In a democracy, pandering to the citizenry is kind of the point.
Long term plans that work and are popular are often continued even by governments with diametrically opposed agendas.
What would lead to better democracy is a populace that isnt informed by network TV and tabloids with owners who have diametrically opposed interests to their readers/viewers, not longer term limits.
Blairite governments werent neoliberal because of short term limits. They were neoliberal coz thats what the blairites/brownites were.
The theory that voters dont punish bad behavior is fairly well disproved just by looking at the last presidential election.
Canes-Wrone, Herron, and Shotts’s analysis identifies the circumstances under which an incumbent may be tempted to “pander” - implementing the policy preferred by the voters even though her private information suggests that it will not serve their interests. In their basic model, pandering occurs when the probability is not too high that the inferiority of the voters’ preferred policy will be revealed before the next election (and if the expected quality of a prospective challenger is strong enough that the incumbent has to worry about her public standing at election time).
This model essentially glosses over the phenomenona of policies sold to voters as fixes for their problems by dishonest media.
It also assumes that politicians essentially only want one term and would be perfectly content to be destroyed electorally in their third term if they can win their second term.
No, it assumes amnesia on the part of the voters. There is an abundance of evidence backing up the assumption of amnesia. Study after study shows that voters are only paying attention for the 6 months before an election. Even where 80% of the voters follow events and are well informed, the election is determined by the 20% who are poorly informed. There is a fix for this, discussed here:
I'm very interested in novel forms of policy making, alternatives to parliamentary procedure. Your suggestions are worth trying out. Perhaps as a game or simulation, a la Nomics.
I'm personally interested in participatory democracy strategies like citizen juries.
Not to be confused with direct democracy strategies like initiatives. Which have proven to be poor choices.
Emphasis on the deliberation, discourse, participation. Versus just voting.
Learning how the Iroquois governed is on my "to do" list.
For what it's worth, I'm working on a software simulation that will allow testing of different systems, to see how close a system of voting can come to aggregating the preferences of voters. Back in 1953, Kenneth Arrow published his Impossibility Theorem, which proved that rank voting failed to aggregate voter preferences. He later won a Nobel Prize, in part for this work. But Arrow remained hopeful about "approval" voting, where the voters get an infinite number of votes. The central problem is that our voting systems today tend to be course-grained, and they need to be fine-grained if they are to aggregate the will of the voters, without having small, random variations swamp the results. So I'm working on a simulation to let everyone experiment with all the possible variables: how many votes, how many candidates, etc.
I share your concern about grain (scope). Both bundling unrelated stuff as well as the need to preserve (protect) mutually dependent facets. A "just so" example of the later is comprehensive progressive tax reform is easily sabotaged by breaking up the effort.
In a democracy, pandering to the citizenry is kind of the point.
Long term plans that work and are popular are often continued even by governments with diametrically opposed agendas.
What would lead to better democracy is a populace that isnt informed by network TV and tabloids with owners who have diametrically opposed interests to their readers/viewers, not longer term limits.
Blairite governments werent neoliberal because of short term limits. They were neoliberal coz thats what the blairites/brownites were.
The theory that voters dont punish bad behavior is fairly well disproved just by looking at the last presidential election.