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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

Representative democracy works when you remember who you voted for, and track whether they work on fulfilling their promises because of which you voted for them.

In the US, people mostly remember the president / vice-president names, because they are so widely publicized, some possibly remember the name of their Congress representatives, or can google them up in the rare case when they need to write to them about some issue. AFAICT very few people even remember who did they vote into the state legislature.

This is very sad, and certainly disfunctional.

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Probably worth pointing out that the great hollowing out of journalism is a likely causal factor here. The chain of events went something like:

1. Web comes out and makes it trivial to distribute information for nearly free.

2. Users find enough "information" (in quotes because I mean "data that satisfies their instinctual desire to feel in the know" regardless of its actual value) on the web for free that they don't want to pay for their local newspaper anymore.

3. Dying paper subscriptions forces newspapers to go online. Even so and even with copious ads, their profit margins collapse.

4. The only news agencies that survive are national news because they can aggregate their journalism costs over a larger number of readers.

5. Bereft of money, local news agencies get bought up by conglomerations that produce "local" news which is a slurry of national stuff, press releases, and relatively low quality local reporting.

6. People stop reading the local stuff entirely since it's frankly just not good any more.

7. Now everyone is only clued in to national politics since national news sources rarely write about state or city politics.

Have you ever read the local rags from two, three decades back?

Think Buzzfeed with no spellcheck. You had colorful characters, but I wouldn't argue the informational content is all that more hollow today than in that time period.

There have been actual studies done showing a clear correlation between the decline of local news and an increase in municipal- and county-level corruption, so it's hard to argue they were entirely useless.

Yes, I have. :)

Sure the writing quality wasn't always great, but it was a functioning conduit of information about what local politicians were up to. And, more importantly it wasn't drowned about by other information sources so a greater fraction of people actually consumed it and were clued in to what was happening in their city and state.

I'm reminded of the 'Information Bubble' section in Wait But Why's 'A Sick Giant's essay. Essentially, once upon a time the big media outlets had an incentive to reach a broad audience. The biggest megaphone had to appeal across the political spectrum. Then, cable news, the Internet, etc. balkanized journalism. Everyone could easily shift themselves into whatever bubble they wanted to pretend was reality.

https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/01/sick-giant.html

Promise resolution tracking for political choices could be a useful tool. With each promise tracked you could produce a percent which could be displayed with the candidates picture and a brief synopsis of their "score". The contact information and a tool to initiate communication would all be available (even if the communication is just email), and you could even have the politicians join so that they could have like an intern respond to messages or something.

This has probably been done, right?

There is one in Ukraine, see links below. Interested to know about such ones for western countries.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=uk&tl=en&u=https:/...

it's easy to game and those sorts of stats mean nothing to most people.

if it became effective enough that any politicians even heard of it, let alone started trying to game it, that would be great news.

I've thought of starting a social media website where people can upvote proposed legislation to draw attention to it, and people can indicate their own preference on legislation and track it. Then, come election time it could tell you something like "Mr Your Politician votes the way you would prefer 20% of the time" or such.

In Switzerland there's http://smartvote.ch. It's not exactly what you're describing but close.

I like it! Ping me if you want help. Draw the contrast between the popular policies and the reps that only pay lip service to them. Open API that might be a good place to start:

https://openstates.org/tx/bills/?query=&session=87&classific...

the problem with this is that I think few people care enough to enter their preferences, let alone to come back and check. not to mention that most people don't really expect politicians to follow through on their promises, and anyone who does will probably figure out how they want to vote via other methods. the only way I see this idea actually becoming useful is if it starts being displayed somewhere people already go, like in a google results page

We can't fix people not caring. It might help make it a little easier to care and keep track. Especially if there's some good flamewars happening on the site (half joking about the flamewars). Seriously, if you could make it a decent place for concrete discussion of the laws people would probably visit just to get in on the discussions, just like Reddit.

my point is that since people don't care it might be hard to get people to use the site. And you might have trouble getting enough people to use it in the first place to get these discussions going - why wouldn't they just do it on reddit or twitter where everyone already is?

> the problem with this is that I think few people care enough to enter their preferences, let alone to come back and check.

Game-ify the shit out of it? Farmville, but for electoral awareness? Somehow piggyback on the inexplicably-popular-and-viral "take this quiz to find out which X from Y you are" thing?

I think you'll struggle with a network effect issue. people aren't already on it - and already have plenty of places to discuss politics - so people won't come on the site and so people won't really care about the points they get on it

I wonder is there any country that's not true.

This isn't true. Polling shows people dislike congress but like their congressional rep.

How does that make what he said not true?

It implies that they're sufficiently aware of their local representative to approve of them.

They may not "remember who did they vote into the state legislature", but they're not totally unaware of them.

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