Ah yes, let’s give the EU and its undemocratic system in which policy formation is heavily filtered through a relatively narrow professional political class, ordinary voters have weak or almost no direct control over major policy choices, dissent encounters administrative/economic punishment, and central institutions possess and use powerful financial means to discipline peripheral governments should have even more centralised power?
And no, just because voting for MEPs is bolted on there as a pressure valve doesn’t suddenly make it all okay when most of the real decisions happen behind closed doors and adherence to the passed laws, no matter how damaging is ensured through financial coercion.
Not a single person voted or agreed to this law, and yet here we are.
Yeah, that's always been my concern with the EU (I'm American, for context): the long worrying practice where the legal concept of the EU is assembled by a small group who very much want EU citizens to go back to sleep and only wake up once all the laws and regulation has been created.
A federation makes sense to me: I live in one. But how the EU has assembled itself in a way that seems to unrepresentative has been worrying to watch over the last couple decades.
US House term is 2 years, European Parliament is 5 years. The latter is actually proportional at least but you can see how they’d only feel pressure every so often
But it seems relative immune to the current rise of populism.
Not a bad tradeoff, all included.
It seems you have an issue with representative democracy.
Quite the contrary actually. I take issue with systems LARPing democracy.
There is no such a thing as "representative democracy", that’s antinomic bullshit throw at people to lower it down to powerless populace.
Either citizens have the power, exercise it continuously in practice and are supplied with everything it takes to assume that role properly with all the duties it implies, or there is no democracy beyond empty words.
Has such a system ever existed anywhere? How would citizens even have the time?
Switzerland
Continuously exercised and on everything as a matter of course? Not all is done via direct democracy there (even though it is the ultimate backstop in a way), it also has representative democracy.
Switzerland is also a representative democracy
You cannot compare 10 million people with 450 million people when talking about direct democracy. It cannot be done I think. But if you know a way propose it here.
Just saying lets vote directly on everything will put everything on hold until all goes down.
Direct democracy doesn't mean everyone votes on everything.
At the extreme you could do something like localized e-voting: citizens vote on issues that affect a given geographic radius of where they live. Because the boundaries are purely distance-based, gerrymandering is impossible.
Maybe we could have a decaying distance boundary by some measurement like population density or something like it?