Original archived Re: "Referendum democracy" - how it can work
Scraped on 21/07/2025, 09:39:01 UTC
Current idea of representative democracy is simple and looks fine: the population choses between several professional politicians in power. But in fact, this does not work: these professional politicians establish a “cartel agreement” (often even unconscious) and a monopoly of elites on information, and this prevents people who do not belong to elites from going into politics (only Zelensky maybe as exception). Here I suggest “democracy 2.0”, and the main aspect of it is a big number of referendums, which are performed e.g. each week. This system will motivate common people to study sciences like economics for better voting.
The referendums can be performed online; currently some decisions like DeFi can be used for guaranteeing that the votes will be calculated both closed (anonymous) and confidently/honestly. I can explain this later. Here I write the most important idea: these multiple referendums will not be referendums in strict sense, because they will not have a legal force; instead, they will reveal what people want, and the power will have to fulfill the will of nation. If a referendum was “profane”, theoretically the power can reject is in the interest of people, but it will have to explain this later, after leaving the power – otherwise the politicians who ignored the will of nation will be imprisoned via a decision of people via a new referendum. I mean that the people will be able to either imprison somebody, or vice versa give somebody a juridical immunity, via a referendum.
You can see how it works in real time in Switzerland. It is quite interesting to see how they vote several times a year on a variety of weird topics that rarely go ahead. I just love the system because is basically an antidote for populism. The moment people try to solve things "quick and easy" on simple yet wrong solutions they pay the price directly.
This has made the Swiss quite reluctant to populists.