As Winston Churchill once said: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

It seems to be more true today than ever. People have fought so hard for so long for basic rights, and it seems they are throwing them away. May it be the Arab spring, or the rise of the extremists in the west - voting alone does not seem to protect the basic values behind democracy anymore.

Perhaps a good analogy is Goodhart’s law - “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” In a business organization, it means that if the CEO, for example, defines a metric for the organization to optimize around, it will work for a while, and actually improve the organization’s performance. But soon enough, the people of the organization will realize how to manipulate that specific metric, playbooks will be developed, and the connection between the metric and the actual performance of the organization will break.

The only way a company’s leadership can go around this problem and avoid stagnation and deterioration, is to constantly innovate and re-invent the metrics to measure: if you innovate fast enough, you don’t give the organization the chance to learn how to manipulate the metrics. Once you update the way you measure the performance of your organization often enough, the only and the most cost-effective way for the organization to improve the metrics in the long-term is to actually improve the performance of the organization.

Going back to democracy, it means that the mechanics of modern democracies may have served their purpose initially, but today are exploited to the point where they are no longer effective, since people have learned how to manipulate them.

For example, the Trump campaign admitted to create an online campaign targeting Hillary potential voters with the purpose of discouraging them to vote. Wouldn’t we expect candidates in a democracy to encourage public participation to maximize the representation of every person? Does this stand in line with the underlying values of democracy?

And it’s not only a problem of the campaigns. The elected administrations have their playbooks, small pressure groups have their playbooks, large corporations have their playbooks. Each of these powers have spent years and years learning how manipulate the democratic system for their needs, while pulling the system away from the purpose it was created to serve.

What I’m suggesting is to innovate around the mechanics of democracy. Honestly, probably any innovation would do good and would allow better representation of the democratic values, if only because all the playbooks would have to be thrown away, and the underlying values would matter once again.

Here is the list of the biggest problems I identified:

  1. Democracy shouldn’t be about the representatives - corruption, concentration of power, ad hominem, extortion. Humans are imperfect to say the least. They are ego-driven, they get intoxicated by power and they are susceptible to bribery. It’s enough that they make a single mistake during their long careers to allow them to be extorted. The chance that a politician does not have someone extorting them (if not multiple people) is close to zero. The fact that we are putting so much power in the hands of a single person is too risky. And honestly, it shouldn’t matter who the candidate is. What should matter is the values and opinions of the public that is represented by the candidate. Structures that will not put so much power in the hands of individual representatives susceptible to their human weaknesses, will be much more resilient.
  2. You shouldn’t vote for a specific topic - For example, you might agree with Trump when it comes to foreign policy, but not when it comes to women’s rights. Why do you need to choose? Why do you need to compromise? What happens today is that people need to choose the candidate that corresponds to their most urgent topic, but need to compromise on all the other topics.
  3. Small fluctuations, big changes - Even though public opinion almost doesn’t change, elections won by a slim majority can cause big changes. It’s also related to the issue above. A candidate might win thanks to his foreign agenda that has the public support, but then use the mandate given to him in order to make changes in unrelated areas that do not have the public support.
  4. Underrepresentation of the silent majority vs organized pressure groups - we all know how a loud crowd can have more influence over decision-making than the silent majority. Be it commercial lobbies or activist pressure groups.
  5. Representatives loosely held accountable for their actions during their term - among other reasons, because they’re elected only for the main issue at the time of the election and because of the lack of transparency.
  6. Your views can change over time, even during a seat - nevertheless, you are not able to update them.
  7. There are topics that you care more about and want to be more involved in.
  8. Lack of transparency - Government lacks transparency. You don’t necessarily know about all the meetings, and definitely not about the content of all the meetings. It’s hard to understand what are the powers at play and what are the interests of all the different stakeholders. No one in the government formally holds the role of creating transparency.
  9. Superficial level of public debate - a citizen has very few touch points with the administration, and can barely let his opinions be heard, except for voting for a candidate, that only very partially corresponds to his views, once every 4 years. Of course he won’t be involved.
  10. Lack of fact-based debate - or in some cases the use of “alternative facts” formerly referred to as “lies”.

I believe many of the above can be solved by introducing a new system. Modern insights together with technological achievements that were introduced since our flavor of democracy become widely used can definitely help.

I’m working on drafting such a proposal. I believe that almost any system will bring us closer to the core values than stagnation, but it’s always better to try to improve rather than only innovate.

For questions, comments or suggestions, please email me at: me@itamarweiss.com