democracy - Vision the Italian Think Tank

It would then be much more realistic to expect the voters to express individualpreferences for each policy, whereas they are instead asked by “general elections” tomake an ‘average’ of their preferences in the different areas. An unrealistic requestthat is probably one of the prize we pay to an unrealistic (“idealistic”, in fact) conceptof politics and of the State. And a loss of informative power because it is perfectlylegitimate that our opinions may make us prefer a right wing party in four out of tenpolicy areas and a left wing one in the rest of them.A loss of information that was a rather understandable sacrifice at a time when votingwas very expensive and ideologies were rather good to tell policy options in any areaand in a consistent way; and that now it is increasingly less acceptable becausetechnologies have changed cost structures and that problems to be solved has exposedideologies’ obsolescence..In fact, the problem we are talking about produces two possible failures: 1) theelector may be not able to do the weighted average that general election require andthis may produce a vote different from the one she may have expressed if called tochoose one of the possible governments by policy; 2) some (actually) most policyareas may simply result not to account to anybody and the performance of agovernment in, say healthcare or even economics, may go practically not evaluatedby citizens (because a different priority – say terrorism or security – may have takenattention out of media).Once again democratic are still assuming a number of hypothesis that were valid for aSociety that maybe has existed but that surely does not exist anymore. They stillassume that the world can be divided by ideologies and models and these models canexplain most of possible political choice; therefore they also assume that each modelcan correspond to some political party or some alliance that will implementconsistently that vision.They assume an Hegelian romantic hypothesis of the formation of the will of aModern State. Hypotheses that appear totally not true in a context like the actual one.The consequence is, even in this case, paradoxical: the romantic, idealistic conceptionof politics has apparently reduced democracy to the ghost of what it was meant to be.In a post ideology world, the citizen faced by the daunting task of reducing all herpreferences into a synthetic judgment, frustrated by the impossibility to have anyserious say on specific issues that do impact her life, decides not to vote or – if sheconsiders a moral obligation or even a rewarding experience to still be part of a game– to use as criteria factors have nothing any more to do with the “impact of politics onlife”: the sense of belonging (more or less similar to the one soccer fan express whenthey try to explain why their team is so distinct from any other else) that has replaced30