The Danish Experiment

[xoxoxoBruce]

Demovote 101
What are we doing

We are devising a way to hack direct democracy into representative without changing the rules by building two things: 1) A web-based platform for Danish citizens to vote on all legislature put forth in parliament. 2) A political party to vote according to the general vote on the platform.

Why are we doing it

We believe that the current representative democracy holds a faulty incentive structure for politicians making it inefficient. We follow politics closely and see a need for reform. Giving back decision making powers to the public makes it impossible to block legislation that citizens want and pass legislation that they do not. By taking agency out of the equations, everyone shares a common goal.

Why is it a good thing that we're doing it

Different suggestions of democrative reform may work great in theory, but we do not have sufficient data to know whether they'll work in practice. Facilitating direct democracy within the framework of representative democracy means not having to change parliament, while still being able to receive data and insights from people voting on real decisions with real outcomes.

What do we wish to gain from it

First, we believe there are several immediate upsides to the party obtaining seats in parliament;

the accountability all politicians have to meet,
the transparency it provides for the people,
the demand for engagement it imposes on everyone.
Secondly, we believe we can gain many insights, which can be used to further improve democracy, e.g.:

who votes on what,
what legislature matters most to the public,
where do citizens agree more or less with each other,
where do citizens agree more or less with parliament,
...and probably many others, which are hard to imagine at this point.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Maybe the Danes are cohesive enough to pull this off. Would it work here if by some act of god the politicians were forced to accept it?