The Athenians 500 to 400 BCE recognised that the way they did\u00a0democracy had both limits\u00a0and\u00a0risks.\u00a0In particular, they\u00a0had come to realise that “expressive\u00a0voting”\u00a0– where there is only one vote held on a proposition – could and, sometimes,\u00a0did result in the ‘wrong’ outcome.\u00a0So they concluded that every vote should be held twice\u00a0to enable\u00a0the first result\u00a0to be reviewed in the cooler light of day as hitherto\u00a0unanticipated\u00a0implications revealed themselves and that this would most likely\u00a0produce better\u00a0and more correct decisions (for example, Plato’s despair over\u00a0the Athenians’ decision to kill his mentor\u00a0Socrates)\u00a0 How very relevant for recent referendums like Brexit (“I didn’t think my vote would count and so voted NO”)\u00a0and\u00a0for every other vote we can think of.\u00a0 This conclusion strengthens WfaAR’s\u00a0opinion that\u00a0any non-binding votes on the Republic should be held at least twice, 12 months apart,\u00a0to more accurately gauge\u00a0voters’ views disassociated from an immediate, emotional response. We note women\u00a0couldn’t vote in Athens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Athenians 500 to 400 BCE recognised that the way they did\u00a0democracy had both limits\u00a0and\u00a0risks.\u00a0In particular, they\u00a0had come to realise that “expressive\u00a0voting”\u00a0– where there is only one vote held on a proposition – could and, sometimes,\u00a0did result in the ‘wrong’…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-15","wpcat-15-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1064"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1065,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064\/revisions\/1065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}