democracy - Vision the Italian Think Tank

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Even more disturbingly is when random events in the run up to an election impactdirectly the elections results.The “mistake” is clearly smaller in a system dominated by ideologies in which peoplecan express themselves on the basis of convictions that are stable in time. It becomeslarger in a contest where the number of uncertain “voters” grows, or where the groupsof fully convinced citizens is large but yet of more or less equal size so that the lastminute swing of small amounts of mobile electorates turns out to decide the result ofthe election 20 .The problem of the fairness, of the capability of the mechanisms of democracy toreflect the “real” level of satisfaction tends to become self reinforcing. Theaccumulation of errors makes the trust of people, their perception of the relevance oftheir opinions even smaller and this reduces even further participation and thequantity of information that democracy processes.More over, as we mentioned before, there is an additional problem. Lower levels ofdemocracy are also (this is the concept that seems to consistently escape most of theanalyses) politics ever less capable of solving problems.The consequences of five year “political cycle” can be ‘bad timing’ for a number ofdecisions:1. short term decisions which produce an advantage for small interest groups anda cost for the general public tend to be concentrated in the first months of thecycle;2. short term decisions which can be popular among citizens and especiallycrucial segments tend to be concentrated at the end;3. medium term investments get damaged by the disruption of the “every fouryears” general election;4. long term investments risk to never materialize because the benefits that theymay produce go beyond the government cycle.The time frame of the normal renewal of government is, in other words, both too longto be able to avoid certain reallocations of resources from the general public tosmaller interests (and these decisions may take place at the beginning), and too shortfor policies whose realization is beyond the cycle. Moreover the disruption that takesplace every five – four years, can decrease the consistency of a number of projectsand the approach of policy making becomes short term oriented.20 This exactly the situation where the USA happens structurally to be.18
The issue we are talking about is not new. In fact many analysts have discussed thepatterns in terms of typical changes in public expenditures and related them to the“electoral cycle” typical of western democracies.However it is possible that today the problem is more relevant because of:1. the considerable increase of the “opinion”, not ideology driven preferences andthe corresponding, great difficulty that a voter encounters in foreseeing whatcould be the behavior of political parties in such a relative long time span;2. the increase in political marketing expenditures and therefore the increase inthe necessity to pay costs to special interest groups in the first “shadowed” partof the government life;3. the greater urgency to re-launch investments with long-term outcomesdetermined exactly by the fact that for years this type of expenditure seems tohave been constrained by the very logic of the “cycle”;4. last but not least, technologies have reduced the costs of collecting opinionsthus rendering the system we have been using for decades increasinglyobsolete.A real solution can only come from an articulated cultural process: theexperimentation of a smart combination of institutional reforms and the use of theopportunities made available by technologies can facilitate such a process.The idea is, in principle, to go towards a dilution in time of the mechanism ofaccountability.An experiment worthwhile doing is to progressively switch from a system that totallyrenews the members of its Parliament every five years, to one which partially renewsits components more frequently.An hypothesis could be, for example, to renew a tenth of the members of theParliament every year and in case one would like to preserve an electoral momentumof greater importance one could preserve the possibility for a substantial renewal (forinstance half) which could happen during a greater span of time (five years, for ourexample’s sake).Election periods may even be differentiated by policies: we could then experimentmechanisms by which progress in education or infrastructure, for instance, may bescrutinized in a period longer, say seven years, than in other policies, for example,health care systems performance or advancement in digitalization of administrativeprocedures. But we will come back to this point dealing with the third of the mistakesthat present democracy presents.It would, obviously, not be necessary that the whole electoral body express itself ineach intermediate deadline and, in effect, rather simple statistical mechanisms could19
Page 1 and 2: BACK TO DEMOCRACY 1In progress pape
Page 3 and 4: General elections UKShare of eligib
Page 5 and 6: 2. the inequalities; if we try, mor
Page 7 and 8: The current limits of democracy’s
Page 9 and 10: DEVELOPING AN INFORMATION BASED THE
Page 11 and 12: The changes of a democracy that ‘
Page 13 and 14: minimum expectations that are assoc
Page 15 and 16: 1. ARE ELECTIONS STILL A LEGITIMATE
Page 17: Such a loss of information is, in t
Page 24 and 25: of a much celebrated choice of bein
Page 26 and 27: democracy today and specifically of
Page 28 and 29: decide to divide her/ his own vote
Page 30 and 31: It would then be much more realisti
Page 32 and 33: Iraq). The vote was “obviously”
Page 34 and 35: Similar innovations may then be exp
Page 36 and 37: situations are not equivalent, and
Page 38 and 39: 3. ARE CONSTITUTIONS STILL USEFUL?
Page 40 and 41: 5. DOES TELEVISION STILL MATTER? TH
Page 42: We, in fact, also, think that the d

democracy - Vision the Italian Think Tank

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