Introduction
We're in an era of capitalism and democracy, in its various forms, all across the world. The previous century was dominated by questions such as education (elite academies with poor man's libraries versus public schooling), healthcare (private hospitals and insurance versus state-run or single-payer systems) and one of the largest was participatory government (military dominated like nationalist or fascist states? Command economies like the Soviet Union? Market approaches like the United States?). Some of these have settled, others continue to linger. But, let's focus on the question of democracy; how it is today and how it might move forward tomorrow.
Push and Pull
Since the mid twentieth century most have assumed that electoral democracies are the only way forward. While their effectiveness has certainly been demonstrated, if only by their survival versus systems such as Soviet-styled communism, there is, as always room for improvement. But first, let's take a hard look at what it means to be an electoral democracy and then let's look at other societies hoping to become more democratic over time.
Europe and North America are defined by their belief in the vote-based democracy, the so-called electoral democracy. Every set number of years people gather to cast a secret ballot which determines the next set of leaders in office. This happens in its various forms, from proportional representation and coalition governments like in Scandanavia to winner-takes-all systems like British Commonwealth countries.
In contrast, East Asia is dominated by single-party systems such as South Korea, Japan or Singapore. Opposition parties are almost entirely meaningless, in most places having only won once in the last fifty years and only because their leadership was taken over by the first party to make them more palatable (ie. becoming the same party). They rule mostly by competency and resignations. Poorly performing leaders or officials can be sacked or resign in disgrace.
Overall, these systems represent a set of democratic policies that can be defined as "push" based. People are expected to use their own time and energy to "push" ideas to the government. Usually this consists of: the vote, referendums and petitions.
That of course leaves us with a question of, "if you defined push then what is pull?". A "pull" based policy is one in which the government spends time and energy to elicit opinions from the public. There has been some growing examples in the twenty first century. Many parties conduct opinion polls. But only some countries, particularly East Asian ones (such as China), base performance on opinion polls. A Chinese Communist Party official who fails a polling of the population over a competency check (for instance, if he/she were in charge with implementing public transportation then an opinion poll might be conducted in the city to see if the population is satisfied with the result) then the person can be sacked outright. This is an example of a "pull" based policy; the time/energy to make a decision was expended by the government but based on the people's thoughts.
The Pull Future
So, what is the future of democracy? Hopefully one in which it continues to survive. There's something that can be argued where quality of life is improved simply by the degrees of freedom one can in enjoy: in clothing, in lifestyle, in cuisine, in language and everything else. But, in order to survive a democratic society must strive to be better than its competitors. The world is always watching and it never cares what is moral or correct, only what survives best.
A significant improvement to Western electoral democracies is the adoption of pull policies. One issue that has remained since the very birth of democracy is the time investment versus reward. There are few people in society in which voting makes a significant enough difference versus the time cost. One must research political parties. Then after knowing their policies they must then seek out information on the consequences of those policies. That is usually not simple; most required doctorates in economics, political science, engineering and so on to understand. So then after so much investment what can one do? Cast a single ballot. So for the vast majority of the population, it is simply not worth the time, rationally speaking.
But, for a select few, such as high-power lobbyists or individuals who have direct connections to the government, they have a lot more incentive to vote. They might have money to invest in political campaigns of politicians, thereby allowing them to shift votes in the government to their favour. Such an example might be the corn lobby in the United States. For the average corn corporation (ie. the executive staff, not the workers) to invest time in corn subsidies can be worth thousands to millions of dollars a year. For the average American? Maybe a piece of a penny to fight those subsidies. So why would anyone bother? Thus, corn subsidies live on.
This uneven gain from time invested is the exact root of the problem in Western-style electoral democracies in developing sound policy. With the highly educated societies, with thousands or perhaps tens of thousands, of intellectuals in each discipline, the government relies on at most one or two to develop far reaching policies. How should fishing regulation be determined? Ask one man; ignore ten thousand others. That is the unfortunate reality of a push-only based democracy.
So, what is a pull-based solution? In this instance, we must have a government spend an equal amount of time eliciting the thoughts of every citizen. Rather than develop fishery policy on its own, one can develop it, post it to every single university across the country and have it reviewed. Imagine for instance an engineering environment. When one produces product changes, it is first posted for review so that other engineers can review it. Then changes are made until it passes the review. Then finally it is submitted. Why is government policy a one-shot no-review process? That is ridiculous when you consider that even changes to inspection regulations can result to the deaths of many citizens.
(You might argue there is a review process, in that Congress or a House of Commons might "debate" policy. Of course this is usually a foregone conclusion. Either a politician will accept that policy or not and it is done based on political stripes. In any corporate environment this is considered the most toxic way of producing products. Why should we have our government operate in a fashion well known for being the worst possible method? Expert reviews of each political party's policies makes far more sense.)
With the internet, with digital communication, with electronic processing, this is the century of pull-democracies. Government shouldn't wait until there are riots before acting. It can and should consult the population wherever it can. Whether it is building roads (civil engineers and urban planners) or power plants (capacity planning) or anything else, it shouldn't rely on individuals to expend energy of their own volition when it is almost never worth their effort (cost versus benefit ratio). It has to be up to government to figure out what the people want, it should not be up to the people; it gives undue power to radicals.
Global Outlook
Government models are lead-by-example paradigms. Should we become successful in designing a well oiled government that responds properly to the population's demands, others will follow suit. But, we have to build a government model that works. We cannot afford to simply stagnate in a presumption of our superiority while others change and evolve and grow beyond us in democratic prosperity. Countries which were previously thought to be lagging far behind are no longer. We shouldn't hide behind self-made democratic indices, we need to move forward on our own democracy or be left behind.
