democracy - Vision the Italian Think Tank

1. ARE ELECTIONS STILL A LEGITIMATE INSTRUMENTFOR POWER ALLOCATION? .. AND DEMOCRACY AS ANINFORMATION SYSTEMThere are four limits of participation and we will quickly mention them beforeanalyzing them one by one:1. We vote for a given institution with frequencies that are not efficient.2. The articulation of electorates is made exclusively on a territorial basis and thisentails the impossibility of capturing other forms of aggregation andcitizenship.3. Elections are exclusively general 17 and this makes it technically difficult toarticulate preferences and opinions of individual sectors .4. The choice is almost exclusively in terms of the acceptance or overall rejectionof a given political decision (it is the same thing that happens with a proxy).However, in reality, individual preferences in respect to a given politicaldecision are obviously distributed under the form of a configuration of anormal curve (Gaussian) in partial agreement with that choice.These are technical limits of specific institutional “mechanisms”. They represent aloss of “information” (from the point of view of whoever makes the decisions) and of“influence” (from the point of view of the citizens) that at every step/error the gapwidens between those who govern and those who are governed. They lower theoverall quality and the efficiency of the political action.We are exposing problems that are not new and that yet, become (which is the theorywe propose) no longer “tolerable” whereas the costs of participation are drasticallyreduced and therefore, our expectations 18 are increased by the same magnitude.Democracy is – at its most basic – an “information system” which transformsindividual preferences into collective wills and then these into political choices withina certain framework of regulations that will prevent abuses.The problem is that it is as if we are using one of those huge IBM calculators fromfifty years ago to process the amount of information handled by a modern PersonalComputer. The costs of accessing information has been reduced by many times, the17 With the exception of referenda.18 On the question of the exectation it is our opinion that in fact the request for democracy has grown and has becomemore complex. It is natural instead that it is like this in a world in which information is accessible to everyone and thatall the world’s problems enter with violence in everyone’s house. It is also true that the expectations not satisfied foldback on themselves and can transform themselves into their opposite - resignation and indiference.15