CitizenSovereignty.org

How Secret Political Donations Can End the Secret Deals

The Financial Times today published a comment by Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres, Secret political donations can end the secret deals.  It begins

Tony Blair of the UK is following Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Germany's Helmut Kohl in the long line of world leaders to become embroiled in campaign finance issues.  There will be many more scandals in the future unless reformers do some fresh thinking.

That fresh thinking starts with an analogy to the ballot box, which a little more than a century ago was as transparently a marketplace as is contemporary political campaign finance.  Think about it this way: If campaign contributions were secret, the Coushattas could have conned Jack Abramoff.  That would be a good thing.

Bill Corbett

Deliberation & Direct Democracy

Jim Fishkin has published in the Boston Review The Nation in a Room: Turning Public Opinion into Policy.  It's a great explanation of how deliberative polling and direct democracy can relate.  An excerpt:

From the standpoint of democratic theory, giving random samples of ordinary citizens the power to make political decisions has some advantages over giving that power to elected representatives. Citizens can deal with issues without worrying about the implications for their re-election. They are not subject to party discipline. They can offer their sincere views at the end of the process without worrying about social pressures from the other participants for consensus. In Madison’s terms, the process of Deliberative Polling does indeed seem to be capable of refining and enlarging public views, of merging the good judgment that comes from deliberation with the citizen involvement that comes with democracy. The result is something like what Gallup hoped for in the conventional poll—a town meeting on a national scale. But getting the informed and representative views of the public requires more than polling alone.  It requires an institution that facilitates discussion and grants access to good information and differing experts, and a public space where people feel free to express themselves.

More on the topic of deliberation and direct democracy -- and David Broder -- is here.

Bill Corbett