Hey, so I’ve created a community to discuss and talk about sortition, a type of governance where leaders and officials are chosen at random. This was practiced by ancient Athens, and is considered to be much better at representation than normal democracy.
I remember in college sort of independently coming up with the idea (there’d be a large pool of representatives, to make bribery harder. And I think we had an idea of like some of them their votes secretly won’t count at the end, so your bribe might not even count)
Then one of my friends linked me to the wiki page and I was like “oh”
With a large enough body, it’s true bribery gets harder, but you also have some of the same problems as direct democracy. At some point you’ve basically just made a smaller voting public.
There’s very few things about representative democracy that work exactly as intended, but it does makes (illegal) corruption hard to maintain. A politician having a reputation for corruption and self-dealing is one of the few things that voters uniformly don’t like, and will actually act on at the polls. (Obviously there’s a major counterexample right now, but the trend is undeniable)
I would have agreed with you before Trump. The power of conservative in-group solidarity is powerful, especially when multiplied by media support.
Ah shit, I just ninja edited that it. Too late! Oh well.
It is conservative in-group solidarity, and a crazy cult of personality he managed to stumble into, but that’s not a common, easy-to-manufacture situation.
For most of history and still in most places, paying off officials was/is a normal, everyday part of life. Now, living in Canada, I’ve never paid a bribe, or even been given the opportunity. Democracy seems like the obvious answer as to why; it’s not because Canadians are just better.
I don’t see how that’s better than just having a large representative body and counting all votes. The expected value of a bribe is still the same no matter what percentage of the votes are counted, but a lower percentage also increases the variance such that one bribe has a chance of having a big impact on the voting outcome, whereas if you count all the votes, a single bribe will only ever have a small effect.
I did not intend to claim my college dinner conversation was a flawless political system, heh.
It may have come from the idea that in firing squads, some of the executioners have blanks.
But you’re probably right, its probably simpler and fine not to have fake voters. Though it would be funny to have some honey pots…
Same experience here. Then I learned about court juries and it kinda confirmed the idea.