In my previous blog post, I have pointed that it is important to create a political and social movement around democracy and being driven by those ethics, to propose new forms of social organizations as they become available with new technological innovations.
The problem that arises, if we have the goal of democracy, is that there are multiple types of democracies. Most of us live in so-called Democracies. Others like me do not consider this a Democracy. Instead I say that it is an oligarchy. Leninists prefer democratic centralism in their party and delegative democracy in Society. Anarchists prefer direct democracy. New software applications allow the practice of liquid democracy. We all consider ourselves democrats but noone considers the other a democrat. It is apparent that any social movement based on democracy would fail because of the ambiguity of the goal.
The problem with the above definitions is that they mingle the implementation with the result.
In the same way that software developers use tests to check the output of a function and do not care about the implementation of the function if the results are the same, our social movement about democracy should develop such tests to check whether an implementation is democratic or not.
What is democracy?
It is a decision process in which the majority opinion is accepted as the decision of the whole.
A simple test
Thus for any of the above systems, a way to test its level of democracy would be to make surveys about different topics and check whether the majority opinion is the one that has been accepted.
This is not as simple as it seems though. The output of any democratic implementation should be checked if it has certain characteristics.
* Cost
The cost of the decision making process is determined by the sum of the decisions of the persons that participate in the democracy divided by the number of subjects that were decided upon.
* Speed of decision making - latency
The latency of the decision making process is determined by the time it takes to make a decision. This is unrelated of the fact that the decision is the majority opinion or not.
* Convergence speed of the decisions to the majority opinion.
Here we measure the speed in which a decision changes to reflect the opinion of the majority. This could happen for many reasons:
** In order to reduce the latency and/or the cost, the implementation hastily takes decisions that can be changed in the future with a more costly decision process.
** The opinion of the people changes and that needs to be reflected on the decisions as fast as possible.
* Per-topic analysis
All of the above wouldn't be sufficient if we didn't point that each subject matter has different requirements for the above characteristics. A nuclear power plant that has a leak would require a decision mechanism that is quick when it comes to emergency situations. For the working conditions of the personnel, latency requirements can be relaxed. For non-reversible decisions, the majority opinion should be reflected immediately in the decision.
Conclusion
I think that it is time to introduce a scientific analysis of the different types of democracies. This way, we can have plenty of statistical or theoretical data to show that the world we live in is not as democratic as it seems to be and that we should fight for a better democracy.
The problem that arises, if we have the goal of democracy, is that there are multiple types of democracies. Most of us live in so-called Democracies. Others like me do not consider this a Democracy. Instead I say that it is an oligarchy. Leninists prefer democratic centralism in their party and delegative democracy in Society. Anarchists prefer direct democracy. New software applications allow the practice of liquid democracy. We all consider ourselves democrats but noone considers the other a democrat. It is apparent that any social movement based on democracy would fail because of the ambiguity of the goal.
The problem with the above definitions is that they mingle the implementation with the result.
In the same way that software developers use tests to check the output of a function and do not care about the implementation of the function if the results are the same, our social movement about democracy should develop such tests to check whether an implementation is democratic or not.
What is democracy?
It is a decision process in which the majority opinion is accepted as the decision of the whole.
A simple test
Thus for any of the above systems, a way to test its level of democracy would be to make surveys about different topics and check whether the majority opinion is the one that has been accepted.
This is not as simple as it seems though. The output of any democratic implementation should be checked if it has certain characteristics.
* Cost
The cost of the decision making process is determined by the sum of the decisions of the persons that participate in the democracy divided by the number of subjects that were decided upon.
* Speed of decision making - latency
The latency of the decision making process is determined by the time it takes to make a decision. This is unrelated of the fact that the decision is the majority opinion or not.
* Convergence speed of the decisions to the majority opinion.
Here we measure the speed in which a decision changes to reflect the opinion of the majority. This could happen for many reasons:
** In order to reduce the latency and/or the cost, the implementation hastily takes decisions that can be changed in the future with a more costly decision process.
** The opinion of the people changes and that needs to be reflected on the decisions as fast as possible.
* Per-topic analysis
All of the above wouldn't be sufficient if we didn't point that each subject matter has different requirements for the above characteristics. A nuclear power plant that has a leak would require a decision mechanism that is quick when it comes to emergency situations. For the working conditions of the personnel, latency requirements can be relaxed. For non-reversible decisions, the majority opinion should be reflected immediately in the decision.
Conclusion
I think that it is time to introduce a scientific analysis of the different types of democracies. This way, we can have plenty of statistical or theoretical data to show that the world we live in is not as democratic as it seems to be and that we should fight for a better democracy.
No comments:
Post a Comment