Having recently witnessed the large-scale confusion among the public caused by most propositions on the California ballot, I am now acutely aware of the downside to direct democracy: it forces decisions that require significant domain knowledge upon a largely uninformed electorate. The one advantage of representative democracy is that we can pay people to make informed decisions on our behalf. After all, without senatorial guidance, we plebes are liable to mistake the Internet for a truck. Fortunately, it is not hard to introduce this feature into direct democracy without losing any of the advantages it offers.
The solution is akin to a
Web of Trust but it is a hierarchy rather than a Web and expertise is added to trust as the basis for the connections between people. On any given topic, unless you are an expert yourself, you can probably think of somebody else whom you know to understand the topic better than yourself and trust t make a better decision on issues concerning that topic than you would. In my proposed system, people would have the option of selecting microrepresentatives on each major domain of knowledge that is generally of importance in legislative and policy decisions (healthcare, economics, education, foreign affairs, etc.) as well as a catchall one for whatever doesn't fall into those categories. Whenever an issue came up for a vote, people would be able to use their vote plus any that were conferred upon them by people who picked them as microrepresentatives. These microrepresentatives would usually just be regular people that they already know and so the microreps in turn would generally pick somebody who knew even more than they did about that topic, causing the votes to flow up the tree, until you ended up with all decision-making responsibility for a certain domain concentrated among a small group of people by default, much like the system we have now. The key distinction would be that people could always override their votes for a particular issue if they wanted to.
This system effectively turns a "refrain from voting" into a cascading "ask my friend instead". Assuming we can implement this as an open system instead of outsourcing it to evil companies like Diebold, I think it would be entirely superior to representative democracy.
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