I’d like to try enlightened preference voting in Denmark or New Hampshire.
How it works: 1. Everyone votes for their preferred thing (whatever is being voted on). 2. Everyone somehow registers their demographic data. 3. Everyone takes a 30-question quiz on basic political information.
With 1-3, we then estimate what a demographically identical public would have voted for if it had gotten a perfect score on the quiz. We do that instead of what the majority/plurality actually voted for.
There are lots of details here I’m not getting into, but that’s what I’d want to try. No one’s done it to actually decide policy, but researchers have been doing this in labs for a long time with good results.
Are you worried about governments using the quizzes to favour certain groups regardless of political knowledge? Kind of like gerrymandering. Who will decide what answers are correct? Or do you expect that this would only be abused if they were going to do far worse anyway?
Also, maybe demographic data should include stuff like health conditions and personality, although intellectual disabilities may prevent people from scoring well in the first place, and intelligence/knowledge may correlate with actual interests, i.e. what would be good for a person. Has there been much written about this? I guess we’d hope the more informed would look after the less informed? We’re already hoping for this now with representative democracy.
I’d like to try enlightened preference voting in Denmark or New Hampshire.
How it works:
1. Everyone votes for their preferred thing (whatever is being voted on).
2. Everyone somehow registers their demographic data.
3. Everyone takes a 30-question quiz on basic political information.
With 1-3, we then estimate what a demographically identical public would have voted for if it had gotten a perfect score on the quiz. We do that instead of what the majority/plurality actually voted for.
There are lots of details here I’m not getting into, but that’s what I’d want to try. No one’s done it to actually decide policy, but researchers have been doing this in labs for a long time with good results.
Are you worried about governments using the quizzes to favour certain groups regardless of political knowledge? Kind of like gerrymandering. Who will decide what answers are correct? Or do you expect that this would only be abused if they were going to do far worse anyway?
Also, maybe demographic data should include stuff like health conditions and personality, although intellectual disabilities may prevent people from scoring well in the first place, and intelligence/knowledge may correlate with actual interests, i.e. what would be good for a person. Has there been much written about this? I guess we’d hope the more informed would look after the less informed? We’re already hoping for this now with representative democracy.