TITLE:
Representative Government in the Era of Improved Communication
AUTHORS:
Benjamin Barrowes
KEYWORDS:
Representative Government, Open Source Government, Citizen, Electromagnetics, Improved Communication
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Political Science,
Vol.9 No.2,
April
15,
2019
ABSTRACT: Technology
is allowing communication to become inexpensive, ubiquitous, secure, and
instantaneous, in the process transforming individual lives and societies.
Representative government was conceived in an era of laborious, slow, insecure,
local, and high-cost communication modalities. These modalities imposed
burdensome but inescapable limitations on both the representatives who were
entrusted to aggregate and adjudicate public sentiment while making decisions
on the behalf of others, as well as the public who faced trust crises,
participation barriers, and ignorance of facts and issues. This paper explores positive and negative consequences that
improved communication has for representatives. Consequences for a better
educated and informed citizenry often with unprecedented discretionary time are
also examined. Conclusions include deliberate power divestment on the part of
representatives and an open source government model for citizens.