Opinion polls are not quite the same as the
deliberative methods I mentioned. Planning Cells and Citizen Juries have been
used for several decades with much success. There is a voluminous litterature
about this subject.
Sincerely,
Jiri Polak
----- Original Message -----
To: wddm@world-wide-democracy.net
Sent: Friday, August 13, 2010 6:09
PM
Subject: Re: [WDDM] Democracy
axioms The problem, in my opinion, with doing issues by a poll or by
signatures is that it raises the possibility for citizens to be swamped by
many legislative actions at once, not to mention it often limits the number of
people who can show support for it. I think in this, we can take a wonderful
democratic notion from internet sites like youtube and diggit: the "Vote up"
option. If there's a limit on the number of legislative actions that have to
be voted on at any given time (of course this number is alterable by vote of
the people), and there is a single location/forum/etc for government
legislation, then people can go and 'vote up' what they view as important
issues. Of the submitted issues, the top (however many the people have decided
on) will go to be voted on. If the ability to also 'vote down' an idea is
available, then the process has many of the advantages of both a poll and a
survey, and few of the disadvantages, while being even more democratic in many
ways.
That's my two cents.
On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 10:51 AM, < Joshua N Pritikin>
wrote:
On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 05:20:43PM +0200, Jiri Polak
wrote: > Concerning "practically possible", we mean that some
oligarchies > raise obstacles that make referenda possible in theory,
but not in > practice. (too many signatures required, too short
periods etc.).
Right
> Qualification by public opinion is in fact included
in the term > "legally possible" We wanted to make the text as concise
as seemed > adequate.
I attended the 2010 Global
Forum in San Francisco. NI4D sent a video team there. We did a lot of
1-on-1 interviews. I asked many people about "qualification by public
opinion poll". You would think that among this pool of people, many would
be familiar with the idea and be in favor, especially since we spent at
least a whole day discussing problems with gathering signature petitions.
I was surprised that only John Matsusaka and Paul Jacobs were
unambiguously optimistic about the idea. Everybody else was either
skeptical or confused as if they had never considered the possibility of
qualification by public opinion poll. Therefore, I suggest adding
something like "initiatives may be qualified by public opinion poll". I
understand you want to be concise, but omitting this might tend to
exclude it from
consideration.
|