Give citizens more input on the lawmaking process - Participatory Democracy!
We currently have a very low resolution democracy. We vote once every couple of years and... that's about it. If you feel strongly about a certain law that's been proposed you're best bet at influencing it's fate is... to make a big fuss about it on social media, hope a bunch of other people do the same, and then hope that the lawmakers care enough to change their vote accordingly.
For lawmakers it's your job to represent your constuents. But how do you know what your constituents actually want?
There are several roadblocks here for citizens that would like to have greater input in the lawmaking process. Some that I can think of off the top of my head:
- Visibility. How do you even know what's been proposed?
- Legalese. If you look at the text of a proposed law, there's a good chance that you either don't understand what's written or your eyes glaze over after two sentances.
- Lack of meaningful input. If someone has an opinion about the passage of a law, how are they supposed to effectively give input? Write a letter to your representative? Rally thousands of your closest friends?
A platform for lawmaking that involves both lawmakers and the people they would affect.
Here, proposed laws would be surfaced for discussion. Arguments can be made for and against a proposed law. People can upvote laws/arguments to show support*.
*this could get pretty fancy. For example, we could give each registered wallet 100 vote tokens each week (unused tokens don't roll over) and then use quadratic voting to show support/dissaproval of laws/arguments. So to vote for/against something the first time it costs 1 token, the second time costs 2, the third time costs 4, 8, 16, etc.
Citizens could even propose laws or amendments. Lawmakers could then see these laws according to how much support they have.
Ideally, all of this would be gated so that you could only provide input on things that would actually affect you. e.g. you could only vote on things for your own city/state/country. Although I could see there being reasons for exceptions, perhaps the voting cost is just higher if you're out of the target area. UPDATE 1: okay check this out - what if your location was a verifiable credential!? law NFTs would have a location/affected region field. on the frontend we could display a badge + give higher sort priority to people who are verifiably affected, thereby giving people that are actually affected a louder voice in the process!
Eventually, this could also help inform voters in elections and increase accountability for lawmakers. For example, if I've actively been giving input on laws, there could be a tool that shows how closely a candidate's voting record matches up with the laws that I was actively for or against.
- A lawmaker proposes a law (perhaps this gets minted as an NFT?)
- There's a discussion period where people can make arguments for/against
- People can up/down vote laws/agrguments, the most supported laws/arguments are sorted to the top (by default) so they're the most visible
- Lawmakers make a final vote, votes are publicly recorded on-chain. Perhaps the final result is minted as an NFT.