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.

You define a bunch of "constituencies"

Farming, Tech, Fossil Fuels, Civil Rights, etc. Maybe as many as 50.

Each one puts up candidates, perhaps on a list basis,

You give everyone 10 votes to distribute to those candidates. If you're really into supporting Farming, you might put 10 votes to Farmers and screw the rest. If you are more widely concerned you might put a couple in tech, a couple in civil rights, one in space, etc.

Those votes are then distributed and the number of representatives are chosen in proportion. If Farming gets twice the votes as Tech, they have twice the congressmen, and Farming gets twice the representation at a national level.

If you don't have this, you end up with widely supported low level things (say a 15% support evenly across the country - truckers for example) with no representation, but areas where there are high levels of concentrated support (Tech for example) with a lot of representation.

I don't know, if you just have a fixed '50' many people will be very unhappy with the list. That's why I suggested that this somehow had to be algorithmic.

Its an interesting concept, I don't know of anybody that has fully defined how this would work.

>I rather have backroom deals when people can make rational compromise,

Along these lines, policy kind of went to shit when they got rid of earmarks.

It used to be some congressman from rural Ohio being able to vote in favor of union stuff his people want but the party doesn't because he knows the bill has some pork for his district to make his people happy so he'll be secure next election.

Now that guy's security next election is all dependent on party funding so he's gotta vote the party line every time and any deviations from the party line are a complex game of favor trading and backroom dealing and whatnot.

The parties in the US are pretty damn weak. And their ability and interest in overthrowing their own members is limited. They need to focus resources on the battleground states. So in the US, parties are much less less powerful.

In Britain, you basically get removed from the party very quickly and as an independent its incredibly hard.

Trump is only the latest example of how parties are weak in the US.