Hi Bill,
I have read through your questionnaire.
Are the blanks in each table to allow for extra questions?
I would like to modify it in Excel and send it back to you for
comment and send it out to my community in Buccleuch, Sandton, Johannesburg, South
Africa (550 emails).
This process is fairly labour intensive and a properly designed
web site would get results far easier and with less errors
Regards
Jim Powell
From: William McConochie
[tstmastr(at)rio.com]
Sent: 26 December 2009 03:20 PM
To: wddm@world-wide-democracy.net
Subject: Re: [WDDM] Weighted voting
10/14/09
Dear Jim, Antonio and others:
Questions about who should be allowed to vote in a government can be explored
by
research. Especially if one supports democratic forms of government, one
should let
citizens participate in voting on such issues as to who should vote. For
example, I have
done research asking citizens if persons with more education should have their
votes on
policy issues count more than votes of persons with less education. The
majority of
citizens were of the opinion that all citizens' votes should count equally.
A way to address the ignorance concern of some citizens is to follow
Jefferson's
recommendation to educate them. This is a reasonable long-term ideal, but
not a
practical short term one, except perhaps in a questionnaire itself. E.g.
one could
present an issue and pros and cons and then solicit the citizen's vote on that
issue.
Then present another issue, etc. In Oregon before issue elections we get
voter pamphlets
that provide this sort of information weeks before the actual vote, to help
inform
citizens on the issues they are asked to vote on.
Another approach is to do research to find out what citizens want from
government on a
range of general and specific issues, not as an actual legal vote that determines
policy
but as a way of reliably measuring public opinion to inform both governments
and the
media, and via the media the citizenry, on what the community consider to be
the "common
good", programs and policies that represent the best interests of the
community at that
point in time. These sorts of surveys could and should be repeated
regularly, in my
opinion, and should ask more questions than a typical Pew, Gallup or other
national poll.
More questions on a topic increase reliability of the findings, rather
than taking
"sound bites" or "opinion bites".
The questionnaire I sent to you a few days ago is a draft of the sort of
questionnaire I
am referring to.
I invite your review of it and comments on it and on this general model for
assessing the
common good.
If there's enough interest, I can load the questionnaire on my web site and
citizens from
anywhere in the world can fill it out to begin informing us about
citizen-defined "common
good" from one community and nation to the next.
Best regards, Bill McConochie.
Politicalpsychologyresearch.com