[roenxi]

As ideas go this is a bit of a non-starter. If you can't tell what your congressperson is voting for, how do you know if they are representing you? When you vote, how would it be even theoretically possible to make an informed decision of who you want as a representative?

The only axis of discrimination between politicians would be charisma - which is no predictor at all of what someone will actually do.

EDIT It might be even easier for handlers to corrupt the system, because they could make it known that if a bill gets through, they'll be generous with their largess to everyone - and there will be know way to verify which politicians are the ones who are being bought off.

[zanny]

Charisma is only a problem when your representative is a figure on a screen you never see or interact with. Its definitely fallen by the wayside in recent times with the explosive population and suffrage growth not corresponding to a larger legislature, but there is ample historic record of the aristocratic voters in the decades following the founding of the US also having close relations to their representatives. The voters (the <10% of the population eligible) often had regular, direct access to converse and interact with those they elected.

In more modern terms it would be if you weren't electing a representative for every several hundred thousand people, but had one for every few hundred. Something constrained by Dunbars Number. You wouldn't be electing a caricature but someone you can actually interact with, especially in an era of total digital interconnection.

Fixing representative democracy in the US and abroad is probably the most fundamental issue facing America and most of the world today. Getting back to actual representation by peers has to happen eventually or the widening divide between the political aristocracy and the commoner will revert most of western society back into a model more reminiscent of 16th century Britain.