Another political idea I really like is that of electronic liquid democracy. The idea is this - instead of trying to choose which of a very small number of representatives will best represent your interests, you can instead vote directly on every measure that your representative would vote on.
Most of the time, you might not care or might not have enough background knowledge to know what's best, so you appoint a proxy to choose your vote on your behalf. You can even choose different proxies for different areas - one for health-related legislation, another for trade-related and so on. You can choose multiple ranked proxies so that if one proxy fails to vote on one issue, the vote will go to your second choice and so on. Proxies can also delegate to other proxies. All this is done electronically (with appropriate security safeguards to avoid elections getting hacked) so you can change your proxies and votes whenever you like.
It's somewhat surprising to me that this hasn't taken off already, given how often voters seem to be dissatisfied with the decisions of their elected representatives. It seems like it would be relatively easy to get going - somebody just needs to run on a platform of no policy except voting in accordance with the result of the system. Such a representative could get votes from both sides of the political spectrum and grants voters much more power and control - it seems to be the best of all worlds. Unfortunately when it was tried in Australia, the Senator On-Line failed miserably to get elected. There are several reasons why this might have happened:
- People avoiding voting for a candidate they feel is unlikely to win in order to avoid the wrong mainstream candidate getting elected.
- People not trusting this newfangled internet stuff.
The second problem should go away as the generations that haven't grown up in the internet age die out. The first problem is ever present for third parties in first-past-the-post systems. Given that politicians won't generally reform the systems that elected them, it seems like the only chances are for the third parties to sneak in at times when a majority of people have an unpopular view of both mainstream parties (which may happen more often as internet-savvy voters get better informed about what their representatives are actually doing).
[...] we have some ideas about how we want the world to look - the next question is "How do we get there from here?" [...]