Citizen's Override

So, this is another suggestion on how we can improve representational democracy from the giant mess its in, to something which is actually 'for the people'. As you may have surmised, I'm not a large fan of this political system for many reasons.

A quick summary to this idea is simply giving normal citizens the ability to call referenda without needing to go through parliamentary discussion, nor needing parliamentary members to vote for it.

In some cases, parliamentary members take decisions which are contrary to the country's best interests - or are driven by motives other than the greater good. The problem is that there is no mechanism for the people who get the short end of the stick (aka the civvies) to undo this damage - nor to direct them in a forceful manner to the right decision.


You could argue that unpopular decisions mean that the party won't get elected next time. That said, in reality this won't be the case unless they mess up something huge constantly and consistently. For one, large political parties have a large buffer of mindless drones who will always vote for them. For the second, there are many reasons for voting for a party. What if it made a horribly unpopular decision and many good ones? Do we want to remove a party from power because of that? Shouldn't there be a more efficient manner? For the third point, elections happen every 5 years or so. This is a long time. 


Also, there are certain decisions which are for the good of the people, which no politician will ever support - because it affects him/her negatively in a personal manner. Here are two real-life case studies to explain my points.


(Case Study 1: The transport minister made a mess of the public transport system. A vote of no confidence had (almost) all his party vote in his favor and all the opposition voting against him. If the people were allowed to vote on it, the guy would be out of there like a rocket)


(Case Study 2: Parliament members got a large pay rise, even though some of them own companies and rarely turn up at parliament)


A third problem is obviously that sometimes the politicians are subject to 'lobbying' (also known as bribes) or other such things. The Greeks found a solution to bribes in their courts - they used to have hundreds of Archons - so bribing a majority was difficult and expensive. Lets apply this solution.


So what's the band-aid over this gaping wound in democracy? Give the people the chance to make laws themselves. Bypass the parliament. The idea is that if a person succeeds in getting enough agreements on his petition, then instead of passing through parliament where it will be forgotten/ignored - it will be drafted into legalese and a referendum take place to determine whether it passes or not.

This is different from petitions and lobbying, as the vox populii directly modifies the laws, and bypasses the representatives. People who don't want to risk pulling their favourite party out of parliament can vote against them, because they're not losing anything.


Of course we can take this one step further and implement what I call Technodemocracy - which I'll talk about later.

The Llama.