“Referendum democracy” – how it can work

Linkey July 13, 2025 at 15:23 375 views 5 comments
The idea of modern (representative) democracy is simple and looks fine: the population choses between several professional politicians in power. But in fact, this does not work: these professional politicians establish a “cartel agreement” (often even unconscious) and a monopoly of elites on information, and this prevents people who do not belong to elites from going into politics (only Zelensky maybe as exception). Here I suggest “democracy 2.0”, and the main aspect of it is a big number of referendums, which are performed e.g. each week. This system will motivate common people to study sciences like economics for better voting.
The referendums can be performed online; currently some IT decisions like DeFi can be used for guaranteeing that the votes will be calculated both closed (anonymous) and confidently/honestly. I can explain this later. Here I write the most important idea: these multiple referendums will not be referendums in strict sense, because they will not have a legal force; instead, they will reveal what people want, and the power will have to fulfill the will of nation. If a referendum was “profane”, theoretically the power can reject is in the interest of people, but it will have to explain this later, after leaving the power – otherwise the politicians who ignored the will of nation will be imprisoned via a decision of people via a new referendum. I mean that the people will be able to either imprison somebody, or vice versa give somebody a juridical immunity, via a referendum.

Comments (5)

Leontiskos July 13, 2025 at 18:37 #1000275
A.k.a "Direct Democracy." An old idea.
Linkey July 14, 2025 at 01:24 #1000349
Quoting Leontiskos
A.k.a "Direct Democracy." An old idea.


Does the idea of direct democracy described in the article include the possibility for people to make the decisions which are currently considered as a sphere of judicial branch? For example if the people of USA could vote for releasing Julian Assange...
Linkey July 19, 2025 at 04:52 #1001344
I suggest you to read about the Easterlin paradox:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterlin_paradox

The economic growth itself does not do anybody happier. During last 500 years, the productivity of labour of the planet has increased maybe 1000 times, but the people haven't become happier because of this. Only psychological factors can make the society happier, and they include the aim in life, which helps people gather friends (for friendship people need to have common aims). A referendum each week will give people such aims, and this will end the lonelisess and misanthropy...
Paul July 31, 2025 at 14:43 #1004216
The idea that voting on things frequently will motivate the public to educate themselves is beyond ludicrous, it's dangerously stupid. What you'd get is a much smaller proportion of people voting, and most of them voting based on extremely low information on a subject they have no expertise in. In a typical such referendum I'd estimate you'd get 10% of the population voting, and less than 1% who actually understand what they're voting on. And what does that mean? It means you've made it far, far cheaper for the oligarchy to buy all the laws they want. A few manipulative targeted ads and they've got whatever law they want passed.

I live in California. We have tons of referendums (ballot propositions) already. They already make it too easy for special interests to create even more corrupt laws and more direct theft than they can get through legislators.

The overwhelming majority of laws are complicated and involve specialized knowledge that the average person wouldn't have time to research even if they cared (which most of them don't). Laws need to be vetted and voted on by people who actually know something about the subject -- or at least people who have advisors who know something about the subject.

Tech bro proponents of technofascism often propose constant digital referendums as a way to present a farce of democracy that's really easy for them to manipulate more effectively and cheaper than the current system.
Linkey August 13, 2025 at 17:16 #1006822
As I have already explained, each week a referendum will be performed, but these referendums will not be "referendums in strict sense", they will not have a legal force. If the government considers a referendum as "profane", it can reject it; but it will have to explain its position to the people, otherwise the ruling politicians will be possibly imprisoned after leaving the power - through a new referendum. And this leads to the following conclusion. If a ruler (President) rejects a referendum selfishly (e.g. because he does not want to loose money, etc), he will realize, that after leaving the power, he will be soon imprisoned. And this will easily make him a dictator - he will use the force (administrative resource) to keep his power. This means, that the proposed model of referendum democracy can work properly only in conjunction with the Ukrainian political model, "ideology of Maidan", the readiness of population to overthrow any power if it becomes corrupted. That's why the survival of Ukraine now is critically important for the human civilization...