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My trouble with it is that I think it's a distraction that allows people to feel like their voice is heard, but actually makes status quo results more likely because it simply shifts your vote to one of the two status quo parties. I'm deep into P2P collaboration in terms of implementing aids for deliberative assemblies, or even complete implementations of different kinds of deliberative assemblies. When you study this stuff, you find first that it's still a very loose and new field of study that hasn't quite come together yet. Next, you find that there's a split: some people are trying to figure out the practicalities of implementing traditional deliberative rules in new mediums, aided by all of our cool devices, and even to experiment with those rules when things assumed by them have changed due to technology, e.g. asynchronous deliberation, or instant recall of delegates, etc.. On the other side are the "deliberative polling" people. They present themselves as looking for some sort of innovation in randomly selected focus groups, and ultimately, as looking for ways to essentially split a citizenry into focus groups, and to use those combined focus groups to either wield power as a government, or, more often, to advise a government. It sounds laudable, like a Delphi Method (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_method) for non-experts. But this is until you read their papers, and notice that the way they evaluate the conclusions of their deliberative group experiments is by how well the conclusions the groups reach agree with their hand-picked experts. Then you notice that what they're actually doing is figuring out frameworks that can guide randomly selected groups of people into predetermined conclusions. It's literally manufacturing consent by maximizing the feeling of participation that people have in ratifying decisions already made. Then you finally realize why Cass Sunstein is interested in it. They want to build a nation of grand juries. I see ranked-choice voting as a similar tactic. It allows people to express their feelings without any danger that those feelings will have any effect. edit: I'd also like to point out that in the UK, which has a long recent history of complaining about their FPTP systems, has more viable parties than the US even with FPTP, such as the Liberals who have been around forever (although they've only been "Liberal Democrats" since the SDP split from Labour), the SNP, and even single issue Brexit parties. Even their major parties, such as Labour, are to a degree composites, including things like The Labour and Co-operative Party. The reason the Democrats and Republicans are the only real choices is because they fixed the rules, like e.g. against "fusion," which makes it so parties like Labour and Co-operative can't even exist outside of New York. The insane requirements for qualifying to run, the absence of campaign finance regulations, the fact that the government hosts their internal primary elections and marks parties on the ballot sheet... there are obvious ways to keep these awful parties from a lock on power, and they will not be done because these awful parties make the rules. |