(i.e. Politicians are selected from average people, often on things like appearance, charm, charisma, voice, snappiness, being less-bad than the other candidates, standing for the voter's preferred party, etc. not based on intelligence or systems thinking; so why would they be better reasoning about 3rd order effects than average people? And they are elected on short terms, so why would they be more interested in spending time trying than others?).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Miliband_bacon_sandwich_pho...

If the current scenario is bad, and someone says "we should do this other thing that would be even worse," pointing out that the other thing is worse isn't an endorsement of the current (bad) scenario.

Your point was that people are , on average, not smart enough to make these decisions. Parent post points out that it's unclear that such a situation would be a downgrade from current.

However average people are actually pretty good at making the right moral, common sense calls, if not the technical legal detail. I suspect that's in part because they are not living in the Westminister ( or whatever your seat of power is ) bubble.

So any system needs to blend that common sense, with specific expertise. In theory that's what a representative democracy does - however one of the failings currently is the party system ( note designed, in part, to overcome the bandwidth problem - people grouping together to give a single consistent message rather than 100's of independent ones ), where capture of the party by a few people has become too easy and some options that the majority of people want never being offered at the voting time.

This results in an increasingly angry and volatile electorate.

It's easy to make decisions when you are the benefactor and the costs are born by someone else. Unless you are in a country with overall population density approaching that of an urban hub, there are high chances that the benefits afforded and costs born by the seat of power bubble versus an average person barely overlap.

> however one of the failings currently is the party system <...> where capture of the party by a few people has become too easy and some options that the majority of people want never being offered at the voting time.

I'd argue that the fiefdoms within parties come primarily from their corporate likeness. Since the ultimate goal of any party is to capture power and remain in power, the structures that emerge serve this goal first, everything else second.

If this is true, which doesn't seem that unreasonable, then the crucial factor then becomes what are the key factors in terms of staying in power - responsiveness to the electorate or raising money to persuade the electorate?

Ensuring the latter doesn't take over, in my view, is a top priority to ensure a working democracy - and from the outside, appears to be why the American system is now largely broken.

News channels are generally more subtle about it, but are still quite egregious. Look at e.g. debates. The questions are carefully framed to make certain positions appear positive or for the debater to go into tangents with context and get shut down for supposed demagogy. Look at some high profile TV hosts. They may appear somewhat reasonable-ish on camera, but then their facebook feed mirrors the topic discussed and takes an extremely biased route. They argue it's private vs official comms, but in reality the line is blurry on purpose and this confusion is used to persuade.

If you go into any country, state and ususally city subreddits (fb groups, discord channels), they are controlled by some PR agency. Discussion is carefully curated to fit the narrative. Bot nets are useful, but zealots are crucial. If previously the young recruits were important to distribute flyers around, these days they are crucial in shaping the public opinion on social media.

> Ensuring the latter doesn't take over, in my view, is a top priority to ensure a working democracy - and from the outside, appears to be why the American system is now largely broken.

I have no idea how.

It's not hard, or a new problem. For example in the UK paid for political campaigning on radio and TV has been banned pretty much since the dawn of those mediums. In terms of print, you can have media pluracy rules, to stop the concentration of power.

Any kind of election spending, at the local and national level, is regulated and capped.

Now people have been using less visible targetted online ads using dark money to try and get around this - in my view this is an extremely serious offence and people should go to prison.

You could go further and make it illegal to spend money on online ads for any kind of political campaign whether it's aligned to a party or not ( ie single issue ) - with penalities for the companies hosting those ad campaigns as well as the people running them.

You could include astroturf botnets as part of this definition.

Sure these things can be worked around - but the point is the risk of being caught breaking the rules, and the political damage as a result, will make people think twice.

One of the problems at the moment is people are getting away with a slap on the wrist - in my view undermining democracy is a serious offence - and it's about creating a culture where that's the prevailing view.