Back room deals aren't necessary a negative. That how the sausage is made. I rather have backroom deals when people can make rational compromise, rather then having media spectral where congress sessions are reality TV. Mostly used to get clips that can then be used in adds.
> I think the larger problem with democracy in general is that constituencies are no longer geographic.
I think that is a good point. Specifically on federal level. On local level geographic still matters.
Its basically the old socialist argument about class system. Just with a much more complex class system.
I guess you could have some sort of cluster analysis putting into X different interest clusters and you could vote for a representative in each. And then somehow calculate an optimal congress.
"Vote for me, I'm representing technically inclined fantasy nerds that like cat girls"
Not sure that is the solution. But you are right that the 'pyramid' style system used in most countries could be improved on. A simple version of this is basically to do all federal votes for congress and use some kind of representation algorithm.
The issue with this is that doing a political campaign on a federal level is insanely expensive. And I can't even imagine if each congress person had to try to get elected on federal level. The amount of political adds would be crazy.
I really don't have the solution and its hard to run experiments on things like this.
> The representative for Austin has to represent the conflicting views of both the Tractor dealer and the software engineer.
Smaller countries does help her, as geographic area gets smaller more interested are represented.