Thursday, April 11, 2024

Crisis of Representation and Shortage of Democracy in Contemporary Democracy

By now representation aspect of our democracy reached a crisis and some original solutions are needed to fix this issue.


When modern representative democracy took its current shape in early 19th century society was radically different from what it is nowadays. A system that was adequate for these times overtime got outgrown by society and technological progress.

Bach in the day's population was much smaller, and MP could reasonably know most of the people in their electorate in person. Thus, it was feasible to call it representation.

However, over the course of last 200 years population skyrocketed and by now one MP represents so many different people its physically impossible for him to actually knew or understand what people even need.

Because of that MP are completely reliant on staffers, aides and middlemen. However, staffers can act in faithless self-serving manner. They can prevent complains and suggestions they do not like from reaching the MP or in contrast inflate representation of groups they personally agree with.

This skewers democracy into effectively bureaucracy: rule of staffers and bureaucratic middlemen.


To make it worse media begun to act increasingly in biased, self-serving. Adding media-cracy as a second corruption of the democracy.  Murdoch press shamelessly lie about issues, underrepresenting the issues they do not like and inflating those they favor. 


Dual issue of bureaucracy and media-cracy compromised the democracy to the level of medieval robber baron acracy.


Solutions

A single/group issue conseils that deal with some particular problems or issues can be the other one. One big parliament that handles all issues is good, but it just cannot solve all the problems simultaneously. Some specialized sub-parliaments are needed for different areas of life or different demographics. Not committees or sub-committees and most problems look different from top down compared to bottom up.

Effective means of direct democracy can be others. Internet already allows people to vote on issues directly from their computers. Effective methods of verifying identity already exist. All we need now is political will to make it broadly available and influential. 


Other Organizations 

This problem does not only affect politics, but other spheres of life as well.

Over time of the last 200 years organizations became so complex and multilayered, that faceless bureaucrats you have to deal with have much more influence over daily life compared to distant and often unreachable upper management. Some of them deliberately ignore official polices and embark on shameless power trip at expense of their clients.


Solutions for other Organizations.

To solve these issues, we need effective mechanisms of addressing these problems, a workplace democracy as well as effective and simple way to use feedback mechanisms can be one such solutions.

Company employees need opportunity to vote manager out of power.

Clients need opportunity to vote out company officers they interact with personally.

Hiring process too cannot be left to completely unaccounted HR departments. Workplace democracy should have a say in that as well. An impartial hiring system should be available for potential employees, possibly based on their ability to solve test issue.

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