Sean Hayden wrote: ↑Sat Nov 28, 2020 11:00 pm
JimC wrote: ↑Sat Nov 28, 2020 10:04 pm
Sean Hayden wrote: ↑Sat Nov 28, 2020 9:11 pm
But for a lot of issues, and going forward, if the expectation is that democracy will lead to good outcomes, the people have to be capable of producing those outcomes, and it seems to me that this is not dependent solely on their ability to participate.
These are 2 separate issues. The basic need for any democracy to ensure that the maximum number of eligible voters participates stands alone from any discussion of the outcomes of the voting process. To me, there are 2 parts to such a challenge. One is to ensure that there are no systemic issues which disenfranchise voters, and the second is to combat apathy, and to ensure that as many people as possible are committed to playing their part in democratic processes.
Then we have your issue of wanting "good outcomes". Of course, people will have a diverse range of opinions on what counts as "good outcomes". Here, I think that we simply need to be hopeful about the fruits of the changing zeitgeist...
You mean that it is possible to ensure as many people vote as can without worrying about the outcome, and I agree. That is possible. But what good is it?
Who votes cannot possibly be irrelevant to the outcome, and hoping for the best hardly sounds promising or reasonable...
The part of your post that I've highlighted is a slippery slope into some very dangerous territory. Clearly it is true in a bald sense - if only white folk voted in the US, or only people with college degrees, or only those who can pass a science exam, or a history exam, or... we'd have very different outcomes.
Putting any except the most obvious limitations on voting (an age limit, possibly limits on those serving jail sentences...) runs a clear risk of distorting democracy even further than current levels. Who decides who votes, and in whose interests would that be?
In general, there are a variety of aspects of how a given society functions that will affect what might call the quality of choice exercised by a voter. Amongst those would be the quality and extent of a society's education system, and the diversity and quality of mass media, as well as how well a society defends itself from malign external influences with their own agenda. There is no magic bullet, but disenfranchising significant parts of a society will always be the wrong choice.