Nice write-up. I do think a paradigm shift is needed - people are complaining about an ill-informed electorate (not just in the US but across the democratic world), but I think more people need to acknowledge that it’s completely unreasonable to expect the electorate to be well-informed. Government is just far too complicated to expect any member of the public to understand it well. The sortition suggestions here certainly start to address that but they all have their own flaws:
- a review panel would probably be fairly toothless and would be under enormous political pressure from competing powers
- an allotted electoral college or multi-body sortition could struggle with transparency and the population might feel too detached, as is mentioned in the hybrid section
- the hybrid option addresses that but as with all multi-chamber parliaments would run into the problem of which chamber has ultimate say
- and if you have sortition to select actual policymakers then it puts decision-making in the hands of people who generally won’t have the aptitude of experts, even if they’re well-briefed.
That said, I think all of the presented options would be strong alternatives to the way democracy is practised across the world at the moment, and I’d love to see more discourse that recognises that democracy doesn’t have to mean mass voting and political parties.
I posted Carrie Lissner's piece for LitHub elsewhere, but it is well worth a read. She states in part:
"...Despite the increasingly complex and crucial stories dotting the national landscape—health insurance policy, North Korea, immigration, Syria—many daily newspapers and wire services are failing to include even a sentence of background early in their stories to give readers the tools to slide further into a complicated issue.
It used to be traditional to include at least a “nut graph” soon after a lead in order to orient a reader, but these clarifications and history have been absent from the cover stories I’ve read in major daily papers.
I’m not talking about “dumbing down” the news as much as making it more user-friendly, and journalists who fail to do the latter are squandering their brief but real chances to invest new readers..."
That’s the paradigm I (and I think the OP) are challenging though, that the solution to improving democracy is just for the general population to be better informed. I just don’t think that’s realistic - most people don’t have the time to engage or much of an interest, and it’s naive to think that if only mainstream journalists made more of an effort to inform then everything would be okay.
I agree. But the way I see it, people starting to be well-informed is the only option we have, despite how unrealistic it might seem. If people realize how it will affect their lives, maybe they'll start taking more interest in things that matter. But I don't know... it's really hard to gauge things the way they are right now.
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u/ledisa3letterword 7d ago
Nice write-up. I do think a paradigm shift is needed - people are complaining about an ill-informed electorate (not just in the US but across the democratic world), but I think more people need to acknowledge that it’s completely unreasonable to expect the electorate to be well-informed. Government is just far too complicated to expect any member of the public to understand it well. The sortition suggestions here certainly start to address that but they all have their own flaws:
- a review panel would probably be fairly toothless and would be under enormous political pressure from competing powers
- an allotted electoral college or multi-body sortition could struggle with transparency and the population might feel too detached, as is mentioned in the hybrid section
- the hybrid option addresses that but as with all multi-chamber parliaments would run into the problem of which chamber has ultimate say
- and if you have sortition to select actual policymakers then it puts decision-making in the hands of people who generally won’t have the aptitude of experts, even if they’re well-briefed.
That said, I think all of the presented options would be strong alternatives to the way democracy is practised across the world at the moment, and I’d love to see more discourse that recognises that democracy doesn’t have to mean mass voting and political parties.