Eric Friedenwald-Fishman explores the increasing power of faction, how it damages deliberative decision making and good policy, and what we can do about it.
We need to reform initiative and referendum requirements in the context of the social media age to restore thresholds that limit their use, and to ensure that the issues that get to the ballot have widespread interest and are priority concerns.
We need to make veracity a household word. In the age of spin, Internet and social media rumor mills, and push polling, factions and interest groups are increasingly framing of issues and solutions. We must increase our collective demand for information integrity, funding transparency, and unbiased analysis of policy impacts before we sign a petition, repeat a narrative, or re-tweet a story.
We need to advocate campaign finance reforms for candidates and initiatives that provide full transparency, limit spending, and close loopholes exploited by Super PACs.
And ultimately, we must demand that our elected leaders engage in deliberative decision-making—the core of representative democracy. We need to reward and publicly acknowledge those who do and we need to hold them to account when they do not.
Read his full post at: http://www.ssireview.org/...