[eru]

That's a nice dream. Let me shatter it: what you suggest might make policy reflect public opinion better, yes. But alas, public opinion is crazy and we can be lucky that policy by and large isn't quite as crazy.

Have a look at Bryan Caplan's "The Myth of the Rational Voter" for more background.

[Lanolderen]

But now you have a system where the general public still decides who leads the caravan but a potential leader can straight up lie about what they're gonna do and it'll be a pain to replace them before their term is over.

To fix that you need either unequal votes or to remove the voting rights of those with incorrect opinions and understandings. Maybe education but then you'd have to make reeducation camps for those of incorrect opinions and understandings since educating the entire populace will mostly just move the average bar higher.

I'm not talking about doing referendums on every single issue direct democracy style and I am aware that to correctly implement something like this you'd need to do it gradually so that the populace has time to adjust to their increased political power which will hopefully increase their interest in politics in general.

[eru]

> To fix that you need either unequal votes or to remove the voting rights of those with incorrect opinions and understandings.

Not necessarily. You could also punish liars several after the fact, ie after their term, and hope that incentives will do the trick.

Though my favourite idea is to make voting with your feet easier. If you have more issues decided at more local levels, then it's easier to up sticks and move to the next town over, if you disagree with a policy.

I call that the "McDonald's flavour of democracy": McDonald's doesn't let you vote on their menu, but if you don't like it, you can always just head over to Pizza Hut.

You can either (A) do that inside an existing system by aggressively pushing responsibility down. That's what subsidiarity is meant to capture. And also how the US was supposedly meant to be structured; but over time centralisation won out.

Or (B) you can ensure that by having smaller independent countries. Ideally city states.

That's one of the reasons why Singapore is my adopted home.

Moving with your feet is about the most direct democracy you can get, but you also don't have to worry about the usual downsides of direct democracy.

[Lanolderen]

Punishing the liars after the fact, to me, sounds like a very slippery slope. What percentage of promises have to be upkept? Do they have to be kept if the situation changes and they're no longer the correct decision? Do they have to be upkept in special circumstances such as Covid/WW3/etc? Though I would love a system where applicants list their main plans and their progress (not as done or not but as references to legsilation changes, etc) gets officially documented after their term. It won't be wildly useful but it doesn't sound like too much work either.

I like local governance but you have the same issue on a different scale. Whether the president or the governor runs the show I'd want them to be replaceable in a timely manner and to have a little fire under their ass.

Moving your feet is something I also do but I'm not sure is sustainable. What you get is people going to more social places in the beginning of their adult life to get as much support as possible and then move to the most capitalistic places possible once they start earning big money to pay less taxes/have more buying power. How many people do that, I don't know. In my circles it's a lot and I'm one of them.

It's one of those perfect is the opposite of good things though since centralised politics isn't really better either..