I appreciate it’s not polite to reply by QT, so apologies, but this is an important point. If there are 200k elected officials in Germany, they are by far NOT the only people to have influence on political decisions. twitter.com/thorsten_sterk…
Aside from voters and party members, to whom all those elected officials are ultimately accountable, there are also lobbyists, media owners and writers, thinkers, researchers, civil servants, campaign groups, and individual citizens all of whom influence decisions in some way.
Add to that the bureaucrats who implement the decisions and are accountable to the elected officials, and there are a huge number of influencers involved in any political decisions. Elections are about far more than choosing decision makers, they are about choosing
people to be the key point in those influencing and decision making systems, and allowing those key people to be ejectable by citizens at any time (some systems enable this better than others). They are also about choosing between parties that act as
synthesisers of policies around a political position, without which it is easy to have incompatible policy positions – and those policies themselves are put together through negotiations with party members and influential groups – climate campaigns for Greens, businesses for EPP.
Unless you are claiming that all politicians are elite because they are in positions of power, which is a circular argument, I think you will find that a lot of those politicians particularly at municipal level, are not at all from privileged or elite backgrounds.
I don’t disagree that the majority of senior politicians are likely to be from strong academic backgrounds, have good networks, are possibly rich, but I would say probably not more so than those in senior positions in non-political positions.
And I also agree that decision makers need to hear a wider range of voices, and more diverse voices – but there are many ways to do that without a blank-page rebuild of the way in which we take political decisions.
Originally posted as a thread of 8 tweets on Twitter on 16 September 2022. View the original thread.