Democracy is great. It gives people the ability to replace bad rulers without the need for a civil war. However, who should be the new ruler is not an easy question to answer and people often choose poorly.
But wait, if choosing a good ruler is hard, would it not be easier to find one good ruler than finding a whole parliament worth of them? Well, possibly yes. But if our selection process has a possibility of a mistake, then you could end up with someone, who will fill the government with a bunch of yes men and pass laws, which will prevent you from voting them out. And you may be fine with that, until the government starts to screw up and make your life much worse. This is why it is a good idea to split the power among multiple people. The more people has to agree, the less likely a crazy law will be passed (in general anyway, people in the same party tend to vote the same). Of course, This makes it sound like the best option would be to have everyone in the parliament, but who would then do the actual work?
OK, now about the right to vote. Everyone can vote now and that is how it should be, right? I do not think so. First of all, there always will be some limit on who can vote. For example, in most countries you have to be an adult to vote. So, why do we not allow children to vote? A six year old is more than capable to take a paper and put it in a box. Reading might be a problem, but we can have an adult or a machine read it aloud. So why do children not vote? It is because they are not experienced enough.
So, what happens, when a person has little life experience? They are naive, can be easily manipulated and have a hard time recognizing when people lie to them. To have a good government, we do not need the people, who promise the most, but those, who will actually fulfill their promises.
Now that we know we want to have voters, who are capable of choosing the best people for the job, how much experience is enough experience? Our threshold can not be too high, because very few people would meet it and those few, who would, are practically a ruling class nobody voted for.
On the other hand, if we set it too low, we give voting power to all kinds of interesting people. Like people, who are literally too stupid to understand what they are doing, or people, who care so little that their vote can be straight up bought. Another people of note are those working for the government. These have a strong incentive to vote for bigger government, because it gives them more power and, more importantly, ensures that they will not loose their job due to budget cuts. This creates a pushback against making the government more efficient, because efficient government requires less people to run it. It could also be argued that these people (and politicians too) should not be able to vote in principle alone, because they can be considered part of the ruling class, which means them voting can be compared to rulers in dictatorship deciding who gets to rule with them. Another type of biased voters are those, who rely on the government to survive. They may not work for the government, but they do get payed by it, therefore they are very unlikely to vote for any changes that may decrease the amount of money they receive. And so the government and its expenses keep on bloating.
Of course, nobody wants that, unless they wish the government to collapse. But how can we increase our chances that we keep the right kind of people in the government, who will keep it within reasonable bounds? Who is fit to choose our leaders? Who should vote? I do not know. I only know that an age threshold is clearly not good enough, even if it was increased. So, lets explore some more or less serious options.
Really, the first hypothetical solution that comes to mind is to just have the smart people voting. Which is not a bad idea on paper. Generally, a smart person is capable of critical thinking and might have some knowledge on how people like to lie by omitting information or misinterpreting statistics, so they should be more resistant to manipulation. And at the very least you can be sure that they actually understand the words politicians are saying.
But how do you figure out who is smart enough? Even if you dismiss the various different kinds of intelligence as nonsense and stay with the idea that intelligence is about problem solving, there are many different tests, which try to measure this ability and give different results. Then there is also the issue that how sharp we are differs a lot by what time of the day it is, how well did we sleep last night, whether we have some worries that are currently distracting us and so on. You would have to probably give everyone multiple tries on this test and take the best result, not to mention retest them before every future voting. And finally, can the test be cheated and how would we deal with that?
An interesting government idea appeared in the strategy game series Earth (Earth 2140, Earth 2150 and Earth 2160). One of the playable factions have a story, which describes the rise of a so called “stochocracy” government system. The idea is, that power corrupts and people, who seek it, usually does it for personal interest. Corrupt politicians then act according to what benefits them the most, instead of what benefits the whole society. So, instead of voting for politicians, the people in the government are chosen randomly from the population using a lottery system and remain in office for extremely short period of only a few months. Of course, randomly chosen people will have little idea of what to do in the office, but in the story that is compensated by support from computer systems. As time went, the short lived politicians relied on the computer advisors more and more until it was clear the computers can just run everything themselves (which nicely ties to the next idea).
While I do not think choosing the rulers entirely randomly is a great idea, the thought of severely limiting the time spent in office has some merit. There are quite a few people out there, who fit the description of a “career politician”. The kind of people, who spent most of their life in various governmental positions, connecting with other people in power… what does this remind you of? Maybe the ruling class, the kings and queens of old? How well did that system work? These are the kind of people, who have little idea what the life of an average citizen is like and have a high probability of being corrupt just by the sheer amount of time they were exposed to various attempts of influencing them. I think our governments would benefit a lot, if people were prevented from working any kind of office once they spent a certain amount of years in total as a part of the government. And I am not talking just about the politicians we vote for, but about the government employees too.
Similarly to the previous idea, this is another “just do not vote at all” solution. On paper, a super computer running an artificial intelligence, with access to as much and as accurate data as possible about the country, should be capable of rule not just more efficiently than any human, but also fairly with no risk of corruption. And in an ideal situation, it would work that way.
However, in the real world, there is the question of who will build this system? Can they be trusted to build a truly fair and efficient system? How does the system get the data? Who is receiving and carrying out the system’s orders? To have any chance of the computer not being puppeteered by some shadow government, it has to be all very open and transparent, so that any citizen can check that it is not being manipulated. Unfortunately that also means that everyone, even the enemies of your government, know exactly how well your country is doing, because it is impossible to make the system transparent to citizens and at the same time obscure it from enemy spies.
In the book Starship Troopers, the only people who can apply to government position are citizens. To obtain citizenship, civilians have to serve their country for a few years, often in military. This is completely voluntary and besides the ability to govern, there is not much of a difference between a civilian and citizen when it comes to rights. The service is described as very harsh (being dumped in the wilderness with basically nothing, adding few real bullets between blanks when being shot at… it is rare, but you could die), people have the option to quit at any time and are even encouraged to, but if they do, they do not get another chance at becoming a citizen. The whole idea is to weed out people, who are not willing to sacrifice everything for the better of others.
Again, this has some merit. Think of your favorite example of a corrupt politician for a moment. Can you image that lazy ass going through such a training just so that they could apply for a government position? Probably not. On the other hand, we have quite a few examples of a military taking over the government in our history and the results are mixed. There were some good outcomes, like when the Napoleon took over France, he did manage to improve the situation in that country by a lot. Even the ruthless dictators with big body counts managed to improve their countries here and there. Under Stalin’s rule the Soviet Union industrialized itself enough to push back the Germans. Similarly, under Hitler’s rule the Germany managed to fix itself enough to take on most of the Europe. You can debate how much they actually attributed, but at least they did not make it worse. Then there are bunch of other countries which are very poor due to never ending government overthrows by the local military.
This is the idea, that only the people, who pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits, are allowed to vote. It is appealing, because you can say it is fair. The people who give money to the government should have a say in how the money is spent. People, who get more money from the government than they gave to it, did not really contribute anything to the money pile, so allowing them to vote would be unfair to the ones who did contribute. The benefits are, that if the voters would elect politicians, who give them taxpayer money, then they would not be able to vote anymore. So, their vote can not be bought this way.
However, this gets much more complicated in practice. Like, what exactly counts as a benefit? Does building a public road to your house count as a benefit? There are many ways you can bribe someone and you would have to take as many of them as possible into account, if this system is supposed to avoid corruption. That could be very hard to do, requiring a lot of people checking who benefits from every government expense. This system can also create weird situations like people voting to increase welfare, so that less people can vote and therefore each vote is more important. Like, sure, the nonvoters have easy living with all that money, but only until the voters elect someone, who will change the whole system to their favor. In theory, the voters should avoid this, because in general they care about how their taxes are spent and would not want to just give it out to people, who have no job and thus do not contribute. Assuming there is a large enough amount of voters, a single party should not be able to get enough power to change the whole system.
And that is all I have right now. I think some of these ideas could help keeping the government healthy, if implemented in a softer way. If there is anything here I want you to remember, it is that you should be wary of people, who want children to vote. They are just trying to get easy votes, because their ideas are probably too crazy to convince the adults.