Limits on a Democracy's size?

[dal_timgar]

I think the social-psychology of the culture is more important than the size. But the technology is changing our social-psychology. Elvis wasn’t allowed to swivel his hips on TV in the 50’s but advertisers have been pushing the envelope every year since then.

Now we have the internet to influence people’s thinking. Maybe we shoot holes in the bullshit on the TV and improve the democracy regardless of the size.

I saw BEYOND THE BELTWAY a few days ago where a caller mentioned the '94 hijacking in France to crash in Paris. Some guy from the University of Chicago blew it off. He didn’t deny it but he didn’t acknowledge it either. Why has the media been ignoring that for 2 years? Lynch the FAA.

Dal Timgar

@Spavined Gelding

Of course that has been my experience in far too m
any cases.

Maybe there is a fair argument that a new level of representation need to be inserted between the individual voter and the national legislature. Right now each member of congress represents some half million constituents. The chances of your Congressman paying any attention to your opinion or problem unless there are 250,000 other people in the district with the same problem or opinion, or unless you come to him with a brown envelope filled with untraceable cash is pretty much nil. That is why “special interest groups” have become so significant–only organizations have a loud enough voice or enough money to get the Representative’s attention. It’s even worse with Senators since there are only two of them for each state–strangely enough in a small state, for example North Dakota, a voter has a better chance of actual contact with his Senator than with his Congressman. In a big state, like Ohio, California, New York, only the Big Dawgs have access.

Maybe the answer is some sort of regional parliaments who’s consent to legislation is required and with the power to institute legislation and to investigate for that purpose, sort of a sub or intermediate congress.

[clairobscur]

@scotandrsn

YAPT (Yet Another Politics Thread)

A standard, non-first class letter costs $0.27. To send it to each household costs
$32,400,000. This figure gave me pause. This is simply postage, not even the cost of producing the letter or other inserts. Extend this notion. Broadcast media are more effective means of getting a message out, and therefore, have every right to charge more, which they do.
!

It’s not necessarily an issue. Here, before the election, we receive a mail including one such letter from each candidate. This is paid for by the governement. Similarily, political ads on TVs and radios (public or private) are forbidden, but each candidate is granted an equal amount of time on the public medias during the campaign for free. And finally, the total campaign expenses are controled and limited for all candidates (and reimbursed if they got at least 5% of the votes)
If you have an issue, as you seem to, with wealth giving too big of an advantage in elections, then you just have to push for similar laws, precisely intended to place the candidates on a somehow more equal footing.
It has everything to do with the system, and nothing to do with the size of the country, anyway. Implementing such laws (like the government paying for the mail) won’t cost more per capita in a little or in a large country. At the contrary, if, say, Tuvalu, follows the same system than the USA, then, the wealthiest Tuvalian will have a big advantage too during the elections.

[scotandrsn]

Thaumaturge, I agree with much of your post, but there are points I wanted to address.

@Thaumaturge

Of course, there is the internet, and email, but many people do not have access to those still, which brings up issues of fairness. And even bandwidth costs. I don’t know the figures, but a few million hits a month on a website can’t be cheap. ( even if it’s alot cheaper than mail). And there is the issue of getting people to want to navigate to your website, unlike with TV or mail ads, the voter must seek out the information. Voter apathy stands in the way of making the internet very effective.

Even without the problems you have laid out, I could hardly think of the internet as some kind of fix-all. As romantic as the notion of “cyberspace” as some sort of new frontier with rules yet to be laid out, it’s simply a fabrication. The internet is a series of targeted messages sent from computer to computer over wires. Organizations, corporations and governments own that hardware, and, as you say, it costs MONEY. Ivoking the internet as a cure for what ails us politically is hardly what I could think of as normalizing the influence of the wealthy.

@Thaumaturge

Bigger societies are more efficient than smaller ones

IMO, bigger societies are more powerful (not efficient), given that they can accomplish certain large tasks more quickly by virtue of being able to bring more people on to perform similar tasks. I think they are not efficient in the sense of making the best, most economical use of available resources.

[scotandrsn]

@pervert

Didn’t Dean’s campaign at least suggest that alternatives to small numbers of large donations are possible?

I assume you mean large numbers of small donations. Dean showed it was not impossible to generate funds this way, but he did not show that it wins elections.

[scotandrsn]

@Bryan Ekers

I make it 5 Governors, 6 Senators, and one military man, including 5 Vice Presidents (three of whom got the job when the Prez died or resigned). If you really want to be President, you don’t have to be a Senator first.

I was simply responding to HeyHomie’s plan, which implied working your way up through D.C. politics. I consider state governors to be outside of this, but as you point out, it certainly has been successful for many.

A state governor has the same issues though. Unless you come from a state that gets attention anyway (NY or CA or a handful of others), or manage to charm the press enough for them to pay attention to you (I’m thinking Jimmy Carter here), how do you make a national name for yourself in the US while a governor? Name all 50 current governors off the top of your head without looking at least half of them up.

It could work in a smaller nation (or several smaller ones, as suggested in my OP), but not the current US.

[scotandrsn]

@2sense

There are many misconceptions of America’s odd system for selecting its president. The first of which is that we have an electoral college. We don’t. An electoral college is a deliberative body entrusted to select a leader. Our “college” isn’t a collegial body. It isn’t a body at all because it isn’t allowed to meet. Electors gather within the seperate states and just vote. They don’t even count the votes.

We are probably stuck with the term though and the image it conjures of a body of wise men determining the best candidate independent of public opinion serves to support another misconception: that this was the original intent behind our system of election of the president. While the independent elector ideal certainly existed I have found no reason to suppose that was the generally accepted role of an elector at the constitutional convention. On the contrary, if there had been a consensus such a role would have easily been written into the Constitution. Instead, compromise was finally reached by leaving the method of selection of Electors entirely to the states themselves and isolating those Electors from outside influences by keeping them in the state to vote.

I don’t doubt that some, even most, of the men who signed the Constitution believed in the ideal of the independent elector but they were practical men. They knew there was little idyllic about the rough and tumble state politics of the day and that plenty of pressure would be exerted in elections. And there is another ideal of representation, a more democratic one. In New England representatives could be bound by instructions to vote and act in certain ways. Room was left in the Constitution for this role for Electors as well and that idea of officials bound to follow the will of the people is how our presidential elections continue to operate.

The mistaken belief about the original intent for the role of the Electors is supported in turn by the misconception that there was a debate in the constitutional convention on the merits of electors over a popular vote. The popular vote was never seriously considered. It was brought up but solely as a stalking horse for electors. The real choice was between a president chosen by the Congress or one chosen independent of the national legislature. Seen in this context the intent behind the system they settled on is clear. It’s one of the main tenets of the Constitution: seperation of powers.

The other tenet of the Constitution that you’re forgetting about is the sovereignty of the states, which is the reason Electors don’t meet nationally.

[scotandrsn]

@Spavined Gelding

Maybe there is a fair argument that a new level of representation need to be inserted between the individual voter and the national legislature.

There used to be. The state governments elected the Senate in the original Constitution. While I understand the the state governments had become a corrupt quagmire by the time the Amendment providing for direct election of Senators was passed, I don’t think it has created a better situation.

I think Americans are now too focused on national politics over local, and expect the government to swoop down from above and fix problems when local governments show themselves to be too inept. I think the Revolution was an opposition to the idea of top-down government. We need reforms of some kind that focus people more on local solutions to local problems. Repealing direct election of senators and encouraging states to beef up their Electoral Colleges would be a move in the right direction, but I doubt such reforms would ever be passed.

@Spavined Gelding

Right now each member of congress represents some half million constituents. The chances of your Congressman paying any attention to your opinion or problem unless there are 250,000 other people in the district with the same problem or opinion, or unless you come to him with a brown envelope filled with untraceable cash is pretty much nil. That is why “special interest groups” have become so significant–only organizations have a loud enough voice or enough money to get the Representative’s attention. It’s even worse with Senators since there are only two of them for each state–strangely enough in a small state, for example North Dakota, a voter has a better chance of actual contact with his Senator than with his Congressman. In a big state, like Ohio, California, New York, only the Big Dawgs have access.

Of course the alternative is to have the maximum Representation allowed by the Constitution: 1 per 30,000. Who’s going to pay the salaries of these 10,000 Representatives? The US is too big for full representation.

[Lemur866]

But you don’t have to send a letter to every household in your constituency. First of all, the only national elected offices are president or vice president. Since the average Joe isn’t going to be president, why should we expect an average Joe to be able to campaign for president? After all, there are 250 million americans and only one president. That seems to suggest that the vast majority of americans will never get a chance to be president. Too bad, so sad. So you have to be somebody special to become president. Not necessarily born into the elite–just look at Bill Clinton. But Bill Clinton had an inordinate ability to socialize and make friends with people and get them to support him throughout his career from backwater Arkasas to elite schools to the governorship to the presidency. If you can’t match Bill Clinton’s smarts and charisma, why exactly do you think people should vote for you?

Second, all other political offices are state offices. So you’d only have to send a letter to everyone in your state. Except you don’t even have to do that. Most state offices don’t represent the whole state either, except governors, lt. governors, senators, a few other executive branch officials like attorney general, and perhaps elected state supreme court justices. The vast majority of offices represent a subset of the state. National House seats (except Alaska and Wyoming), state house seats, state senate seats, mayors, city council, county council, local elected judges, dogcatcher, school boards, etc. So you only have to reach all the voting households in your district.

Except you don’t even have to do that. In my state, and I’m sure in yours, the state prints up a voter’s guide, where every candiate on the ballot has the opportunity to post their photo and a short article explaining why voters should choose them. Even the third party candidates and independents get this chance.

And third, there is also free media. Most of the information voters get about candidates doesn’t come from paid political advertising or voter’s guides, but from unpaid media. The papers cover the race. They interview the candidates. They cover the speaches, the rallies, the debates and the gaffes. And the candidates and parties pay nothing for this coverage.

But the media won’t cover you just because you have a few interesting ideas. You have to be able to do more than that. Face facts, if you can’t convince your friends and neighbors to support you in your campaign, how exactly are you going to convince the rest of the voters to support you? You have to provide some compelling reason for people to vote for you. Maybe you’re extra-likeable. Or you’re a smooth talker. Or you have a keen grasp of policy. But you have to have something.

[Jonathan_Chance]

@scotandrsn

A standard, non-first class letter costs $0.27. To send it to each household costs $32,400,000. This figure gave me pause. This is simply postage, not even the cost of producing the letter or other inserts. Extend this notion. Broadcast media are more effective means of getting a message out, and therefore, have every right to charge more, which they do.

As a member of the Direct Marketers Association I thought I’d just offer some clearer numbers.

One can get about $.22 for third class mail if done in enough bulk. That looks like a savings but you should expect to pay another 20 - 25 cents per piece for printing, merge/purge, list purchasing and so forth. So figure your cost for mailing would end up being around 45 cents per piece.

So you’re mail costs are going to be somewhere around 54 million dollars. That buys you ONE impression. And any decent marketer should know that it takes at least 3-4 to build real product awareness in the consumer. So figure on the low end you’re looking at $150 million. Pricey.

But there’s email. Figure you can buy 50 million email addresses. Apart from the legal angles (because you’re sending political email you’re exempt from the Can Spam laws) this can be done rather cheaply. I get it for 2 cents per delivered email. If all of your list is sweet then you’re looking at $1 million for a single email hit.

The downside to email is that it takes MANY more impressions to build positive consumer awareness (negative takes only 1 most times! Ow!). So figure you’re going to be doing that once per week to everyone for the year. So that’s $52 million dollars.

Wait! The election’s coming up. And there’s millions of votes in play! Call it 5 million critical undecideds. You need to hire a phone bank and call those people. List purchase and the calling will be about $2.50 per call. And you’ll need to do it at least twice. So that’s another $25 million dollars.

So without factoring in broadcast advertising (nor print advertising)…just direct marketing efforts you’re looking at a total hit for the year of $227 million dollars if you wanted to hit every person with an effective marketing campaign.

Far better you just auction yourself off on Ebay and get it over with.

Note: All prices good as of this afternoon. I priced out some campaigns with some vendors about 2-3PM today. No kidding.

[scotandrsn]

@Jonathan Chance

As a member of the Direct Marketers Association I thought I’d just offer some clearer numbers.

One can get about $.22 for third class mail if done in enough bulk. That looks like a savings but you should expect to pay another 20 - 25 cents per piece for printing, merge/purge, list purchasing and so forth. So figure your cost for mailing would end up being around 45 cents per piece.

So you’re mail costs are going to be somewhere around 54 million dollars. That buys you ONE impression. And any decent marketer should know that it takes at least 3-4 to build real product awareness in the consumer. So figure on the low end you’re looking at $150 million. Pricey.

But there’s email. Figure you can buy 50 million email addresses. Apart from the legal angles (because you’re sending political email you’re exempt from the Can Spam laws) this can be done rather cheaply. I get it for 2 cents per delivered email. If all of your list is sweet then you’re looking at $1 million for a single email hit.

The downside to email is that it takes MANY more impressions to build positive consumer awareness (negative takes only 1 most times! Ow!). So figure you’re going to be doing that once per week to everyone for the year. So that’s $52 million dollars.

Wait! The election’s coming up. And there’s millions of votes in play! Call it 5 million critical undecideds. You need to hire a phone bank and call those people. List purchase and the calling will be about $2.50 per call. And you’ll need to do it at least twice. So that’s another $25 million dollars.

So without factoring in broadcast advertising (nor print advertising)…just direct marketing efforts you’re looking at a total hit for the year of $227 million dollars if you wanted to hit every person with an effective marketing campaign.

Far better you just auction yourself off on Ebay and get it over with.

Note: All prices good as of this afternoon. I priced out some campaigns with some vendors about 2-3PM today. No kidding.

Holy cow! Thanks for the thorough research, JonathanChance! Really drives my point home!

And thanks to the many of you who have offered advice on how to run a campaign, but I assure you, I have no intention of mounting a campaign at this time (my issues with the job description of president would be a whole other thread).

I am simply a voter who would like the opportunity to vote for a candidate who I not only felt had the skills and intelligence for the job, but also would not have to compromise themselves by fulfilling promises to big corporate campaign donors (too much to ask?). It had always seemed to me that an honest campaign could be run, but that most political types were too interested in grabbing the spotlight quickly to do so.

All these thoughts on running a lower-impact campaign that nonetheless got all the information out there have led me to believe that it is simply not possible. Postage is cheap, there are simply too many people. The amount of space available in a voter booklet might not be sufficient for anything but the most basic of statements, as opposed to a full description of views in a mailer.

When considering this, I have to think about what I personally would respond to as a voter. You would never see me opening up a “Vote for me!” email, and the only stimulus that political TV ads provide for me is a reminder that it must be time to change the channel or mute the sound. I would like to see candidates with guts actually debate the issues (as far-fetched as that may sound), and a mailer with some solid statements would get me too look for a candidate’s name in a debate (although I confess, along the lines of JonathanChance’s post, that the WRONG mailer would just get dumped in the garbage, so go figure).

George Bush will not get my vote, John Kerry might, but I have my own issues with his motivation, and any others are simply off the radar, whatever their ideas may be.

I just don’t see any real reform on the horizon, and a lot of it has to do with the sheer numbers of eyes and ears that must be reached. I have to wonder if the system was ever designed to take on this kind of load.