Individual

 

Regardless of how the political system is designed, it will not achieve good performance unless the individual voter demands good performance from his elected officials. As will be discussed, the promotion of close knit communities in the towns will encourage citizens to vote. Reorganizing the election process to provide the voters better information to evaluate the incumbent and his or her challengers should greatly reduce the cost of evaluation. Consequently voters will demand better performance.

As was pointed out in Chapter 5, towns were given broad powers to promote the lifestyle of the town majority in order to promote more congenial communities to compensate for the more impersonal, insecure market. In addition, to protect themselves from overzealous towns, individuals were given rights to limit the town's efforts to promote the majority lifestyle. As freedom of location increases, most individuals would seek a town which promotes their lifestyle. And as people's dependence on the automobile for work and shopping decreases, most towns would promote more personal interaction than currently.

The new design would promote individual participation in the political process. Because the new towns govern emotional lifestyle issues which directly affect them, citizens would want to vote either directly on such issues or for the candidates representing the various positions. Also, towns with similar political beliefs would have incentives to organize political action committees to encourage all citizens to vote in elections for higher levels of government. Because to the extent that the town tends to cast identical votes, the town's ability to influence the political process would be proportional to the extent that the town customarily turned out the vote. The advance in the social nervous system facilitates the formation of such special interests groups to promote political causes. For example, towns with similar political beliefs could easily organize into a league in order to obtain even more leverage on politicians at higher levels of government.

The participation of interested groups of citizens in higher levels of government, while desirable from the perspective of encouraging participation, would be subject to the same check of a professional review as any other special interest group. Indeed, the decentralization of lifestyle issues to the towns is designed to reduce, as much as possible, promotion of emotional issues at higher levels of government. The positive impact of the concerned citizens on promoting good government would not be a valiant attempt to promote some form of legislation which would not pass a professional review, but rather their impact would be to insist that politicians would have to be accountable for their performance. Since voters have limited cognitive skills and resources to evaluate their political alternatives, the information policy and election organization should be designed to improve the performance of voters  under the conditions of modern government. Hence, the purpose of election information policy would be to make the voter aware of whether his government is providing competitive services. And as government has become so complex that having elections for all levels of government on the same day time blurs the focus of the voter, elections would be rearranged in order to simplify the choice process.

Accordingly, in order to focus voter and media attention on what services and how efficiently they are being provided, elections of each of the four levels of government would occur on the same day during an assigned quarter throughout the country. For example, town elections throughout the nation would occur on the same day in the winter quarter, although in direct-democracy towns, voters would vote on issues on a regular basis. Similarly, metropolitan elections throughout the nation would occur on the same day in the spring quarter, state elections on the same day in the summer quarter, and national elections on the same day in the fall quarter. This does not mean that every town, metropolis, or state would necessarily have elections every year, but on years in which they did they would have to hold them on the assigned day. Public campaigning for each election would be restricted to a few weeks before the respective election. Presidential elections would have a longer campaign period.

In addition, information policy would encourage more evaluation of political performance by comparisons with rival governments and less on personal discretions. Prior to each campaign period information policy would require the federal government to release of comparative figures for the various services at each level of government and the associated costs. At the national level this would require comparisons with other nations. The state and metropolitan governments would release additional information prior to the beginning of the campaign periods of subordinate government elections. The purpose of this release of information is to get the media focused on the comparison of costs and benefits of governments at the same level. For example, during the town election campaign national and local media coverage would be focused on innovative towns and high cost exceptions. Thus, news segments such as ABC's American Agenda would show during town elections, human interest stories of towns with successful innovations of better services at lower costs. Hopefully, only the tabloids would concentrate on the candidates' sexual peccadillos.

The release of such information would have a great impact on the political campaigns in informational society because of the greater political organization in informational society towns. Political action committees would digest election information and formulate the community position on election issues. Such political action committees would be aware of whether the incumbent's previous actions had resulted in negative professional reviews. But just important the political action committees would be aware of whether their government was providing quality services efficiently. Incumbents who did not rapidly imitate successful political innovations would be turned out of office by challengers promising to deliver to a more aware political audience. Thus political innovation and imitation would be accelerated.

Evaluation