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Re:Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf] by baddox on Thursday November 10, 2016 @01:40AM (#12918232)
While any such system would obviously be a radical change from our current system, such systems do exist both conceptually and historically, and it's not just stateless societies. The most obvious example is sortition, whereby officials are selected randomly. Again, applying that everywhere overnight is obviously radical, but the idea is fairly sound. It's how jury duty works in the United States, and it's how Athenian democracy (mostly) worked.
Re:Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf] by Elrac on Thursday November 10, 2016 @11:19AM (#12921697)
That this is how jury duty works doesn't inspire me with a lot of confidence.

Case in point: A couple of weeks ago, a jury acquitted the Bundys after they'd occupied a federal building and used threat of lethal force to keep federal authorities from evicting them. If you'll pardon my snark, this is what happens when you turn jurisprudence over to a handful of rednecks.

Along very similar lines, modern-day politicians make decisions affecting (in some cases) millions of lives and trillions of Dollars. The issues they decide on are complex, and ideally we'd want lawmakers to really work at their "trade:" To deeply study the issues and consult competent experts. Our current crop of professional career politicians, some of whom are evolution and warming deniers heading up education and environmental/energy committees are spectacularly failing to live up to this expectation, and there's no good reason to believe a selection of people randomly chosen from the population would do better, on average.