Uncategorized Archives - Democracy Upgrade

Achieving True Democracy: Questions & Answers
2020-09-16 Peter Monien

This is part 9 of my “Achieving True Democracy: A New Breed of Party as Realistic Next Step” articles. Here you can find part 1, the introduction for the article series, and part2, a short description of the idea of the Proxy Party, and part 3, a description of how a party program should look like, and part 4 about finding, prioritizing, and voting on topics, and part 5 about going beyond ‘simple’ direct democracy, and part 6 about efficiency and effectiveness, and part 7 about safeguarded information processes and decision processes, and part 8 about a 1:1 transfer to parliament. How does the Proxy Party differ from a normal party? The Proxy Party: …is organized on the basis of grassroots democracy and also includes the most important right of the member of parliament (the voting right). …obliges the elected representative to vote as determined by the party base. …does not ignore the dissenting votes of its members but reflects their

Achieving True Democracy: Safeguarded Information and Decision Processes
2020-09-14 Peter Monien

Safeguarded Information and Democratic Processes

This is part 7 of my “Achieving True Democracy: A New Breed of Party as Realistic Next Step” articles. Here you can find part 1, the introduction for the article series, and part2, a short description of the idea of the Proxy Party, and part 3, a description of how a party program should look like, and part 4 about finding, prioritizing, and voting on topics, and part 5 about going beyond ‘simple’ direct democracy, and part 6 about efficiency and effectiveness. A democracy without deliberation (based on well-balanced facts) is a weak democracy. Focusing on political differences while demonizing the other side makes a democracy very vulnerable to a divide and conquer strategy. It misses out chances to agree on common goals and put forward measures that a great majority of citizens would vote for. “The point with democracy isn’t that the majority is always right. The point is that there is a process of free

Achieving True Democracy: A Sound Basis and New Party Operating System
2020-08-21 Peter Monien

This is part 3 of my “Achieving True Democracy: A New Breed of Party as Realistic Next Step” articles. Here you can find part 1, the introduction for the article series, and part2, a short description of the idea of the Proxy Party. The Proxy Party could give itself the normal type of program like a normal political party. But I would argue that it should go a different route to emphasize that. This route includes: …the Proxy Party is more trustworthy, …will be more open and adaptable to add topics based on the will and current priorities and their members and…will ensure it will stay to be more representative than the conventional parties. Why a party program at all? A program should achieve the goal to rally people around a set of values and goals and enable its officials and elected representatives in parliament to act efficiently guided by this

Short Interview with Smashwords
2020-07-02 Peter Monien

Finally, my book is not just available at Amazon. I also checked it in with Smashwords, one of the best-known distributors for ebooks. So you can expect it to be available in your ebook store shortly. Here is a very short interview that I did for Smashwords: Why do you write book about «Direct Democracy»? In the last years, I increasingly wondered what will be left of democracy when the current worldwide trend continues. And I started to think about how we can reverse this trend and inject more democracy into our political systems. After my research, I concluded that purely representative democracy is not going to solve this problem (and many other important problems). I studied systems with a direct democratic corrective like the Swiss model and found them to be the better (yet still improvable) alternative. In my research for potential improvements, I constantly stumbled over one aspect:

Don’t give away your vote for 4 years
2019-11-03 Peter Monien

Politics doesn’t represent the majority of the People. Even if an overwhelming majority is clearly in favor of a certain policy it doesn’t mean that this will translate to legislative action in parliament. An American study has shown that “when preferences of low- or middle-income Americans diverge from those of the affluent, there is virtually no relationship between policy outcomes and the desires of less advantaged groups.”[1] A German study revealed similar results. Some reasons for this disparity are: The political system is outdated and hands over power to politicians for 4 years on a very vague basis. The power structure within the system is heavily biased towards influential groups with money. These groups have a decisive influence on politicians and legislation. The internal structures of political parties are mostly far from democratic. It is time to Upgrade Democracy! What can be done to gain a real say in politics