Pierre-Ettienne Vandamme, Université Libre de Bruxelles
Add a layer of ethics of voting and deliberation around elections:
- Enrich the message conveyed through votes.
- Stimulate public debates, before and after vote.
- Foster a more reflexive and public-spirited ethics of voting.
- Focus attention on policy proposals.
- Clarify the specific mandate conferred to elected representatives.
Need to think about institutional ways of fostering an ethics of voting.
Traditional secret ballots send the message that all motivations are equally valid.
Need to think about devices that both respect privacy and protects voters, incentivizing “deliberation within” on relevant considerations.
Laurentiu Gheorghe, University of Bucharest
Inequality splits society and opens the gates to demagogs.
Big data and artificial intelligence helps in identifying the major trends of society, the major interests of society. This is in general good, but can be used in evil ways: to change the major trends of society, to affect the major interests of society. That is, to massively manipulate society.
We should regulate this in some way: we have to preserve the freedom of building one’s own reasons to vote and the sense of that vote.
Miljan Slavic, University of Belgrade
The proceduralist approach: how we vote is very important. The way we design voting procedures/institutions determines the legitimacy and the outcome of the elections.
Discussion
Elise Rouméas: discrimination should not come free, it should have a cost both for politicians and voters that chose a discriminating programme/option.
José Luis Martí: Sebastian Linares talks about the “democratic oath” as a programmatic compromise with values.
