[MG] Liquid democracy versus proxy voting

[Michael Allan]

Welcome Jens,

Jens Egholm wrote:
> My original idea was to couple Habermas' ideas about the public
> sphere (deliberation) with the internet concept mass-to-mass
> communication (term from Bohman 2010). I found that proxy-voting
> could do exactly this; create small "minipublics" (again, see Bohman
> 2010) where active deliberation would do exactly this. ...

I wonder what he means by "mass-to-mass communication" and
"mini-publics".  Do you have the full citation?

My first introduction to the public sphere was Blanning's "The culture
of power and the power of culture: old regime Europe 1660-1789"
http://books.google.ca/books?id=3qCIzooCRlwC
It's enjoyable, but not so eye-opening as Habermas's original book:
"The structural transformation of the public sphere"
http://books.google.ca/books?id=e799caakIWoC

For me, these historical studies make all the difference.  The
prospect that new techniques like recursive voting might prop up and
support the public sphere is not so exciting, in itself, as the
prospect that they might *reinflate* it.

> ... So I turned to the legislature; It's very idealistic to
> completely remove the parliament and rely on proxies as such. That's
> where the concept I (wrongly it seems) referred to as "liquid
> democracy" comes in. This would essentially allow the political
> structure to persist, but would still include strong elements of
> e-democracy. As mentioned I discussed this with Michael Allan who
> proposed the term "liquid legislature". It actually sounds much more
> appealing to me now...

But is it realistic?  To restructure parliament in "liquid" form would
involve changing the constitution.  That would certainly meet with
strong and competent opposition from the political class, not to
mention others.

It would also go against historical precedent.  During the
Enlightenment, the institutions of the state were not the first to be
restructured in democratic form; the first to be restructured were
those of the public sphere.  It might even be considered more
democratic that it happened that in that particular order, which would
make it one of those rare cases (seemingly) in which the more
realistic approach is actually closer to the ideal, and not further
from it.

-- 
Michael Allan

Toronto, +1 416-699-9528
http://zelea.com/



Originally posted to the mailing list of the Metagovernment Project:
http://metagovernment.org/mailman/listinfo/start_metagovernment.org