From: peta@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu (Peter Whaite)
Subject: Re: Canada and Quebec (was: REFERENDUM '92)
Organization: McGill Research Centre for Intelligent Machines
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 92 16:14:03 GMT

I just know I'm going to reget this but...

In article <1992Nov6.115003.23260@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu> mouse@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu (der Mouse) writes:
>In article <1992Nov4.230737.29054@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu>, thomas@McRCIM.McGill.EDU (Thomas Jelonek) writes:
>> In article <1992Nov4.052742.16237@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu>, mouse@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu (der Mouse) writes:
>>> I don't think I've heard of a workable democracy ever involving more
>>> people than the city-states of ancient Greece.
>> It should be noted that the Athenian concept of democracy was
>> markedly different from our own.  Only 3000 men were allowed to cast
>> ballots in Athens so one can safely assume that their `democracy' did
>> not work for the vast majority of the people.
>
>What was the population of Athens at the time?  (And I'm not so sure
>that the ancient Greek notion of democracy is that different from the
>modern one; I don't see anything in what you've said to make me think
>so, except possibly (depending on the population) the proportion of
>residents that had a franchise.)

Really means the rule of the "demos", or the citizen body. A citizen wasn't
just any old bloke in Athens (or any of the city-states in the area) -- more
like being a member of the Chamber of Commerce.

>> As an aside the citizens also regularly voted on banishing someone
>> from the city.

Certainly did -- you can even go to Athens and scratch around for the shards
of the pieces of pottery under the Acropolis (dont let the guards see you), on
which they scratched the names of their victims.  If you are really lucky you
might even get to pick up some naming one I believe (memory is a bit foggy on
this) Aristotle, who survived two of these votes but lost the third.  

I also had the impression (more trivia) that the pieces of pottery were made
especially for the purpose and were called something that sounded like "vote"
and thats where we get the word from.  However according to the Webster "vote"
has a Latin root, so its probably something the Greek Tourism Department made
up.  They generally try to claim that our western democratic tradition is
entirely due to the golden age of Greek democracy (which lasted for almost 40
years can you believe), and that we are eternally in their debt.

>So?  We do the same, only we have courts do it, and we call it
>"imprisonment"...sometimes "extradition" or "deportation", or in
>extreme cases "capital punishment".  In all cases, it amounts to "we do
>not want you forming part of our society"; they differ only in the way
>in which the person is removed from society.

Its the process that's different -- the separation of the judiciary and the
representatives (and dont forget only citizens got treated this way -- the
others were probably executed outright).  Imagine what it would be like if
parliament voted on the guilt or innocence of criminal cases, and debated the
amount of punishment.  You could (would?) be guilty simply because you are
"politically incorrect".

>Are there any democracies left?  I don't think there are, except
>possibly a couple of small countries, I think in northern Europe.
>Everybody else is too large, and has had to go to some other system;
>the countries whose governments I am familiar with are either
>monarchies (or other hereditary-rule system) or use some
>supposedly-representative system, like the US, which is a republic, and
>Canada, for which I do not know the correct term.  (Okay, not
>*everybody* else.  Vatican City may well be small enough.
>Lichtenstein, perhaps.  Maybe a couple of others.)

As you've said the size of modern nation states makes "direct democracy"
unworkable, so we have "representative democracy", i.e. we reduce the
bandwidth required by electing representatives to speak for us (whether they
do or not is another matter).  But I think we see other trends developing, e.g
the use of referendums in California and other US states, and the phone-in
balloting for the Liberal Party Leadership election in the Maritimes.  

So it may be that the development of communication technolgy is going to make
"direct democracy" viable again.  This may or may not be a good thing, for as
I have been told, "Democracy is the system where the opinion of two idiots
counts more than that of three philosphers," (can the comments about
philosophers == idiots).  However its going to be interesting, in particular,
how can one guarantee the integrity of an electronic vote collecting/counting
system that is continental in extent?

Xref: sparky soc.culture.canada:8507 rec.arts.tv:21863