---
title: Democracy - Approaches
contributors:
  - Nick em
---

There are basic categories that I would consider "traditional" of how to
approach Democratic Decision Making

These include:

[[Direct Democracy]]

[[Representative Democracy]]

[[Sortition]]

Direct Democracy means that citizens can vote directly on a policy.

Representative Democracy means citizens elect a representative to vote
on this area on their behalf

Sortition is that a random selection of citizens are placed together to
discuss and create decisions for the state.

### Other approaches to democratic governance:

Liquid Democracy: - Citizens can vote directly on a policy, or elect
someone else to vote on this policy for them, and are able to withdraw
the power of their vote back to themselves any time Stockmarket
democracy - You can trade votes on one issue/candidate for votes on
another issue/candidate.

Within this, there is also a spectrum of how deliberative it should be,
and whether that is formally part of the system or not -e.g. debate has
to be X amount of time, or if there is a formal house of review. Some of
this can be part of the government process but not in the area of making
laws, such as, in Australia, a Royal Commission can give recommendations
to governments on a particular issue, and engages a deliberative process
to find out what should happen and create those recommendations
accordingly.

There are some approaches that look to ensure minimum deliberation by
citizens, it is unclear whether this is truly democratic or constitutes
some technocratic approach, as it could disenfranchise people who do not
engage in minimum deliberation. Another alternative is that by ensuring
deliberation as a citizen duty as well as compulsory voting will ensure
that this approach could still be considered democratic and not
disenfranchising, even if it is more burdensome.

Experimental: We try different policies to see what works

In future we may have "AI/Algorithmic democracy" , in which democracy is
based off revealed preferences or values from individuals, and collects
it with a range of possible policies, and is fed into an AI to give the
best possible expected policy outcome. This could also come into
"predictive democracy", in which people make bets on what may happen and
resources are allocated based off these bets

Other things: [[Methods and Infrastructure of Democratic governance]]:
Participation ("Ladder of participation"), consultation, information,
Legal system, Separation of Powers
