democracy - Vision the Italian Think Tank

Iraq). The vote was “obviously” not divisible and incapable to articulate opinions soto register disapproval for handling of economics and a specific encouragement onthe war to terror.For sure, we are not suggesting to have a system by which it may happen that two(theoretically a number of them equal to the number of policies) presidents may beelected according to the relative strength of candidates on different issues. And yet itis difficult to accept that a rather rich set of opinions (and thus of information, ofpersonal experience and sometimes of individual know how) that an individualexpress has to collapse to a single vote; and even less acceptable that large pieces ofpolicies (large as the decision of moving a war or increasing public deficit) do,practically, go not accountable to citizens or at least they are bundled in a muchlarger and thus rather into very meaningful feedback. We still may have one presidentand one premier but it is increasingly less acceptable not to have some form ofaccountability on some specific policies or even for the responsible (being themministers or secretary of state or assessors) of their implementation.We are not questioning then the validity of the existence of a “general” election. Anysystem does need to have somebody who is in charge of establishing prioritiesamong different policies and different public services. However, the point is that onceagain, democracy cannot be based solely on moments (more or less cathartic) ofgeneral elections.In a certain sense, if the “federalism” interprets the real need for greater participationmoving power vertically to general institutions on lower levels (regions, town halls),the next democratisation phase could be one where power are instead re allocatedhorizontally still at the same level but towards specialized policy makers 30 .Market researches do reflect this type of articulation. People are asked not only tovote (this is, in fact, not even one of the most popular polls), but to express personal(almost a sort of consumer’s) satisfaction by question (security, jobs, immigration,family, ..). And it is the never ending demand for polls that points to citizens’ formore “informative” mechanisms. In a sense, the possibility that we are discussing isto construct a process that is able to reflect in a legitimate way feedbacks provided insome regulated fashion.As said before, however, to change electoral processes imply a change in theinstitutions and the way government operates. This makes the entire exercise muchmore fundamental and difficult than the one that some e-democracy experiments haveattempted.30 This is, in fact, what already happens with the multiplication of “agencies” which do work rather well, and yet are notaccountable to any body but the general institution that rented to them decision making capabilities.32