bigideas

Last night Alasdair Mackenzie took us through some different models of democracy that supposedly connect the “people” with political decision-making more directly than the hoary old representative model that led Edmund Burke to warn his electors:

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

Alasdair covered the Californian system, the Swiss system and ideas for improving the British (citizen’s juries). He cast a skeptical eye over e-democracy and, separately, the media. His main reference point was Fareed Zakaria‘s book The Future of Freedom.

There was barely anyone who dared to come out with an all-out defence of standard representative democracy. People speculated that liberal democracy was culture-bound, unsuited to the Confucian tradition prevalent in parts of the Far East. People ended up worried about the influence of specific interest groups on the operation of democracy — particularly religion.