Political Science

I hope we can agree that moral politics should be a thing of past. If that is the case then I would like to share an idea with you.

I thought to myself: How could politics become tangible so more people could get into it? A democracy, from my point of view, is something that requires people to be active. Voting every four years is a mockery of that ideal. The public should be a lot more hands on with this; their system of choice.

So what could spark this involvement?

Well perhaps transparancy and responsibility could. Why not introduce a new approach that requires all new bills and laws to refer to at least one relevant scientific study done on the subject? Politicians are paid handsomely to do their job, and I would find politics a lot more interesting for sure, if I could back track their work and see how they made the conclusions they did. If you can get into the mindset of the politicians you would be a lot more likely to want them as your representatives as well. It would indeed motivate them to be and work for the people.

Consider how much more sense new laws would make if it held a clear reference to a scientific article explaining in detail the research done on the matter. And as a database programmer I can promise you that it would be easy to make a central hub of politically used articles, so that the voting community can keep up to date with when the science is surpassed and obsolete as grounds for law making. It could be an online community of sharing information about what is new in social science. What do we know about society today?

I would log on to my voter's account every day keeping myself up to date with what is new from the politicians. Which articles are they currently reviewing, and what laws could be extracted from this work? Just like checking my online bank account. I would give my daily votes towards what articles I would like to see as basis for new laws, voting up the work of the progressive social scientists that used to be stuck in the old system where their work would be overlooked.

Example: Is the change in the law that reduces the age at which you can be jailed from 15 to 14 reasonable or not? The answer is: We do not know. What we need is research on the subject and proof before we come to a conclusion. What we also need is at least one clear referencing point for this potential law or bill, which will serve as a connecting hub for it, meaning that it is discarded and reverted to its prior state when new science emerges that disproves the old assumptions.

To me that sounds like a democratic society of the year 2012.