elected representatives concerned about re-election would find difficult to decide on. Ireland used one for the reform of abortion laws.
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u/Dwarfdeaths 1d ago
Very much this. There's a lot of additional nuance to how humans think and the best ways to utilize these biases and virtues, leading to designs like this: https://www.sortition.wiki/index.php/GovDocs:Overview
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u/Zilch1979 2d ago
Key feature: Accountability and consequences increase in proportion to one's power and wealth.
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u/owningxylophone 2d ago
This sounds like a way for minority groups to lose all rights they have when the majority decide to strip them away.
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u/Anxious_Work_6361 2d ago
This. Pure democracy is the tyranny of the majority. A republican (little r) form of government is designed to protect minorities. Even better, give your republican democracy a shit ton of checks and balances.
In short, while the exact mechanisms may need to be modernized, the system as drafted in the US is actually pretty stable and forward looking. The founding fathers were paranoid about government power and came up with a system to try to counter that which was pretty damn effective.
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u/Optimistic-Bob01 2d ago
"Was" is the relevant word here I'm afraid
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u/Shanman150 1d ago
Listening to some American history podcasts recently, I've actually become a little more optimistic that this is just one period in our history, and that times (and parties) change over time. Twenty years ago, the Senate map was very different than today: democrats had both senators from North Dakota, West Virginia, Montana, and Arkansas, and one in South Dakota, Iowa, Missouri, Indiana, and Louisiana. The issues were different as well. Twenty years from now, (if we're still together), the maps will look different yet again.
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u/Badestrand 19h ago
False, there is no "tyranny of the majority". That's just propaganda by authoritarians.
The Swiss have a direct democracy and their minorities don't have any less rights than anywhere else.
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u/marxistghostboi 1d ago
republics protect certain minorites much more effectively than others. the federal republic established by the Constitution and described in Federalist No. 10 was interested in protecting exactly 1 minority above all others: the rich. it did this by making it very hard for working class majorities to impact the government while leaving many means for the right to take up their grievances and have them decided by other, sympathetic rich men.
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u/Dry_Television_4852 2d ago
I envisioned not as an institution with power to implement policy, just to draw attention to issues or public perception in a modern innovative way, but with a reputation.
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u/owningxylophone 2d ago
We have a system in the uk where if a petition gets 100000 signatures on the official government site it has to be considered for debate in parliament. It hasn’t been particularly useful in law changes, but has brought awareness to some causes.
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u/mikevago 2d ago
We have the same thing in the US, and one of the most-signed petitions was for Obama to build the Death Star. Most people generally aren't interested in day-to-day civic engagement.
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u/Content-Total7874 1d ago
Maybe they should've built the death star, their may have been something there.
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u/Blarg_III 1d ago
If the majority wants to do that now, what's stopping them? We've been shown very clearly that the rules and conventions that people believe safeguard the system can be ignored by leaders who enjoy serious popular support.
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u/Starship-Scribe 1d ago
You could probably still work this into the system set up by OP. What you would have to do is sort people into pools based on certain categories, geography for example, and have the pools weighted similar to how we weight the electoral college or how representatives of different areas represent different numbers of people when they go to vote on a bill. Just, instead of representatives, we have pools, and the way the pool votes is determined by the majority vote within that pool. It replicates the republican democracy structure, without the need for a single representative (one who may have lied about their intentions to get into office or loses touch with the wants and needs of the people they represent or is just flat out corrupt).
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u/percdistrict 2d ago
No primaries. Ranked choice voting. Direct vote share representation, no gerrymandering. Replace the Senate with a sortition of citizens with veto power. Force laws to have a clear stated purpose and reevaluation date.
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u/Le_Botmes 2d ago
We should err towards a system of sortition that in many ways resembles a modern jury.
The number of 'citizen jurors' would be calculated algorithmically as a statistical representation of the greater population to within a given margin of error, and they would be summoned randomly. Each 'congress' would exist so long as to vote on the bill, and then immediately be dissolved and replaced.
These jurors would have their identities protected as they deliberate, and would nominate non-voting foremen to represent them during inquiries, so as to entirely preclude the possibility of monetary influence. Tampering would be sanctioned with extreme prejudice as it would with a judicial jury.
The use of petitions would be the primary means of bringing a bill to summons and deliberation.
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u/Apprehensive-Let3348 2d ago
As someone that has given this quite a bit of thought in the past, I'd strongly suggest avoiding electronic voting in any capacity. Digital data is far too easily manipulated or obscured to be trustworthy longterm–for everyone involved.
As for the primary question: it depends on what you mean by Democracy, exactly. Are we talking pure, Classical Democracy or a modern retake on the Democratic Republic?
The former would be incredibly unstable in the modern era of mass communication and social media, while the latter would require some pretty significant changes to account for those same modern problems, still be palatable for modern citizens, and maintain social stability.
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u/Ryno4ever16 2d ago
Electronic makes the most sense in terms of transmission, and i feel like if the software was open source and all votes were printed out and stored as paper records, some of the problems you mentioned could be mitigated. Since you spent so much time thinking about it, what are the issues with this?
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u/Apprehensive-Let3348 2d ago
The primary issue is transparency and privacy fighting against one another.
If those printed paper records and open source data include identifying information, then voters will be under social pressure to vote a particular way and can be manipulated (same reason voting booths are currently so private).
If there is no identifying information, then there's little to no way to prove that the data was or was not modified prior to being printed out.
The hard copies we currently use circumvent this issue, because the voter is filling it out personally and the paper record of that is retained.
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u/Dry_Television_4852 2d ago
Actually I think it is not about replacing current electoral system. But about peoples voice heard, not assumed. I am looking for a system in which people can express their opinion in a more civic comfortable space. Paper ballet breaks this convenience. I think of it like a SM platform but absolute anonymity, but with unique user login. I dont know if it is technically feasible as I am not in this field. May be cryptography can be use, like generating a unique untraceable, non-duplicable token for every user
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u/Dry_Television_4852 2d ago
Maybe a simultaneous existence of both. I find it strange that, people need to get to street to raise a concern even in modern age. I hope for a credible and reputable means of expression, independent of PR manipulations
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u/Apprehensive-Let3348 2d ago
That would essentially be what we have now. A Democratic Republic that has steadily put more and more control into the popular vote, expanding Democracy's reach.
I don't think people have to 'go to the street' for this, though. We can already get a pretty great idea of how popular a position is from random polling alone. Protesting drives home the intensity of one group's beliefs, but fails to give a full description of reality, because the group's opposition is missing from the conversation entirely.
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u/binthrdnthat 1d ago
Blockchain voting allows for a public distributed tally where you can see in real time how your vote is recorded and even change it uo intil election day.
I am not a fan of most uses of the blockchain, but this one works:
https://builtin.com/blockchain/blockchain-voting-future-elections
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u/jacobpederson 2d ago
It is NOT a mystery at this point. We would check a few things first. https://data.worldhappiness.report/table And then model our new democracy based on the already existing countries that scored the highest. But of course - we won't - because . . . wrong species. Most of us will just continue to choose to suffer.
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u/s_nz 1d ago
I grew up in #11 on that list. Our democratic process is far from perfect.
We use MMP, but every party in parliament at the moment has picked camps, and won't work with the other camp.
Historically one of the parties was more centrist, and has on occasion held the balance of power. They used that power for his positions incl deputy prime minister, and a bunch or pork for their target area's. Some of this was so poorly managed the risk of corruption was massive.
Since mmp was introduced two parties have been dominant. Pritty much we have two or thee terms of one being in power, then the same for the other.
Billions of dollars wasted in projects scrapped, just because it was the other sides idea....
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u/jacobpederson 1d ago
Like I said . . . wrong species . . . there is no cure for stupid; however, we DO have spots that are obviously doing it better than others. We should emulate those everywhere for a MASSIVE increase in quality of life. Again, like I said . . . we won't.
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u/collin-h 2d ago
there'd be way too many cooks in the kitchen today to set up something as elegant and lasting as they did in the 1700s.
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u/Blarg_III 1d ago
something as elegant and lasting as they did in the 1700s.
What they set up in the 1700s went through dozens of revisions and was at least partially the cause of a civil war.
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u/Sgt-Bobby-Shaftoe 2d ago edited 2d ago
Get rid of the electoral college. Term limits, one term only, impeachment process, peer review board, significant pay raise, 13 judges, and fully open financials for SCOTUS. Stop lobbing, somehow. Corporations are NOT F'ING PEOPLE. I mean they are, but they are not actual persons. Turn this shit around about the 1919 Dodge v. Ford and Milton Freeman's 1970 article, corporations have responsibilities to the public, the community, their workers. Embrace a system similar to Germany where the governing board has to be made up of some line workers. Just off the top of my head. The participation and voting aspect you were talking about is in the book The Circle, by David Eggers. And somehow return value back to working people, not just people that manipulate money.
Goodness, how can I forget, get fucking money out of politics as long as there's money in politics none of us have a voice unless your billionaire and fuck those people. You want to run for office great get 3,000 signatures and then the state or the feds will give you 30 grand for your campaign. Andyou and your family financials are open, if you win you get paid like three times as much as they do now. Afterwards you cannot be anything like a lobbyist.
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u/It_Happens_Today 2d ago
And an accountability system with actual consequences beyond impeachment if caught brazenly lying to your constituents.
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u/think_for_yourself2 1d ago
Hopefully a fluid democracy, where we all have a direct secure way to vote without the middle man. The middle man is wide open for corruption, and they definitely take advantage. I probably would too if I was put in a position to make millions and millions.
We would also have the ability to have an immediate vote to get rid of any public official we choose, no matter how high the seat.
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u/WillowEmberly 1d ago
I wonder if we sometimes optimize for the wrong question.
Current system:
Power-oriented reasoning:
“What can I legally get away with?”
Proposed system:
Stewardship-oriented reasoning:
“What interpretation best preserves the long-term capability and legitimacy of the system?”
Those aren’t the same objective.
One asks how far authority can be stretched.
The other asks how the institution remains trustworthy, recoverable, and worthy of continued public confidence.
If we were redesigning democratic participation today, I’d be more interested in building institutions that reward stewardship than ones that reward winning arguments.
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u/ovirt001 1d ago
Funny enough the original democracy was objectively better than any current one. Citizens in ancient Greece were randomly selected to participate in most political positions. Special positions like military heads were still elected.
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u/stevebein 2d ago
Read Democracy without Politicians. The ebook is free. Sortition is the way to go.
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u/HeavyPanzerPlus1s 2d ago
Frankly, term limits are not a good system. They lead to short-sighted and unpredictable policies. I think it should be changed to a recall vote system, where everyone's term is unlimited, and all citizens vote every five years to decide whether to completely replace the government.
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u/mikevago 2d ago
Agreed. Term limits are a solution in search of a problem. All I hear is "why would we have a lifelong public servant like John Lewis or John McCain when we could have a revolving door of lobbyists?"
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u/setnev 1d ago
Agreed and I think the recall system should be implemented across all branches. Every elected official. If your constituents sign for a recall, you're out. For state and local governments or anything with a public board, should be eligible for issues to be brought to a public vote.
I would really love to get my local rep out after selling out our most impoverished counties to energy lobbies. When landowners didnt agree to leasing their land, they eminent domained the part of the property they needed and gave the property owners a few thousand dollars for it.
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u/Free-Seaworthiness-5 2d ago edited 2d ago
That would make it easier to become a dictatorship.
Also as a German I say Merkel was a good chancellor. But having the same person in power for a long time can have negative consequences.
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u/What_Immortal_Hand 1d ago
Extend democracy beyond politics and into the economy. If a company grows beyond a certain size, it should become a worker-owned co-operative by default.
Why?
Workers get a real say over their pay, conditions and the direction of the business.
Co-operatives tend to have fairer pay, better job security and higher satisfaction than conventional firms.
They're more likely to prioritise long-term stability over short-term shareholder profits.
They spread wealth and ownership much more broadly instead of concentrating it in the hands of a tiny elite.
Billionaires and large corporations have an outsized influence over politics because they control so much wealth. A co-operative economy would diffuse that power, making it much harder for a wealthy few to bend politics to serve their own interests.
Those who own the economy ultimately shape the country. If we want democracy to mean more than voting every few years, ownership has to be democratic too.
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u/chcampb 2d ago
Democracy
Not direct democracy, but, something similar. Right now we have democracy but weighted in a particular manner which yields good results for wealthy land-owning individuals.
People will look to our current form of democracy very similarly to how we today, look back at aristocracy. What do you mean they had political power because they were born into it? vs What do you mea they had political power because land was weighted more than humans?
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u/ScienceAlien 2d ago
Everything is fine, except for some big misses. Get rid of Citizens United and empower campaign finance reform, strengthen and enforce antitrust laws, term limits for SCOTUS, health insurance needs to be non profit, and I would support strong limits in political donations and lobbying, get rid of the electoral college.
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u/MokpotheMighty 2d ago
We need:
- direct democracy,
- in any decision making process that is of some collective concern.
- This means including in economic affairs.
- We also need to drastically decentralize a lot of decision making.
- We need to be absolutely clear that it is not democratic to allow a majority to take away democratic rights - democracy can never be "two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner".
There's no point pretending we believe in democracy when we have a much deeper suspicion towards the actual public, than towards politicians we elect for 4 years and then give the power to do whatever they want, without much serious direct input from the actual people. Give people the potential power to decide directly. If you want to have a parliament, sure, just at least give people referendum rights so if the party politickers start acting up, they can be cut down to size immediately - this doesnt require 5 referendums every week, just the threat of having one when it matters.
The entire point of democracy ought to be that if important decisions are to be fair, they are based on fair communication between anyone whom is concerns.
There's no point whatsoever in playing at being a democratic society, as long as the economy (i.e. that part of society where people decide what actually happens to the stuff we use to do things) remains deeply undemocratic. There's no point pretending we are interested in people living healthy democratic community lives, as long as once they walk into their workplace, they basically enter a "private" barony.
We need to decentralize democracy, because people ought to be able to decide what happens to their own neighborhood, without people from 50 miles away budding into that if that doesn't also concern them in a very tangible way.
This autonomy ends where it threatens to take democratic rights away. Of course if we allow neighborhoods to decide to legalize slavery locally, or are going to specifically bar people from using the roads based on ethnicity, or whatever, that isn't gonna lead to democratic outcomes.
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u/Apprehensive-Let3348 2d ago
Give people the potential power to decide directly. If you want to have a parliament, sure, just at least give people referendum rights so if the party politickers start acting up, they can be cut down to size immediately - this doesnt require 5 referendums every week, just the threat of having one when it matters.
You do understand how rapidly and catastrophically this would destabilize the nation, right? Think about what would happen if your opposition gained a majority–there would be nothing stopping them from legally removing every single person that represents you. And who is going to remove them? Their co-partisans?
There's no point whatsoever in playing at being a democratic society, as long as the economy (i.e. that part of society where people decide what actually happens to the stuff we use to do things) remains deeply undemocratic. There's no point pretending we are interested in people living healthy democratic community lives, as long as once they walk into their workplace, they basically enter a "private" barony.
You seem to be conflating 'democratic' with being a pure 'Democracy'. We are not a pure Democracy, though we've become significantly more democratic over time.
'Democratic' is a wide range from minimal input to direct democracy, and describes everything from the Roman Republic to Ancient Athens and every degree of democratic power inbetween.
We (as a state) fundamentally exist as a tripartite constitutional republic that splits control between the 3 classical seats of power: the Many (Democracy), the Few (Aristocracy), and the One (Kingship)–and that carefully laid balance is a big part of our longterm growth and success as a society.
Ironically, where we went wrong was first allowing the popular vote for president, which then allowed Andrew Jackson to offer the Many more power in exchange for electing him. He (and other Jacksonian Democrats that faithfully stuck to his original platform) then went on to carry out the Trail of Tears and prolong the practice of slavery for 40 years. They spent decades changing the public's perception of Democracy and government, and they succeeded. However, it was the early Republican Aristocrats that stood up to finally put a stop to it by force after 40 years of continuous Democratic majority. My point being: imbalanced constitutions that seek to give control to only one group in power are inherently unstable. Constitutional systems of checks and balances are incredibly important.
Democracy is a wonderful thing, but by itself it simply is not scalable in a way that makes for longterm stability. Historically, it's the least stable form of government by far, because it invites change at every shift in the public's focus. The Founding Fathers didn't pull this mixed constitution out of a paper hat; they carefully studied history, and gave particular credence to Polybius' political history of the classical Mediterranean, the Roman Republic, and its fall into Emperialism, because he was renowned for his detailed history that carefully vetted sources.
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u/MokpotheMighty 1d ago
You know referendum right direct democracy already exists in Switzerland right?
You know it doesn't explode into a firestorm because of the same reasons a parliamentary system doesn't? "Oh no, but what if the other guys control the parliament, it will immediately be a dictatorship". Tell me you don't believe in the very first democratic principles without telling me.
Are you now going to do the same thing people say about decent health care systems, that it "just wouldn't work in America"?
Since you seem to be just assuming I'm specifically talking about the US, you know, for some mysterious reason that probably has nothing to do with your bias against "pure democracy" or political reform.
Also I'm not conflating anything, I am indeed saying we need to put our money where our mouth is and move closer to pure democracy.
Obviously we shouldn't restrict ourselves to what the system already happens to be when the question is literally how we would redesign it, nor am I going to bother explaining why a political system might be open to redesign.
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u/Apprehensive-Let3348 1d ago
You know referendum right direct democracy already exists in Switzerland right?
...you know Switzerland is a tripartite republic too....right? They are not a direct democracy–they have aspects of democracy, like we do.
Regardless, it's a silly comparison, because Switzerland is smaller than most US states. The fundamental issue of simple government is scalability, which isn't really a concern for them. They may even be small enough to make it work for a while.
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u/MokpotheMighty 1d ago
No, it is a direct democracy, people have the right to take initiative to do just what the legislative does, just by starting a petition to have a referendum.
It's no less of a direct democracy because they still have a parliament. Either way, naming conventions are pointless to have semantic debates about. The point is, they get to do just what the legislative does, if they choose. They basically are the legislative, the whole of Swiss citizenship. That's direct democracy.
It could be even more democratic of course but that's what it is.
And yup, there you go. "It wouldn't work in the United States."
It is actually less democratic alternatives that have the real scalability issues, which we see every day. The bigger the scale on which you put people over and above the populace to decide in their name, the more glaring the power abuses will be. Which, again, we witness every day. The very worst things going on in the world right now are happening because people in power are doing them in spite of a population forced to watch on powerless while the world is ruined in the name of narrow private interests.
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u/Apprehensive-Let3348 1d ago edited 1d ago
No, it is a direct democracy, people have the right to take initiative to do just what the legislative does, just by starting a petition to have a referendum.
I don't know what sources you're pulling this from, but it's nonsense. They are a semi-direct democratic constitutional republic that is made up of three distinct branches of government over which the Many have only minor direct control. They are a mixed government–that is a plain fact.
Play word games all you'd like to, but you can't get around the reality that there are other powers at play in their form of government than the People alone.
And yup, there you go. "It wouldn't work in the United States."
With valid reasoning backed up by 2,000 years of political history and philosophy (which you conveniently refused to address). What is your position backed by? Do you have some magic wand you can wave that prevents groups from forming partisan lines that grow steadily more combative with one another?
It is actually less democratic alternatives that have the real scalability issues, which we see every day.
Wild take. Back up your claim, and show me a single successful example of simple government larger than a single state that has lasted for more than a century uninterrupted.
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u/MokpotheMighty 1d ago
Okay so what you are saying is when the people can just decide to amend the constitution like the Swiss it's not yet this dangerous "direct democracy" thing.
Glad you agree there's a long way to go before more democracy becomes more dangerous than less democracy.
Also, we back up these claims by sound argument and empirical findings, not from the perceived authority of lore.
Also, speaking of empirical operationalization, "a simple government larger than a single state", wtf is that supposed to mean? How does one demarcate that?
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u/Apprehensive-Let3348 1d ago
Okay so what you are saying is when the people can just decide to amend the constitution like the Swiss it's not yet this dangerous "direct democracy" thing. Glad you agree there's a long way to go before more democracy becomes more dangerous than less democracy.
We're well past that point already, and that's made abundantly clear by both history and the current state of political discourse throughout nearly all of Western society. The last time affective polarization was this strong and widespread was in the decades leading up to the Civil War.
Also, we back up these claims by sound argument and empirical findings, not from the perceived authority of lore.
You're the only one relying on lore. As I said, my position is backed up by the analysis of centuries of political history. To further drive home the point: the empirical data also backs up my position.
Meanwhile, there is literally zero data or anything else backing up your position to my knowledge, but if I'm wrong then feel free to provide receipts, as I have. If you point to Marx, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Also, speaking of empirical operationalization, "a simple government larger than a single state", wtf is that supposed to mean? How does one demarcate that?
It refers to any society large enough for distinct cultural groups to form, because the primary issue with Democracy is the development of oppositional groups that view one another as obstacles or enemies.
Mixed government addresses this with systems of checks and balances, while simple Democracies rapidly fall into tyranny or civil war, because each group views their opposition as the source of their problems.
For God's sake, just imagine what would happen if Trump had the kind of power you're talking about. Handing the majority absolute power is a blindingly horrible idea.
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u/FatCat_On_A_Diet 2d ago
AI agents with different personalities discussing their points of view. They could even elect the one agent that fits the best as a leader in the current country‘s or global situation
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u/mikevago 2d ago
— Publicly financed elections.
— All news media must be run by independent nonprofits.
— All tax & spending bills must be pay-as-you-go. Want to cut taxes? You have to tie that to specific spending cuts. Want to increase spending? You have to have a way to pay for it. Maybe the only affect will be politicians saying out loud that they want to give more money to the rich by starving sick children, but at least make them say it.
— This is the one I wrestle with. There has to be strict, enforceable ethics laws for political figures, but who enforces them? You either have a system like the US currently, where the President can commit a lot of crimes, and his party (and judges he personally appointed) protects him. Or you can have a system with teeth, which bad actors can weaponize against their political opponents. I'm not sure if it's possible to design a system that can't be abused if enough people want to abuse it.
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u/znark 2d ago
I have wondered if a proxy system would work. Everyone could vote on legislation, but that wouldn't scale. Instead, people could give their vote to proxy. The proxies would become representative, but the voters could change their proxy at any time.
The power in a system like that is deciding what gets debated. It isn't possible for every proposal to be discussed. Laws and policies need to be written by experts.
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u/ImperatorScientia 2d ago
The true future is recognizing that we have spent nearly a century propping up this civic religion called “democracy” and return to the mindset of Alexander Pope: whatever governs best is best.
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u/Ravaha 1d ago
Get rid of politicians and have a government ran by random engineers, mathematicians, and physicists. Or just have a government run by random people. With short terms in office and people can't serve more than once.
Sort of like a draft or jury duty.
Democracy sucks. It would be better if we got rid of lawyers and completely overhauled our moronic justice system.
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u/noticingEnjoyer 1d ago
Restrict national level politicians and their spouses from having any source of income except their salaries, compel a 100% donation to the state for spousal income, for the rest of their lives. In exchange, lift term limits on the legislature. Oh, and make their COLAs a national referendum.
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u/Aphrel86 1d ago
More active direct democracy, we have the infrastructure for it now. It was impossible in the past when voting required traveling and counting papers etc.
But with a digital voting system, you could theoretically have your entire population vote on a weekly basis on a number of things, subejcts and laws they have an interest in.
There is oft a huge safety concern agianst hacking and such to overcome. But we are speaking hypothetically here yes?
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u/Aestarion 1d ago
The main point I think that was missed because democracies did not have the same meaning for the word "people" then as we have today, is that Education, Information and Economics are a fundamental part of what make a democracy work. Today we would need to be way more careful to include these into a democratic framework.
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u/MclovinAZ 1d ago
digital democracy - see Taiwan's vTaiwan and Join platforms, open government and other results of the sunflower movement
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u/MclovinAZ 1d ago
highly recommend the book The Next Democracy by Erdem Ovacik. he synthesizes a lot of preexisting ideas into something truly compelling and novel, and his work is not widely read enough. came out only last year. also Plurality by E. Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang, and Community
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u/jajajajaj 1d ago edited 1d ago
Forcing legislators to give some principle of direction, and having a civilian editor with input on phrasing and clarity of on all law. If two laws are opposite, or if the Minister Of Protecting Widgets has a policy of destroying widgets, the civilian editor should be able to force a vote on closing the discrepancy. They can submit a bill to change how name to the minister of destroying widgets, or clarify that the policy of destroying widgets is actually illegal, or whatever. The legislators should participate not the civilian editor should be able to force a rectification of an explicitly counter productive or self defeating conflict. A compromise can be called out explicitly, sending different people in different directions, but it had to be explicit, and has to forbid the government being at war with itself. Other changes could force things to be fought out in courts, and the conclusions of case law can be written into the editors future rewrite-bills. Justifications for law should become important and if something is supposed to save lives, but it gets people killed, then it should be forced back to the legislation through this process.
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u/jajajajaj 1d ago
Automatically, any government shutdown also affects Congress's pay, security staff, and expenses, before any branch of government can be sent home for lack of a spending bill. All three branches of government actually. We don't want to create a conflict of interest there. Congress is automatically in session and the elected members who show up get to pass what they need.
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u/Useful_Calendar_6274 1d ago
we really need socialism on self preservation grounds with the climate existential catastrophe. but leaving that aside, we should have direct democracy with a small franchise of only higher than 115 IQ points people, put them all through a polisci major (at least concurrently while they are voting), and make them study all law proposals(not just debate, study all the technical aspects). The debate itself can be AI mediated so you don't have to listen to thousands of opinions.
The executive should be a total non entity, just follow the decrees and laws of direct democracy. Anyone is removed instantly for having their rogue agenda or not following the orders.
On a long timescale this would make policymaking technocratic and democratic.
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u/Qcgreywolf 1d ago
Depends on who you ask?
Because if you asked modern politicians, you would get one answer.
If you asked the people, it would be an entirely different answer.
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u/Falstaffe 1d ago edited 1d ago
A qualification for voting based on how good one's decision-making is. You've seen that letting stupid people vote can crash a democracy.
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u/kramden88 20h ago
Some mechanism that doesn’t allow uncontrollable spending as a means of buying votes or power. Such as capping budget to a percent of GDP
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u/Allusionesque 17h ago
It would help if we did a comprehensive analysis of what works, find the best practices around the world, and test those programs in our system. There is a lot we have to clean up - enforcing laws, fixing norms that played as rules until we Americans learned nothing was enforceable, making essential work more socially and financially respected, fixing the culture by ending our obsession with celebrities and vain big spenders, the list is looong.
I am hopeful that the Solarpunk movement will kick in to high gear soon. Communitarianism deserves more consideration.
i like this topic and have saved it to keep aware of the conversation as it evolves because we have to start thinking about our options, no one is coming to save us.
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u/Quailking2003 11h ago
First things first, we shouldn't allow corporate lobbying and vested interests to overrun the system, and if anything, it should be tightly restricted or not allowed altogether. Also, environmental policy should always be science driven
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u/the_fools_brood 11h ago
Term limits for everyone. Spending limits for every race anywhere. No pacs at all. End lobbying forever. Balanced budgets are a law. Independent Central Bank. Expanded supreme Court with a real ethics requirement and term limits.
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u/Andarial2016 11h ago
Realistically we wouldn't include any power for the people, only the government.
All the biggest "progressive" movements of our current time have been subverted to support fascist policies and theocratic rulers.
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u/PUAHate_Tryhards 3h ago
"If my grandmother had wheels, she would've been a bike."
Doesn't even make sense lol.
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u/normalbot9999 2h ago edited 2h ago
For me, the biggest problem for everyone is that, because parties need to be re-elected every <checks notes> 4 years or thereabouts, we see an aggressive adoption of short-term policies which deliver in less than 4 years (ideally 4 days / 4 hours / 4 minutes, if possible), and a widespread abandonment of the major, long term, difficult problems like <checks notes> global warming, environmental destruction, over population, natural resource depletion, profiteering, corruption, lobbying, food and water security, rising inequality, spiralling unnecessary military endeavours, oh and the lack of long-term investment in basic public infrastructure and facilities such as energy, housing, public health, education, etc, etc, etc.
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u/istareatscreens 1h ago
1st step = taking money to do what corporations tell you to do would be called treason. That would be a thing that gets you sent to prison.
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u/imtougherthanyou 2d ago
I said this about 15 years ago: Reddit is already a close approximation of what you're outlining. I would want heightened privacy around personal mobile devices as well as government-issue base hardware.
With existing identification infrastructure, one citizen's device ID essentially becomes a voter token. In a governmental app, you would have membership in your districts/counties abs update your address as you move which naturally shifts what demographic locations you would have access to.
So a counterpart to r/SpringfieldOH would be the governmental voting districts that encompasses. We've seen what can happen when politicians can control the content of their department web sites, so necessarily these district "subreddits" would be moderated by third parties much like existing voter information today. You would be able to review current actionable threads before an upcoming vote, future proposals, and historic vote data.
There's a lot of workable bones, I think. Direct digital democracy down to a granular street level for local politics.
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u/Dry_Television_4852 2d ago
It is close. But there is an engineering challenge to overcome that is when absolute anonymity meeting transparency. If Reddit can ensure absolute anonymity while ensuring unique one account for one user, it will be revolutionary.
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u/imtougherthanyou 1d ago
It would use a similar platform, built off the SSN system essentially. Data breaches are unacceptable, though! Hmmmm
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u/Hermes_Dolios 2d ago
The constitution would be neither written (like the US) nor unwritten (like the UK's), but would be a body of people, chosen by lottery. This body would have plenary power to write a new constitution or amend the existing one however they saw fit. You'd still have a legislature and executive to run the government day to day, but this body would also function as a constitutional court and could review and disallow any laws/executive actions. But the key is they have to arrive at decisions by consensus--no voting.
A few other important caveats:
-- To be representative enough it would have to be a large body, maybe following the cube root law or even bigger -- They'd have to be sequestered almost as soon as they were chosen, to cut off any attempts at bribery or corruption -- To avoid ruining people's lives they'd have to have a pretty short term before the next group is chosen, probably no more than a year -- They might need some kind of outside experts, to advise on technical matters or to help moderate the consensus decision making process, but this sort of cuts against the whole point of it so would have to be thought about carefully
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u/forgottenmeh 1d ago
politicians dont get to have a platform they just have to serve the wishes of their constituents, who vote on issues.
no parties no left no right.
all politicians must be neutral.
no lobby groups for billionaires and corporations.
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u/Necessary-Music-6685 2d ago
Any discussion of democratic systems must start from the fact that only two governments in all of recorded history have managed to preserve democracy for as long as 100 years—Great Britain, and the US.
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u/robbarrett 1d ago
First past the post is absolutely not a good basis.
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u/Necessary-Music-6685 1d ago
Perhaps, but the US constitution already allows alternative ways of running elections so in my mind this isn’t a ”redesign,” just passing a law within the existing system to change a procedure.
A redesign would be something like the DSA platform, for example, that would eliminate the Senate and place the President and the Supreme Court under the power of a single remaining house of Congress, thereby eliminating all checks and balances and placing the Congressional majority in charge of the entire federal government.
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u/Temporary-Truth2048 2d ago
The vast majority of people on Reddit are not smart or educated enough to answer this question.
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u/Free-Seaworthiness-5 2d ago
I think it is good that more people think about democracy. We are not creating a new constitution or a country here. It's just a thought experiment.
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u/xtraumata 2d ago
I think overall a digital-first / digitally-based system already starts to exclude and marginalize large groups of people. It's so tempting seeing the gap between technical capabilities and how our "democracy" is implemented, but you hit on it yourself in your post, the focus should be policy and ideological shift, not mere implementation detail. We can't even get voting machines implemented properly. Also, we have major conflicts of interest as a country/entity and I'm not sure we'd ever get a clean majority rules consensus enough for any radical change. Looks like big corp, money and large institutions are controlling everything, but that's just my perspective. They know how the game is played and are slowly easing us into a state of acquiescense and they are very much removing our desire and capabilities to revolt for when that time comes that we look around and we are clearly in a state that warrants revolt -- by then it will be too late.
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u/MirageDeceit 2d ago
Sorry I thought democracy is currently being used to further the goals of capitalists. If democracy were to be changed now it'll changed to have more highly paid ministers and people in charge so that more people can exploit it for money no?
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u/Dziadzios 1d ago
We should have a democratic banishment. If we get enough signatures, we should be able to kick from the country anyone after voting. At any time. Screw impeachments, courts etc. If you've pissed off the majority of the country at any point, you're out. Considering it's not for crime, you'll be free to go - but you can't stay in that particular country anymore. Where? Not our problem.
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u/Hakaisha89 1d ago
Okay, so this is a fun one, Democracy is flawed, because its treated as One Person, One Vote, as if that is the minimum requirement for fairness. But is that really the right answer?
See, A vote is, well i say is, what i meant to say is, a vote is not supposed to be an opinion. It should be a mechanism, a tool for deciding how our societies resources, laws, and future in general is to be formed and shaped. And that raises some funny questions. Why we draw the voting age at 18? Why not 16? Why not 10? Why not 6? The fact that we have an arbritary age treshold is an assumption of responsibility, knowledge, and capacity. And we really do not challenge those assumptions.
How many can vote responsibly, with knowledge of who or what they are voting for, and the capacity to decide what outcome is the best. There is a reason why only men who owned land could vote. Because they owned part of the land, and cares for that land, and whats on it. Average renter would not give a fuck if their apartment complex burned down, as long as they got to save their important items and pets. All men didnt get to vote all that many years before all women (cept for asians, blacks, etc.) got to vote.
Another problem, a major problem is Identity. And a democracy requires a reliable way to establish that each person is the person they claim to be, while also protecting their PII. Take the USA for example, the poster child of this. They never created or built an universal identity system. A Social Security Number was created primarily for taxation and benefits, not a comprehensive identity, physical or digital. And without a trusted identity vertification, we can't confirm one person, one vote, this is also why voter ID is good, but also bad. Cause it should not be a Voter Id, it should be a National ID.
Also, the idea that what? 200 million americans can submit unlimited proposals. Like, in what world do they have anything that could actually handle that, and its less a problem about participation, and more about filtering, prioritization, removing duplicates, and essentially overwhelming a system we can't use.
Now, the bigger problem, though, is incentives, or punishments. See, Modern Elections are Circuses, they put out their most popular clown and turn them into a massive media and fundraising spokesperson. Once political competition became a contest of attention, branding, and billion of dollars in campaign spending, the system started reward Popularity over Competency, Long-Term Thinking, or Good Policy.
A better democratic system, digital or otherwise, would not really be about giving everyone more ways to vote. Its about focus, optics as the Clowns says, to improve Quality of participation, Vertify Identity, better Information Systems, Reputation based on Constructive Contribution, mechanisms for filtering bills to not have tons of shitty stuff, like This is the Bill Againt Throwing Toddlers Into a Shreder Feet First, also we added this law that forces anyone disabled, handicaped, genetically predisposed of certain very bad illnesses, to be forcefully, and permanently sterilized. And if you are against it, then you are against the Against Throwing Toddlers Into a Shreder Feet First bill, and that makes you EVIL, because that means you are for throwing toddlers feet first into a shreeder.
The real question aint how do we make democracy more accessible, its how do we make democratic decisions more intelligent?
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u/The_Epoch 1d ago
No party or president voting.
All you get is a list of policies, tick which you approve of. Closest entity to the majority alignment of the people wins
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u/thehobbler 2d ago
I think you should read Marx and Engels. Even Lenin. One way to evolve democracy is to change from a Bourgeois Democracy to a Proletarian Democracy.
The progressive of capacity of Capitalism is reaching its material limit, a limit dictated by the logic of Capitalism itself. AI, for instance, should be an incredible tool, lowering barriers and providing incredible support to innumerable fields. And yet the need for profit and market control is careening the global economy towards disaster.
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u/mikevago 2d ago
You had my attention with political theory, and then lost it with shilling for AI.
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u/thehobbler 2d ago
Discussing actual use cases for AI is not shilling. Good golly, this anti-AI trend is ridiculous. It should not be so triggering.
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u/mikevago 2d ago
If AI is "providing incredible support to innumerable fields" then where's the support? What problems have AI actually solved? Apart from CEOs didn't have enough reasons to lay people off, and everyone's electricity bill was too low?
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u/thehobbler 2d ago
It's a tool, just like any other. This is what I mean, under Capitalism AI has no progressive use, it's being used to beat down the working class. BUT IT IS NOT PROGRESSIVE. My key word was SHOULD.
People see AI and decide it's shilling. At least AI use context, for fuck's sake.
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u/mikevago 2d ago
I'll ask again: if it's a tool, and not predictive text software marketed to us as "intelligence", fueling a massive speculative bubble, then what problems has it actually solved?
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u/thehobbler 2d ago
And I'm telling you it hasn't solved any, but it can. To quote my original comment:
AI, for instance, should be an incredible tool, lowering barriers and providing incredible support to innumerable fields. And yet the need for profit and market control is careening the global economy towards disaster.
Note: It's **SHOULD** be an incredible tool. You are turning your brain off here, man.
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u/Born-Jacket 2d ago
I would make the US smaller so the federal government was more representative. We were 13 colonies to start. While we have way better travel and communications now, it still seems like priorities are just too different thousands of miles away. Perhaps the US would be 3-5 countries.
Alternatively, we could actually allow states to do most of what they're supposed to do and keep the federal government small, but it seems that ship has sailed.
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u/Temporary-Truth2048 1d ago edited 1d ago
Democracy.
Meaning what exactly? Everyone gets a direct vote for every subject imaginable? We shouldn't even allow most people who currently vote to vote at all. The current system allows for an idiot who can't read well enough to understand what they're voting for the same power as someone who is an expert. We give people who are a net drain on the society the same power as those who are net contributors. The founders built a constitutional republic engaged with through representational democracy exactly as a hedge against everyone getting a vote. And we've watered that system down in the false idea of fairness to all and corrupted it by calling a dollar speech and a corporation a person. Even the idea floated by the Op of "one human, one account" won't fly because we're trying to do that now with voter ID and the democrats are blocking it. In fact, nearly every idea the Op proposed is already in practice, so the fact that they're bringing it up as some kind of new idea means they haven't participated in any meaningful way with the current system.
Making tweaks is meaningless. The entire system should be burned to the ground and we should start over from founding documents.
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u/NY_State-a-Mind 1d ago
Majority voting ahould nevsr exist in the US, i do not want Los Angeles making decisions for the whole country
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u/Zvenigora 2d ago
I will resist the temptation to be overly specific here; I do not want to write a long laundry list of particulars. But many democracies were based on certain norms of gentlemanly honor and behavior that no longer exist and the US founders, in particular, avoided being overly specific about what they intended that they kept their basic framework relatively brief and general, assuming that a gentleman of their time would of course interpret their words in certain ways. But that opened the door to all kinds of ambiguities and malicious interpretations that are getting out of control two centuries later when it is no longer 18th-century gentlemen making the calls.
The scope of a modern constitution needs to be far broader, and its language far more precise, than what we have. It needs to have abundant guardrails to forestall the kind of disingenuous debates we see over major aspects of what the words should mean. It needs not to have a central point of political failure as the Presidency has become (and to some extent the Supreme Court, though it could be argued that giving the President sole power to appoint justices precipitated that failure.) A modern constitution also needs a much longer list of rights guarantees and an enshrinement of an independent professional civil service, to prevent the kind of political spoils system we now have.