It’s great to see more reflection about approval voting and possible alternatives. I think the EA community should probably favour a lot more research into these alternatives before it invests resources in promoting any of these options.
Excessive political polarisation, especially party polarisation in the US, makes it harder to reach consensus or a fair compromise, and undermines trust in public institutions. Efforts to avoid harmful long-term dynamics, and to strengthen democratic governance, are therefore of interest to effective altruists.
I will note that many political theorists think that reducing polarisation and increasing consensus should not be our goals in democracy and need not be positive things e.g. agonistic theorists. This is especially so when, increasing consensus and compromise solutions is identified with “moderate” or centrist (which, as you note, could be construed as a bias).
Tl;dr: We should argue before the election, and build a consensus when it’s time to actually get stuff done
I don’t think reducing (tribal) polarization is at odds with agonism. There’s plenty of room for healthy debate about what direction we should go in, but when in comes to actually deciding who has power, we want to track the median of what people think, not sway back and forth between two extremes (which is a compromise in and of itself)
It’s great to see more reflection about approval voting and possible alternatives. I think the EA community should probably favour a lot more research into these alternatives before it invests resources in promoting any of these options.
I will note that many political theorists think that reducing polarisation and increasing consensus should not be our goals in democracy and need not be positive things e.g. agonistic theorists. This is especially so when, increasing consensus and compromise solutions is identified with “moderate” or centrist (which, as you note, could be construed as a bias).
Tl;dr: We should argue before the election, and build a consensus when it’s time to actually get stuff done
I don’t think reducing (tribal) polarization is at odds with agonism. There’s plenty of room for healthy debate about what direction we should go in, but when in comes to actually deciding who has power, we want to track the median of what people think, not sway back and forth between two extremes (which is a compromise in and of itself)