2. Some would try to bribe or influence members of the evaluative committees.

3. It would be likely that some parties / factions / groups / philosophies (see # 7. below) would end up with their candidates doing consistently worse than the other parties. Then they would create a lot of publicity alleging bias in order to introduce their people into the election administration or even to have Evaluative Democracy scrapped altogether.

4. Free-marketers, libertarians, anarchists, and many others would argue that your concept of "collective interest" is socialistic and therefore unfairly biased against their political philosophies--and therefore should be dropped from Evaluative Democracy.

5. The evaluative committees would base their conclusions, it seems, partly on the written campaign materials of the candidates and partly on what the candidates can get across in speeches and under questioning. Some would argue that whoever can slickly whip up the best-sounding propaganda would win, not necessarily those who would actually perform the best in office. (Just like now.)

6. You write, "A law which required independent media sources to give fair, accurate, equal coverage to all candidates. . . ." All the administrators judging that media coverage would be heavily criticized and accused of bias and corruption by whoever they criticized. Perhaps a majority of the public would reject the process as an attack on freedom of expression.

7. The banning of political parties would be attacked as a violation of freedom of association. Groups of people will manage to work together for their group's interests (whether you call it a political party or not), no matter how hard you try to stop them.
They will argue also that parties and campaigning are needed to educate the public. Each party will say that their political philosophy doesn't get fair enough treatment in the secondary schools and in the universities and in the media, so they need to educate the public directly to remedy all that neglect and all those bias.
So you will not eliminate parties and campaigning. You might, at most, drive them underground.

Also, you said you decided to add some kind of public referendum feature to your proposal as a safeguard against the whole process becoming corrupted. Perhaps you could mention that in your summary on-line.”

Received: July 31 2007

Response:

To deal with potential corruption, which any political system is susceptible to, Evaluative Democracy is transparent to the public, and guided by the standard of collective interest. Also, the selection process to be on Citizen Evaluation Committees, which is based on testing and random selection, and open to any adult in a constituency, should help reduce the possibility for corrupt committees. Moreover, severe legal charges for political corruption and gross negligence should discourage individuals and/or groups from attempting to corrupt the evaluative system.

The argument that “collective interest” is socialistic and therefore unfairly biased, is unsound, because collective interest (or community or society interest) is the basis for democracy, in which individuals from a State of Nature join together for their collective benefit.
Democracy defined by “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” is fundamentally about the collective. To deny the collective interest, is to deny democracy itself. To reduce the role of collective interest in democracy is to reduce democracy itself.

Political representatives, who have made false promises or are incompetent while in office, can be removed from office at anytime through citizen-initiated evaluations. To initiate an evaluation of a political representative, a citizen needs to establish how the political representative has acted in a way inconsistent with the collective interest. In other words, the process is initiated by the soundness of the reasons against the political representative. Also, the performance of political representatives while in office can be used for or against the individual in subsequent determinations.

The main purpose of Evaluative Democracy is to determine through evaluation who are the better political representatives in terms of the collective (or community or society) interest. So it is assumed that the political candidates with the “best sounding propaganda” would be exposed.

The solution to the biases of private media, is Independent Evaluative Democracy which makes public forums and citizen evaluations the focal points of the political process, and eliminates political parties and voting.
It is assumed that regardless of how bias the private media is in Independent Evaluative Democracy, the citizen evaluations would cut through any biases which have entered the political process. (The upcoming pilot studies will provide evidence for or against this assumption.)

We agree that there is no way to completely eliminate political organizations like or similar to political parties. However, through Independent Evaluative Democracy, political parties at least can be eliminated formally from the political process.
It is imperative to eliminate political parties formally because they are a main structural piece behind the autocratic hierarchy of the western or liberal democracy. By controlling political candidates and dominating the political arena, political parties allow the few to take control of the political process. So a more democratic political system is synonymous with the elimination of political parties from the formal political process.

The summary on Evaluative Democracy makes reference to citizen-initiated evaluations (as opposed to citizen-initiated referendums). In Independent Evaluative Democracy voting including referendums is non-existent due to the high susceptibility of voters to influence and manipulation politically. Moreover, voting through a mere aggregation of votes, fails to adequately address the collective interest. On the contrary, evaluation through public forums on community priorities and citizen evaluation committees is a more thorough and sounder approach, and less susceptible to influence and manipulation politically.