Thread: POWER TO THE PEOPLE

smine wrote:

On the subject Tom wrote about with timing and market closure hours: I encourage everyone to write this board often to explain the concept of we make more TSP makes more! They're in Washington, of course. The address is with this link. Tell them; write them.

"The Board. The Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board is an independent Government agency. The five members of the Board and the Executive Director are required by law to manage the TSP prudently and solely in the interest of the participants and their beneficiaries."

That would represent "Power to the People" Attached: article for relecting on the issues of "Power to the People"

Vicky

SURVEY: THE INTERNET SOCIETY POWER TO THE PEOPLE
Jan 23rd 2003 From The Economist print edition

A Pervasive Web Will Increase Demands For Direct Democracy

IN THE early, heady days of the internet, many of its most zealous proponents expected cyberspace to transform the political landscape. Autocratic governments, they thought, would be scuppered by their inability to control the free flow of information. That could yet happen (see article). But cyber-optimists' hopes were even higher for established democracies, where they saw the internet restoring the electorate's civic engagement. Citizens would no longer have to rely on information spoon-fed by politicians, but be able to find out for themselves. Eventually, people would vote directly from the comfort of their own homes. The political apathy which has spread through western countries in recent decades would be reversed. Democracy would be rejuvenated, at last achieving its original meaning of “power of the people�.

Judging by the most obvious political effects of the internet, so far this has not happened. Established democratic governments have published enormous amounts of information on the internet and moved towards the electronic delivery of some services, but this does not seem to have made much of a difference to the conduct of politics. The structures of democratic government remain intact. Political parties and candidates have set up websites and flooded voters with e-mails. But internet campaigns, according to most studies, have appealed to the same band of already committed voters who are also reached through letter boxes and by knocking on doors. Broadcast advertising still dominates campaign spending.

Governments in Britain and the United States have conducted experiments with electronic voting in real campaigns. A number of European countries are also planning trials. Some experiments have produced a rise in voter turnout, as hoped, but most have not. On the whole, the internet seems to have had remarkably little impact on mainstream politics.

That will not remain true for much longer. Communication is the lifeblood of politics, and every big change in communication technology, from the printing press to television, has eventually produced big, and often unexpected, changes in politics. As the internet becomes mobile and ubiquitous, it will bring about changes of its own. Precisely what these will be is not yet clear, but the earliest claims of cyber-dreamers—that the internet will produce a shift of power away from political elites to ordinary citizens—may well become reality. One of the big political debates of the next three decades will be about the relative merits of direct versus representative democracy.

A different kind of politics
Indeed, it has already got under way. In a recent book, “Democratic Phoenix: Reinventing Political Activism�, Pippa Norris, a political scientist at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, rejects the conventional view that there has been a pervasive decline in political participation in western democracies. Voter turnout and membership of political parties may have declined in some countries, she concedes, but much more political activity is now being channelled through single-issue, grass-roots organisations and expressed by means of “protest politics�, such as petitions, demonstrations and consumer boycotts. This trend was well established before the internet, but the web's arrival has accelerated it. The ability to organise, proselytise and communicate at low cost has been a huge boost to such groups, be it a locally based effort to block an airport expansion or a global environmental campaigner such as Greenpeace.

Joining in a protest or a web discussion is not the same as stuffing envelopes for a big political party, but it is political participation nevertheless. According to Ms Norris, survey evidence shows that this kind of protest politics is particularly strong among the well-educated managerial and professional classes in post-industrial societies, and that it is no longer confined to the young. In other words, the bulk of those who are organising themselves on the internet and engaging in “direct action� politics are not anarchists or anti-globalisation protesters, but the kind of people who join political parties and are most likely to vote.

The growth of “protest� politics is not the only evidence for a slowly mounting demand for direct democracy. Over the past few decades, the popularity of direct voting by electorates has sharply increased. Through a variety of mechanisms—local and national referendums, initiatives placed on the ballot by citizens, and advisory votes—governments are now consulting their electorates directly.

Not all such plebiscites are respectable. When Saddam Hussein pushed up the proportion of voters approving his rule from 99.96% to 100% in a referendum last October, the rest of the world could only laugh at the sick joke. But such manipulation does not invalidate the device itself, properly used. Referendums have helped establish popular approval for new constitutions in eastern Europe, accompanied the periodic reforms of the European Union, sometimes with surprising and awkward results, and have been embraced even by Britain, a country with a strong tradition of parliamentary sovereignty.

Vote often
In Switzerland, where various forms of direct democracy have long been an integral feature of government, the number of direct ballots has climbed sharply in recent decades. The same is true in the United States, where direct votes of one kind or another have been used since colonial times. Since 1980 there have been more than 600 state-wide direct votes, and thousands more at city and county level. Twenty-seven American states now have a provision for some form of direct ballot. In some states, such as California, Oregon and Colorado, voters face a slate of referendums every year.

Moreover, public-opinion polling has become endemic in most democracies, with politicians, political parties, the media and even governments continually conducting polls to gauge opinion. Instant, and blatantly unscientific, polls have become a regular feature of news shows and websites. Even that most passive of all media, broadcast television, has spawned scores of websites where couch potatoes passionately debate popular shows such as “The Sopranos� or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer�. These sites are now monitored by television producers to see how audiences are reacting, episode by episode.

In modern societies, in other words, the public is now accustomed to being consulted regularly, and when most people get the chance, they like expressing their view on anything under the sun. Although representative democracy is the basic structure of all western governments, it is accompanied today by a penumbra of direct popular control. Opinion polls in America and Europe suggest that large majorities are in favour of referendums.

Not everyone is happy about this. Politicians are regularly derided for being “poll driven�, as if that were a synonym for public pandering. David Broder, a veteran political reporter and columnist on the Washington Post, entitled his recent book about America's initiative campaigns “Democracy Derailed�. Mr Broder is appalled by the intrusion of direct ballots into the governance of American states, believing that such ballots are too vulnerable to control by powerful moneyed interests—a remarkable claim for someone who has been covering America's Congress for most of his career.

And yet despite his scathing criticism of such initiatives, Mr Broder is honest enough to report that his view is not widely shared by voters. “In every state I visited in my reporting, the initiative process was viewed as sacrosanct,� he writes. “In most of them, the legislature (even though term-limited) was in disrepute.� Moreover, he is convinced that it will not be long “before the converging forces of technology and public opinion coalesce in a political movement for a national initiative—to allow the public to substitute the simplicity of majority rule by referendum for what must seem to many frustrated Americans the arcane, ineffective, out-of-date model of the constitution.�

Mr Broder is right, and not just about America. The growing expectations of an educated public for whom individual choice is an important value, combined with the technology of an increasingly pervasive internet, will challenge the structures of all western governments based on representative models of democracy. Once reliable methods for validating electronic votes have been found and internet penetration rates approach saturation, the internet will remove the biggest single obstacle to direct democracy—the physical difficulty of distributing information to a large population, engaging it in debate and collecting its votes. When this happens, probably during the next decade, many people will come to see national elections every few years as an extraordinarily blunt instrument for expressing the popular will, a remnant from the age of steam, when most representative institutions were invented.

Constitutional change is never easy, nor should it be; and moves towards direct democracy are likely to be fiercely resisted, by politicians and lobbyists out of self-interest, by many others out of a genuine fear of the unknown and by some, like Mr Broder, out of a principled belief that, even if technically possible, government by referendum would be a “tragic mistake�.

The many faces of democracy
Assuming that frequent mass polls will become a practical possibility, critics of direct democracy will argue that, without intermediary institutions such as political parties and legislatures, the kind of rational trade-offs necessary for good government will become impossible. The bargaining that takes place in legislatures may not be pretty, but without it successive referendums are likely to result in contradictory policymaking and instability. Critics will also say that most citizens simply do not have the expertise or the time to examine the complex issues that must constantly be decided in modern societies. Impatient or distracted by other demands on their attention, voters will be prone to snap judgments and vulnerable to manipulation. Professional politicians, for all their faults, do serve a useful purpose.

Those arguing for more direct democracy will reply that regular polls of the electorate should go a long way towards avoiding irrational policymaking. If voters find that they have made conflicting decisions, then another ballot can be held to resolve them. Moreover, even in a direct democracy not all intermediary institutions, such as political parties, government departments or even legislatures, will necessarily be abolished. Legislatures might survive to monitor elected governments, just as they do today, and to formulate and propose legislation. Voters might confine themselves to making the final decision about what legislation to enact. Evidence from the hundreds of initiatives held in Switzerland and in American states does not bear out fears that voters will take undue risks or oppress minorities. Electorates are generally risk-averse, upholding the status quo unless they are thoroughly convinced that change is needed.

Even in a direct democracy, most people do not want to live, eat and sleep politics, so new intermediate institutions may have to be found. James Fishkin, a political scientist at the University of Texas, has experimented with “deliberative polls�, both national and local, in the United States, Britain, Denmark, Australia and Bulgaria. These polls are, in effect, large juries of ordinary voters (200-500 people at a time), selected to mirror the general population, who gather to interrogate experts on both sides of an issue over a couple of days and then debate among themselves in moderated groups. Participants are polled both before and after their discussions to see what difference these have made.

Mr Fishkin's results have been encouraging. Minds were opened and some attitudes changed. Judging by the evidence of lengthy questionnaires before and after each poll, it seems that all socio-economic groups (not just the rich or well-educated) are capable of considering complex issues; that participants are able to absorb information even if it clashes with their own views; and that such groups are able to weigh alternatives and set priorities even when difficult trade-offs are involved.

The jury is out
In a direct democracy, voters might well trust such juries of fellow citizens more than they would groups of professional politicians. With a ubiquitous, video-enabled internet, such juries would not need to assemble physically, as did most of Mr Fishkin's. Voters could follow the deliberations of the group as it wrestled with a decision, review the evidence presented to the jurors, and consider the jury's decision when it was made. Juries could be used as advisers to the electorate before votes, or some decisions could be delegated directly to the juries themselves. A poll by the Center on Policy Attitudes, a Washington-based think-tank, found that two out of three Americans believed that such a jury would make better decisions than Congress, mainly because it would be less subject to lobbyists' attempts to influence it.

Such innovations may still seem a long way off. But in trying to hold back the demand for more direct democracy, the defenders of traditional representative institutions will have a fundamental problem: any criticism they make will sound as though it is aimed at democracy itself. If voters are not wise enough to make direct policy choices, how can they be wise enough to choose legislators, or governments, to do it for them?

The financial corruption and lobbying by special interests that plague all democracies today are much harder to stamp out in a representative system than they would be in a system with more direct voter involvement. Mr Broder is right that big-money interests have also tried to manipulate many American initiative ballots. But it is hard to bribe an entire electorate, or even to mislead it for very long, if there is a free flow of information and open discussion. In any case, most research by political scientists has found that, contrary to Mr Broder's view, state-wide initiative campaigns are, on the whole, remarkably difficult for big spenders to control.

To function effectively, of course, even direct democracies will need rules, procedures and an array of institutions. Most of these are likely to be adapted from existing ones. Others will have to be invented, and voters persuaded of their merits. One of democracy's greatest virtues is its flexibility, but the changes about to be wrought by new communication technologies will stretch the adaptive abilities of western democracies to their limit.