In the view of elections in 2024, can we improve on how voters choose a candidate?
My perception is that the choice of candidate is strongly influenced by the party preference of the voter. For good or bad, what often gets overlooked is the candidate’s personal merits. e.g. BJP’s Pragya Thakur got elected by a significant majority presumably by the virtue of being in BJP, even though she had serious criminal charges against her (This is not limited to one particular party of course)
I wonder if candidates should be voted based on their personal merits? Irrespective of which party they belong to. I believe that is how parliamentary democracies should work.
ADR [https://adrindia.org/] has done excellent work in compiling the affidavits of candidates and tracking their criminal history, wealth etc. Perhaps this could be used or leveraged to inform voters during elections, so that we choose better representatives for ourselves in the parliament.
Any specific ideas on this? I would we nice if somehow we can crowdsource this. Maybe make a thread on this forum for each constituency? Then people can add their comments? Start with one?
This problem is similar to the one in the music industry and they have solved it beautifully. Perhaps, we can borrow their solution.
Earlier, an artist would launch an entire album of songs, and you’d have to buy the entire album even if you wanted to listen to 1-2 songs from the album.
It’s the same with political parties right now. People vote for an album (eg. BJP) instead of a song (eg. a candidate).
What if we build a Spotify of Political People?
A place to learn more about an individual candidate, and perhaps, make your own collection (eg. playlist).
If more people use this, candidates would have pressure to prove their individual worth versus riding the party’s reputation.
A place where anybody could submit a verifiable piece of information about a candidate.
For marketing, when a local or national elections happen, we should circulate the report card of each of the candidates so that people stop voting on PM, and instead vote on their candidates.
But individual candidates cannot independently vote in parliament, they are bound to vote by the whip issued by their leadership. So without changing that part, there is no value in choosing a good candidate from a bad party.
Agreed 100%. The parties themselves are not democratic and the actions are dictated from the top, instead of rising from the bottom.
However, having public accountability tied to a candidate incentivizes them to speak independently and earn a public reputation. Afterall, public reputation will remain even after the parties change/die.
I think this is more of a wishful thinking. I don’t think it is easy for anyone to win an election without their party’s backing - unless they have a lot of power and influence already. We will have to change the parties themselves for this to work (something we are trying), but we can’t expect this to work with any of the existing parties. Anyone speaking against the party leadership will not get a ticket next time.
Bringing in change is never easy. Almost everything can be dismissed by calling it “not easy,” so, perhaps, the right question might be “is it worth it?”
The questions is also about logic. As long as parties remains the same structure, how do you expect things to change?
I said we need differently structured parties, not because it is easy, but because that is logically the right direction. Hitting our head against the wall does not necessarily break the wall, we have to understand the root of the problem and address that. As long as parties remain top down, expecting bottom up changes is foolish. If we want bottom up politics, we have to build bottom up parties, that is why I’m excited about Democracy Collective, but I don’t think focusing on candidates when they have any say in the party policies helps our cause.