I don't think it's just a bandwidth problem.
(i.e. Politicians are selected from average people, often on things like appearance, charm, charisma, voice, snappiness, being less-bad than the other candidates, standing for the voter's preferred party, etc. not based on intelligence or systems thinking; so why would they be better reasoning about 3rd order effects than average people? And they are elected on short terms, so why would they be more interested in spending time trying than others?).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Miliband_bacon_sandwich_pho...
If the current scenario is bad, and someone says "we should do this other thing that would be even worse," pointing out that the other thing is worse isn't an endorsement of the current (bad) scenario.
However average people are actually pretty good at making the right moral, common sense calls, if not the technical legal detail. I suspect that's in part because they are not living in the Westminister ( or whatever your seat of power is ) bubble.
So any system needs to blend that common sense, with specific expertise. In theory that's what a representative democracy does - however one of the failings currently is the party system ( note designed, in part, to overcome the bandwidth problem - people grouping together to give a single consistent message rather than 100's of independent ones ), where capture of the party by a few people has become too easy and some options that the majority of people want never being offered at the voting time.
This results in an increasingly angry and volatile electorate.
It's easy to make decisions when you are the benefactor and the costs are born by someone else. Unless you are in a country with overall population density approaching that of an urban hub, there are high chances that the benefits afforded and costs born by the seat of power bubble versus an average person barely overlap.
> however one of the failings currently is the party system <...> where capture of the party by a few people has become too easy and some options that the majority of people want never being offered at the voting time.
I'd argue that the fiefdoms within parties come primarily from their corporate likeness. Since the ultimate goal of any party is to capture power and remain in power, the structures that emerge serve this goal first, everything else second.
If this is true, which doesn't seem that unreasonable, then the crucial factor then becomes what are the key factors in terms of staying in power - responsiveness to the electorate or raising money to persuade the electorate?
Ensuring the latter doesn't take over, in my view, is a top priority to ensure a working democracy - and from the outside, appears to be why the American system is now largely broken.
Second, your comment hinges on an interesting hidden assumption. There's implication, that representative democracy selects for a group with inherently higher average bandwidth allocated per proposal and inherently higher average expertise to evaluate the non-immediate, higher-order effects. I'm not going to contest the idea, however, this assumption has to hold quite strictly for the concerns listed to be material.
> If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers.
Otherwise this concern is just another side of the lobbying coin. The distinction between professional storytellers curating media in favor of certain party and convincing masses or elected representatives on merit of some law is paper thin anyway.
Eh? It's a representatives full time job to consider these things as oppose to the general public doing a full time job and then having to consider legislation.
The difference between lobbying for representatives versus people directly is that representatives have to answer to the people - whereas no-one loses their job as a citizen if they get persuaded by story tellers.
ie both come down to - "it's their job"
I would not be so sure. What's the fundamental difference between convincing general public to vote certain way in a hypothetical direct-ish democracy and convincing that lobbied-for vote by representatives is the good one in a representative system? Quite a large portion of this full time job is already not spent nitpicking legislative initiatives
In terms of persuasion - if a representative votes in a way that's at odds with the people who elect them, then there is a risk of the representative losing their job.
If you have a small group of citizen, selected at random for a particular decision, if they are bribed/lobbied/copted - they aren't at risk from an electorate down the line.
Obviously given that large scale persuasion is now cheap and automatable - even in a representative democracy you might well choose to set the political weather by directly targeting the electorate.
Right now this is a major threat to democracy - you only need a few people skilled int he dark arts, no morals and a sackful of cash to change the political weather currently.
Some of the examples I've seen it tried - I've seen the people setting it up trying to fix the outcome by carefully choosing the question, then providing expert advice on options scoped by the question.
Framing of the question is a powerful tool to promote the outcome you want, and avoiding ever asking certain questions is another.
Not saying it doesn't have it's place - you just need to be careful that the process isn't used to try and legitimise what would otherwise be unpopular policies via concentrated persuasion on a small number of people.
Framing questions is already a problem with legislation. You can frame "do you want to increase online surveillance" as "do you want to protect children" very successfully!
If you are saying choose people at random to be an MP for 5 years ( or whatever ), then sure that's different and it would be an interesting experiment - though that would be a pretty stressful job to pitch people into at random.
It would be interesting to see how those random 600 people would organise to get stuff done. In the current government you have specialisation - home secretary, foreign secretary etc - you wouldn't want to keep that structure and randomly allocate roles - but if you have the 600 vote on everything then you still have a bandwidth problem.
It may work in some other country..
Jury service in the UK is generally seen in a positive light ( despite having far too much hanging around ).
I suspect the US problems could be easily fixed by forcing employers to pay you while you are doing it.