Random idea: what if instead of electing politicians, instead we used democracy to set policy directions, usually by setting up temporary groups to draft and propose more complex/technical legislation (with a charter that was voted on that sets the group's mission)? A second vote would be required to accept the results. Simple things would just be voted on directly.
The civil service would continue to run day to day operations, so not everything needs to be codified by the people.
Disclaimer: I'm not proposing this idea, I'm just collecting other perspectives on it.
Also, my inspiration for the idea comes from two sources:
1. In the US, our current legislative system is more or less broken. Political gridlock has been so bad for so long that not much is getting passed, and so the executive and judiciary have had to step in to effectively legislate through executive orders and court rulings respectively.
A legislative based on direct voting would be much slower, but maybe this is not really that big of a problem, especially if the tradeoff is better results
@urusan weird, I find getting nothing done, unless on bipartisan support, the best feature of the legislative. I guess I thought of that as the point. I prefer to have equal members of both parties (even tho I don't like a 2 party system, nor like either party) so that only things that we all agree on get changed. We have 10s of thousands of more laws than we did in the 50s, nationwide, and most (not all) are stupid to me.
@obi The civil service and judiciary would also be important to keep things running smoothly when the legislature is too slow or too coarse grained. They would handle small technical legalities for the public, but the public could overturn their decisions if they disagree with the interpretations that these bodies decide.
The last piece of the puzzle is strong constitutional guarantees to keep the system from being hijacked or the majority from violating the human rights of minorities.
@urusan I'm not really down with mob rule, which is why I'm not really on board with that. Otherwise its solid.
@obi A direct democracy (with a civil service) like I was describing would also get relatively little legislation done. After all, since we don't have a good way to do electronic voting, the voting would have to use paper ballots (or a hybrid scheme). So any new legislation requires getting everyone out to vote each time legislation is going to be changed (or at least twice if a legislative charter is used to draft technical legislation).