Scott Raney
2017-09-01 21:34:45 UTC
Looks like everyone else took the summer off too: I was swamped by
demands in RL and about the only political thing I got done was to
read Democracy for Realists (Achen and Bartels, 2016). Hopefully
things will settle down and I can get back to updating proxyfor.me now
that the Angular developers have released version 4 which reportedly
has fixed many of the design flaws that were vexing me with the
previous version (Angular 2: Seems they skipped "3").
I can't say that I'd recommend the book, especially for this group
which is undoubtedly fully aware of all the flaws in misrepresentative
democracy. It's criticism of direct democracy is at best half-hearted
and they offer exactly pretty much only one anecdotal analysis to
justify their dismissal of it: Apparently there was an example of The
People cutting fire department budgets when given direct control over
them in Illinois (data from Tessin 2009, which turns out to be an
unpublished PhD dissertation). Unfortunately although the authors
claim that this was a bad outcome, they offer very little in terms of
economic analysis to prove it. Sure, fire response times increased,
but they never provide any direct evidence that compared fire
insurance rates in these counties in Illinois with comparable counties
other states to prove that it was economically an unwise decision. Not
to mention the whole problem of expecting people to make wise
decisions when the only power they're given is to veto a tax increase
(vs. giving them total control over the budget which would allow them
to cut some other service to use that money to beef up fire fighting).
There is of course no citation of any experiments actually comparing
direct with representative democracy (e.g., maybe compare how often
major decisions are reversed in the two systems: My money would be on
representative democracy having a far higher failure rate by this
criteria). I haven't found experimental reports like that either,
though.
I was also very disappointed that they failed to deliver on the
promises made by the endorsements on the dust jacket (and cited in the
reviews on Amazon and elsewhere): Nowhere do they propose a better
system, or even any way to improve our current systems beyond some
vague handwaving about how reducing inequality will result in better
democracy. Unfortunately they apparently even lack even any awareness
of the Catch-22 implicit in their recommendation. All in all I think
the title of the book should probably have been "Democracy for Cynics"
;-)
About the only thing I *did* find enlightening were the
descriptions/examples of how demagogues take advantage of uninformed
voters and how they even have major impacts in the operation of
small-scale "deliberative democracies" like New England town halls
(i.e., "activerts" end up making the decisions in those forums, just
like they do in misrepresentative democracies everywhere else).
Anyone else get anything else out of it?
Regards,
Scott
demands in RL and about the only political thing I got done was to
read Democracy for Realists (Achen and Bartels, 2016). Hopefully
things will settle down and I can get back to updating proxyfor.me now
that the Angular developers have released version 4 which reportedly
has fixed many of the design flaws that were vexing me with the
previous version (Angular 2: Seems they skipped "3").
I can't say that I'd recommend the book, especially for this group
which is undoubtedly fully aware of all the flaws in misrepresentative
democracy. It's criticism of direct democracy is at best half-hearted
and they offer exactly pretty much only one anecdotal analysis to
justify their dismissal of it: Apparently there was an example of The
People cutting fire department budgets when given direct control over
them in Illinois (data from Tessin 2009, which turns out to be an
unpublished PhD dissertation). Unfortunately although the authors
claim that this was a bad outcome, they offer very little in terms of
economic analysis to prove it. Sure, fire response times increased,
but they never provide any direct evidence that compared fire
insurance rates in these counties in Illinois with comparable counties
other states to prove that it was economically an unwise decision. Not
to mention the whole problem of expecting people to make wise
decisions when the only power they're given is to veto a tax increase
(vs. giving them total control over the budget which would allow them
to cut some other service to use that money to beef up fire fighting).
There is of course no citation of any experiments actually comparing
direct with representative democracy (e.g., maybe compare how often
major decisions are reversed in the two systems: My money would be on
representative democracy having a far higher failure rate by this
criteria). I haven't found experimental reports like that either,
though.
I was also very disappointed that they failed to deliver on the
promises made by the endorsements on the dust jacket (and cited in the
reviews on Amazon and elsewhere): Nowhere do they propose a better
system, or even any way to improve our current systems beyond some
vague handwaving about how reducing inequality will result in better
democracy. Unfortunately they apparently even lack even any awareness
of the Catch-22 implicit in their recommendation. All in all I think
the title of the book should probably have been "Democracy for Cynics"
;-)
About the only thing I *did* find enlightening were the
descriptions/examples of how demagogues take advantage of uninformed
voters and how they even have major impacts in the operation of
small-scale "deliberative democracies" like New England town halls
(i.e., "activerts" end up making the decisions in those forums, just
like they do in misrepresentative democracies everywhere else).
Anyone else get anything else out of it?
Regards,
Scott