"The Venetian Doge was elected through a complex, multi-stage process designed to prevent corruption and ensure fairness. Here’s a summary:
Initial Selection: The Great Council randomly chose 30 men, reduced to 9 by lot, to act as initial electors.
Elector Selection: The 9 electors chose 40 men, reduced to 12 by lot. This pattern repeated (selecting groups of 25, 9, 45, then 11) until 41
final electors were chosen.
Final Election: The 41 electors selected the Doge, requiring a majority of 25 votes.
Public Approval: The elected Doge was inaugurated and presented to the public at St. Mark’s Square."
- Chat GPT
Obviously, this form of election took place before the internet, and also before the printing press. This form of democratic election is quite different than what we have had for the past century or so.
Now, in the months approaching elections, you are bombarded with information about each candidate. Everything from their policy decisions, their speeches, and their scandals are published and practically force fed down the average (Insert "Western Democracy" here) citizen's gullet until they grow sick.
Because of this, you know a LOT about what candidate you are voting (or not voting) for. From their aforementioned scandals and policy decisions, all the way down to unimportant information not even worthy of a footnote, such as a candidate's wife, how many kids they have, how well they play golf, etc.
As us fellow humans (surprise!) tend to perceive characteristics of a candidate, process them with archaic heuristics, and treat them as indicators of qualities that are desirable in a politician (Trump is a businessman, he must be good with money), we inherently fall short of having a good idea of what a candidate's term in office will do for the nation.
This is a major pitfall of Democracies. As the modern voter is inundated not only with information, but with daily life, and, while attempting to be rational, falls short nearly every time. This partially causes elections to turn into popularity contests. Many candidates get pushed aside because the general public only ingests information from a numerical minority of parties, which simultaneously have the most funding.
Here is where it all comes back around (I think chieftain Trump calls this the WEAVE). Because these candidates receive enormous amounts of funding, which helps them get elected, once they get in to office, they can use their newly acquired power to create mutually beneficial agreements with business men. A good example of this is the "revolving door" in US politics, where lobbyists/ corporate "higher-ups" move between positions in the US government and corporate positions.
As I have presented here in rudimentary, drunken-old-man fashion, this issue stems at least partially from the transparency of modern democracies. You know exactly who is working for whom, and can lobby, bribe, and make deals to achieve power. This is obviously a problem in politics.
I believe that making democracy in the west more opaque would help to create a bulwark against the perpetuation of this "revolving door" (you are just now realizing this is about the USA?). Creating a system where, in order to be elected for a government position, you have to pass through multiple councils and organizations would (at least in theory) help to prevent bribery and lobbying by simply making it less effective and more costly. If you have to lobby multiple councils instead of just 1 (called congress), it not only makes it more expensive monetarily, but is more time consuming, and because of this, is a greater risk than just lobbying a few organizations.
Discuss.
