[js8]

I disagree. The above condition is unorthodox, I admit, but is needed to make the definition logically consistent.

The idea of democracy is to give everybody the same voice in decision making. There are different mechanisms to achieve that, direct voting is only one of them. Other mechanisms are consensus, random selection and representation. Each of the mechanisms has different strengths and weaknesses and should be used to decide different things. You can also combine them to an extent, for instance you can randomly select members of a jury who then decide by consensus.

[nairboon]

I do like your idealism. But what means "to give everybody the same voice"? Is this about having your voice heard? Or about actually participating in a decision? Either way, only the pure direct democracy guarantees both. In the end you still have the rule of the majority. What you might be looking for is some sort of equal representation of "minority groups"? We're somewhat doing this in Switzerland on the executive level and this only partially works because the executive is explicitly chosen to be very "consensus friendly" in other words no extreme (left/right) positions.

But this won't really work with the legislature, because there we have all kind of incompatible ideologies. There is simply no consensus possible with the contemporary ideologies (socialism, liberalism, conservatism, etc.) by their very definition. If you insist on consensus, your decision making process will simply deadlock forever. How can you ever unlock it? By shifting to a almost-consensus aka direct democracy.

[js8]

It is about actually equally participating in the decision. I agree with you on direct democracy, I am big fan of it (since about 2000).

Consensus can work but only in a very small groups. That's why I explained that there are different methods to achieve democratic participation and have different trade-offs.

I don't think ideologies are big a problem for direct democracy. I think they are artifacts of representative system, where you have to choose a package of things, rather than when you can decide each issue in isolation. From what I heard, that actually happens in Switzerland - since everybody is sometimes in a minority in referendum, people don't take losing as a big deal.