On Democracy and Accountability

[Mr Khan]

GameOver22 said:

A lot of issues here. I'm going to focus on the American system for simplicities sake.

 

1. As for people keeping local government's more in-line, I think the argument has some intuitive appeal, but the truth is that there is still a lot of corruption and inefficiency at the local level as well. Also, the quality of local politicians tends to be pretty low. They tend to be well-meaning, but they often don't know the first thing about navigating the governmental system.

The last point (which somehow renumbered to the first point <_>) is worth noting. The higher up you go in government, the more competent people that you find, and that local politics are VERY dependent on the kind of soft-politics that really hurts accountability "I voted for him because i know him from the golf course," that sort of thing. If they really know the person, they'll vote on the person and not on the issues, which is horribly bad for accountability.