In a way, you're always going to have political manipulation by large wodges of cash.
For one thing, votes are a kind of currency; they're not explicitly transferable but there is an exchange rate. Prosaically, the more leaflets you can print, the more shiny badges you can hand out, the nicer office space you can rent, the more self-confident your supporters are, the better you'll do.
We have a lot of campaigning budget restrictions in the UK for this reason, but you can't stop someone really determined from renting the office cheaper to their mates, or providing a delicious home-cooked meal to their friends which they just happen to be doing after a hard night of canvassing, or having a nice house in a convenient position to be a base for leafleting, or wearing a nicer suit...
Representative democracy also doesn't necessarily balance out educational differences very well; if your underclass are too downtrodden to use their votes effectively (which includes seeing through quite advanced advertising and marketing tricks), it doesn't really matter if they have a vote at all, especially as they're not going to be well-spoken / well-dressed / possessing of enough free time and useful contacts to be a candidate themselves.
Again, it's a matter of 'what are you maximising for'. One person, one vote is a system which has a heavy load of 'people are equal' bias in it - but if you look at it closely it has all kins of other biases in it, like 'people can't vote from prison' and 'people can't vote until they're 18' and 'people can't vote if they weren't born in this country or achieved citizenship in some other way we approve of'... so actually it's another manifestation of 'people like us are equal', and what you pick as the defining characteristics of 'people like us' is interesting and important.
(some people, after all, would want to put at least some animals in 'people like us'; I might try quite hard not to be racist, but I am quite cheerfully species-ist, so this limits my ability to complain about other people's 'narrow' definitions of 'people like us'...)
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Date: 2011-12-31 01:28 pm (UTC)From:For one thing, votes are a kind of currency; they're not explicitly transferable but there is an exchange rate. Prosaically, the more leaflets you can print, the more shiny badges you can hand out, the nicer office space you can rent, the more self-confident your supporters are, the better you'll do.
We have a lot of campaigning budget restrictions in the UK for this reason, but you can't stop someone really determined from renting the office cheaper to their mates, or providing a delicious home-cooked meal to their friends which they just happen to be doing after a hard night of canvassing, or having a nice house in a convenient position to be a base for leafleting, or wearing a nicer suit...
Representative democracy also doesn't necessarily balance out educational differences very well; if your underclass are too downtrodden to use their votes effectively (which includes seeing through quite advanced advertising and marketing tricks), it doesn't really matter if they have a vote at all, especially as they're not going to be well-spoken / well-dressed / possessing of enough free time and useful contacts to be a candidate themselves.
Again, it's a matter of 'what are you maximising for'. One person, one vote is a system which has a heavy load of 'people are equal' bias in it - but if you look at it closely it has all kins of other biases in it, like 'people can't vote from prison' and 'people can't vote until they're 18' and 'people can't vote if they weren't born in this country or achieved citizenship in some other way we approve of'... so actually it's another manifestation of 'people like us are equal', and what you pick as the defining characteristics of 'people like us' is interesting and important.
(some people, after all, would want to put at least some animals in 'people like us'; I might try quite hard not to be racist, but I am quite cheerfully species-ist, so this limits my ability to complain about other people's 'narrow' definitions of 'people like us'...)