Enlarge / Cover detail from Infomocracy, by Malka Older. (credit: Will Staehle)
Whether or not you think American democracy is broken, you can probably come up with some ways to improve it. The country gets less than 50-percent voter turnout; the Electoral College has disagreed with the popular vote twice in the past five election cycles; there are referenda with explanations that take 10 minutes to read and still don’t make any sense; and don’t forget all the special interests and pork-barrels and legislative gridlock. Surely we can do better.
With all the technology we’ve developed in the centuries since the Founding Fathers set up our system, we have the capacity to make voting much more convenient. Plus, we can manage an almost unlimited number of voter concerns simultaneously. With all this technological capacity, what are the possible next steps for democracy?
One idea is microdemocracy. As the name suggests, this is about getting democracy to a more granular, local scale, although there are different suggestions for how to do so. In the 1990s, the term arose in academic literature exploring whether democratic practices at the civil society level could support democratic transitions in authoritarian regimes such as Zimbabwe.
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Source: Ars Technica – Microdemocracy is a high-tech solution to America’s current system