Re: [apsa_itp] community law-making, a system based on recombinant text

["Peter Muhlberger" <peter.muhlberger@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Michael and others:  I'm a social scientist who is quite interested
in communityware.

Here are some potential hurdles for Michael's community lawmaking proposal:

People aren't lawyers.  Will participants be able to draft laws that
are sufficiently precise and technically consistent with the existing
legal framework?

People aren't political.  Most Americans understand politics little
better than quantum mechanics and are about as interested in it.  If
community lawmaking were adopted, would this not end up either being
lawmaking by a select elite of people who are a) interested in and b)
(quasi-) knowledgeable about politics?  I suspect any effort to
involve people in direct democracy must be preceeded by a range of
civil society efforts to get the average person more involved and
interested.  My own focus is with various efforts at cultivating
democratic deliberation, efforts that are advisory for political
institutions and carried out by civil society in various ways.

People are twisted.  The average American scores quite high on a
measure of Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA).  Do we really want a
direct democracy with a public a substantial portion of which thinks
along lines similar to the Nazis (ethnocentrism, obedience to
authority, punishing attitudes toward deviance, etc.)?  Again, I think
some intermediate political education efforts are needed.  RWA is in
part due to inadequate socio-political understandings that might be
fixed as people are challenged to reason about social and political
matters.  This creates a case for more civil society efforts to
involve people in democratic discussion, but I suspect direct
democracy would result in a variety of problems.

Community lawmaking might be a step in the right direction if it we
introduced first as an effort to create rules in non-political social
settings and then as non-binding efforts to suggest laws to lawmakers.
 That's pretty much the best that can be hoped for in the medium run
anyway.

Cheers,

Peter

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