Actually, I think what would be more useful is the ability to vote directly on all things and delegate your vote on specific topics or in general when you want not every 4 years.
We can have the technology to enable this and it would effectively kill a full time politician as a job.
That think would instead be done by retirees in their spare time.
And if things were not going to work in the right direction, you can vote immediately, any time.
If, on the other hand you don’t care or don’t know enough about the subject, you can delegate your vote and that person can also delegate your and her vote too.
In a parliamentary democracy, the full-time politicians decide what is debated; what is up for debate; what is possible to change through a vote (and what is not possible to change by not putting it up for a vote).
They also decide what civil servants act upon - and what they don't. What is researched and evidenced - and what is not.
Deciding what direction you want to vote on a particular single issue is relatively late in the process of democracy (and conveys relatively little power).
The power to elect a representative is thus much greater, fairer, and more desirable, than the power to flex your vote on single issues.
A liquid democracy would have to be much closer to direct democracy than representative democracy in this regard.
In California you need to collect a certain percentage of the population's signatures to get something on the ballot, and I imagine it'd have to work the same way. You could increase the frequency to yearly, or even quarterly, and build a system where you can endorse anything you want to be added to a ballot, then once a quarter you can vote on the issues you care about, and give the rest of your voting power to any other citizen, who can do the same for any other issues.
> Actually, I think what would be more useful is the ability to vote directly on all things and delegate your vote on specific topics or in general when you want not every 4 years.
Sounds like the ultimate form of populism: a government that just blindly follows what the majority wants. This has many problems. For example, who will care for minorities? And do you realize that everybody is part of a minority group in some ways?
The Aurora Rising books by Alistair Reynolds are set in an environment where this is the case. Basically the only automatic right is that to have a vote.
