It’s not what “the people say they want”. It’s what a few wealthy corporations/individuals can fund signature gathering to put on the ballot, advertise the shit out of, and then trick people into voting for without understanding the implications.
It’s a horrible way to make public policy because it is typically based on an oversimplified model of the world, can be worded vaguely/sloppily, often takes no design input from experts, is almost entirely unresponsive to real-world problems that arise afterwards, generally does not effectively empower lasting institutions to administer the policy and make sure it works as intended, and forces additional complexity, confusion, and legal ambiguity when the state legislature or local governments try to work around it with kludgy patches.
If your own policies are so easily weaponized against you then maybe your policies aren't very good. Is it so hard to believe that regular voters might have ideological reasons for preferring a smaller, less intrusive government that imposes lower taxes?
And blaming a hostile media is entirely too facile. Other politicians and parties have managed to win despite such obstacles by crafting messages that actually inspire voters.
I understand what you mean but one of the big problems in US politics is that citizens vote for people not policies. Most people are uninformed and it's not completely their fault. It's because the politician's are allowed to attack each other, lie about each other and there isn't an unbiased major media outlet the public can turn to for the truth.
This is just one of the reasons I got out of politics several years ago. Simply put, things don't work the way most people think they do.
Policies are decided behind closed doors, by people with vested interests, and then presented to the public - who are by and large uninterested, uninformed, insufficiently educated and unwilling to consider anything but their immediate short-term interests.
As Mark Twain is supposed to have said, "If voting changed anything,they'd make it illegal."
Except in current democracies there are lots of important popular issues that voters want addressed and yet politicians refuse to, because their owners are against it.
I cannot be the only one that sees politicians promise things and then spectacularly not deliver when they get elected. If the folks you vote for don't do what you want and you cannot vote for someone that does, there is no way for you to influence policy with a "democratic" process. For most people "just get elected" is not an option, because for that to happen you need to be rich, well connected and relatively well spoken.
I like how we already had a few iterations of this nonsense (eg ACTA) and it just keeps coming back. It's as if the political class doesn't give a shit about what the population wants and just want to win through exhaustion.
Fuck these politicians.
You touch on a really deep problem. One that poisons political discussion.
People vote for outcomes. Politicians make up various programs and policies promising these outcomes.
This is why my pickle example was purposely contrived: it's a thing. You get it or you don't. There is a clear success criteria.
We have a lot of things in the world like pickles. I don't go to the store looking for pickles and come back with a game. I want it, they have it, I push a button, now I have it.
But once you start selling me feelings? There's no end to it. This is like hiring consultants without clear deliverables, timelines, or accountability. You're always going to get something, but most of the time it's just regurgitated policy promising to fix things you have been talking about that need fixing. I want it, they don't have it (it might not exist in this universe), I push a button, and now I have a bunch of reasons why it didn't work and why I need to push 7 more buttons to get what I actually wanted.
I really don't want to go there in the current political climate. There are far too many button-sellers and people desperately wanting all sorts of ill-defined and perhaps ephemeral things. So all I've got is pickles. If you understand why pickles work one way and social services work another? Then we can move one step forward and continue the analysis. Quite frankly a lot of people won't be able to take that first step. (I guess if I believed I could push a button and get something really awesome, I wouldn't want to take that first step either.)
"we get government even more detached from the popular will"
Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels present an abundance of evidence that there is no popular will. The public does not understand the issues. The voters do not know what they want. Achen and Bartels also make the interesting argument that when there is more than one issue (more than one dimension) it becomes difficult to build a 51% coalition that also has 51% support on every issue, and where there are, say, 100 issues, it becomes almost mathematically impossible to build a 51% coalition that also holds the popular position on every issue. Put differently, to win elections, politicians must advocate for some deeply unpopular issues. This is the most important thing to understand if we are going to understand "Why elections do not bring about responsive government." (the subtitle of the book).
The problem is when the voters see a government with expenses > revenues and send someone in to implement:
1) Increase government spending on services by 10%
2) Reduce taxes by 10%
3) Run a balanced budget. No borrowing or tricks.
The politicians need to have some level of freedom to deal with impossible voter demands and then you get back to voting for people who are most likely to make decisions the voter likes.
Politicians who govern by poll typically find they have accomplished nothing and yet managed to piss people off anyway.. there’s a line between ignoring voters and instituting needed reforms, and its easier for Pai to argue the latter when this is the policy platform republicans campaigned on. It’s tough for me to believe a party shouldn’t carry out the legislative agenda it campaigned on whenever the opposing party didn’t like it.
I think if people voted consistently in the midterms that would solve many problems, but alas that is relatively rare, much less the level of involvement you describe.
Yeah, believe it or not, sometimes politicians need to do the opposite of what the electorate wants. When the electorate votes to kill Socrates, you really want to have someone around who will let him live.
Where I live in NJ there are plenty of examples to point to. Raising our gas tax is widely unpopular, and as a result our roads are full of potholes -- so much so that we pay more repairing our cars than we would pay in higher taxes for road maintenance.
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