Wednesday, April 21, 2004
A year-old future vision
Today I found a year-old article written in the Economist about the future of democracy.
The Economist writes that "One of the big political debates of the next three decades will be about the relative merits of direct versus representative democracy.".
Some other interesting quotes from the article:
- the bulk of those who are organising themselves on the internet and engaging in “direct action” politics are not anarchists or anti-globalisation protesters, but the kind of people who join political parties and are most likely to vote.
- Once reliable methods for validating electronic votes have been found and internet penetration rates approach saturation, the internet will remove the biggest single obstacle to direct democracy—the physical difficulty of distributing information to a large population, engaging it in debate and collecting its votes.
- The financial corruption and lobbying by special interests that plague all democracies today are much harder to stamp out in a representative system than they would be in a system with more direct voter involvement. (...) Big-money interests have also tried to manipulate many American initiative ballots. But it is hard to bribe an entire electorate, or even to mislead it for very long, if there is a free flow of information and open discussion.
Comments-[ comments.]
Today I found a year-old article written in the Economist about the future of democracy.
The Economist writes that "One of the big political debates of the next three decades will be about the relative merits of direct versus representative democracy.".
Some other interesting quotes from the article:
- the bulk of those who are organising themselves on the internet and engaging in “direct action” politics are not anarchists or anti-globalisation protesters, but the kind of people who join political parties and are most likely to vote.
- Once reliable methods for validating electronic votes have been found and internet penetration rates approach saturation, the internet will remove the biggest single obstacle to direct democracy—the physical difficulty of distributing information to a large population, engaging it in debate and collecting its votes.
- The financial corruption and lobbying by special interests that plague all democracies today are much harder to stamp out in a representative system than they would be in a system with more direct voter involvement. (...) Big-money interests have also tried to manipulate many American initiative ballots. But it is hard to bribe an entire electorate, or even to mislead it for very long, if there is a free flow of information and open discussion.
