Re:Switzerland to vote on banning banks from creating money
by wazoox on Tuesday December 29, 2015 @07:49AM
(#10806438)
> Both of you are correct. The problem with direct democracy these days is that it ignores the power of mass media, which is to say it ignores the influence of money on a statistically significant portion of the voters.
That's why the example of the 2005 French referendum is so important. All of mainstream politics were campaigning for "Yes". All of media, papers, TV, radios were exclusively campaigning for "Yes". However, the "No" vote won by a comfortable margin 55% to 45%, and the campaign for the "No" almost entirely took place on the internet and social networks.
Re:Switzerland to vote on banning banks from creating money
by ethbro on Tuesday December 29, 2015 @08:38AM
(#10806580)
The outcome and the results are useless without normalizing against an unadvertised baseline.
If either traditional/big media or the internet and social networks influenced the vote by pursuading people who didn't do their own research -- that's a fundamental problem.
Premise 1: if you continue adding people to the voting pool on an issue, at some point (X) you're going to exceed the number of people who have interest / time / capability to render themselves informed.
When you do, mass media begins to exert a much greater effect on the outcome (as these people are more susceptible to having their opinions swayed).
Premise 2: If you shrink the pool of potential voters, but keep the money involved the same, then corruption increases
--
There are of course things you can do legally to fight both of these negative outcomes, but I feel you'll always be fighting the basic tendencies. The solution then isn't direct democracy (where mass media overrides logic) or oligarchy (where corruption rules) but some point in between.